jstsch

Joined 15 years ago

Karma
887
Submissions
279
Member since
Aug 5
Look at jstsch.com :)
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Recent submissions

Comment · 10 days ago
It can just be a toggle button, just like 'show formatting' in lots of rich text editors. And remember the state of the last interacted window when opening a new file.

Then some sane styling defaults, which you can change globally, on a per folder and on a per document basis. Perhaps the option to include some stationary backgrounds for PDF rendering, and I think you have touched upon 95% of the document editing needs.

Comment · 2 months ago
Was the error visible somewhere through Console.app? This is a major annoyance for me with Cocoa/AppKit apps that basically have terminal usage secondary.
Comment · 2 months ago
I think this is a step in the right direction. However, I would've loved if they'd make API keys in MCP a first class citizen versus oauth. It adds so much friction having to implement that in an app, just to get Codex to connect. Sure, for a full blown SaaS, it's OK, just a bunch of libraries to include and a new table to add to your user database, but just a drag if you just want to connect something quick, fast and quite secure.
Comment · 2 months ago
This! I remember reading 'Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X' by Aaron Hillegass and being fascinated by it. Coming from Java, C, doing some DSP code, web work, Objective C and Cocoa at first seemed just utterly alien and a bit wrong.

Message passing, these loosely coupled 'delegates', a mixture of hardcore C, needing to do memory management but also just passing objects around in the runtime... messy, weird... but in the end the right solution to make flexible but performant software. I learned a lot from it. I should dive into the history of NeXT one day.

Comment · 2 months ago
Good points. It's just that responsive layouts have not been fixed anywhere. Also on the web, it is way too hard. How often don't you see a box floating over some background photo and then covering the focal point, e.g. the face? Sure, it can be done, but the permutations of testing are simply too large for mere mortals.

Multiple 'artboards' for screen sizes/ratios are the solution, which basically just means swapping out a .nib in Interface Builder. Better to just make it explicit.

Comment · 2 months ago
I remember this video, from way back. Then, it was impressive, but it also felt logical that machines of that era were able to do it. So it wasn't magic. Just good engineering. Now everything is jank & stutter and my 64GB 25 times more powerful machine just refused to play back a YouTube video in my Safari tab since I have too many windows open.
Comment · 3 months ago
Two Toyotas. The steering you apply, even with almost no torque, always overrides lane keeping. Super dangerous. No beeps when that happens. Whereas with my Tesla you’d have to force it out of autopilot. Or fight a bit back if the car corrects you for safety.
Comment · 3 months ago
The regulations are great, in theory. In practice, I've noticed that implementation of the technologies are lacking. So on paper, lane keeping will keep you on the road when distracted. In practice, it does not. You'll be beeped at a million times, though.
Comment · 7 months ago
I dislike ‘energy religion’. Nuclear is necessary for Europe. We simply can’t heat our homes and power our industry with renewables in winter. At the same time wind and pv can be built up faster and is simply cheap. Hydro where topography and local bio conditions allow it. We need all those technologies, so we can move away from fossil (climate, resilience and depletion).
Comment · 7 months ago
Set it up myself, mostly. Some specific tasks like bringing three-phase power to the garage and hooking up the breaker box I did with an electrician. But installing an additional circuit inside the breaker box, or putting new conduit up, is easy to do safely yourself. Pre-wired breaker boxes can be configured online and are cheap.

The battery is 16kWh. Effectively around 14kWh, since you never fully discharge. LiFePo4, so no chance of spontaneous combustion like other battery chemistries.

I'd say the months Nov→Feb are tricky, although since I have quite a bit of excess solar capacity there are even in December plenty of days where the battery pulls me through the night.

Charging/discharging from/to the grid is possible, since I have a retrofit inverter (AC to battery), but not doing it yet, have to do a bit more research (dynamic pricing, tax is >50% of the kWh price in NL, etc).

Comment · 7 months ago
Every installed PV-panel is a dozen barrels of oil (eq.) less CO2 in the atmosphere. Plus, so much fun to generate your own power! Can highly recommend it, even starting small.

It's addictive though. Living in the center of the city (The Hague, NL), with a home battery, I'm now 100% self-sufficient electrically for 10 months of the year.

Comment · 7 months ago
Same! Set up a DIY home battery system and needed something to communicate with the inverter and battery over RS232, RS485 and bluetooth. Had an old Raspberry Pi-B with 512MB RAM lying around.

Running 3 python scripts as daemons would become a tad heavy and was a bit worried about serial timing. So used Codex to rewrite them in Go. Cross-compiled them, deployed the binaries and they're now running very comfortably on the pi. A few MB of ram per daemon. Making good use of an almost 15 year old device.

Comment · 9 months ago
> especially not to spec torque on terminal connections and botched crimps leading to hot spots

This was indeed my greatest concern. However the battery came with pre-crimped very solid DC wires, and nice push connectors for the battery itself. The battery also has an integrated DC breaker (great!).

The system runs 3KW max, so I just added an additional breaker (with RCD integrated) in the conduit box. In NL this is something a DIY-home owner easily can do themselves :) (just use the right solid/flex stranded cabling for the connectors, etc...)

Comment · 9 months ago
I will do a write-up in a couple of days. It's all relatively simple, you just have to expect terrible documentation and do a bit of reverse engineering and serial sniffing. I expected the battery to be complicated, but it turned out that the inverter was.

You'll encounter stuff like: manual says use RS485 port on Battery for GroWatt inverter → need to use CAN port on Battery. Meter Port (RS485 [serial] over RJ45) wiring on GroWatt is unknown (A: white orange / B: white blue, cross them over). Dinky RS485 serial → USB converter needs a 120ohm resistor between pins for line termination. Growatt meter port expects a SDM630 meter, not a DTSU666 (hardcoded), so vibe code another emulator. DIP switches for RS232 connection need to be both on the ON position (undocumented). CH340 USB→serial converter for RS232 does not work, but one with a Prolific chip does. Etc. etc. etc :)

Oh, and the biggest one... I was expecting to be able to just send a command, 'charge at 500watts', now... 'discharge at 2000watts'. But no. You have to emulate a power meter and the inverter will try to bring the net power to 0. Fun! :)

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