jwise0

Joined 14 years ago

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2,033
Submissions
221
Member since
Sep 5
all-purpose engineer

http://www.joshuawise.com/

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Recent submissions

Comment · 9 months ago
Hi, original presenter here :) The beginning is FTs 101. The end gets more application-centric around OFDM and is why it feels 'unreasonably effective' to me. If it feels obvious, there's a couple of slides at the end that are food for thought jumping off points. And if that's obvious to you too, let's collab on building an open source LTE modem!
Comment · 11 months ago
As someone else posted a link to the Reddit thread, I posted there to say, roughly, 'no, I'm pretty unhappy about it'.
Comment · 11 months ago
Lance -- I really like this comment because it is a compelling argument for something other than the viewpoint I hold. Obviously I am not fully convinced by it (yet?). But this is the kind of discussion that we had hoped for in response to this post. Thanks for posting it.
Comment · 4 years ago
I was Chris's housemate at the time, the victim of the hours of 'sssshhhh sssshhhh shhhhh'. Interestingly, he rendered this mostly by drawing boxes in pov-ray -- I'm not sure what he used to make dimensioned drawings, but it was definitely not any of the modern CAD tools, and they were mostly for his reference.

But these days, I do highly recommend Onshape -- it breaks down a lot of the 'rules' that I thought I knew about CAD software. I started using it about two months ago; one of my clients uses it for real industrial design of some IoT hardware, so it is powerful enough to do real things. Before I started using Onshape, I thought that 1) all CAD software was a million billion gigabytes, and required stupidly powerful hardware for no readily apparent reason, and 2) had an annoying licensing model that requires you to jump through hoops to get access to the free tier. Well, neither of these are true with Onshape: I went from 'hmm, maybe I should try this for my personal projects' to 'constraining a sketch' in about 90 seconds ... on Linux ... in Firefox ... on my Shenzhen ThinkPad ... with an Intel GPU. I was blown away at how much it failed to suck.

Anyway, my suggestion on choosing software is: it probably doesn't all that much matter. What you want to learn is the CAD mindset, not the software. An experienced MechE once told me that if you are not careful, you can end up writing 'spaghetti CAD'. These tools these days give you a lot of features that are, in theory, more expressive, but in practice, can result in unmanufacturable parts or unmaintainable designs: be careful!

Comment · 8 years ago
Oh, and a quick update on this -- I just got mail back from Chip at Wahoo. (Looks like my previous mail got caught in a spam filter.) They're looking to get a bunch of the attribution and source issues cleaned up shortly. I'll update the blog post later today, but I wanted to give HN first knowledge of this!
Comment · 8 years ago
I was kind of surprised too. I have some conjectures about the internal politics from the output that I observed (super friendly, super helpful support team; development team knew it was an issue, and had orders from above?).

And yes, the ELEMNT is an ok cycling computer, but I think with a few bug fixes, it would work 'at least tolerably' for hiking (that is to say, at least as well as the Garmin Edge 510 did). The Edge 510 was not a great hiking computer, but for 'datalogging with a separate battery from my phone, and capable of speaking ANT+ to my heart rate monitor', it at least captured correct data...

Comment · 8 years ago
Hi, HN! Author, here. Yeah, I was a little disappointed by the GPL and attribution issues, too. But also, I feel a little bad not having given them too much time to respond, or too much heads up that I was gonna write a piece about it. So if anyone has a way to reach out to them, I don't want to trash them too much, and I'd be really happy to update that blog post!

But also, the other side of this is that the attribution issue is, perhaps, only 50% of my thrust here -- the other 50% being that it's actually a really cool device inside, and it's neat to see how they managed to build a device that's (mostly) competitive with Garmin's rich feature set so quickly. And so that, I think, might be what would be even more interesting to HN, rather than just torching them. If they opened the platform up to tinkerers a little bit -- perhaps if they 1) unlocked the bootloader; 2) provided /system images; and 3) enabled a switch to give you access to adb -- then it would be a really really cool form factor of a toy for a lot of different uses.

Comment · 10 years ago
This appears to have been flagbombed.
Comment · 10 years ago
Well, what you want and the physical realities of synthesis are different :-)

In the early days of compilers, of course, you were mostly writing C as a macro language for your system's assembly language. If you wanted your program to perform well, you'd have to write C that was, more or less, a translation of assembly that you'd constructed in your head first. If you wrote bizarre C, you'd either get incorrect results, or if you were lucky, you'd get correct but inefficient results.

But that's also Dan's point: Verilog isn't a "high level language". You don't write programs with it, you describe hardware with it. (In fact, that is why it is called a 'hardware description language'!) So if you try to write a program, instead of describing hardware, you'll get something that isn't really either.

Comment · 10 years ago
Comment · 10 years ago
I think I agree with at least some of what you say. I feel bad viewing content from small blogs without "paying" for it. My current best compromise is that I run uBlock Origin with an exemption for Google, and then I use Contributor.

It's still not a perfect solution. I give up a lot privacy that way, and in order to use Contributor, I have to give up some of the other uBlock features that I really like (in particular, element-based blocking).

I will note, though, that I don't feel in the slightest bad viewing Facebook or Twitter with ads blocked. Facebook and Twitter survive by network effects; I couldn't reasonably opt out of using their services even if I want to. Since I'm forced to use their services, then, I think it's reasonable that I do so on my own terms.

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