squeed

I, too, built almost the same thing for my kids. It plays music, using Spotify, Chromecast, and a whole lot of virtual duct-tape via HomeAssistant.

There is also an NFC tag that will turn off all the lights and turn on a disco ball :-).

Yeah, we had a lot of construction debris once, and rented a 30 cubic-yard dumpster (one of the big ones). After we tossed what we had, we told the neighbors to bring all they wanted. It was really helpful, especially since there were definitely a few that were down on their luck.

It was an awesome way to build good-will, since the price difference between a 10 and 30 cu.yd dumpster was ~10%. Obviously most of the cost is in the truck roll.

We also did the opposite once: we were demolishing a small vacation home, so we told some of the locals to pick through and take what they wanted. It was funny seeing our kitchen.. but in a different house.

I agree completely. Just look at io_uring and PowerShell, to name some examples.

io_uring totally rethinks the notion of a "syscall". It is going to eat the world, and most of us are not even going to realize that it happened.

PowerShell is a really cool example of re-imagining input and output. Namely, it is record-oriented ("Object") rather than byte-oriented. No more stringing together chains of fragile "awk" commands to make pipelines do what you want. (I know there is prior art here)

If you think OS's are moving still, then you're the one stuck.

I think you're basically right. I know some people that looked in to building a flow battery (it didn't pan out for other reasons). The utility wanted it for frequency regulation - in other words, extremely short timescale response times.

Hah, I remember a pallet or the now-empty IA enclosures showing up at Noisebridge. They were super useful - a USB3-SATA adapter. I still have mine for occasional data spelunking.

I know you mention the San Francisco DMV, but you cannot get a commercial building connected to the water system in the city without a $10,000 bribe.

Its cloaked with "agents" and "consultants" but it's still cash changing hands, at the end of the day.

Yeah, my dad had a tank like that. I dove with it exactly once - never again, yikes. It was coated inside and out so, despite being a steel tank, it was in excellent shape.

Argh, that's been my experience too. (I've just rented electric cars). None of the charging stations take credit cards; they all have some byzantine payment method.

There are weird resellers abound - some have apps that work, some have crashy pieces of crap. Some have clear pricing models, others have weird "memberships" and surprise bills. The same charging station can cost wildly different amounts to different people.

It reminds me of the bad old days of American long-distance service. Really difficult to actually pick the right provider.

There are a lot of EV chargers in Germany but they're such a bizarre experience. And they're not cheap! It costs ~15eur to fully charge a car here in Berlin.

For sure. Part of being a successful writer is communicating in a way that is most effective for your audience.

Rarely is a wall-of-text the right answer. Bullet points, flow diagrams, and examples are all helpful techniques when writing for engineers.

Yeah, same here. It turns out I could focus, but it took a lot of brain power to actually and understand text.

Getting new glasses lowered the cognitive load.

You have to learn to write, and get comfortable doing it.

When I was the (de-facto and later de-jure) architect, I was too reliant on in-person synchronous discussions. I neglected my e-mail and design-document skills.

The result: everything had to be synchronous. Chat was a wasteland. Decisions where one just had to Sit Down and Think wasted multiple people's time. I realized I was subconsciously avoiding writing long documents.

Part of the problem was - no kidding - I needed a new glasses prescription. But mostly I just needed to get used to the act of sitting down, drafting, and writing a design document. I also needed to encourage the team to have a bit of discipline and design before coding.

Later, as I transitioned out of a "move-fast-and-break-things" place to a large open-source project, my learned avoidance of writing definitely hurt me. I was not practiced at asynchronous design and development.

Systemd reflects the underlying system it is meant to support: the Linux kernel. And the Linux kernel is neither easy nor complex.

That Systemd can make the mania of Linux knobs usable is, IMHO, a huge achievement.

They're phasing much of the go and replacing it with rust.