tverbeure

"The free Shield, rebuilt"

There is nothing wrong with admitting that a (small) part of a hobby is getting recognition from your peers.

I’m just happy that, for now, AI can hold a soldering iron or operate a multimeter.

As for gardening: the town where I grew up has these plots of land for vegetable gardens There’s a long waiting list to get one. You should see how the plot holders compete over who has the best vegetable beds.

Yeah, mine is arriving tomorrow, because I totally needed another unused SDR platform.

mega samples per second. IOW: sample rate.

The significance is that most off the shelf SDR platforms have much lower specs. Almost all of them use the same Analog Devices transceiver chip.

Photopea is one of the clones discussed in the article…

Twitter used to be a fantastic place to interact with other electronics hobbyist. Then it became the nazi bar and that was that. Every once in a while I go back out of morbid curiosity but the Following tab is barren and the For You tab is disgusting.

I found a place on Mastodon, but the critical mass just isn’t there.

It doesn’t help that many cool looking hobby projects are now just AI slop.

Things are bleak.

> Break pads on ICE wear out slower than EV due to torque and weight difference

The only time I use brakes on my Tesla is for unpredictable events on the roads or for going from slow to standstill. For everything else, I use regenerative braking. In fact, back when I just got mine, I asked my tire/brake shop about typical brake pad lifetime. They said that they almost never service brake pads on EVs. It's just not a thing.

If your brake pads don't last at least 100k, then you're holding it wrong.

I don’t have solar panels but own a house with parking spot.

I use the PG&E EV2-A night tariff at home which is still 0.23 $/kWh, though the rate at work is only 0.14 $/kWh which I use as much as possible. I rarely use the superchargers (0.45$/kWh.) Let’s use the 0.23 value.

I drive 15k miles per year. At roughly 2.5 mi/kWh. That gives $1380 per year.

At 20 mi/gallon and $6/gallon, I’d pay $4500 per year. At today’s gas prices, the difference is IMO not marginal anymore. (That said, I didn’t buy the EV for the drive savings…)

> driving includes a lot more costs than just fuel

Oil changes, break pads, oil filters, spark plugs, …

For whatever reason, my wife’s car needs yearly scheduled dealership visits that always cost a few hundred. Meanwhile, my 5 year old EV has had none of that, other than one of those recalls that required a technician to park 15 minutes on our driveway to tighten some bolt (which my wife’s car also had, but it took another visit to the dealership.)

The depreciation thing is true, but I drive my cars into the ground anyway, so it’s not a factor for me.

> seems really quiet too

That would be a bug to me!

That’s understating the importance of the error coding. The modulation scheme is almost a side show, it’s the modern error coding algorithms (LDPC or Turbo coding) that allows you to get arbitrary close to the Shannon limit.

John the Baker.

Moonwalking with Einstein is a fun read. I started using some tricks in real life. One of the key premises is that humans are much better at remembering sensory things than abstract ones.

A good example is remembering names: when one’s name is “John Baker”, it is so much easier to remember by silently adding “the” in front of it.

We’re also very good at remembering salacious stuff. I tried constructing my own memory palace for a grocery shopping list that included cream cheese. If you mentally make Claudia Schiffer take a bath in cream cheese, you’ll never forget that. (I read the book at least 10 years ago and still haven’t…)

Never heard of Hoka either, so I asked my wife just now: “oh yes, I have a pair.”