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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • Great to hear this story of success. That plus

    $266.99 per probe for the original proprietary one

    Reminds me of Schneider’s stupid proprietary dongle for programming their PLCs. It’s just a CH341 in a funny shaped case that fits into the funny shaped slot on the PLC, where it plugs onto an ordinary 0.1" pin header to talk logic level serial.

    Plus it has a custom USB ID of course. Probably costs $2 to manufacture, sells for almost $300 as well.








  • If you don’t want memory-safe buffer overruns, don’t write C/C++.

    Fixed further?

    It’s perfectly possible to write C++ code that won’t fall prey to buffer overruns. C is a lot harder. However yes it’s far from memory safe, you can still do stupid things with pointers and freed memory if you want to.

    I’ll admit as I grew up with C I still have a love for some of its oh so simple features like structs. For embedded work, give me a packed struct over complex serialization libraries any day.

    I tend to write a hybrid of the two languages for my own projects, and I’ll be honest I’ve forgotten where exactly the line lies between them.


  • They should really stay away from the dirty word of Live Service / GaaS in that case!

    They should have gone with something like “We plan to support the game for years to come”. This model is well respected with games like Terraria and Minecraft that just refuse to stop coming out with free updates despite having no subscription model. Klei has done this with a lot of their games, Don’t Starve, Oxygen Not Included come to mind.

    Everyone loves seeing new content for a game that they own, even if it’s just little things, QoL or a new item or two.

    Hell, AoE2 still has support with Definitive getting patches all the time, and it’s decades old at this point.



  • I wouldn’t try parametric models in freecad

    I would clarify that you’re talking about a specific usage case, that OpenSCAD does indeed do better at. However for most CAD tasks I find OpenSCAD is overkill and less intuitive.

    “Parametric design” usually refers to the workflow used in the Part Design workbench, as well as SolidWorks etc. where geometry is defined by constraints.

    The Part Design workbench does work well and despite the topological naming issue is sufficient for most hobbyist and many light industrial tasks. If I need to draw up an arbitrary bracket or bushing or similar, I don’t even bother using a workflow that guards against the issue, I just use it casually like I would SolidWorks. Only if the part is complex or if I know it will need to be tweaked do I bother doing everything on datum planes etc. because it’s a lot slower and more hassle.

    That’s very good news that the topological naming issue is being solved, though. #1 issue with FreeCAD IMO and the one that holds it back from serious industry use.




  • For free tier, Google Cloud is more transparent about what you get than AWS IMO.

    The only catch is to make sure your persistent disk is “standard” to make it totally free as it defaults to SSD.

    However if you do mess up the disk you’ll still only be paying $1-2/mo. Been using GC for years, and recently they finally started offering dual stack so you can do your own 6to4 tunneling or translation if you want, depends on your usage case.

    AirVPN also are legit and will let you forward ports to expose your local services if you’re worried about DMCA type issues.

    I finally got IPv6 here through Starlink, it’s nice to have full access to the internet again after a decade behind CGNAT




  • We’re talking about replacing lost content here though. And as such you can use the streaming services as a “backup” by re-ripping your whole collection if you lose it.

    I’m actually doing this now as part of a library cleanup. Zotify + beets are a great combo to pull down vast quantities of music and properly sort and tag it.

    Then I stream it to my phone in my truck using ampache and ultrasonic, which does have a local buffering option.

    However if you have some exotics that you ripped from rare discs, demos or prerelease, live recordings with sentimental value etc. I would suggest keeping those properly backed up. I don’t have many of these, but the ones I do have are backed up both cloud and offsite.




  • You can download from Spotify using Zotify. Albums, playlists, if you set it to Artist unfortunately you will get a bunch of singles and EPs that you have to clean up.

    If you have Premium you can download at high bitrates, otherwise you get Ogg Vorbis at around 150 ABR. You can automatically transcode to whatever format you want, then I feed it to beets to catalogue and deliver it with Ampache.

    I like the moderate bitrate OGGs myself, as I often stream from Ampache to my phone and our mobile service is quite slow. So this system works great for me.