Showed off my hack day project early last Friday (due tomorrow), but I thought it turned out pretty cool. Grabbing WiFi APs and cell tower locations on a cellular / wifi board, forwarding to an API, and then returning lat/long down to a device
On The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast: discussions around controlled impedance board traces, classic hacker movies, Location APIs, CHIPS act beneficiaries, power problems in houses, and more!
In general I have been enjoying the features that are new in #kicad 8 (not that new now, I know). But some of the small UI changes have reaaaally thrown me off. For example, in the new BOM dialog, it took me a very long time to find the "Group Symbols" checkbox in the upper right corner. Like way too long.
I never really figured out a good option for RSS feeds, long long after Google reader and then Feedburner went away (damn I sound old). For many publications I started relying on newsletters and occasionally third party RSS bouncers to email.
Recently a co-worker told me that you can just subscribe to RSS feeds in slack channels ("/feed <feed_adress>" in your channel of choice), and since I'm stuck there all day anyways, it's actually a pretty good way to make sure I see things.
Expanding on a former wacky idea: I used to have metal shelves on my desktop in my apartment in Chicago, but they suffered from being mounted to a flimsy Ikea table. What if I mounted it to my sturdy as heck Husky rolling workbenches? Would need to be between 52 and 72 inches (shown is 60) and then I drill through the tabletop and mount with bolts that match the threads that the feet normally screw into. Don't plan to move the bench much, plus the weight of stuff on top helps hold it in place.
Held a meetup tonight where I wasn't sure if anyone was going to show up and 3 others did! Also I forgot that a smaller meetup group is sometimes allows for more in-depth conversations. Just like the old days of setting up meetups. Worked out pretty well in the end.
@daryll It's always interesting about what might drive people to actually show. For some other meetups I'm adjacent to, it seems like having a regular date and time so people can plan around it is good and that ups the attendance. Having tried that myself, I've run into situations where the lack of novelty actually drives attendance down. I think novelty as a key feature is a good driver of attendance because it makes people feel a little fomo. What that novelty is depends on the type of Meetup.
@daryll For past meetups that I ran, having a scheduled speaker actually introduced a decent amount of novelty because they were always talking about different things month to month. However, I'm not that interested in hosting a more formalized Meetup like that anymore. Mostly I don't want to deal with food and drink and I want to go somewhere so that people can purchase their own from the institution we're patronizing.
I know the answer is "whenever the power company says is cheapest", but from a mental model perspective: is it better to plug in the car to charge on a sunny day where solar is generating excess capacity (on other roofs, not mine)...or better when the overall grid utilization is low, like in the middle of the night?
@ferrix@chris_gammell I have solar on my roof and an electric car. When I'm wfh I plug in during the day and charge from the excess of my solar. The effective cost is about $0.04 per kilowatt hour. That's all the power company will pay me for that. That puts my Bolt EUV at about 350 miles per gallon equivalent.
Going to do another Hardware Happy Hour in the Durham/Raleigh/Chapel Hill (Triangle) area on May 7th. If you know any electronics enthusiasts who live around here, please let them know about the event!
@chris_gammell trying to avoid the jokes, but partially on the real, there are fewer-to-no slot-machine mechanics making us come back for for irregularly delivered dopamine. It's a little slower, but more focussed... not sure drinking from the fire hose was very healthy in the end there on the blue bird site of horrors, heheh.