exmadscientist

9 ms·

91.
by exmadscientist 4mo ago
Yeah, wake from deep sleep is always one of the weirder bits. It's just hard to do.
92.
by exmadscientist 4mo ago
Yes, this would have been around 2015. (When I said "Surface Book" I meant the original!) Docks were bad, bad products in those days. They were no longer the dedicated bulky-but-reliable things of years past, or the modern finally
93.
by exmadscientist 4mo ago
I worked with some of the people responsible for the Surface Book, Surface docks, and specifically the Surface Book's dock. These were hardware people (EEs), not software people, and this was after their time at MS. Unfortunately I don
94.
by exmadscientist 4mo ago
Most companies didn't, no. Just because alternatives exist for some people some of the time does not mean Office is worthless, or that buying it isn't rational. (Though buying it starts to look a lot less rational when things like
95.
by exmadscientist 4mo ago
The other problem with Slack is that it just straight up... doesn't do what you tell it to. I have a set of notification settings that work for me. Slack goes ahead and just does something else, and you simply can't fix it to do w
96.
by exmadscientist 5mo ago
There's nothing wrong with the Kobo store itself, but some titles are only published via Amazon. Especially from self-published authors or participants in Kindle Unlimited. Whereas the major releases from the bigger publishers are usua
97.
by exmadscientist 5mo ago
They did the same with Windows 7 going to 10. (I used to use a containment VM for their products, since they aren't particularly clean installs. I used the same one year after year and was too lazy to update it.) I seem to remember tha
98.
by exmadscientist 5mo ago
Another way to phrase the same thing, which has helped me to explain things in the past: the BJT isn't a current-controlled device. It's a voltage-controlled device, with a low enough input impedance that it appears approximatel
99.
by exmadscientist 5mo ago
The point is that the dance with the relay doesn't move the needle on design acceptance. If it is acceptable with the relay, it will be acceptable without the relay, because the component stresses will be the same. So if it is unaccept
100.
by exmadscientist 5mo ago
Also one of my favorites, even in my own city!
101.
by exmadscientist 5mo ago
Don't bother. That's not how these things fail, and one day is so so far beyond the thermal time constants involved that it's not doing anything useful. You would have to switch on timescales of seconds to minutes to do anyth
102.
by exmadscientist 5mo ago
Silicon rectifiers don't wear out. (At least not on timescales relevant to individual humans.) So hearing that makes me get suspicious that something else is going on.
103.
by exmadscientist 5mo ago
> the same job could be done with an isolation transformer It really cannot -- the isolation transformer doesn't have control of its output, so it can't start or stop cleanly, and it can't ramp voltage cleanly. (An autotra
104.
by exmadscientist 5mo ago
Also I probably should have actually addressed your Class B comment: No, they're not Class B. It's all digital PWM stuff inside. But the duty cycle gets tiny near zero cross, there's very little power in the waveform there, a
105.
by exmadscientist 5mo ago
> Evidently, AC waveform generation is extremely power-hungry Yes, it's quite ugly. Open up one of these things and you'll find a big block of four transistors (if not more due to doubling up) on a big heatsink. That's the
106.
by exmadscientist 5mo ago
> to avoid wearing out one side of the rectifier inside the PSU If you are seriously worried about this then the whole thing is trash. Either the design is marginal or it is not. You cannot possibly switch a relay fast enough to make a d
107.
by exmadscientist 5mo ago
This really should not happen, at least for units that are qualified to the relevant IEC standard. But, certainly, garbage devices are all over the place.
108.
by exmadscientist 5mo ago
Phase-shifted full bridge is the way to go. (It might have another name in this area of power electronics, these things do have lots of names....) We did a "big" inverter design a while back (500 VA was big for us; perhaps not for
109.
by exmadscientist 5mo ago
Please just buy a pair of mains voltage diff probes. They're not expensive (around $500 each new, much less used) and they will eliminate the crazy connection scheme and give you true input -> output fidelity.
110.
by exmadscientist 5mo ago
Seeing a datacenter proposal in the news come in at 1.3GW was very sobering for me. I spent a lot of time in grad school on the campus of a large nuclear plant, and it turns out one nuclear core is good for about 0.9GW of electricity (or 2.
111.
by exmadscientist 5mo ago
My best travel advice (for urban areas) is simple: get lost. If you don't know exactly where you are or what's around the corner, you've got to take it as it comes, and that makes it all the more interesting. No FOMO or oppor
112.
by exmadscientist 5mo ago
By my definition "tourist traps" are both low quality and high price... and also fairly easy to avoid. If you can walk three blocks away from a major attraction and find restaurants that are both cheaper and better, then the other
113.
by exmadscientist 5mo ago
> I assume that all connections use 3.3V signal levels. Should I ever come across 5V signals, I would probably use a larger Julet M8 for differentiation. OpenWrt writes that some routers already ship with incompatible 1.8V or 2.5V logic.
114.
by exmadscientist 5mo ago
ESD diode costs are nothing compared to the connector headers or even dealing with the mechanical complications of exposing Just One More Thing. Seriously, they're cheap.
115.
by exmadscientist 5mo ago
In my experience noise on hot-plugging the serial adapter is a complete nonissue. I'm sure it matters for you, sometimes. But for this kind of embedded work, I'd say it's important far, far less than 1% of the time.
116.
by exmadscientist 5mo ago
Secret storage isn't considered "security through obscurity". Everyone knows that when you find the key to the door, you've won. Security through obscurity is more like hiding the keyhole: it isn't going to stop any
117.
by exmadscientist 5mo ago
Checklists are amazingly powerful if they are fast and aligned with staff priorities (or true needs, which should also be aligned with priorities, but that's a separate, and pervasive, issue). Checklists are worse than useless if the
118.
by exmadscientist 5mo ago
Working in medical device design has trained me to just ignore this crud. I am literally designing the things that plug in to the other side of this object. I kind of need to have them. (I could get them from a contact, and often do, but th
119.
by exmadscientist 6mo ago
"Cold pressed" seems to be what you want for keeping flavor. All the good supermarket juices are cold pressed.
120.
by exmadscientist 6mo ago
The other thing that I can't help but think has seriously hurt the industry is that, between concentrate and flavor packs, almost all supermarket orange juice tastes like garbage . Fresh-squeezed orange juice is, of course, the benchm

More ›