robotguy

10 ms·

91.
by robotguy 4y ago
Reminds me of a term I came up with years ago: Engineer Critical Mass. As soon as you get X or more engineers standing around looking at something, you will start increasingly attracting more engineers at a rate proportional to the current
92.
by robotguy 4y ago
I'm still using Alien Blue on iOS. Not fully compatible, but worth it for me.
93.
by robotguy 4y ago
>The average person wants to turn their hobby into a day job because the average person's day job sucks I have a metahobby: I collect hobbies. Invariably someone will tell me I should try to make money from one of them and my respon
94.
by robotguy 4y ago
Reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Ira Glass: Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, and I really wish somebody had told this to me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it&
95.
by robotguy 4y ago
>people assume that it is highly unlikely that they will be the target of such a search Rather than directly handing someone an unlocked phone, I like to think of it more like the residents of high-rise buildings who leave their curtains
96.
by robotguy 4y ago
Also Horrorstör: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13129925-horrorst-r
97.
by robotguy 4y ago
There should be a corollary to Poe's law that says something like: For any satire published on the internet, someone out there is going to think "Now, THERE'S a good idea!"
98.
by robotguy 4y ago
>it's a bad idea to take pictures that show the street where you live Reading this it just hit me that GeoGuessr is basically doxxer training.
99.
by robotguy 4y ago
Huh. Kind of a proto-ARG.
100.
by robotguy 4y ago
Probably not the place to ask, but some of you might find this interesting enough to take pity on me. I had an idea years back to build crosswords on the surface of a truncated icosahedron ( https://i.imgur.com/qlLl434.jpg )
101.
by robotguy 4y ago
Agreed. I splurged on a Blackwing One-Step Longpoint Sharpener and I really like it. Unfortunately I loaned it to my wife and she really liked it too... ;-) https://www.amazon.com/Blackwing-One-Step-Long-Point-Sharpen...
102.
by robotguy 4y ago
Most Stephenson fans think I'm nuts when I say The Big U is my favorite. What can I say? I like my sci-fi cheesy with lots of interesting concepts.
103.
by robotguy 4y ago
Here's some really bad advice, but it's what works for me (for hobby projects): Give up and start a metahobby of collecting unfinished projects. The real treasures are the friends you made ^h^h^h^h^h things you learned along the w
104.
by robotguy 4y ago
Valuable? I don't know about that, but fun? Sure. I developed a 3-D crossword tile-building puzzle. Everyone that tried it was vociferous "You should sell this!" My response was always "I already have a job and I like it
105.
by robotguy 4y ago
Reminds me a bit of REJECTED by DON HERTZFELDT. My entire family finds it hilarious. Several others I've shown it to were more like "WTF?" https://youtu.be/W7JyjZI3LUM
106.
by robotguy 4y ago
No luck. I scoured Prime, Hulu, and Netflix and the only possible one was "The Booksellers."
107.
by robotguy 4y ago
I’ll scour my watch history, I’m pretty sure it was on Amazon Prime. Meanwhile, if you think that sounds interesting I’d highly recommend the documentary Helvetica.
108.
by robotguy 4y ago
Achilles, Ulysses, Archimedes, and Octopuses.
109.
by robotguy 4y ago
My brain always want to pronounce that as “oct-AH-poh-deez” like some Greek hero from the Odyssey.
110.
by robotguy 4y ago
Oxford & Merriam-Webster list both plurals and the author calls out that octopi is "the quite beautiful plural form of 'octopus' " which could be interpreted as "while there are multiple correct plurals of octop
111.
by robotguy 4y ago
I've got a real hankering to build one of these that punches (or lasers) actual paper tape. There's quite a few examples of DIY tape readers, but I can't find any for tape punches. Heck, even obtaining the tape seems to be a
112.
by robotguy 4y ago
What really resonates with me is not focusing on results. Reminds me of Ira Glass' take on creative work: Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, and I really wish somebody had told this to me. All of us who do creative w
113.
by robotguy 4y ago
My initial EE Senior project proposal (back in the early 90's) was a biofeedback controlled music generator. The idea was to use a Markov chain (not that I knew that term, but I'd heard of the concept) to produce tone sequences, t
114.
by robotguy 4y ago
As an EE for an ROV manufacturer for 20 years, this was really interesting to see how he attacked some of the design issues that plagued my entire career. Great stuff!
115.
by robotguy 4y ago
IoT Geiger counter in the garage, even though I have absolutely no reason to expect the radiation in my garage will ever vary. Geiger Tube-->ESP32-->MQTT-->Raspberry Pi-->Node Red-->InfluxDB-->Grafana Regret? Nah, I learne
116.
by robotguy 4y ago
Back in the late '90s, I worked for an inventor dealing with analog dome switches. We took a mouse that had a rocker for scrolling instead of a wheel and I reprogrammed it to "fake" scroll clicks faster or slower depending on
117.
by robotguy 4y ago
I have moved beyond hobbies into METAHOBBIES. Specifically: Collecting Hobbies. I find that following my ADHD hyperfocus until the next shiny thing comes along has led to a massively diverse array of introductory knowledge and mediocre skil
118.
by robotguy 4y ago
Not specifically related, but something that provides about the same functionality and HN users might find interesting: Bokode: Imperceptible Visual Tags for Camera Based Interaction from a Distance https://www.researchgate.net&#
119.
by robotguy 4y ago
- Most of them over-use transparency to absurd degrees. https://www.hudsandguis.com/home/2018/florida-hospital-ui It's probably more apologetics than anything else, but as an EE my first thought is that the p
120.
by robotguy 4y ago
Ben Eater's Youtube series "Building an 8-bit Breadboard Computer" is a really good introduction to the lowest levels of how a computer works: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLowKtXNTBypGqImE405J2... I

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