dgriffith

joined 1 year ago
[–] dgriffith@aussie.zone 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I loaded the video, paused, jump jump jump jump jumped through the timeline looking at the thumbnail images, about 5 seconds of actual playback while I watched them mess it up, more minor adjustments in the timeline, paused for 15 seconds at the thing I actually wanted, closed the video.

Good luck getting any kind of decent metrics out of that.

I can skim documents at 800 words a minute, they are mostly nicely arranged and indexed/sectioned. Compare that to videos where half the words are "um, so", and it's no wonder I prefer text.

[–] dgriffith@aussie.zone 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Lol between the top paragraph and the bottom one the number of partners increased by 23. I wonder how many partners they have now?

[–] dgriffith@aussie.zone 13 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Today I had the pleasure of trying to search for how to shift a chartjs array and finally had to try and watch a "tutorial video" where they allegedly discussed it.

Cut to me clicking around just trying to find the screenshot where they are actually doing the thing that I want to do, and then they proceed to fuck up its usage three times with much scrolling back and forth through their example code that they didn't show in full anywhere and rapidly clicking between windows while they got their shit together.

I just wanted to see like, three lines of code.

Maybe I should have just asked chatgpt.

[–] dgriffith@aussie.zone 23 points 2 days ago

Motor oil tastes funny.

[–] dgriffith@aussie.zone 8 points 3 days ago (1 children)

It's pretty simple:

  • USA and Russia have public talks and say they have a "good solution".
  • Ukraine says ,"We are not interested in a solution negotiated by a third party and the aggressor in this conflict"
  • USA says "oh look Ukraine isn't coming to the party here these negotiations were in good faith we can't believe how they're acting we are withdrawing support."
  • Ukraine gets stomped on, USA and Russia divvy up the spoils of war.
[–] dgriffith@aussie.zone 6 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Lots of expensive industrial equipment runs these kinds of processors still. You can still buy motherboards with 8 bit ISA slots even, although you'll pay quite a premium.

But all of that kind of gear typically runs its own distro with an in-house build system. For example, my work uses a flavour of Buildroot for their embedded Linux systems and you can just set whatever processor type you like all the way back to plain old i386 when you build it.

[–] dgriffith@aussie.zone 4 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Map usage times for a week.

In the middle of a non usage time type the string of characters that are first typed at the start of usage time.

Then open a browser using keyboard shortcuts (does Win+R open a browser in Windows if you type a URL in?) , type a URL, type in all learned username password combos, close browser using keyboard shortcuts.

[–] dgriffith@aussie.zone 8 points 1 week ago

It's only one wire in the cable, and it's not the wire, but it looks like the pin, or possibly the crimp point on the female pin.

So a few possibilities:

  • Bad pins. Female pins (sockets) have internal wipers that grip the male pin and there is also the crimp connection. Bad QA on those leads to hotspots in the pin under high current draw. I'd probably go for this explanation, looking at the photos.

  • Bad electrical layout on the card that means that the bulk of the current goes through this pin. Milliohms on the track traces are enough to cause imbalances. This might be balanced out by having a small-but-still-larger resistance in the (standard) cable, which leads to:

  • It looks like thicker cabling is soldered and heatshrinked to smaller cabling that actually goes into the pins in the connector. There's a reason why industrial cable connections aren't soldered. Possibly a solder connection on another cable has broken and hidden in the hearshrink leaving more current to pass through this one.

  • Following from this it's also quite possible that the thicker cable with less resistance , now has less voltage drop across it, and simply allows more current then designed through a connection already at its limit.

  • It's quite possible that there are different pins/connector sets for different current draws. This cable might be using the wrong connector with the same physical size but lower current rating. The fact that the cable has been soldered to skinnier wires in the actual connector suggests this, but it's quite possible that the connector is the right one.

[–] dgriffith@aussie.zone 5 points 2 weeks ago

"Oh, it's got an embedded TIFF of the actual content. That explains it."

Yes, I am quite old now.

[–] dgriffith@aussie.zone 41 points 2 weeks ago

Bastard user from hell

Every IT/software group needs to have one, otherwise you get complacent.

[–] dgriffith@aussie.zone 2 points 2 weeks ago

Yeah it's steadily getting enshittified.

I used to have a mythtv box that I'd built , like, 15 years ago and it was pretty good. For a while there TV UIs were adequate enough that I didn't need it, but it seems that maybe it's time to build another one.

[–] dgriffith@aussie.zone 8 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

TVs that do anything more than displaying a signal exactly as it's input shouldn't exist.

Some of that input could do with a bit of tweaking though.

I wouldn't mind if the TV was able to do things with the audio track, like remove background music, or lift the volume of people speaking, or erase laugh tracks/live audience hooting& hollering.

There's probably similar manipulation that you could do on the video side (eventually, once TVs stop getting the worst processors ever, not here and now). Imagine a prompt that says "Airbrush every recognisable brand name on-screen so that it blends with the background".

I seriously doubt if any major manufacturer would do that kind of thing though, so better get working on jailbreaking those TVs.

 

I know, upvotes/downvotes mean less compared to That Other Place. But it would be nice if I could set Boost to not show all the spammy spam spam in my communities that have a score below a configurable threshold.

 

I subscribe to a bunch of communities and often there is a cross post with the same title and the same URL link across four or five of them at once. This usually results in a screen or two of the same post repeating for me, and I usually just find the one with the most commentary to check out.

It would be nice just to do that automatically, and shrink to a single line or otherwise "fold in" the other cross posts to the highest commentary post so they don't clog my feed. Maybe a few "related" lines under the body of the post when you go into it, similar to the indication that it's been cross posted.

Thoughts?

 

Hi all,

In an effort to liven up this community, I'll post this project I'm working on.

I'm building a solar hot water controller for my house. The collector is on the roof of a three-storey building, it is linked to a storage tank on the ground floor. A circulating pump passes water from the tank to the collectors and back again when a temperature sensor on the outlet of the collector registers a warm enough temperature.

The current controller does not understand that there is 15 metres of copper piping to pump water through and cycles the circulating pump in short bursts, resulting in the hot water at the collector cooling considerably by the time it reaches the tank (even though the pipes are insulated). The goal of my project is to read the sensor and drive the pump in a way to minimise these heat losses. Basically instead of trying to maintain a consistent collector output temp with slow constant pulsed operation of the pump, I'll first try pumping the entire volume of moderately hot water from the top half of the collector in one go back to the tank and then waiting until the temperature rises again.

I am using an Adafruit PyPortal Titano as the controller, running circuitpython. For I/O I am using a generic ebay PCF8591 board, which provides 4 analog input and a single analog output over an I2C bus. This is inserted into a motherboard that provides pullup resistors for the analog inputs and an optocoupled zero crossing SCR driver + SCR to drive the (thankfully low power) circulating pump. Board design is my own, design is rather critical as mains supply in my country is 240V.

The original sensors are simple NTC thermistors, one at the bottom of the tank, and one at the top of the collector. I have also added 4 other Dallas 1-wire sensors to measure temperatures at the top of tank, ambient, tank inlet and collector pump inlet which is 1/3rd of the way up the tank. I have a duplicate of the onewire sensors already on the hot water tank using a different adafruit board and circuitpython. Their readings are currently uploaded to my own IOT server and I can plot the current system's performance, and I intend to do the same thing with this board.

The current performance is fairly dismal, a very small bump of perhaps 0.5 - 1 deg C in the normally 55 degree C tank temperature around 12pm to 1pm, and this is in Australia in hot spring weather of 28-32 degrees C.(There's some inaccuracy of the tank temperatures, the sensors aren't really bonded to the tank in any meaningful way, so tank temp is probably a little warmer than this. But I'm looking for relative temperature increases anyway)

Right now , the hardware is all together and functional, and is driving a 13W LED downlight as a test, and I can read the onewire temp sensors, read an analog voltage on the PCF8591 board (which will go to the NTC sensors), and I'm pulsing the pump output proportionally from 0-100 percent drive on a 30 second duty cycle, so that a pump drive function can simply say "run the pump at 70 percent" and you'll get 21 seconds on, 9 seconds off. Duty cycle time is adjustable, so I might lower it a bit to 15 or 10 seconds.

The next step is to try it on the circulating pump (which is quite an inductive load, even if it is only 20 watts), and start working on an algorithm that reads the sensors and maximises water temperature back to the tank. There are a few safety features that I'll put in there, such as a "fault mode" to drive the pump at a fixed rate if there is a sensor failure, and a "night cool" mode if the hot water tank is severely over temperature to circulate hot water to the collector at night to cool it. There are the usual overtemp/overpressure relief valves in the system already.

All this is going in a case with a clear hinged cover on the front so I can open it and poke the Titano's touchscreen to do some things.

Right now I am away from home from work, so my replies might be a bit sporadic, but I'll try to get back to any questions soon-ish.

A few photos for your viewing pleasure:

The I/O and mainboard plus a 5V power supply mounted up:

The front of the panel, showing the Pyportal:

Thingsboard display showing readings from the current system:

Mainboard PCB design and construction via EasyEDA:

view more: next ›