Viewing profile — asteli

Why no love for network switches? The old mechanical telephone exchange equipment is enormously satisfying to watch as well. https://youtu.be/_xI9tXi-UNs

Saildrone's forecast app is like Dark Sky but even better and more beautiful. They don't have an android app yet, just iOS, but I believe one is in development, and they have a ful…

I work in electronics and laser stuff, where we use german-style compound names like "multi-pixel photon counting" and "erbium-doped fiber amplifier." Even in low-level compute, pa…

Joke is on me. I picked those nouns at random but Pangolin is a bona-fide frontend framework[1] and Clamp is a text truncating utility.[2] 1: https://pangolinjs.org/ 2: https://git…

I used to troll my old housemate (web frontend guy) by saying something along the lines of "Oh, Node.JS? Yeah some people I work with use that, but they're mostly moving over to Pa…

Here's a hack I haven't seen anyone else mention: Look at the calendars of venues that you like. Their whole job is curation, and they book lots of local bands. Throw one song from…

If you live in Florida, you can go down to the pawn shop, buy a gun, drive over to the airport and start shooting at planes. Doesn't take much sophistication to cause a lot of harm…

Wait, that exists. USB is the standard. The UPS with standardized DC-outs is a USB power bank with integrated pass-through charging.

The CFI let you do all those things?

The aforementioned Swedes appear to be quite content paying their high taxes, given the benefits conferred. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/money/2008/nov/16/sweden-tax-bur... [2] …

The unpainted steel of the DeLorean made it a pain in the ass to repair. You can't pull dents, apply body filler and repaint, you basically need a whole new panel if you want to re…

Apparently 41% of the land in the contiguous US is pasture or grazing land for livestock (548MM acre). Just staggering. To compare, land we use to grow crops that we directly eat a…

Some venues are better than others. Figure out which places and events have sound engineers that give a shit, and go there.

I do the same kind of resource management with books when I travel. It's no fun to go on a trip with a mostly depleted fiction paperback and end up lugging around dead weight for 5…

For the purpose of this exercise, assume a rectilinear ant.

One cm^3 of water is 1g. Ant's a lot smaller.

I agree re: power. I do not agree about traction. Assume you're stuck in mud somehow, a perfect case for diff lockers. If you lock the rotational rate of all your wheels together y…

The people who make money in industries that pollute would love for you to keep buying into the myth of personal responsibility. We saw this with cigarette and drink companies with…

Plus, no propshaft or exhaust to get hung up on things, and you can get the CoG lower, improving handling. Plus, a level of traction control that simply isn't possible with ICE. I'…

I'm getting a kick out of the image of getting spotted by a housemate while walking to the bathroom, fully nude with a DSLR. "Hey asteli, whatcha doin?" "Aaaah, cleaning the sensor…

it is good practice to keep emissions equipment in place. this way you can avoid paying to replace your cats if you have to move to a state that tests/inspects. it also reduces the…

i have a lifted truck but i'm cheap so i just wrapped a length of chain around the cat, secured with shitty padlocks i had laying around. doesn't actually have to be secure, just l…

This is about transit safety. Cyclists are in a lot more danger than pedestrians, because unlike peds, they don't have special infrastructure set aside from them for the most part.…

Depends on how they're set up. My Sony over-ear noise-cancelling set has ambient noise mics that assume a non-windy environment, and thus can pick up wind noise themselves. I turn …