Viewing profile — jmwilson

The Youtube introduction video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igVscvWAR1s ) is a great explanation of the tech and the end where he retrofits it into a Panasonic CF RZ is wild.

TrueNAS is just web-based configuration management. As long as you only use the web UI, your system state can be distilled down to the config file it generates. If you do a vanilla…

Firefox does do the right thing and seems the most usable browser for private CAs. Chrome and derivatives mostly too, except the problem mentioned about the public suffix list. Mob…

Another obnoxious behavior is clients enforcing lifetime requirements for domains they have no business imposing their opinion about: .internal and .home.arpa. These are specifical…

HyperCard was my introduction to programming and delivered on the vision of personal computing as "bicycle for the mind." RIP

Working for a great company in its heyday is a gift - one that I wish for everyone. Stories like this are a comfort when the industry is near its nadir, and reminder that the indus…

The lack of the ohm symbol Ω is also quite a bummer given the technical domain of the font.

I use KaTex ( https://katex.org/ ) as part of static site generation, and I get LaTeX quality output (because it duplicates LaTeX's algorithm) using only CSS. Using the eqn and tro…

I made a test PCB with capacitor footprints repeated at various intervals, with measurement ports for controlled experiments. You can really see the performance difference between …

Who works Sunday morning then? The maintenance window will morph into a do-big-risky-changes window, which means everybody in engineering will have to be on-call. Many years ago, w…

Tuning feedback loops is a topic I've found to be fiendishly good fun, perhaps because of how obtuse the final result is. There is no at-a-glance way to see the connection between …

> they aint ever going to pop a North Korean threat actor bc they simply cant travel at will. True, but the USG has a long memory and holds grudges. Even if they never travel, they…

> In the mid nineties the Internet was largely a research network between university computers and paid for by tax payers. Your timeline is off by at least half a decade, and thing…

> The space of possible subjects is huge, so on average your discernment is terrible, relative to what it could be. This is a serious problem if you create a machine that does ever…

I had this discussion (specifically about the Hippie trail) with a friend before I made a trip to Hong Kong in 2019. The conclusion was it is important to travel while you can. Thi…

https://hnhiring.com/trends Not a true top-line overall number, but the trend is obvious notwithstanding.

Frequency domain analysis is useful when you have a physical quantity (which normally comes down to energy or power, in joules or watts) that you want to understand in terms of fre…

There's different levels of "understanding how things work" and the author makes it clear what kind of understanding he's going for. If you look at the source code to program, you …

(2022) The first time I saw a PCB business card, I thought it was pretty cool. Then I saw a PCBA business card (with components!) and was amazed. But now I just see them as unneces…

A lot of it is not mass-produced ( https://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-caltech-glassb... ). Even if you used brand-new pieces, for analytical work, you'd still need to cl…

Using Alconox (mentioned on the page, and easily found on Amazon) is one my tricks when I absolutely need sparkling clean dishes or containers. Not the best choice for the environm…

The amount of written material (work samples, writing samples, free-form essay responses) they request is staggering. There is no guarantee they will read your responses with the s…

I ran into this when trying to make a vector version of the Smith chart [1] - which has a lot of circles. It turns out the inaccuracy from a 4-segment Bezier "circle" is significan…

Motors, wall warts with line-frequency transformers, or other things that are an inductive load. Magnetic materials designed for 60 Hz may saturate at 50 Hz, though usually things …