jhogendorn

56 minutes agodiscuss

Yes, you need to design for what jlc stocks as basic parts to retain your sanity. Dont just slap down a 1206 resistor and call it good, jlc prob has no stock in that size in that value, but they probably have it in 0603. Once you get a handle for whats basic or very common extended parts, that sort of thing gets a lot easier. You kind of have to work backwards, ie if i need a diode i see what jlc has in basic and make my part choice accordingly.

jhogendorn

7 hours agodiscuss

Lots of things.

- Got https://beachcomber.sh pretty much stable. Next stage is to propose to various upstreams its worth integrating. - Custom firmware for some ikea symfonisk dials because the oem firmware on them has some pretty bad bugs. Added features like hold and turn. Getting nice smooth dial behaviour over zigbee etc is surprisingly tricky - Built a skill evaluator tool that runs a skill through test suites and then tweaks the skill context and runs again. Its been pretty effective to be honest, almost all skills you do the first version is laughable compared to the one you get after this automated self improvement. - A robust tmux bridge interface for claude to hook into, and then a director layer on top of that for agent orchestration tooling - a stenographer skill that on the fly ripgrep and builds a rag on your on disk conversation history as a form of memory. Pretty effective. - I have just started a tool that brokers woodpecker ci to openbao/vault to give a gitlab like integration for controlled secrets injection for ci. - Been beating my head against a camera tool for a while now, finally making headway. Many ptz cameras dont support fov move, which nvrs need for ml object detection and tracking. They just have a super clunky continuous move and stop. So my tool characterises the camera with cv tools and calibrates movement curves to produce a data file that can be used by my onvif proxy to emulate the more advanced move commands. - Various helper tools for fusion, like csv based parameterised export, and compliant magnet insert generators. - A pipeline that consumes my content backlog, ie instagram saves, reddit saves, hn faves, etc and analyses them with local models and various algorithms steps to categorise and intuit why it was saved and what the key information is and what category it fits into for future reference etc. - A map of my city that shows live river height data with flood map overlays, contour data, predicted overland flow etc. flooding is a regular concern but theres no great resource to know whats going on. I have about 60gb of public datasets it works with. - A package manager for kicad library symbols and footprints, datasheets - skills for kicad so claude can reasonably interpret the schematic and advise on problems, check against datasheets etc. surprisingly effective. - A gcode controlled expansion board for the Carvera Air that gives you 8+8 channels of control for extraction, air assist, vacuum table, timelapse camera, etc. you only have 1 pwm pin so the protocol encodes over that. - A novel exploration interface for vitamins that renders them in a network graph, showing relationships. When you select one it rearranges around it into a kind of valance orbit style so you can explore chains of effect. Turns out, lots and lots of things relate to magnesium. - A comprehensive usb c pd board with 4s battery management. 3a or 8a depending on version. Trying to do proper pd in is nontrivial so this is a drop in solve. - A new brain pcb for Kinesis Advantage Pro keyboards to give modern firmware, bluetooth etc. - Repacked my rack UPS battery with LiFePo cells, and built an induction/resistive series battery balancer pcb for it. - Playing around with a new debug header/connector concept thats tiny footprint and zero cost to add.

The hard part is getting things over the line, publishing and seeing if theres interest. A thing can be largely done but theres a lot of detail work polishing it up so its public ready.

jhogendorn

7 hours agodiscuss

So a lot of this goes away if you try to stick to jlcpcb basic parts from lcsc, and you sort of develop preferred components for things. Another trick is when in a category, for example angular hall sensors, once you have the key attributes like vin, smt, etc, sort by quantity desc to see what parts get heavily stocked, that tends to indicate what is popular in industry and likely to be a good generic fit. Out of the top 10-20 pick according to stock level against price. If youre ordering from jlc, look through lcsc and you can do pcba with them, or get the parts shipped with the pcbs. Otherwise digikey, mouser (good for connectors), farnell, rs etc, roughly in that order. You will quickly learn for a lot of components there are very standard parts everyone uses. Diodes, inductors for example. To some extent if your footprint is already in the jlcpcb library, its popular and use that. Ie theres 1 smd push button that is basic on jlc and has a footprint in kicad default library. Youd be a little crazy to use anything else. Make all your resistors and caps 0603 or 0402, jlc stocks those the most, vs spotty coverage in 0805 or 1206.

But you find each time you find something in a category, a hall sensors, an encoder, a capacitance sensor, gpio expander, adc, you just file that away as kind of solved and next time you hit that part first before finding alts. Over time you have to dig about less and less. But dont bother with things like resistors, caps, etc that are basic. Even mosfets, unless you have special needs the 3 main types jlc has as basic are fine. Dont get some odd package thats technically two mosfets in one, just put down two basic mosfets. And if you do need a more 'advanced' part, look what is on jlc's promo list atm. Theres very popular stm's for example that are prettymuch constantly on promo (promo is they have the part loaded in mid term for some big customer so you might as well piggyback. Means no loading fee. Adds up)

Llm's can be useful for sifting the sand. Narrowed it to like 30 options and still dont know whats the best pick? Export search as csv and ask your favourite stochastic parrot which part would work best for your application and why. Dont ask them for part numbers though, completely pointless.

jhogendorn

last monthdiscuss

I built https://beachcomber.sh after one day getting huge lag and asking claude to investigate found that one of the factors was thousands of resources purely for giving my prompt, tmux statusline, nvim statusline, claude statusline the same identical information.

I probably would not have bothered to allocate time to this pre ai, the juice wasnt really worth the squeeze. But I approached it with an initial amusing naivete about it being 'super simple'. As is almost always the case with software theres a reasonable amount of hidden complexity. But I have been using it as a sort of learning proving ground for how to work with agentic development. For example I got to a point where claude wouldnt implement properly and would argue with me about changes because it would read the current/old docs in the repo and get confused about reality. So right now I'm experimenting with 'canonical specs' that can only be changed modally with gates and a defined cascade from canon, to code, to docs in that order. Otherwise you end up in a weird thrash about the docs and the code disagree and which one will the agent decide to change for consistency?

Anyway, its been interesting and its v0.6 and at a point where Ive not hit a sharp edge dogfooding for a while and some beta testers would be valuable. Right now you have to manually wire it into your stack, once some others have kicked the tyres hard enough I will make some pr's to the popular tools to consider integrating it.

jhogendorn

last monthdiscuss

If you like that, you should check out my project https://beachcomber.sh . Its about time I take it from dogfooding to beta users if you want to give it a go.

jhogendorn

last monthdiscuss

As far as I understand it, the movies were actually very successful, but there was some kind of internal politicking or studio issue and they just didnt continue.

jhogendorn

3 months agodiscuss

Compaction wont save you, in fact calling compaction will eat about 3-5x the cold cache cost in usage ive found.

jhogendorn

3 months agodiscuss

I dont believe the fixes offered by boris et al are genuine. What i can get done on my max plan has gone down by about 80%. I have often seen my usage meter sit at 3-7% before a single message has been sent that session, and ive seen simple fresh prompts jump usage 15-20%. Theres clearly some fundamental underlying issue with the usage monitoring and billing platform.

jhogendorn

3 months agodiscuss

[flagged]

jhogendorn

3 months agodiscuss

If you hold command while you restore the window from the dock it will restore into the current space. I wish i knew how to make this the default. Getting whisked away to a random space is one of the most irritating issues. Like when you want a finder window for downloads and instead of a new window in the current space you get taken cross country to on thats already open.

jhogendorn

4 months agodiscuss

I wonder if you can buy a replacement headband yet, since they have a lifespan of about a year before the mesh collapses. Which probably happens because they are so god-damn heavy.

I really wish the audio technica headband style was more common, even they use it less now. The two winglets as the head contact are just so much more comfortable than literally any other configuration.

Has anyone done a teardown and figured out where all the gravity in these things comes from?

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