Nice. I tried to submit a project on the former. However CloudFlare seems to be blocking me from submitting the form.
This is a common issue for all of us in Viet Nam though, not sure if there's anything you can do your side. I'll figure out how to get my submission through later :)
After moving to Asia, it did seem that fewer of my colleagues remarked on my choice of SMT for everything. I hadn't really thought about it until now!
Custom PCBs are even cheaper here than in North America, and longer workdays meant I had less time for hobbies. That probably made me double down on my choice.
I don't own much fancy equipment, just a cheap hot air rework station. I've found that mixing in fresh gel flux into my solder paste to get the right consistency made a big difference, enough that I never really needed more tools.
After doing that, I just sort of smear some near-ish the pads (perversely, often using a THT resistor), drop the parts in approximately the correct position with tweezers, and heat it up gently. Surface tension handles the rest. Once in a while, an 0402 resistor shifts out of position, but otherwise it just works. I'd probably need better tools for BGA.
What I love best is that SMT microcontrollers can be very, very cheap. I like the attiny10 (36$ for 100 computers! What a wonder!). There are plenty that are under 10 cents each, but I rather like AVR assembler, and their datasheets are very good.
I worked as a consultant for a company where the CEO one day, they just started using AI chat for everything. Every question you asked, they just forwarded it. Same thing for company strategy, major decisions, presentation content, and so on.
Initially, I was really annoyed. After I took a deep breath, and read through the wall of text they sent (to figure out how to respond), I eventually realized it was slightly better than their previous work. Not like, night-and-day better, but slightly better.
Since then, I've been playing with the idea of 'hiring' an AI to manage my freelance and personal work. I would not be required to do what it says, but I could take it under consideration and see if I work better that way. Sort of like the ultimate expression of "servant leadership".
I don't really use YouTube, but when ads play on random videos and it irritates me, I just close my eyes, the simplest version of content-blocking. (If the ad is painfully loud, I may also cover my ears in contexts where this is not extremely socially awkward)
Can we say it's immoral for me to close my eyes? Can someone's business model be the basis of an argument that it's immoral for me to exert this simple bodily function?
Is there some contract that I've signed where people have the right to my attention in any context? If they've based their business model on the assumption that this consent exists, and it does not, is it fair to say that the business model should fail?
When I first visited Asia 13 years ago, this is the feeling I got too. It's wonderful and intoxicating and new.
It spoke to me so strongly, that I immigrated and started my first business. Not to China, but nearby (Viet Nam). It was a very tough road, I never ended up particularly wealthy, but I have no regrets.
I'm trying to make an RF lightning detector small enough to trivially add to my motorbike.
I live in Viet Nam, and driving through bad storms this time of year is pretty miserable, and they happen fast and are local enough that weather prediction is not terribly useful.
There are a lot of problems with EMI. Lots of ungrounded brushed motors everywhere that make the RF bits hard. If I succeed, I'll publish the PCB designs.
I've also got some educational products in production right now, about Vietnamese history. I'd share a link, but my website probably can't handle the traffic right now.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I share what I read, but only with very close friends. I'm hesitant to lend books out -- people are not great at returning them (partly my fault, I'm also bad at tracking the loans). I also have a hard time finding my books, as I live in a very small house (bookshelves are out of the question, it's numbered bins).
I am also wary of most of the cloud services in this domain.
So I wrote a little software to manage the situation -- just a simple CRUD thing that lets me manage a small personal library, or a small shared library between friends. It's not a "social network for books" or something grand like that. Just a simple self-hosted thing with minimal system requirements. There were some existing solutions, but none that really felt right.
It's published (open source) and has a few users, but I don't think I'll be able to manage it, if it receives a giant burst of attention. On github it's called 'ubiblio'. Perhaps I'll be ready to share it more generally in a few months.
Honestly, a lamp that uses a 1W red LED behind a big diffuser. It uses PWM in the MHz range for dimming (so definitely no flicker), and big physical controls. My wife and I both get migraines and being able to set very dim red light seems to be better than sitting in complete darkness. I have insufficient data to tell if this is a real effect, unique to us, or placebo.
Code is in AVR assembly, because that's easiest for me. Sometimes I feel silly that after all these years working with technology, this is the most useful thing I've managed to build for myself. Hey, it's not nothing though :)
This is a common issue for all of us in Viet Nam though, not sure if there's anything you can do your side. I'll figure out how to get my submission through later :)