Notices by 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account (thorthenorseman@octodon.social), page 72

FYI, the umlauts above Ä, Ö and Ü have actual meanings in German (and in Swedish, minus the Ü), and are in fact considered completely separate letters from A, O, and U, and come after Z in the alphabet.

They are also distinctive when spoken. Umlauts as decor ("Mötley Crüe") are really weird, because those letters don't actually sound like O and U. No German speaker would do something like that, unless they were feigning ignorance to pander to an English speaking audience.

Glargh! Solving the combined geometry and UI problems that writing this piece of software entails feels like too much at the moment. I'm getting analysis paralysis because there's too much to think about.

Designing a computer network and writing scripts for Mikrotik routers was nowhere near as frustrating. That just felt like fun.

"While there exists a classic
body of literature for the electromagnetic properties of various materials, the actual reflective properties of typical
external building structures at microwave frequency bands are
just beginning to be explored."

From a 1996 research paper.

Only 22 years ago, they didn't really know much about how building materials reflect microwaves. Microwave links aren't exactly new, but indoor microwave transmitters (WiFi) didn't exist, so I guess that makes sense...

Here's a question for an RF expert...

Reflection of visible light can be diffuse or specular, depending on how smooth the surface is.

A mirror isn't perfectly smooth, but its irregularities are smooth enough that light mostly ignores them, and I assume that this has to do with the feature size of the irregularities versus the wavelength of light.

Drywall and concrete are diffuse in the visible spectrum, but are they diffuse between 2.5 and 5 GHz?

Scotland and Norway both have a population of about 5 million. With all the attention Scotland receives in popular culture, I thought it was much bigger.

If I ever run into a Scotsman abroad, a highly unlikely event has just taken place.

I suppose what I could do is trace rays in N random directions per pixel in the plane, perhaps with a recursive algorithm that traces extra rays for high contrast parts of the arc.

Ray tracing a 2D scene from above is quite different from 3D ray tracing in perspective. With 3D ray tracing, you always know where to look for the light that you're gathering for a pixel, while, with 2D raytracing, you're looking for light passing through in any direction.

For my use case of tracing radio waves, it might make more sense to trace rays from the antenna and simply draw those straight into the display buffer.

Solid light cones would look better, though...

I'm making a planar/2D ray tracer for modeling the coverage of WiFi signals in a building. I found some dB loss figures for various building materials that I'm going to use for the walls. The idea is to import a floor drawing image and add objects on top of it for the simulation. The scale could be calibrated by drawing a line along a wall and specifying its length (which is usually stated somewhere on the drawing).

@popey @MightyPork I personally like to keep it simple with just salmon, butter, salt and pepper inside the foil, served with sour cream and potatoes, the Norwegian way, but since you already have the dill...

@MightyPork What about salmon with lemon and dill? https://damndelicious.net/2016/08/19/lemon-dill-salmon-foil/

I have a tendency to operate at the limit of what a given programming language is capable of, and it's not uncommon for me to implement functions that I feel should've been part of the standard library.

For example, it wouldn't hurt if JavaScript had set operators (union, intersection, complement, difference) for arrays, or perhaps a native array-like Set class.

Is it just me who will sometimes go through a great deal of effort to find the simplest possible solution to a programming problem?

Is it right to say that keeping it simple is actually kind of complex, because a great deal of work can hide behind simple code constructs?

This tends to happen to me especially often when I'm working with HTML and CSS. I tend to rely on default behaviours and will remove a nested DIV if I can, even if getting rid of it takes 30 minutes.

By the time I saw the text message from the landlord, I was left with these possible causes for the flipped circuit breaker:

1. Some large piece of equipment has momentarily pulled 50A.

2. The circuit breaker is broken.

3. Large voltage spike on the grid.

What didn't occur to me was #4: The landlord had been in there, late at night, to switch it off.

This is a classical case of failing to apply Occam's Razor: The simplest solution to a problem is usually the right one.

But then I checked the amperage on the circuit breaker, and it said 50A.

50A x 240V = 12,000W

That's when I started wondering, because 12,000W can't pass through anything like an ordinary electrical plug without melting or at least discolouring something. It's unlikely that a single piece of equipment could even draw that much current from an ordinary electrical socket.

Naturally, the landlord sent a text message about the impending switch-off, but since it was late and my phone was in DND mode, I didn't see that.

The first sign of trouble was that every single device in the technical room became unpingable.

I went in there with my roommate and a breaker was off, so we switched it on, and slowly plugged stuff in again to see which one would trip it. Having recently installed new equipment, I suspected a busted PSU had tripped it.

The new network equipment I installed for the landlord is on the same circuit breaker as the central heating system, the hot water system and the central vacuum cleaner.

Last night, the central heating broke, and the landlord had to switch off the circuit breaker, meaning no Internet, no hot showers and no warm floors.

Flip one switch and everything is gone. Excellent electrical engineering!

The electricians really should've put those systems on separate breakers...

The task of designing a circuit for powering on a device with a push button switch instead of a latching switch is surprisingly complex.

The simple part is the 2-MOSFET feedback circuit that keeps the device powered on after releasing the switch.

The hard part is turning the switch into an off button after it has been released the first time.

I think what I need is a T flip-flop, and I've constructed one in a simulator out of MOSFETs, but I'm having some trouble getting it to work properly.

The task of designing a circuit for powering on a device with a push button switch instead of a latching switch is surprisingly complex.

The simple part is the NMOS feedback circuit that keeps the device powered on after releasing the switch.

The hard part is turning the switch into an off button after it has been released the first time.

I think what I need is a T flip-flop, and I've constructed one in a simulator out of MOSFETs, but I'm having some trouble getting it to work properly.

Managed to keep the old Epson inkjet from 2013 alive for a bit longer by rubbing alcohol on the pinch roller. I have literally liters of Chinese ink sitting around from the event that prompted the purchase of the printer (an urgent need for posters and flyers due to poor planning on somebody else's part). Technically speaking, it's not my printer, but the owner, an organisation, hasn't asked for it to be returned, and at this point, they would've thrown it away anyway.