Notices by Matthew Skala (mattskala@mstdn.io), page 14

I suppose I should be grateful to this one hater who keeps trying to post insults on my Web log from a variety of different IP addresses, because he's giving me a reason to implement better admin features which will be useful when I'm famous and have more haters.

@xahlee that's an FRH ("Flameless Ration Heater"); I think the chemical inside is powdered metals that oxidize and heat up when exposed to liquid water. The idea is it's a reasonably safe heat source that can be used to heat the food, but also stores well.

@Deiru I can never remember, are stallmanites the ones that point up, or down?

@jk Lots of reused intermediate results in that, such as (op+mn) and (y-oz). Shouldn't really be hard to implement.

@ClemFandango The ore is badly behaved when you attempt to smelt it with the methods used at the time for other ores - turns into this weird powder instead of a metal, and releases dangerous fumes. So miners called the ore "kobold" because it was sort of nasty goblin ore, and then a variation of that name was applied to the metal once people managed to extract a metal from kobold ore ore.

The metal cobalt really is named after kobolds.

@woolie Yeah, I remember you said. PIC24 is mostly looking good for my current project - which isn't DSP, but a USB-to-CV interface. But finding bugs in the assembler like this is kinda worrying for me. I have a ticket open with Microchip support on it.

@lain Well, why not, if you can?

@woolie Probably going to use it in a future project, but at the moment I'm experimenting trying to learn. Kind of disheartening to trip over an assembler bug so early in that effort.

@woolie No, I only just started.

@lain well, there are these men, see, and they're like really ANGRY, see...

disclaimer: I have never seen the show

@ninjawedding Here's the link on the moment-of-inertia measurements to detect device compromise: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18138699

This is it - the smallest test case I can find that demonstrates the bug in the PIC24 assembler, by computer search followed by a little bit of human editing. Assemble this with listing off or the -am option and the symbol x will be at offset 2, correctly; assemble with listing on but not the -am option, and the symbol x will be at offset 1, which should be impossible.

.macro m
.byte 1
x:
.endm
.byte 1
m

@xahlee @harvhat I did some testing just now with MP4 files I had lying around and it looks to me like MP4 is a decent container format for audio-only content from most MP4 audio-and-video files. Depends on the codec that was used in the original, which can vary. But ffmpeg (input options) -vn -c:a copy -f mp4 output.mp4 would be a reasonable choice and you could name the file .mpa (while still using -f mp4) to distinguish it from the usual kind of MP4 if you wanted.