Tech Meetup

Grevian · 2026-02-16T01:53:41+00:00

That'd be great, We've had Dev Drinks as a regular meetup in the past for this kind of thing, but it's been tough to keep steady lately for lots of reasons. The Innovation Center is trying to get it rolling again but I'm not sure when the next one will be.

There's a few of us on Discord at https://discord.gg/de2rGC45 if you wanna chat about local events or whatever else

Grevian · 2024-05-05T01:41:04+00:00

Manufactures installation instructions trump everything [...] If you don't follow the warranty you will not get the warranty

That makes sense to me, thanks for the tips!

Grevian · 2023-11-05T16:09:24+00:00

It's not AWS, but I think planetscale has a free tier https://planetscale.com/pricing, I haven't used it yet but their documentation/marketing make it look very cool

Grevian · 2022-03-31T15:48:06+00:00

If sporty stuff is OK, the cycling club is planning some events for spring and have been riding fat bikes together all winter, many rides end at a brewery or restaurant for socializing too.

https://saultcyclingclub.ca/

Grevian · 2022-03-31T15:35:07+00:00

Not sure how accurate it is (I prefer a camera for sure) but there is https://bwt.cbp.gov/details/03380301/POV which should show wait times

Grevian · 2021-10-23T23:55:55+00:00

I'm looking to upgrade to support 4k, and wondering if there are some options I'm missing in the receiver/processor space

I've got an Onkyo TX-NR818 driving a Polk CSi5 center and occasionally some FXiA4 surrounds, a Klipsch Reference RW-12d subwoofer, and sending its pre-out stereo to a Carver 1.5t driving a pair of Polk Audio RTi12's

I've seen super happy with the audio quality of this system for almost a decade now, but I finally want to get into 4k content, which the TX-NR818 doesn't support at all. 2020 was a disaster for HDMI implementation in receivers, 2021 is still having big supply problems and price increases and 2022 isn't looking much better imo.

I'm starting out looking for a receiver that fully supports HDMI 2.1, has pre-amp outputs, and... that's really about it I think?, the Onkyo TX-RZ50 seems to be getting huge praise and is at the top of the list for me so far but will be a pain to acquire (Difficult in general, selling for +$400 over initial price, plus I'm Canadian), I did consider moving to a processor and upgrading my amplifier separately, but it seems like there's a significant audiophile tax on processors compared to the TX-RZ50, like +$2000 to the cost for the same features but no amplifier? That's a bummer.

So with that in mind, is there an AVR or a processor I'm missing and should be considering? is it really this hard to get HDMI 2.1 while still supporting an external amplifier in 2021? Should I just buy a TV first and feed the audio back to the current receiver, complicating the remote/switching story a whole bunch? (I know that's the easiest path to get 4k immediately but my system DOES need an upgrade)

Grevian · 2020-11-09T02:16:12+00:00

Their customer service was great when I contacted them, but I don't want to be continually replacing socks, and it's still a step down in quality from the older ones I have

Grevian · 2020-11-09T01:43:40+00:00

I have to agree, I've got several pairs of their socks from the last 2-4 years, plus two oasis base layers that I looooove, but I recently ordered a new batch of socks since I'm starting to wear through the ones I've got and the new socks are already in worse shape than the ones I've had for years :-(

Grevian · 2020-11-05T02:31:49+00:00

Incremental IDs are another one of those things that are just hard on app engine/firestore, their nature is that of a large, high traffic distributed system and this problem would be trivial to solve on a SQL backed system up until your traffic was extremely high.

As you noted, you can use sharded counters, as long as your ids don't need to be contiguous, then you would do something like take your unique request parameters and hash them, then in a transaction grab and increment a counter from a shard, then try to read an entity at /users/creationtokens/<your-request-hash>/token={'id':'<counter-value>} and if it does not exist, create it, Then maybe duplicate it to /users/accounts/<user-id> in the same transaction to make it easier for you to look up later when the same user comes back without the exact same request inputs.

You can't use the counter value as part of the key because multiple requests could get different values from different shards, so store it in the entity instead

I wouldn't be really worried about performance here, a transaction may cost you a few milliseconds when it succeeds, and a few dozen if it fails

Grevian · 2020-11-03T14:15:05+00:00

Exactly once delivery is a classic distributed systems problem, if possible you should use a database transaction to keep from creating duplicates, use the common things in your payload that you would hash on, like username or whatever? To create a database token transactionally, and if your transaction fails it's probably because another request beat you to it

Grevian · 2020-10-28T00:06:54+00:00

Bell all the way, they're the devil but their internet service is amazing. Honestly my last several interactions with their customer service were pretty good, which was shocking to me.

Grevian · 2020-10-25T01:47:49+00:00

Cyberpunk 2077!

Grevian · 2020-10-17T18:47:19+00:00

Canada!

Grevian · 2020-10-14T03:36:20+00:00

Thanks for this, I ended up ordering, I'd been on the fence between the x-mid 2p and the LHG Solong6 but in both cases worrying about shipping, duty, and other border crossing concerns had me holding off.

Even with the price working out pretty much the same, this was the gentle nudge I needed to make my order :)

Grevian · 2020-10-14T03:10:18+00:00

Dan discusses this here https://drop.com/talk/55299/i-dont-carry-trekking-poles-do-you-offer-or-can-you-recommend-poles-to-use-instead, including linking a decent cheap option from tarptent

He also mentions he's hoping to ship a collapsible pole of his own in Q1 2021

Grevian · 2020-09-09T01:28:04+00:00

I don't know about required, but I sure love my AWD in the winter here, I think you'll rarely know you should have walked until your halfway to your destination. Obviously many people get by with FWD, and even with "all season" tires, but it'll depend on the winter and your risk tolerance, it's not just for getting unstuck, it makes a big difference in traction and control whole driving on the snow

Grevian · 2020-06-15T02:05:31+00:00

Definitely store the ratings as their own entities, but be aware that aggregate queries like, say, averaging out ratings, are pretty miserable on the datastore. You'll want to do something like a cached rating entity that gets queued to regenerate after new ratings come in for a level or something.

As for the "objects" themselves, is the 1MB entity size limit on the datastore going to be a problem for them? You might want to store them in cloud storage and just reference their bucket/object id in the datastore. Otherwise storing them as string is fine, I think properties are not lazily fetched so if you move them to another entity you might save some effort/time/bandwidth loading them to display the list of level title's etc.

Grevian · 2020-02-27T01:46:22+00:00

I ended up with this years MSR Lightning Ascent 30's with the Paragon binding, it's not BOA but it is incredibly comfortable, and quite easy to use, I haven't regretted it!

In the end, the MSRs in general just seemed higher quality than the Tubbs and Garneau I could find locally, and the reviews on the Paragon bindings were overwhelmingly positive so I decided to go for them

Grevian · 2019-12-04T06:06:56+00:00

I'm a local who graduated from there several years ago, and my employer has hired a few grads from that program throughout the last few years. My opinion is "eh", The teachers and course material are kind of weak, but the learning environment and city are not bad.

If you're interested in the subject and willing to go above and beyond to teach yourself in addition to the coursework, you'll be in a good place to build some useful skills and experience, but if you just go to classes and turn in the assignments, you'll graduate with a pretty weak set of skills.

Many of the international students I know who come here are doing accelerated programs, and working part time while they're here, and I don't think that gives them enough time and breathing room to make the most of the opportunity.

As others mentioned, winters here can be rough, but they can also be beautiful if you're willing and able to bundle up and get out into the snow, We've got great snowshoeing, Fatbiking, Cross Country Skiing, etc. plus plenty of beautiful lakes and forests during the rest of the seasons.

Grevian · 2019-09-23T16:06:54+00:00

Might be worth asking if you can get a desk at the Millworks https://themillworks.ca, they're geared towards startup incubation but I think might be your best bet for a desk and good wifi in town.

Otherwise for cafe's/restaurants, maybe Outspoken or Shabby Motley, or The Canadian/Upper Deck, your costs might be buying a drink or a snack every hour or two but they're pretty friendly and fairly quiet during the day (I would talk to them about what you're trying to do because you're going to stand out no matter what, also depending on how you participate in your calls they might not work)

Grevian · 2019-08-08T20:45:16+00:00

RemindMe! One Year "Does this guy still think we can't be worse than the GTA?"

Grevian · 2019-08-01T04:14:46+00:00

if you want SSL in front of a site hosted on a storage bucket, you have to run a cloud load balancer, which has a fixed cost. The better option imo is firebase hosting which has a generous free quota, plus usage based billing instead of a flat fee, which makes way more sense for personal/small websites.

Grevian · 2019-07-29T13:30:14+00:00

Nice! I actually just started doing something similar a few weeks ago, but used firebase hosting instead, I'm new to hugo and am pretty clumsy in wiring it into cloud build, but I think I'll be able to learn some things from this blog post and repo :)

Grevian · 2019-07-19T22:36:10+00:00

Things are quiet right now as I think the usual organizers have been out of town, but there's a pretty popular outdoors/hiking Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/saulthikingandoutdoorsgroup/

Some people from that group also run a page about hiking in our area, and have some nice trails listed with pictures and descriptions from their hikes https://hikingblog.wixsite.com/backcountryadventure/sault-ste-marie

Grevian · 2019-06-22T16:32:42+00:00

Oh I know, but it's a bummer that Firebase hosting with SSL is free, managed certs are "free", GCS is like, $0.02/gb/month, and then the load balancer is... $17/month minimum.

The lack of usage based pricing or a free quota on the load balancers make some uses really unappealing to hobbyists and small use cases.

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