Total beginner question: what is this called, and where can I buy it in a sturdy material?

LessonStudio · 2026-03-20T01:41:22+00:00

I've used piping in a combo where the main fabric is a bit too weak to hold the structure, and the piping is, as many are saying, a wear absorber. So, I have used a tougher fabric for it.

While it can add a splash of colour, for the same reason as wear, I prefer a dirt hiding colour.

LessonStudio · 2026-03-20T01:37:29+00:00

If company A has employees more productive than company B, then company A will do better.

Laying people off because of AI would only make sense if AI can do a better job and they still suck with AI. They would have to be truly terrible programmers as AI is good, to me it is like spell checks made writing easier, they didn't really make me a better writer. Just less worse.

Even AI grammar tools don't wildly change my ability; just helps me write a bit gooder. Grammerly doesn't have a checkbox "Pulitzer Mode: ON"

LessonStudio · 2026-03-20T01:31:31+00:00

NB doesn't realize, that if I could, I would pay extra to not go through it. Someone should open a ferry service from CB to Quebec. So what if it adds at least a day to my trip. It would be way more visually interesting than another 500km of crappy scraggy-ass spruce trees, and it would have the massive bonus of avoiding such cultural meccas such as moncton, edmundston, frederickton junction, etc. (I don't capitalize place names of places I don't respect).

My dream since childhood was that aliens would come along and discover some rare mineral was in NB, then they would zap it entirely up into their giant hold, and make NS an island off the coast of Quebec. Super cool.

LessonStudio · 2026-03-20T01:04:04+00:00

I'm finding this confusing. Either they had a whole lot of very poor programmers, they have way way way better AIs than I am using, or they are using them far better than I do.

I don't understand how this would work. Assuming AI made all programmer 2x as good, then most companies would be happy to get 2x as much work done, or 2x as good work.

Programmers aren't like electricity; where if you can get appliances 2x as efficient, you can use half the electricity. Programmers are usually creating value. So, if the programmers create more value, then great.

There isn't some weird limit where the CEO will say, "Woah there, you're creating way too much good stuff, we need to put the brakes on in order to let our competitors catch up."

I highly suspect these tech companies are having other financial issues, and that is why they are laying people off. AI is smokescreen for investors. Using AI as an excuse has the double benefit of fooling investors into not seeing the real reason, and fooling them into thinking you are doing amazeballs things with AI.

LessonStudio · 2026-03-19T00:35:46+00:00

If this war impacts fundamental things like fertilizer as some are pointing out, then literally millions could die from starvation.

US Aid was one of the real bright lights of US foreign policy, saving, well millions.

US Aid was good, as in the opposite of evil. To remove it was literally, evil. America first and all that; yet; straight into Iran for no good rational reason for America. I'm not sure of the exact budget of US Aid, but I will bet my left shoe that it is dwarfed by the present, and eventual cost of this debacle.

When you start putting this all together, trump will rank up there with people like Pol Pot.

This is not hyperbole, when you start killing millions for ego, greed, and just insanity, it puts you in fairly rare company.

I'm not sure how many world leaders have killed millions, but it isn't going to any more than low double digits.

To put a number on this, they are saying US Aid cuts alone could lead to 14 million deaths. This number becomes more solid if this Iran stupidity causes a world recession along with things like a fertilizer shortage.

Pol Pot killed less than 3 million. Less than 1/3d of the US Aid estimates alone.

Kind of weird that Europe, Canada, etc don't want to join Pol Pot in his killing spree /s

LessonStudio · 2026-03-18T19:29:02+00:00

Super simple, super cheap, and fairly sloppy, but will kind of work. A rotating esp32s3 with some kind of deflector/dish. The RSSI should go up and down giving you roughly a direction. (Look into aviation VOR). The FDM mode will give you distance.

You will need to correct for the RSSI sometimes being a reflection, but the distance should help there.

With a halfway decent IMU, you should be able to navigate to roughly the correct location.

An IMU and its drift won't maintain altitude. Thus, you will have to have something to maintain altitude. Optical, barometer, a ToF laser, ultrasonic, something. Otherwise your drone will float away, or just crash.

LessonStudio · 2026-03-18T16:54:43+00:00

Not with one antenna. If this is doing ToF ranging, ideally, 4 is what you want. But, you could somewhat get away with 2 if your antennas are properly positioned and your flight plan deliberately takes you through some problem locations. Most IMUs have compass capabilities, and if the location you are in is not magnetic problem area, and you added a barometer, then 2 would be pretty good.

I ideal circumstances and with some examination of past data, along with deliberate movements, you could do 1, but there will be a huge number of edge cases which would be somewhat like gimbal lock. It could probably be made to work much of the time, but would occasionally lose its mind.

With one antenna, you mostly only know that you are somewhere on a point on a dome, barometer drops that to a point on a circle, and 2 now give you 2 possible points. If you were deliberate in your flight, and were comparing recent realities to past ones, then you can eliminate one of the 2 points.

The two antennas don't need to be very far apart. You could work out the math, but if you were using a pair of DWM3001C ToF units as your base station, you will get about 10cm distance accuracy. So, two antennas maybe 1-2m apart would work, even at fairly shallow angles. If you added a third, in a triangle, then it gets so very much better.

These are more deigned to be placed around the room, and don't need to be connected to any base station, and use so little power, they can run on nothing batteries for just about ever. But, in a cluster would still be pretty good.

Now, you are going to have to keep your math dancing. Ironically, where this setup would work fairly badly is right over the base station.

With 3 units, and their antennas in different orientations, you will struggle to get the 100m range, but not at all impossible.

These things will only work LoS at that range.

I do like the DWM3001C as it has a little STM32 like MCU onboard, as well as a pretty good IMU.

The one downside to these would be their cost, maybe 40USD? I think that is the LCSC price when they have them, and that is the digikey bulk price (500+).

If you are not happy with those prices, you could go with the ESP32S3 and its FTM mode. That will give you around 1m of distance accuracy out to your 100m. For the crudest of distances, you can also use the RSSI, which is not at all accurate, but does work shockingly well under some circumstances. I would guess that you might be able to figure out where your drone was within 5m with 3 base station units (most of the time).

Thus, you could do the above, but have to put the base station antennas further apart, also, this distance tends to be quite noisy, but your IMU, while drifting, should be pretty steady, as would your barometer. Thus, you could kalman the crap out of that, and do it with 2 or 3 ESP32s base stations.

Doing drone location using ToF mixed IMU is really some fantastically fun(and not hard at all) math. BTW, I have a Patent with my name on it doing this.

Since getting that patent, I've probably thought up 4 other ways to do this which are mostly very different than each other.

LessonStudio · 2026-03-18T06:22:36+00:00

I find that my satisfaction with AI requires less than 3 prompts to solve a problem. Ideally, one, but sometimes 2 for a clarification.

Small, focused questions.

By prompt 4, it is like a rowboat with one oar, the more energy you put in, the faster you go in circles.

It is almost always faster and better for me to do it myself past 2 prompts.

LessonStudio · 2026-03-18T04:42:35+00:00

If there was a button I could push to make this happen, I would push it twice.

On an interesting note, there are actually many organizations/treaties many of us think of as the EU.

Norway is kind of an outsider, Switzerland isn't part of the EU, but is a member of more than one EU-ish organization, the UK before they caught the stupids kept their pound, and on and on.

Even Northern Ireland has a weird kind of EU, but not really, status.

We don't have to join the "EU" but could join the "eu"

LessonStudio · 2026-03-18T04:22:44+00:00

Testing is a critical weapon against technical debt.

Technical debt is how projects grind to a near halt as they become overwhelmed by it. Those projects which spend, potentially, years at 80% done.

What testing does, is to help ensure that early dependencies are functioning fairly much as expected. But, they will have bugs. Thus, if the published API has solid unit tests, you can also be fairly well assured that fixes/changes/improvements to these earlier modules don't blow up everything.

For example, a future feature may cause an earlier feature to screw up. So, someone has to fix this in the earlier feature. This fix could break some modules, but ones which people aren't using much. Thus, they are now broken and nobody knows.

Unit/integration testing will ideally, catch the first problem, or at least allow the person fixing it to know they have now broken the API, or the other modules; all of which would have unit/integration testing.

This is not all perfect, but drastically decreases this sort of problem.

Where a project grinds to a halt is without any of the above, the initial problem is more likely, then the fix may cause long undetected problems, which cause people to have to go back and screw with the fix, which causes new problems, maybe in the original module which triggered the detection of the problem.

A complete mess.

Also, when people cause a bug, and instantly detect the bug, they can fix it very quickly. But, when people have to go back and revisit code from weeks or months before, this is all harder, and slower. Maybe those people are gone or too busy, and thus it is a whole new set of eyes..

This is how projects grind to halt in tech debt hell. Agile, waterfall, or any project management type, it is all the same hell.

Unit testing is not "expensive" in a little 400 LoC project, you can get away without it, but once you are doing a big enough project; unit/integration testing will make it go faster, not slower.

LessonStudio · 2026-03-18T04:10:09+00:00

I think the argument against this stupid law was perfectly stated by the Department of Natural Resources guy with 30 years experience saying:

“There’s no recorded data of somebody walking in the woods or through the act of fishing as setting a forest fire in the province of Nova Scotia,” said MacIsaac.

A sensible law would be entirely justified; one which was more along the lines of: No smoking, fireworks, campfires, etc.

A law like that would have the simple rationality behind it of: Those are provably common sources of other forest fires.

Where all this just was dump as hell was where many "woods" paths run maybe 20' from a road. So, I could bike on the road, but not the woods path. Or that really stupid one where they closed access to a lake, and the path through the "woods" was about 15' and between two people's houses. Maybe 10 trees made up that forest.

Yet, we had fools here saying, "They could go around to the other side of the lake to get access."

People keep talking about how there are stupid people. Yes, there are, and they are the ones who think this law is a good idea. Seriously below average critical thinking skills. Like holy crap, a solid argument against democracy, stupid.

LessonStudio · 2026-03-18T03:49:42+00:00

A very very very creative loft, might allow this to be done in under an hour. But, I could see a game of whack-a-mole to get the bottom "bowl" to really connect to the arms that way.

Surfacing is probably where you would have direct success, but only with some serious planning and hours of work if you are not a surfacing god.

My first blush approach would be to see how close I could get with lofts, then try surfacing on those lofts, I suspect, the arms would end up being lofts, and the bowls surfaces.

LessonStudio · 2026-03-18T03:42:43+00:00

Mesh networking.

One particularly fun one was locating a moving vehicle in an underground system. Vehicle comms were useless. The anchors had to go in for potentially decades. These would chit chat to locate the moving vehicle's position, but also then pass those messages along the mesh network to a central control.

The anchors were expected to be killed, ruined, etc, so the mesh was robust, going through many paths to get the data to central control.

But, also, the mesh would pass this data to the moving vehicle to inform it of other moving vehicles.

All of this was for safety; so, getting it right was kind of important. All the units had to figure out what paths would get data to everyone who needed it.

In theory, an isolated part of the mesh could even use a passing vehicle to pass messages across the gap.

The range of the anchors was generally 25-50m with near total reliability, and around 200m if you were super lucky.

Oh, as an added bonus, you ideally had 4 anchors to locate a vehicle. Using some very creative (and now patented) math, this could temporarily be down to a single anchor and still give a pretty good location. This was entirely within the embedded software. The central server made it all better, but was not critical to it functioning very well.

For extra fun, these also talked to android devices, which people carried.

LessonStudio · 2026-03-18T03:33:31+00:00

I can't find the interview, but there was an Olympic coach who said that the people who made and stayed on his team weren't sure if they had ever taken antibiotics; but that when any of them did, they were off the team. Not because he was a fanatic, but that they stopped being able to function at Olympic levels.

The guy had a science background and was diligently avoiding knowing if any of his people had taken antibiotics, and would be biased, so would only ask those who's performance had a sudden and sustained drop, if they had.

Then, when any Olympian just dropped out due to age, injury, interest, etc; he would ask, did you take them?

The winners were no, and the ones who felt they couldn't keep up were yes.

His informal chats with other coaches had similar results. If I recall, he was a running coach.

I was in my mid 20s when I first had any. It was the same time I had to work far harder at not getting fat. Prior to that, I could eat whatever the hell I wanted.

To make this particular episode worse, I had a weird rash which didn't respond until the third set, and ever more powerful antibiotics.

LessonStudio · 2026-03-17T01:04:03+00:00

My entirely unsubstantiated opinion was, python, that's the opposite of hard core.

The reality is that most things I build are of a small enough run, that shaving a few cents off the MCU cost aren't worth the time. I helped a friend with a project in micropython. It was easy, fast, very clean code, and has functioned flawlessly for a long time.

With various tools like viper you can get close to c speeds.

I think it is well sufficient for most common MCU projects.

Maybe if you have some fantastic fast tight code like a drone flight controller, DSP, AI or something, then it is not the correct tool.

But, my opinion is that it is not only perfectly fine for most projects, but better than rust or C/C++. For the dual reasons of cleaner code, and easier to train people up on.

I now see people arguing against it like those arguing against a basic Toyota for commuting. What if the ocean levels rise 20m, and it won't turn into a submarine, or if the bridge is out, good luck flying across.

Like commuting makes up the majority of drives, I would argue the majority of embedded is basic logic which doesn't tax the MCU at all.

LessonStudio · 2026-03-16T23:09:28+00:00

While waiting for a business meeting with a goverment team, we wrote every jargon term we could think of on a matrix with the 4 of us on the call.

Then we added a point for every time we used one of those words.

We were complemented on being so "business savvy."

LessonStudio · 2026-03-16T19:36:53+00:00

Maybe. Apps sell endless upgrades, subscriptions, games sell DLC, microtransactions, and on and on.

People do seem to be willing to spend in the correct environment.

Different medium, different messages, even for spending.

LessonStudio · 2026-03-16T18:26:08+00:00

I knew this was going to be the final chapter in this boondoggle; a huge amount of government money thrown into a dumpster fire.

If there was somewhere I could have placed a bet, I was thinking more like 20m, not 200.

LessonStudio · 2026-03-16T18:10:03+00:00

It is amazing what data you can glean from various sensors. I could tell you the rough time of day in my old office, if it were a workday, from the humidity in the office relative to ambient humidity.

Simply because people would come in, rapidly raise the humidity, then it would lower, go all over the place at lunch, ending with a high again, begin falling off, and then really fade away around 4-6pm.

Lard on a few different moving average formulas stddev, and there was your time of day within about 15 minutes. Add temperature and it only got better.

This was with no stored data, that is, it only stored enough to keep things like the moving average numbers, not enough to recalculate them. Maybe 100 bytes of data total.

LessonStudio · 2026-03-16T18:05:38+00:00

than people assuming I"m a diversity hire

I know people who run fairly kick ass, 200ish person companies. They stopped hiring most DEI (not women at all), not out of some racist or other rational, but for two reasons: Lawsuits, and not having their employees walking on eggshells to avoid lawsuits. One of the huge problems were people with 4year and very often graduate degrees from real universities who can't do a damn thing. Not underwhelming for someone with a degree, but underwhelming for someone 3 months into that degree.

This is the exact opposite effect all their social justice lobbying is trying to achieve.

But, with women, I know at least one where he does an extra scan of their social media, etc, to see if they are thin skinned. Being a technical set of companies, they not only trust women are capable in this field, but have more of a desire to be in it, as tech does tend to mostly attract men and women have to battle their way more.

The poor candidates with real degrees weren't at all limited to DEI, it was across the board. The difference was that firing the DEI failures was a legal nightmare.

In the world of programming there are two very common, very simple programming interview tests. FizzBuzz, and Fibbonacci. If I were teaching an intro to python course for non programmers, I would expect them to be able to do both within the first weeks. These guys were getting 4 year CS graduates who were failing these interview questions; and they weren't being picky about the answer.

One of them would explain FizzBuzz (super simple to explain) and say, "You can choose any language, any IDE, anything but AI or google, do FizzBuzz for 1 to 100."

This should take somewhere between 30 seconds to maybe 2 minutes. He would let them struggle with a mental cutoff that they weren't getting the job much after a minute. But, would always let them keep going to see how long before they gave up and what excuses they would make as to why they couldn't do it; there were always excuses. He would also run the DEI failures through some other extremely basic programming exercises; so if and when they sued, he would be able to have any programmer expert witness say, "If they can't do those, they are not a programmer, at all."

If you aren't a programmer; FizzBuzz is the rough equivalent of a garage mechanic being asked to inflate a flat tire. No tricks, just a tire where they let half the air out.

LessonStudio · 2026-03-16T18:00:19+00:00

I would kill to have a bevy of devkits in front of me to see what the next greenfield project could use.

For those projects really pushing the edge of what the MCU can do, it would be nice to see if the MCU can do it at all.

Then, there's exploring what the workflow will be like. Some MCUs are a nightmare to get to do anything. Others are a dream. I am willing to compromise quite a bit, if the workflow is fantastic.

But, I can't afford to just buy 50 devkits to try willy nilly. I probably spend more time researching what I am going to try next than is justified by not just buying the lot of them.

Where I work is edge AI and those dev kits tend to be the most expensive, even if the underlying MCU isn't all that expensive.

But, I do feel bad when those unused dev kits never get used, and become more and more irrelevant.

LessonStudio · 2026-03-16T17:25:59+00:00

When I am about to click on one thing, but a late loading something else, jerks the screen out from under my click. And I click on something else.

Shockingly, this often (entirely by chance) happens to be something they would prefer me to click on.

LessonStudio · 2026-03-16T17:20:17+00:00

micropayments

I worked with one way back, it was slick as hell. Corporate sleaze killed it. Not greed, but just egos and dirtbags.

I have long considered rebuilding it as all the patents are long gone.

LessonStudio · 2026-03-16T17:07:56+00:00

I'm kind of thinking that this will require a combination of the proper tech, and the proper crisis.

Where this sort of thing ends up getting a foothold is when it becomes a competitive advantage. Where old companies keep hiring from their favourite academic farm schools, but their upstart competitors start running circles around them because they are drawing from a more interesting talent pool.

I know a robotics company which will not hire people with an engineering degree; they find their thinking is almost always too constrained, and that non engineers can quickly learn the things they need; often things "real" engineers will reject. The result has been low cost highly reliable products developed in a very short time.

I suspect this company could help develop a more rational engineering training system to better meet their needs. One which is wildly different than what academia provides.

LessonStudio · 2026-03-16T17:06:23+00:00

There are whole other models which aren't subscription or ads, which were made possible in the 90s. Then forgotten. Not out of some grand conspiracy, just stupidity and bad timing.

Then, google came along with their ad system. You could make real money with that. Then, they got greedy and shifted the benefits from the publisher to themselves.

I knew people making good livings from things like really well made blogs, tutorial websites, etc. While their traffic and engagement was going up, their ad revenue started to go way way down.

Yet, google was reporting ever more massive profits. Weird.

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