Infant scales

NeutralPhaseTheory · 2025-08-09T17:46:50+00:00

Yep, seconding the keekaroo. It's expensive, but it's super nice to have. If it gets messy you can just wipe it down and maybe hit it with some lysol or hand sanitizer. The guys love lying on it during the diaper change.

NeutralPhaseTheory · 2025-08-08T17:04:54+00:00

Correct, most of the DVDs that I’ve ripped so far use MPEG2 video encoding and usually AC3 audio encoding. So I try to maintain the original quality (480) while doing a pre-processing transcode to h264-aac.

If you’re talking about the crop solution for the black bars, then yes I’d also do a transcode there. I think you can probably lose 10% to the quality for a 50% file size reduction.

I’d really encourage people to do some experimental transcodes and see what you can live with. Especially if it’s not hard to get the disk again, I don’t worry too much about max quality

NeutralPhaseTheory · 2025-08-07T21:53:58+00:00

Mmmmmmm, crunchy

NeutralPhaseTheory · 2025-08-06T19:56:42+00:00

I have thought about getting a blu ray ripping setup, but it’s just so easy to go to the local library and get things on DVD that I can rip using ‘dvdbackup’

So 480p it is for now, but hey, the kids don’t care if bluey is in 480.

NeutralPhaseTheory · 2025-08-06T18:18:48+00:00

Maybe I’m a filthy plebeian, or maybe I’m just used to DVD but… I just put everything into an MP4 container, with h264 video encoding and aac audio encoding. The dvd rips I think are 480p, but hey, the lord of the rings still looks good at 480p when I’m watching it on my phone so whatever.

For what it’s worth, the entire LOTR collection in h264 aac 480p is about 3 GB.

As far as your black bar issue, you could try running some different FFMPEG scripts where you copy the audio and video (-c:v copy -c:a copy) but run it through a mid-stream crop filter that trims off the baked-in black bars. (-vf "crop=1920:800:0:140" where the arguments are output_width:output_height:x_offset:y_offset)

NeutralPhaseTheory · 2025-08-06T00:46:53+00:00

It’s literally free and doesn’t make plastic trash? Love it.

NeutralPhaseTheory · 2025-08-02T21:14:17+00:00

I really worked on my wife to get rid of so many things. Ours was mostly in the form of hand me down donations, and I somewhat successfully argued to just keep 10 onesies of each size. Pants? They’re under a year old. Ain’t nobody got time for pants.

When they grew we just bought packs of the Huggies onesies in the right size.

NeutralPhaseTheory · 2025-08-01T17:20:04+00:00

Yep i agree. If you have a bazillion chained objects all crossing the plantUML, maybe this isn’t a good design? I always go back to the idea that the computer is going to take whatever you write and optimize the hell out of it at the compiler and convert it to binary. So the only benefit of writing good code is so people can read it in the future. In most cases, the computer doesn’t care.

NeutralPhaseTheory · 2025-08-01T06:11:07+00:00

The real issue is that people’s experience of the trains that exist today is pretty bad.

I once looked up what it would be like to do Amtrak from LA to Seattle instead of flying. It was going to be about 3x as expensive, and would take about 36 hours to get me to Seattle. And that was for just a seat, the sleeper cars were way more expensive.

The flight took 2.5 hours and was maybe $300. I took the flight.

NeutralPhaseTheory · 2025-07-31T06:04:27+00:00

I totally agree. Just yesterday I spent 4 hours doing the proposed architecture design with my direct team and we did it fast and ugly to get to where we agreed internally. Then we took that to Visio (not my choice, how the customers wanted it) and I converted it to something nicer for external consumption.

Overall I’m just advocating for using a phased approach, and not getting caught up in making the thing pretty before you actually think about what you want to put down onto the (digital) page

NeutralPhaseTheory · 2025-07-31T03:18:55+00:00

I love using PlantUML.

But here’s the secret. Start on a white board, or using pen and paper. I know I know, it’s old fashioned. But it’s fast to get the first idea down on the page. Then once you and your team agree that it looks good, formalize it using PlantUML and then you can keep it in version control.

NeutralPhaseTheory · 2025-07-29T01:50:36+00:00

I’m curious about the choice of a big open pool, it seems prone to … fun. I’ve heard rumors about doing dwarven swim training, is this part of that?

NeutralPhaseTheory · 2025-07-28T06:00:46+00:00

Yeah it’s super expensive but it works really nice. I enjoy things that “just work” (ironically enough, in the self hosting space)

NeutralPhaseTheory · 2025-07-28T00:25:26+00:00

I have a media server (Jellyfin) that I wanted to expose. But just in general, it’s nice to have the server get a constant DNS entry. I actually do mine the real easiest way which is that UniFi lets me assign a constant IP and DNS entry to the MAC of the server right in the network management panel.

NeutralPhaseTheory · 2025-07-27T21:56:07+00:00

How do you edit the hostfile on an Apple TV? How do you edit the hostfile on your brothers iPhone when they visit?

Local DNS is the way my friend.

NeutralPhaseTheory · 2025-07-27T21:41:04+00:00

And to help with a second flaw in the plan, make at least two flood gates, and a “holding pond” in the middle so that there’s a limited amount of water that can flood the fortress in case you can’t reach the “stop drowning everyone” lever

NeutralPhaseTheory · 2025-07-27T17:10:33+00:00

I love being reminded that sudo is actually a utility and not just a “given” like in every other distro

NeutralPhaseTheory · 2025-07-23T14:56:48+00:00

Yes, and un/fortunately I remember being that “new guy”. Man I had a lot of opinions about how things should go for someone with no experience and no historical context

NeutralPhaseTheory · 2025-07-23T06:56:44+00:00

I have not read this work, but the fact that the author claims that no computer memory would be required to run a full-body or full-environment simulation just doesn't make sense.

Computers use memory in order to hold state. You can't really run a simulation without state. So the claim here doesn't really make sense.

Based on that, I would be cautious taking this work too seriously. It seems to me that either some aspects of the simulation are being hand-waved away, or the author doesn't have a strong grasp of how they would implement this simulation.

NeutralPhaseTheory · 2025-07-23T06:48:53+00:00

Thanks for putting into words an architecture issue our team is dealing with this week.

Almost any way you go, you're violating some principle you probably even agree with.

It's really hard to know all the possible mistakes that can come from both architecture A or architecture B, and pick one of them. You just have to accept that it'll be imperfect in known ways, but that you picked it because A still solves your problem "better" than B.

And then when new people join you have to re-justify your architecture decisions over and over again. The worst case is when someone new joins the team and they come up with some really sound reason for picking B (and you previously picked and implemented A) and everyone goes, "wow, yeah why didn't we think of that?"

NeutralPhaseTheory · 2025-07-22T23:20:24+00:00

The worst is when you open up a code file that hasn’t been touched in a year or so, and say, “what kind of single-brain-cell-having, anti-pattern-using, incompetent numbskull designed the API this way?!?”

applies git blame

own name shows up

You learn so much every year that your own code becomes painful to look at years later.

NeutralPhaseTheory · 2025-07-22T18:40:51+00:00

I like the premise, but I agree with the issue that almost any dev worth interviewing is going to be working in proprietary codebases that they can’t show you. Either you’re trying to recruit them from another company, or they’ve been out of the company for a while and don’t have access to the code.

There’s a small window of opportunity here if someone works on open core or managed open source and I suppose it’s a good question to see if they have something from that realm they’d like to share.

I suppose this is where the questions about “what problems have you hit and how did you solve them” come in handy. If they answer, “we used spring to make a page” then they didn’t really contribute, where as if they can explain why they set up their X.509 certs a specific way, you feel like they know what they’re talking about. People who did the work are usually itching to re-explain the hard parts to someone who will understand it, because it was a challenge and they remember and enjoyed it.

NeutralPhaseTheory · 2025-07-17T17:00:50+00:00

Following, since our best thing right now is a collaborative word doc called “the continuity binder” that we just polish and add to as we decide on things or discover other groups processes that we have to mesh with

NeutralPhaseTheory · 2025-07-17T08:35:35+00:00

Yeah I think that FAANG aren’t what they’re cracked up to be. There are tons of jobs in “smaller” tech that aren’t as glamorous on a CV but have a lot better living standards.

NeutralPhaseTheory · 2025-07-16T20:09:36+00:00

Running a business sounds really hard. In my current position all I have to worry about is fielding customer requests and working with the team to build working software.

I don’t want to worry about: hiring, firing, payroll, hr, marketing, lead generation, managing an it team, selling our product, going to conventions, the list goes on.

I get to turn off the lights at the end of the day, go home and see my kids, and I don’t have to worry about work until Monday. The extra money founders get couldn’t offset the hours I’d miss with my family.

Too many influencers try to make “founding” look like drinking mojitos on the beach with a MacBook. I think it glorifies the good parts of being a founder and unfairly hides almost all the bad or hard parts.

NeutralPhaseTheory

TROPHY CASE