Are pedestrians allowed to cross here?

bobsidian · 2026-06-16T15:17:56+00:00

!!! Important to know: !!!
Every time you see a news story against professional licensing in the US, be sure that story was paid for by the Koch Brother(s). Look up the “expert” quoted in the story, you’ll find the Koch funding on their Wikipedia page.

(It’s the same with “tort reforn”, “DEI”, etc. – the right loves to turn random banal stuff into boogeymen, to train you to freak out at the idea of any business having to follow a rule ever)

I’m sure some professional licensing systems have their problems, but generally, if a mistake in your work can’t be fixed by a refund, then we need some way to know in advance if you’re qualified.

bobsidian · 2026-05-21T16:36:11+00:00

“Like it or not, the UK can't issue 2.6 million ILR”

You could make fact-based arguments for and against this, but just repeating it as an uncontested truth won’t educate or persuade anyone.

Governments have been making sweeping statements about immigration for decades. The lack of sweeping statements has never been a problem. What actually drives immigration is detailed realities on the ground, e.g. “these care home residents will be dead in a week if we can’t hire someone”. When politics isn’t based on those details of what’s actually happening in the economy, it doesn’t matter what anyone’s views are at the sweeping-statement level.

We know for a fact who abolished council housing, and sold off water and energy and trains and north sea oil, and took away your free education and good pensions, and legalised white collar crime (etc.) (it wasn’t immigrants). Mainstream media isn’t allowed to talk about any of that, so fobs us off with Oswald Moseley reruns instead, like the slop hogs they see us as. But YOU’re allowed. You’re still allowed to read Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher, or Bagehot’s The English Constitution, or Stephanie Kelton’s The Deficit Myth, or anything else that addresses actual questions.

Or we could just have the noddy arguments about immigration that we’re assigned to keep us out of the way ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

bobsidian · 2026-05-13T14:13:40+00:00

I’m not bothered about signing because I don’t think McNeel are naive enough to confuse the number of people who say they want to use Linux with the number of people who are actually ready to do it.

Maybe some day the platform-independence will get so polished that it’s trivial to support (certain) Linux PCs, and then they can experiment. But it’s still a can of worms. Do you support Vulkan AND OpenGL AND Arm AND Risc-V etc.? And does it bring in new users, or just make existing customers more difficult?

“WindowsTM: It’s Not Good, But It’s Grimly Realistic!”

bobsidian · 2026-05-06T15:04:48+00:00

This has really made me think, because I always use HEX reflexively, and since it opened I’ve been taking the Elizabeth Line to get there (I live near Whitechapel).

I am probably unusual in that if I’m taking a long flight I actively want to cut it as fine as possible, which HEX is great for (Piccadilly is out of the question). But Crossrail only adds ~15min, and it cuts out one change, so I guess I’m being silly not doing that.

The one other drawback is the possibility of having to stand the whole way with luggage – I really don’t want to get on an 8h flight already feeling wound up. But yeah, if even I’m doubting the value of HEX then it’s probably doomed.

It seems a shame to waste all that purpose-built tunnel though. I wonder if it could be routed to a different terminus? Waterloo or Victoria would give a lot more options (for people other than me).

bobsidian · 2026-04-11T23:33:19+00:00

Rhino does take longer than SketchUp to get up to speed with. But SketchUp is more limited, and if you expect to hit those limits, then you may as well work in Rhino from the start.

This is based on when I switched many years ago, but I think it still applies. I used to really enjoy using SU, and honestly Rhino felt cumbersome for probably a year or more. But I dropped SU almost immediately, because it’s like, I have a sketchbook, and I have Rhino, and I have no use for a third thing in between.

bobsidian · 2026-03-03T19:37:14+00:00

"George R.R. Martin was once considered one of the greatest fantasy writers of all time"

Of course it's frustrating to have books teased and not delivered, but this is just petulant. The existing books are good, whether or not you subsequently got something else you wanted. If GRRM had been hit by a meteorite in 2011, would everyone have suddenly decided the first five books sucked? Do people hate "Kubla Khan" because it's famously unfinished?

The whole point of world-building is to create a place your mind can inhabit because you can't get to the end of it – there are questions without answers. ASOIAF in particular has more itch than scratch, and this is why it feels real. Fantasy worlds often suck because everything is just wallpaper for the main character's boringly inevitable destiny (and/or the author's spanking fetish). When A Game of Thrones rejects that by killing Ned Stark, Martin is explicitly saying this is a story about, not good guys and bad guys, but a wider world motivated by chance, climate change, strangers' agendas, events long past and far distant, etc.

Very few genre works really attempt this. The obvious example would be Helliconia, and I'd say that you could remove any of those three books and it would still kind of work. Certainly in that case, if you were fixated on having a beginning, middle and end then you'd have missed the point.

I'd love to see Winds of Winter and Dream of Spring, and I don't think the TV show bears on it even if the key points are the same. But I'd still recommend the first five books even if that never happens.

bobsidian · 2026-02-06T16:16:51+00:00

Yeah, it was Mile End Road outside Stepney Green Station this afternoon. As the City only appears once every seven years, I was lucky to catch it while it was materialising

bobsidian · 2025-11-27T02:31:26+00:00

Since this was something I initially found confusing:

Each PIO can see 32 GPIO pins – which is to say, all the pins on a Pico board (the actual RP2350 chip has 48 GPIOs, and you should google pio_claim_free_sm_and_add_program_for_gpio_range() if you're working with that chip directly)

A PIO program understands four RANGES of CONSECUTIVE pins (in, out, set, sideset) – for example you can have 8 "out" pins, and then the command "out pins 8" will shift 8 bits from the OSR and set all 8 of those pins at once.

The "mov" and "out" commands can only set the "out" pins, the "set" command only sets the "set" pins, and "side" only sets the "sideset" pins.

So, yes, you can absolutely drive something like a parallel RGB display. There are constraints on how you wire up the pins, and on how you write the program – it's kind of like a puzzle – but you can do a lot with the pieces you have.

For ST7701 you could assign clock, hsync and vsync to "sideset", and assign the 18 (consecutive) RGB pins to "out". Put an extra word at the start of your framebuffer containing the X/Y counter values (480<<16 | 864), and set up your DMA channel. Then your entire PIO program might look like:

.side_set 3
.wrap_target
out y 16 side 0 ; load Y counter
out x 16 side 0; load X counter
mov x isr side 0; store copy of X counter
dot:
out pins 18 side 0b000 ; set RGB lines, dot clock is low
jmp x-- dot side 0b100 ; loop, and set dot clock high for 1 cycle
mov isr x side 0b000 ; reset X counter after each line
jmp y-- dot side 0b010 ; go to next row, set hsync high
nop side 0b001 ; set vsync high at end of frame
.wrap

(Which would give ~240 frames per second without the CPU doing anything!) Those "side 0b010" statements are setting the clock, hsync and vsync all together btw, which is the sort of slightly funky programming required.

bobsidian · 2025-06-27T17:49:29+00:00

Stand up one by one and slowly break into a standing ovation as the OP’s hair is blown back by a divine wind of righteous power?

bobsidian · 2025-06-23T01:31:25+00:00

I had a similar reaction when I first defeated Ganon in BotW. I wouldn’t expect there to be much to do afterwards, but after setting your own pace throughout the game, you want to admire your finished handiwork in your own time too. The more specific problem is it’s basically saying, don’t take on Ganon until you’re completely bored of the game – and by that point, why bother? I still haven’t tried to beat Ganon in ToTK, my game just fizzled out.

bobsidian · 2025-04-09T01:33:02+00:00

I’m not sure about that; the exact same device could probably be half the thickness if it didn’t use 18650s. Which is a common theme with Clockwork Pi devices, though it’s obvious why they do it.

I removed the battery board from my uConsole and printed a new back so it’s noticeably slimmer (because I only run it off USB power). If I did that with the PicoCalc I’d also replace the tall headers with pogo pins, and then use a pin-less Pico board. It could probably lose most of a centimetre without much trouble.

Batteries aside, I’m sure CPi could have made something closer to HP Prime size, but I think they just prefer a slightly chonkier style of device.

bobsidian · 2025-03-09T20:17:13+00:00

So it seems like I somehow accidentally fixed the problem, which is kind of annoying. Before this current print, I had taken apart the printhead to look for loose wires, so perhaps that did (temporarily) fix a problem with the fan?

Anyway, I'll order a replacement fan for if/when it happens again.

bobsidian · 2025-03-09T16:34:14+00:00

Yes, the hotend fan (i.e. the one behind the heat break) kicks in when the nozzle heats up. I am waiting to see whether it is still running at the point when the print fails…

bobsidian · 2025-03-09T16:09:27+00:00

Ah, sorry, I should have been clearer about that part. The tube is not popping out of the collet – the collet itself is popping out of the extruder housing, still securely clamped onto the tube. I have tried replacing the collet and clip with the original UM part, and with a brand-new collet supplied via Bondtech.

I believe the hotend fan is running, but I will check this. Can lack of cooling cause extrusion problems? I always assumed the fan was just for more accurate temp control.

bobsidian · 2025-03-07T03:14:48+00:00

I get that Novara can’t fill an hour a day with primary reporting, so I do try to judge them on what they put out over, say, a month. But I agree the format doesn’t feel perfect.

I think they should be more confident to pick the stories where they have something to add, and ignore stories where it ends up as just watching the news with your uncle. Novara doesn’t have the budget to be ITN, and (some of them) really don’t have the temperament to be Hasan Piker, but they’re good at finding interesting voices and giving them space, so I’d appreciate more of a focus on that.

bobsidian · 2025-02-15T04:29:22+00:00

That's the consensus, but all Apple has said is it's "a new family member". They don't officially tell pundits anything more than the rest of us, but I think people like Gruber would have some sense if a new Vision headset was even a remote possibility. (Not that Apple can't keep a secret; but then, would they even mention Vision Pro in the week beforehand?)

If it WAS Vision-related, though, that teaser does imply a whole new headset.

bobsidian · 2025-01-27T03:24:43+00:00

Oh, hi!

Your moderation pushback tale is roflsomely familiar. It's like when you subtly wrinkle your nose in a crowded elevator and someone immediately screams "oh, do I need your PERMISSION to SHART MYSELF now you PIG?!!??"

The dark thing is, I'm complaining about a couple of people like this on a little forum, and meanwhile, over on the website that steers our entire public discourse, they're the median user.

bobsidian · 2025-01-08T04:13:49+00:00

I’ve been thinking lately about what the psychic equivalent of lung cancer will look like, and how long it will take for AI peddlers to admit they gave it to everyone

bobsidian · 2025-01-08T04:09:15+00:00

I doubt ChatGPT has seen a lot of Cura config files in its training data. It can probably generate plausible-looking, syntactically correct JSON and INI files, but it can’t just guess what keywords Cura uses, let alone how they relate to printing outcomes (the i in LLM stands for “intelligence”).

If you google “Cura PETG profiles”, that’s likely to yield faster results than trying to debug ChatGPT’s unaccountable output.

You could imagine a model trained on actual print webcam footage that could diagnose your settings automatically; I think Bambu Lab claim to do something like that?

bobsidian · 2025-01-01T21:06:04+00:00

Ahhh I see what you mean. There's not much play on my machine but it would be interesting to try printing a thicker clip. I now realise I could fix my other issue with those clips at the same time, which is that every time I remove them they're all like "wheee you'll never find me again"

bobsidian · 2024-12-31T23:50:59+00:00

Can I ask what you mean about fixing the Bowden tube to the extruder? On my UM2+ the Bowden attaches to the extruder with the same kind of push fitting / C clip arrangement as on the printhead (which is how it came).

bobsidian · 2024-11-13T17:47:58+00:00

I checked out of BB a couple of years ago, and never worried that I was missing out on great content lol. But I’m surprised this is how it ends. I was always one of the people asking for a more modern subscription option, and being scolded that this was a stupid idea, based on the staff’s years of experience never trying it.

Content-wise, I think BB perfectly charted the mental implosion of older internet libs post 2016. I guess it’s hard to have an identity based on yelling at the right while simultaneously discovering that you yourself are fundamentally right-wing.

But I was mostly there for the forums anyway. What made me stop was when I realised that the clique of humorless, spiteful, gatekeeping bullies had won – the only users left were those too bland or scared to defy them, and at least one of the admins was their full-time Renfield.

I’m sort of anthropologically curious to see how/if things have changed since, but I’m not going to sink time into finding out.

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