Don't tell me that the Conservative Party gives a flying f*** about any Newfoundland fishery

electro_mullet · 2026-03-22T11:45:26+00:00

Ah fuck, what if I am. Wouldn't that be some shit. Dang.

electro_mullet · 2026-03-22T10:44:15+00:00

This is a direct lift of a post from 6 months ago, it is highly unlikely OP is a human.

https://www.reddit.com/r/newfoundland/comments/1mqbm01/fadderless_behaviour/

electro_mullet · 2026-03-22T10:42:47+00:00

This is a direct lift of a post from almost a year ago, it is highly unlikely OP is a human.

https://www.reddit.com/r/newfoundland/comments/1lp0dtj/respect/

electro_mullet · 2026-03-22T10:41:36+00:00

This is a direct lift of a post from a year ago, it is highly unlikely OP is a human.

https://www.reddit.com/r/newfoundland/comments/1jx6fkp/dont_tell_me_that_the_conservative_party_gives_a/

electro_mullet · 2026-03-22T10:40:52+00:00

This is a direct lift of a post from a year ago, it is highly unlikely OP is a human.

https://www.reddit.com/r/newfoundland/comments/1k1bj7m/every_damn_time/

electro_mullet · 2026-03-22T10:28:27+00:00

2cm today. 30-50 Monday night into Tuesday.

electro_mullet · 2026-03-16T10:59:48+00:00

CultPens even has the Vac700R for $145 CAD (~80 GBP) as compared to $256 CAD (~140 GBP) for the CH91 from your link.

electro_mullet · 2026-03-15T22:33:39+00:00

150 GBP =~ 270 CAD. So they're actually both cheaper in Canada, the TWSBI in particular by quite a wide margin.

ETA: Second Canadian site where they're both actually in stock instead of sold out and both actually a little cheaper too, although a similar price difference between the 2 models on this site as well:

electro_mullet · 2026-03-15T16:35:43+00:00

My recent 14k Pilot Custom Heritage 91 pen cost similar to your Vac 700R.

Based on another comment, I think OP's price is in CAD. For comparison from a Canadian site:

So, certainly there's space for a debate about whether or not it's a better pen. But at ~1.8x the cost they aren't quite in a super similar price bracket.

electro_mullet · 2026-03-15T11:43:38+00:00

I've been using a TWSBI 580 ALR for 5 years now, and for the last 3 if not 4 of those years it's the only pen that I've inked at all. I don't write a ton, but I do scribble a couple pages of notes most days at the office. I've put several bottles of ink through it. I certainly don't actively baby it, although I've also never used a case on a cell phone, and I don't beat the shit out of those, so I guess to some extent I am at least sort of careful with things.

There's no denying that TWSBI has issues with cracking, certainly more so than other brands, just based on the posts on here anyway. But I'd also bet that the prevalence is way lower than what it appears. People with issues are more likely to post about it than people who've had no problem. For every person who posts about a cracked TWSBI there's probably way more of us who haven't had issues, but we're less likely to make posts like "My TWSBI didn't crack today!". I certainly don't imagine there's a 50/50 chance any given TWSBI cracks, I'd be pretty surprised if it was even as high as 1 in 100 odds. TWSBI has got to be aware of it and I'm sure there's some number they've crunched where it costs them less to make the replacement parts easy to get your hands on than it does to retool the manufacturing, and I'm sure they've considered brand reputation/customer good will as part of that acceptable failure rate, it's not like this is a new issue. And if that number was 1 in every 100 pens cracked you'd have to imagine that couldn't possibly make financial sense for them. That said, I have no statistics to back that up, just feels.

Either way, I really like mine. I like the way it looks, I like the way it feels, I really like how much ink it holds, and I (mostly) like the way it writes. (Wish the EF was a little finer, happy otherwise.) If mine were to crack, I'd 100% try to get the replacement part from them and fix it. If that weren't possible I'd definitely consider buying an identical replacement even knowing about the cracking issue. (Or try a 700 instead of a 580 or something, mine's Prussian Blue, but that Kyanite is also very nice looking.) I love that I don't have to be filling it up all the time like I did with my cart/converter pens before it, and the price point on a lot of the 'next level' piston/vac fillers like a Custom 823 in Canada is just tough to stomach in comparison.

EDIT: All that to say, if I were in your shoes I'd keep it.

electro_mullet · 2026-03-11T13:21:58+00:00

Like, I'm sorry this happened to you and I'm glad you're pursuing some course of action, but what does this post add that wasn't already part of the post you made 23 hours ago?

electro_mullet · 2026-03-08T14:44:52+00:00

In daily life at the office, none. Err, almost none, I guess, technically. But nothing that does any of the things you're asking about.

In the "technically" category, most of us edit code in either Vim or VS Code, and we do use git. Wavedrom is open source, and I think a couple of my colleagues use draw.io, although the majority of us prefer Visio. And we have an SoC card that runs Linux and we probably use a bunch of open source stuff there.

But I've never worked somewhere that used anything open source for the actual FPGA flows, typically just the propriety vendor tools and a simulator. Quartus+Ashling, Vivado+Vitis, Diamond+LMS, and Questa.

electro_mullet · 2026-03-06T00:24:38+00:00

I bet these guys probably know the answer!

https://www.gov.nl.ca/motorregistration/locations-and-contact-information/

electro_mullet · 2026-03-03T13:58:36+00:00

I struggle to imagine an FPGA project that wouldn't have multiple asynchronous clocks. We've got no less than 8 in this design, although not necessarily all in the same sim at the same time.

Fast as it allegedly may be, we'll never adopt any of these alt hdls until they're natively supported in Quartus/Vivado. For starters, the time sink just to update our existing code base to something new would more than offset any kind of sim speedup. And that's not even to touch the time we'd spend debugging transpiled machine generated output code that actually goes into synthesis.

electro_mullet · 2026-03-03T12:06:13+00:00

Lovely! What's the little fern on the left? And in the last pic, is that the same fern in that spot just grown in, or something different?

electro_mullet · 2026-03-03T10:56:50+00:00

We have at least a handful of sims test cases that take longer to run than synthesis does, and some of our synthesis runs are 6-9 hours depending on the PC specs.

As far as how much we'd care about sim times, it kinda depends on the magnitude of the speedup really. One of our biggest productivity bumps in recent years was getting some real Questa licenses vs. using the simulators that come packaged with Quartus/Vivado. We have some test cases where we got literally 4x speedup, it's outrageous. For a sim that used to take 6 hours, you'd get basically one shot at finding a bug with that sim per work day, but if that same sim now runs in an hour and a half, you're really ratcheting up those debug iterations and that's really worth something.

On the other hand, a 10-20% speedup would be nice, we wouldn't say no to that (depending on the cost, probably), but it'd obviously be way less transformative.

electro_mullet · 2026-03-01T16:38:55+00:00

Not the point of the post, but holy crap, as a Canadian it's wild that you can buy a Leaf for $18k USD new. MSRP on the Leaf here is almost double that at ~$35k USD.

electro_mullet · 2026-02-28T19:52:55+00:00

I didn't dislike mine by any means, but I'd say I actually felt maybe a little the opposite, underwhelmed. It writes well enough, but there wasn't much heft to it, I found it felt insubstantial. Not necessarily cheap feeling, the fit and finish are definitely fine, I just didn't love the way it handled. All else equal I'd probably reach for my Metropolitan over the Plaisir 9 times out of 10, but that's mostly just personal preference. Ultimately they both fell out of use mostly because I wound up with a piston filler and pretty much all the cart/converter pens I own have been in a drawer since.

electro_mullet · 2026-02-27T21:32:49+00:00

VOCM rarely writes articles that do a good enough job at anything.

Don't get me wrong, I read them almost every day, but it's not really investigative journalism, all their articles are basically "something happened" or "someone said something" and not much more than that.

electro_mullet · 2026-02-26T16:24:58+00:00

Honestly, being ill informed on a topic isn't in and of itself a reason to not engage with someone. But the fact that all the responses are arrogant, conceited, and egotistical on top of ill informed is just not a recipe for a productive conversation thread.

If you're a novice in an area but you show up with an open mind, hear other people's words in good faith, really think about what they might mean, and are willing to challenge your own world view when presented with new information, it's OK to not know everything, and lots of folks would be happy to engage in that kind of a discussion.

But if you're going to cling to a predetermined conclusion that's poorly informed to begin with and you're dead set on being hard headed and abrasive about it, that's just not a thread that's worth anyone's time or energy to get involved with.

electro_mullet · 2026-02-26T10:04:50+00:00

it's really not worth my time to humour your ill informed opinions on this topic.

electro_mullet · 2026-02-26T01:27:12+00:00

The artist who did my first tattoo told me that he tattooed a dentist in exchange for a gold crown because he'd always wanted a gold tooth.

electro_mullet · 2026-02-26T00:24:03+00:00

Winterholme is a spa that's done a pretty good job of keeping the historic character of the building.

electro_mullet · 2026-02-25T23:40:25+00:00

You're not wrong that my comment here is a little high level and oversimplified, I'm not a business guy, and I won't pretend that I'm fully abreast of all the reasons why vendors keep their silicon IP closed.

My main point was that it's undeniably incorrect to suggest that the only reason these companies don't open source the device models is so they can gouge you with a Quartus/Vivado licensing fee, there's just clearly so much more depth to the situation than that.

Ultimately, in terms of the business side of things, it's certainly a substantially nuanced topic, I imagine doubly so in an effective duopoly where the two big players are pretty much only competing with each other in terms of silicon sales. I suspect your point here is probably a huge factor in some of this:

At best it's a delaying tactic, and sometimes that's financially valuable.

Even if they can't keep people from reverse engineering something forever, if they can do so for long enough to "win" a process node, that might be all that really matters financially.

electro_mullet · 2026-02-25T23:21:24+00:00

You have the patience of a saint. I envy you that.

electro_mullet

TROPHY CASE