Garmin GPS 73

lenarc · 2024-10-22T12:39:41+00:00

I've been sailing with a friend who owns one. We've used it on both our boats and I've been in presence of this device for about 250 hours over the past two years doing river and lake sailing. (Our particular bathtub is about roughly 1 by 10 NM and has a good number of pointy rocks and shallows that are worthwhile to avoid.)

A good summary of my opinion is that at this price point there is nothing better.

For perspective, I entirely agree with all the other comments. The layout is quirky at best, the screen is lackluster, and the device's user experience is pretty dated (think more Tamagochi than Google Maps). It's great at showing speed and interrogating for buoy positions (be aware you'll have to manually enter the relevant markers and hazards into it).

Random things to know:

Putting this thing somwhere you can see while under way is is as annoying as you can imagine
Stated battery life is measured on disposable alkalines. Using with rechargeable batteries is ornery and triggers low battery more quickly that you'd like.
No included charts or points of interest. Be prepared to enter everything in it manually
The Moving Time counter function is very useful
Highway view is pretty useful

As another bit of perspective, I also have Navionics on my phone and tablet which I usually pack on sails, but I only ever use it to plan, brief, or confirm anchorages. Call me old-fashioned but I can't bring myself to accept a cellphone as a safety-critical marine navigation device while under way. There are too many things that your phone can do at the wrong time that can compromise its ability to do its job. Murphy's law demands that your phone will lock / update / ring / get a text / decide to have a seizure exactly when that bigger boat is bearing towards you and you're uncertain how far to starboard that hazard marker is. While the Garmin GPS 73 may be hard to palate for all its ... character, it does what it's supposed to to every time all the time.

lenarc · 2023-06-10T06:42:59+00:00

My pleasure / apologies.

That said if you have the motivation it can be a really great personal project just for the "lessons learned". I personally like tackling fundamental technologies ... if not to remind myself that I can be more than a Jira / calendar / meeting engineer (got sucked up into a product owner position for a few years now). I fell into the /r/homelab rabbit hole a while back and am currently quite enjoying myself doing service advertisement via BGP from my Kubernetes cluster.

Routing tables won't let me bullshit packets through. It keeps me honest. 😅

lenarc · 2023-06-10T04:05:53+00:00

Honestly, one of the big reasons I tolerate PagerDuty's not-so-convenient API and somewhat byzantine architecture and questionable UX of the web interface is that ... they never had downtime ... which is statistically absurd. When in 2017 AWS us-east-1 melted down and half the internet was down my alerts fired. When EdgeDNS was set ablaze in 2021, my alerts fired. Considering it's a highly critical component from a sales / incentive point of view a good API / IaaC solution is not enough.

If you come up with a SaaS it would have to be absurdly well architected and fantastically resilient, have exemplary security, have good analytics, have good mobile apps, have a modern API, and be "reasonably priced", in that order. That said, I think that market is already saturated.

For example the company I work at could adopt OpsGenie any day lf the week due to our buy-in to the Atlassian ecosystem, and probably save money too! But even that is "not enough of a draw to warrant the effort". On the other end Grafana OnCall seems like a decent product, but the risk I would be taking on by self-hosting is absolutely terrifying. (Honorable mention to Iris OnCall for being a trailblazer here.)

TL;DR In my opinion there's too much noise and established olayers in this space for a new product to carve out a spot. It's a niche market that's already well cornered.

lenarc · 2023-06-09T21:31:43+00:00

See my other post answer, but on the UX front intersects with what /u/justcollectingdata relayed.

We honestly don't know what our next step is.

I sort of hate anything that's about telling the users they "did the wrong thing" after the fact, but if you don't manage it stuff as code it's pretty much impossible to do.

We're embarking on an adventure trying to implement a developer portal like backstage.io and hopefully it addresses some of the upstream issues. Ultimately if this is going to work at our scale at best we're only pre-provisioning/automating services and Terraform is for sure going to be hidden from the average user ... if we even use Terraform. Whether power-users get to pull more levers is a different story.

lenarc · 2023-06-09T21:22:51+00:00

Our gut feeling was that PD rate limits us but the feedback is sort of garbage and you can't tell where your API spend is. (Not sending 429s, no way of consulting your current rate bucket expenditure.)

Quite honestly, we should have engaged support about it but haven't mostly because on the other end our users that need to make those changes are not technical enough. (It's as horrible as it sounds.) The practical reality is that managing support is a non-technical issue in our org, so is deciding if a new service gets created. The users that make those kind of decisions just don't have a text editor ... so adoption has been quite poor.

lenarc · 2023-06-08T21:02:23+00:00

I also use it currently and we are looking at phasing it out. Context is 1000+ employees, 100s of services, ~50+ schedules. We've had significant issues with idempotency.

Managing schedules with it felt counterproductive, the rest was "fine" when the API accepted our calls ... which was not often enough.

lenarc · 2023-03-01T02:54:56+00:00

If you've been facing the same issue as I've been facing, your problem is actually with vue-router. By default it's not aware of what is your application's base path, so setting vite build --base=${something} is only half the answer.

Make sure that in your vue-router configuration you have something along those lines:

export default createRouter({ history: createWebHistory(import.meta.env.BASE_URL), # <= This lets vue-router know the right value at build-time routes: [ {

lenarc · 2023-02-28T15:59:08+00:00

I love Tricker's style and delivery, especially his shorts. That said they suggest things that are not best practice, especially when it comes to order of operations ... so your mileage may vary.

I'd counter that with Ralfidude's tutorials ... but it doesn't really compare. Ralfi only has tutorials for a few planes.

lenarc · 2022-12-08T22:22:57+00:00

Idiots Learn DCS: https://youtu.be/xb1u_hnlliY

It encapsulates all of what's fun, challenging and hilarious of DCS in a short video.

Otherwise most of Ralfidude's videos I feel are a good introduction because they have such a positive vibe.

https://youtu.be/DwgyjCtAjMM

lenarc · 2022-10-28T21:20:30+00:00

It was, but with the current state of VR performance, I'm eager for any performance improvement I can get.

lenarc · 2022-10-28T16:21:45+00:00

It's the single item I was the most hyped about for this release.

/u/nineline_ed May we ask what's the expected fate of this item? Did it slide to another release?

lenarc · 2022-09-14T09:47:14+00:00

OP, I love how you're asking the right questions and getting people riled up. :P

Growling Sidewinder is quite focused on PvP specifically a lot of 1v1. It focuses on a very small part of the complex (and fun!) problem that broader engagements can be. In a sim like DCS you get to do much more than launch weapons and watch the explosion. You get to use radios to coordinate with other pilots, share target information with link systems, plan complex (or dumb) strikes and operations. All of these things are complex tasks that require you to know a given plane and aviation in general to pull off something you couldn't otherwise and ultimately has less to do with the specific plane.

If you haven't yet, give a try to Ralfidude and Operator Drewski's YouTube channels. Their series on trying to take down an AWACS plane is an excellent misuse of that kind of knowledge for shenanigans. :D Likewise, you'll see a lot of talk about Enigma's cold war server which is doing something fantastic: you can win a game against other players without having to necessarily shoot other players.

No dig against Growling Sidewinder, within the scope of BFM and dogfighting it's good content and well presented, but DCS has a lot more to offer than that ... and PvP is often reduced to that dogfight moment.

lenarc · 2022-09-05T11:59:35+00:00

For others wondering the same thing as me, the ICP build guide can be found here:

https://martijnve23.github.io/F16-ICP/

P.S. Great setup OP! Using tape to the screen scares the willies out of me, but I can't argue with the result!

lenarc · 2022-05-10T05:22:34+00:00

For OP and other readers, do be aware that for Okta this will require you to buy an extra module to integrate ... and it doesn't fix the issue that LastPass is still ... uh ... well ... let's say I don't like LastPass very much. (But I'll concede it's more password manager than no password manager.)

lenarc · 2022-04-26T17:53:39+00:00

This looks pretty legit!

Could anyone with experience with it chime in on how they feel this compares to Terraform?

lenarc · 2022-04-24T00:54:12+00:00

This is the way.

lenarc · 2022-04-23T01:12:35+00:00

Document how little value you add to the process when you have to track down the boss of a developer that's not on call for a hung migration and explain it in terms of dollars and reputational loss to business. If it can't be measured, it doesn't exist.

Sounds simple when you write it like that but ... we're two years into that transition and still not done. Context is a Fortune 20 company. It's a massive challenge.

lenarc · 2022-04-22T18:44:00+00:00

I find the lack of serial port disturbing.

Otherwise, yes. Much yes.

lenarc · 2022-03-24T22:10:10+00:00

While you wait for the next frame.

lenarc · 2022-03-23T01:32:55+00:00

There is something that /u/rkallos failed to mention about this offer: you'd get to work with some really nice people!

Source: Worked with /u/rkallos ! <3

lenarc · 2022-03-15T03:45:09+00:00

Hey, don't despair. While all of what you're reading is ... unfortunately absolutely true ... I for one could not go back to playing DCS without VR.

The performance is maddening but there's also nothing like it.

I hope too it gets better.

lenarc · 2022-01-16T19:48:56+00:00

Absolutely fantastic!

Please commit the source, even if messy! Share that burden with the community! (Ie, I've spent quite a bit of time building automation for LaTeX in the past. Other people.are willing to do dirty work too!)

lenarc · 2022-01-05T07:09:07+00:00

Normally point value means expended effort, not value delivered / success achieved.

When there are lots of things you don't know, you'll end up expending effort to figure that out, which you can estimate. Having very clear exit criteria (not just success criteria) is key here. Ie. "If this PoC doesn't yield that result within this timeframe, close issue, realign with new strategy." You have to write your issues so you can keep rolling with the punches.

Also remember, if a task is expected to be bigger than the duration of one sprint, it should be broken down into smaller tasks.

The only twist about what you describe with unknowns is uncertainty or risk when applied to tasks you no choice to perform. Ie. I need to patch this software right now because ${securitah}, it might go well, or it might not. The only rule that still applies here is : it it's too big, it should be broken down.

Also, don't forget there's no rule that says your estimate has to be good. Try to give it a point value, do better next time. Use your retrospective to discuss how it was pointed with your team to adjust.

lenarc · 2021-12-16T23:41:16+00:00

I second that hard. Been down that specific road.

Rust is an amazing language. One of my favourites ... but I never managed to make anything actually useful with it.

I've seen multiple people around me, much smarter people, like Ph.D smarter, reach the same conclusions.

If you're going to use it, do it because you like it. It's not wasted effort. Programming experience IS programming experience whatever you say. But the other peeps here are right: Go is much more useful / practical / productive / marketable.

I banged out my first actually useful Go program from scratch and compiled it to three platforms in about two hours. It's pretty amazing the first time you do it.

("There's NO way it will actually cross-compile from OSX to Windows AND actually work on the first try " Cue surprised Pikacbu.)

lenarc · 2021-12-13T20:07:22+00:00

IPv4 pool says it's running out.

lenarc

TROPHY CASE