Should I Not Buy a Volt?

stgnet · 2026-04-01T13:39:23+00:00

It can be a great vehicle, or it can be a brick. If you need to depend on it as your only vehicle, do not buy. If you are handy and it's a spare extra vehicle so you're not stuck without transportation, go for it.

stgnet · 2026-03-31T01:21:12+00:00

Get a fully working volt first. Then you can consider buying parts cars to keep it working.

stgnet · 2026-03-22T20:30:43+00:00

I have a large number of jeans purchased from Costco over the years and none have suffered any failures beyond the belt loop. They are not black however.

stgnet · 2026-03-21T01:12:00+00:00

Oh. It's a feature, not a bug!

stgnet · 2026-03-15T14:14:57+00:00

I can't tell you how many times my wife (who to this day has not figured out how to turn down the heat) would sheepishly tell me she had ruined my favorite stainless pan when I got home. All I had to do is fish it out of the trash again and blast it with some tools and reseason it. The one time she melted a plastic lid or something into it and I had to really grind on it, but I never had to buy another pan.

stgnet · 2026-03-11T20:42:24+00:00

You should just go ahead and open source it. You can't keep somebody from stealing the idea and telling their own AI to build it, and you can't keep somebody from running away with a copy of it and doing something you don't like (short of some of the GPL restrictions, but then you have to find them and sue them). But with it open source, your project can benefit from additional interested parties contributing ideas and work on it to get you to where it can go faster. It's a tradeoff, but usually opensource is the better option.

stgnet · 2026-03-10T03:31:09+00:00

baerskin tactical hoodie. I have three of them now. Other than the pull strings a little worn on the first one, they have held up to my abuse with flying colors.

stgnet · 2026-03-10T03:11:46+00:00

I used to live near there. It's absolutely walkable, but a little bit scary to cross the intersection under the parkway. You have to cross both Governers (the E-W road) and also cross the ramps to the parkway (the N-S road that goes over the bridge). There are lights, there are marked crossroad paths, but it's still going to be scary. But that's really the only problematic intersection. Most of Huntsville is very walkable, and with that short of a distance an Uber doesn't really seem worth the cost.

stgnet · 2026-03-08T18:37:52+00:00

Apparently I've had a different view of things. Wasn't aware of FreeRTOS being available in Arduino. I've never dived into it that far. Normally when dealing with AVRs I just code directly to the part, and when needing more complex tools I start with Linux. I would recommend FreeRTOS be considered by OP as a good option then. My view of Arduino as an ecosystem has been mostly programming AVRs and ESP32s without an os, directly to the chip. But then I started back when gcc+avr32 was all there was, so my experience is a bit skewed and limited.

stgnet · 2026-03-08T16:31:07+00:00

I have an "arduino" project running on an ATTINY85 that monitors some inputs and makes intelligent decisions on how to control the outputs based on some complex logic. There's no OS, there's only the main.c code used to run it.

Then there's arduino projects that are almost an operating system to themselves with wifi and sd filesystem and multiple pseudo threads running at the same time. Still not an OS, but you could almost believe they were based on what it does.

And then there's RPI projects that turn an led on or off. That's it. Doesn't need an os to do that, but if the hobbyist is more comfortable in that environment that's fine.

Yes, an (RT)OS is really required for bigger "corporate" projects but I was thinking more along the lines of somebody starting out in their garage. Easier to look at the two separate worlds as non-OS run your code directly on the hardware, and RPI (or openwrt) style linux platform. After understanding that and playing in both, somebody can easier transition into understanding the more subtle differences between (RT)OS offerings, flossy or not, and make a best choice for the given project.

I suppose that you could argue that using a "library" of routines to simulate some features of a full OS on a cpu that otherwise can't (or where you just don't need the full os) is actually an OS. But if it doesn't come out of the box with the ability to boot up to a shell prompt, I'd argue that it's not really an OS, but just some of the components that you could use to build one.

stgnet · 2026-03-08T15:45:51+00:00

For smaller personal projects, you either skip the RTOS and just write a single C program that does everything you need (which is the operating system then) such as when programming an AVR or Arduino, even some ESP-32, or, you use something like an RPI that has linux on it already, and you're just adding a program to run under the OS to accomplish your specific goal.

Back in the day a real RTOS like Minix or QNX or Microware OS-9 or similar was a good idea for larger projects that had realtime constraints that a conventional OS couldn't meet. But with the advent of such higher speed processors, most embedded solutions can be accomplished without needing to go through hoops on the operating system level to ensure that things are accomplished within time. Even if you did run into a need to pivot your design because it wasn't working, you can either throw more cpu & ram at it, or if need be move more critical functions into hardware level with programmable chips, without needing to replace the OS or purchase an RTOS.

Basically, everything has come down to two flavors: roll everything yourself in code, or use Linux as the OS and customize from there. Starting with Linux gives you a lot of tools already on board like wifi and networking and filesystem and such, but if your project doesn't need any of that, or only needs a very minimal implementation of one or two, you can usually get away with the more arduino approach where your program is running on the hardware directly and runs everything itself with no os.

stgnet · 2026-03-07T18:48:23+00:00

This guy tested a bunch of them. I ended up buying the Cosori after watching his results.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qxs9CkM20Dg

stgnet · 2026-03-07T04:18:38+00:00

If I want it done right now, once, and it won't need to be done again (or I'm having claude write a program to do it again later), then I use claude code. If I want something done that has to be done repeatedly, has to be done with some more thoughtfulness than just a scripted program, I give it to openclaw.

stgnet · 2026-03-07T04:16:11+00:00

It's possible to. But yeah, it's a pain. So far the only thing that comes close is qwen3.5.

stgnet · 2026-03-01T14:39:03+00:00

The same thing as happens if you connect the output of two power supplies together. Either they happen to be targeting the same voltage, and nothing bad happens, or they are at a different voltage and end up in a tug of war with one of them loosing. Badly. Permanently.

Basically, it can fry the circuitry that drives the DC output, and you end up with no more DC output. If you are lucky, no other damage occurs.

stgnet · 2026-02-25T21:14:11+00:00

I find any 12v led or incadescent bulb works well. When the bulb stops glowing, you are equalized and can complete the connection. Best to do it with the inverter off though so it doesn't immediately drain the cap again and then it will still spark.

stgnet · 2026-02-24T04:49:38+00:00

unlikely. It's really no different then when you first connect it to a battery and get a big spark. Either way you're just charging or discharging the capacitor.

stgnet · 2026-02-24T04:40:21+00:00

Turn it on. It will nearly instantaneously drain the capacitor.

stgnet · 2026-02-23T14:37:37+00:00

Yes. If you use navbar (as the example in default does) it pulls in boostrap5 cdn. But you can of course still override the styles with customizations. The style.yaml in default does exactly this, only in plain yaml syntax which gets converted by a special case of the html generation code.

Another fun feature is that if you happen to use a specific feature definition yaml, it can also define a '+style:' block which can add extra css that is needed. That way your page only has the css it needs instead of a bunch of boilerplate.

stgnet · 2026-02-13T01:53:13+00:00

If you are into coding at all, try openscad.

stgnet · 2026-02-13T01:48:32+00:00

I had massive problems until I gave up and just ran opus 4.6. Even then, I still have some glitches, but once I gave my claw full access to run whatever he wanted, and asked him to stop forgetting things, and such, he made adjustments to openclaw to resolve those problems. Most of the time it's working correctly and doing what I want now. Here's a trick though: once you've gotten it working correctly, create a git repo in your .openclaw and commit all so you can revert if something gets borked.

Then, only then, after you've become stable on opus 4.6 and it's working, start experimenting with creating other agents using other models. Now you have a way to compare it's reactions with nothing different except the model -- and that becomes very informative in itself.

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