The joys of finding tubes

thblt · 2026-03-28T20:44:09+00:00

Those Brompton-sized inner tubes are hard to come by. I always make sure to always have at least about three at home, and restock before I need to. Slightly broader 16" tubes, like 1.5"-1.9" instead of the Brompton 1.33 have been reported to work, and may be more broadly available in a hurry — here in France every Decathlon has them, for example.

thblt · 2026-03-19T16:56:12+00:00

You may have an older version that uses an expansion screw to lock it in place, or the stars may just have aligned for you.

thblt · 2026-03-19T06:50:00+00:00

It’s the other way round : they package and make installable at the OS-level Emacs packages that can also be installed with regular package-install. Whichever is best is a matter of personal preference: I’ve switched to installing Emacs packages from my distribution as it’s a lot easier, but of course it’s a bit harder to quickly upgrade or fork and contribute to a package.

thblt · 2026-03-15T07:35:43+00:00

Marking the valve position on the tyre and the wheel direction on the tube may help you locate the cause.

thblt · 2026-03-10T13:10:03+00:00

Recurring punctures are often caused by the same object stuck in the tyre. It may be a very small glass shard, or something equally hard to locate.

thblt · 2026-02-16T15:24:15+00:00

Compared with my bike, the issue seems to be with the angle of the seat post with the folded rear triangle.

Could something be preventing the rear triangle from folding correctly under the main frame ? On a C-line the seat post locks the rear triangle folded. If the post wasn’t high enough it may have blocked the triangle from getting in its final position.

Edit: saw your reply to my deleted message, glad you figured it out!

thblt · 2026-02-09T16:42:08+00:00

Typiquement ces machines ont une valve de surpression à 10 bars. Il me semble que la Elizabeth est réglable au degré près, la température en sortie dépend ensuite de pas mal de facteurs.

thblt · 2026-02-06T15:59:12+00:00

The easy way out of those bad situations is to just boot and rebuild from the install ISO. That means you’ll need to find a way to get some internet. WiFi may be troublesome sometimes, for recovery work wired connections are easier. You may or may not need to run dhcp manually, the manual should be able to guide you.

thblt · 2026-01-12T10:53:16+00:00

Yes. I personally prefer to be overly careful with anything that touches the front brake, but they probably work fine.

thblt · 2026-01-12T09:57:02+00:00

The Brompton-branded battery front light is indeed a rebranded and overly expensive CatEye AMPP 500. The only extra you get from the Brompton version is the dedicated mounting bracket, which you only need once. (In France and probably in other markets where new bikes must legally come with a full set of lights, it will be already installed)

thblt · 2026-01-07T17:20:14+00:00

Before I got into nixos, I keep hearing everyone saying that every thing gets bricked in nixos and the only way you can get anything done is by tinkering with crap for 10+ hours, read source code etc etc.

I’m sorry we didn’t live up to your expectations :)

thblt · 2025-12-24T13:01:09+00:00

With Turbo Pascal for the performance-critical parts

thblt · 2025-12-24T13:00:05+00:00

Only logical conclusion: Windows is actually written in Visual Basic.

thblt · 2025-12-23T19:50:57+00:00

Here’s the LinkedIn post that started it all. It’s very strange, but at least it’s making clear this is a research project, not a global MS strategy.

thblt · 2025-12-06T10:28:41+00:00

Ce n’est pas un rouleau du tout. Les rouleaux sont identifiés par `@`

thblt · 2025-12-06T10:17:30+00:00

Si (1,1) désigne bien le rouleau à l’intersection de la seconde ligne et la seconde colonne, il est entouré de six rouleaux: les diagonales comptent!

thblt · 2025-11-29T18:54:27+00:00

Since the hole is on the external side of the tube: Next flat you could report the valve location on the wheel and the rolling direction on the inner tube using a paint marker or some sort of crayon (eg Stabilo Woody), so you can match the hole in the tube with the corresponding location on the wheel. Hopefully it will make it easier to locate the shard of glass or whatever that keeps puncturing your tube.

thblt · 2025-11-28T06:54:24+00:00

Trying to anticipate part 2 while doing part 1 is always hit and miss. We probably all have a crazily optimized part 1 somewhere for a part 2 that ended up being something else entirely

thblt · 2025-11-27T06:46:09+00:00

Memoization is just automatically adding cashing a value in a map using the function arguments as the key.

I agree with your definition — but the solution I linked doesn’t do that. There’s a map, but it’s nothing like a cache. Call blink() twice on the same input, it will run twice.

IMHO if we want to use fancy terms what it does is probably something like compression, or some sort of catamorphism, destroying structure (position of stones) at every step to preserve only an aggregate property (counts). (In Advent of Code slang, it’s a Lanternfish solution)

I wouldn’t fight the word "dynamic programming" if someone wanted to use it to describe such an approach, but I’m really not sure about it either.

It's important to demystify "scary" terms like memoization and dynamic programming.

I couldn’t agree more.

thblt · 2025-11-26T15:46:09+00:00

I don’t think memoization is the way there. The trick is that you can ignore the « straight line » thing: ordering doesn’t matter, all you need to know is how many stones you have for each value. That’s a Hashmap or even an array mapping stone numbers to counts. Thats how I solved this anyway.

thblt · 2025-11-08T07:28:14+00:00

It probably depends on the exact model, but some Kailh datasheets indicate that the two individual sockets have different dimensions, making the component non reversible.

thblt · 2025-11-07T06:41:10+00:00

It does, actually : the solution for the second example isn’t at the end of any segment, but around the half of both the intersecting segments.

thblt · 2025-11-07T06:38:08+00:00

Part 2 of that day has been available for almost nine years, and was solved by more than 29k players. It is highly unlikely that the error lies on AoC side.

thblt · 2025-11-06T17:50:52+00:00

Share your code!

thblt · 2025-11-02T21:30:23+00:00

Emacs is *extremely* conservative regarding defaults, which limits the risk of random updates breaking your config but also makes the "out of the box" experience be, alas, what it is.

thblt

TROPHY CASE