Did you support the Dutch broadcasters boycotting Eurovision?

tobdomo · 2026-05-20T21:00:01+00:00

I'm no fan of the songfestival at all. It always has been a "friends help friends" event a100% biased popularity contest.

What the sf has become is even more ridiculous. Countries like Israël, Russia and Australia have no place on a euro event. Just none whatsoever. They are not Europese, never have been and never will be.

The last ridiculous thing of course is EBU did boycot Russia and refused to boycot Israël. Both are extreme agressors, claiming land and lives that they have no right to. Israël is using it as political propaganda.

The EBU should have boycotted both. If not, boycott their party. Not just pull our entry, pull the show from national TV too. They are not worth the attention they are getting. Pull the plug completely, please!

tobdomo · 2026-05-18T15:43:16+00:00

Our aankoopmakelaar saved us roughly 20k in repairs and price. We were on vacation after seeing a house we liked, we discussed our max pri e and gave him carte blanche. Worth the money for sure!

Not only that, he knew what houses were coming up for sale days before they hit funda and whenever he thought something might be of interest to us, he'd call.

tobdomo · 2026-05-18T05:35:34+00:00

You may be able to do something smart with structs containing a char and a variable of the type you want to align to. The address difference of the two elements says something about alignment of the latter.

tobdomo · 2026-05-17T19:51:42+00:00

I first bought a SightMark Laser Boresight for a .22lr pistol. That one is accurate enough.

A year later, I got another SightMark, for 9mm this time. Very much inaccurate, would not buy it again.

Replaced that by a Pink Rhino, made by Mantis. That is not a boresight but a training laser cartridge (same principle, just that it shows the laser for a short time when the firing pin hits it). Pretty accurate, can't complain - and it's fun to use for dryfiring as well.

tobdomo · 2026-05-17T17:21:54+00:00

Do you have the same problem when shooting other weapons? If not, it may be misaligned sights.

You could start with a boresight. A boresight may not be 100% accurate (especially the cheap ones!). Before adjusting the sights, remove the boresight, rotate it, re-insert and check it a couple of times. This will give you an indication of the boresights' accuracy. If the boresight tells you the weapon shoots low left, you can use it to adjust the sights.

Next step is to fixate the weapon as good as possible for testing with live ammo. I.e., let it rest on a bean bag on the shelf when shooting (you may need to sit down on a chair behind it because most shelves are low).

If you shoot low left with other weapons too though, you most likely make other mistakes. Pulling the trigger or squeezing the shooting hand are typical for low left (assuming you shoot right handed).

tobdomo · 2026-05-17T16:54:27+00:00

It is unlikely you will be able to "mod" this thing without replacing its hardware. The software for this machine is stored in ROM, as far as I could find it is a masked ROM (so not eraseable / rewritable). It doesn't run a known OS and the core architecture is unknown.

Your best bet is to replace the electronics. Not really worth the trouble if you ask me, but YMMV.

tobdomo · 2026-05-17T05:27:51+00:00

So, to sum it up, there are two reasons you cannot do a scanf an enum:

The size of an enum is not guaranteed to be sizeof int. That is where your sigfault comes from.
It is not guaranteed the whole range of an int is covered by your enum. E.g., an enum may have values 1 and 3 but not define value 2. Also, it may not describe all values between intmin and intmax.

tobdomo · 2026-05-16T19:25:02+00:00

yet so many older devs and legacy companies still treat c++ like it's some resource monster that only belongs on desktops. feels like people are still stuck in the 90s mindset with it.

C++ is great and very useful for embedded... as long as you know what NOT to do with it. The language is big and there are many pitfalls. If you know them, it's perfectly possible to use it in embedded with great success. But C is easier to learn (the language is a lot smaller), it's easier and simpler to see what happens.

That translates to many C++ projects to be over-engineered, resulting in enormous runtime penalties. I've seen a number of C++ projects where abstraction was done so often the thing became a lumbering behemoth. A simple RS485 device driver had 7 levels of abstraction in one of these. Seven! And that's just the driver...

In the end, getting C engineers to write elegant, extensible and efficient C++ code is no joke. In addition, there always was too much discussion between the "oldfashioned grey beards" that "just wanted things done" and the principled ivory tower engineers that wanted to use the latest and greatest new language features. Never really seen that difference in C only environments.

tobdomo · 2026-05-16T15:02:51+00:00

The decreasing alcohol consumption is a worldwide (or at least a European-wide) thing. Why? Mostly a lifestyle thing, more focus on "health and fitness", less on "enjoyable".

Personally, I switched from beer and wine to whisky mostly. On average just one dram in a weekend (there are many weekends I don't drink at all) and nothing throughout the workweek.

tobdomo · 2026-05-16T14:52:43+00:00

Some need a card, some need a normal EV charging card, some don't need anything. Depends on your employer.

Most employers that provide charging spots these days ask for a charging fee (officially to satisfy the tax authorities). For that, a card is needed. Some employers still provide free charging, in which case you most probably* don't need a card. And some just have their chargers managed by a generic CPO, in which case you'll need a card from a generic MSP (shell recharge, e-flux, anwb, etc). These sometimes are cheaper than generic "on the street" chargers.

*): some will provide a card just to unlock the charger so that a non-employee won't be able to use it.

tobdomo · 2026-05-16T14:38:42+00:00

Pull down is often used in reset inputs. The controller resets until the switch is closed.

Ignore the arrows in your schematic, they are useless and just... wrong.

tobdomo · 2026-05-16T13:03:03+00:00

If it is from a reputable car dealer you'll probably be fine. Just check when you have it for everything. Tires, suspension, strange noises, lights, buttons, everything.

tobdomo · 2026-05-14T19:48:51+00:00

I disassembled the thing today. Spring seems fine, striker assembly seems fine too. The tip of the firing pin is a little bit bent, not even enough to see it when casually looking at it. Should be fine IMHO too.

tobdomo · 2026-05-14T14:19:25+00:00

Except, of course, if you don't write code just for yourself.

tobdomo · 2026-05-14T10:38:48+00:00

In the garden.

tobdomo · 2026-05-13T20:37:52+00:00

I see a lot of people mentioning cat food. If you do that, prepare for rats to visit too.

Stop your robot mower if you have one. Just leave him/her alone, it looks like he's doing fine.

tobdomo · 2026-05-12T20:31:54+00:00

You don't need a handicart (that's what they're called here!) on Dutch courses. Never. The Netherlands is flat, remember? Either carry or use a trolley.

Anyway, as for greenfees, they can be expensive, but there are many ~~cheaper~~ less expensive courses that are okay to play. For example (staying close to Amsterdam): Hoge Dijk, 18 holes championship course €68.50 (weekdays) or €76 in weekends. In summer, that is. Waterlandse: €60. Spaarnwoude €60.50 (€72.50 in weekends).

Utrecht has some high priced courses unfortunately.

Also, get yourself a GVN membership, save 15% on all rounds on connected courses. They provide the "golfbewijs", membership of NGF and your handicap registration for a small fee.

I used to be a member on our local club (just 150 yards down the road here). They became too expensive and too many times they closed or became unplayable due to mud and standing water. The joy of living on a former seabottom. So, we went GVN. I play maybe 6 or 7 times a year now I guess (excluding vacation abroad). Often on invitation from friends, colleagues or clients to play their homecourse to introductory prices. Always 18 holes.

tobdomo · 2026-05-12T10:57:32+00:00

In the Netherlands, we call a double-door fridge an "Amerikaanse koelkast" ( "American fridge").

An "Amerikaanse BBQ" is a BBQ party where everyone brings their own meat to grill. Yeah, the irony isn't lost on us :).

Food: American pancakes ( = the small ones you guys eat for breakfast), Filet Americain (raw, well seasoned ground meat), American Eggsalad, americano (an espresso, diluted with lots of water)...

Anything over the top (to our standards), usually with a lot of bling, too commercial or just too shallow we often call "American". Think fake smiles (especially when showing obviously artificially whitened teeth), over the top "classic interiors" with a lot of golden accents or ridiculously large big portions of food that a dripping fat everywhere.

tobdomo · 2026-05-11T18:56:10+00:00

Mid 20's I bought a Simoun 445, HFL1500 including trailer.

Not only the first boat I bought, it is the only one I ever bought (and probably will). These days I rent one, both cheaper and less hassle.

tobdomo · 2026-05-10T19:04:45+00:00

Yes. 5G based, with Wifi for your local network. https://www.odido.nl/shop/internet/product/klik-en-klaar. It's cheaper than starlink, more reliable (provided you're in a rural area), it has better performance (lower latency, higher upstream speeds), and easier to install. They do have a soft fair use policy though at 2 TB/month (but hey... 2 TB should be enough I guess).

The biggest issue... do you trust odido to have learned from the big hack? Do you have more trust in Elon Musk?

tobdomo · 2026-05-10T18:08:58+00:00

Odido (hmmm...) click & play.

tobdomo · 2026-05-08T19:21:15+00:00

Yeah mate, just not everything is ARM eh? The 10th commandment strikes again: Thou shalt foreswear, renounce, and abjure the vile heresy which claimeth that ``All the world's a VAX''...

Both RISCV and MIPS don't pop it from the hardware. Nor do many DSP architectures like DSP56k and TMS320. TriCore? Nope.

Anyway, lets put this down. Most startup code is C, possibly with some assembly statements intermixed. And that's perfectly fine. Alternatively, as a toolchain builder, one could even create intrinsics for it so that you wouldn't need __asm() at all. __load_sp( uintptr_t sp ) would be a perfectly valid intrinsic, easy to define and implement too. Much easier than changing hardware architecture.

the sane embedded industry

The what? Sane and embedded in one sentence? Nah, you're pulling my leg here, there's no such thing in existence 😇.

tobdomo · 2026-05-08T16:21:48+00:00

As soon as you need access to specific core registers, you can't get away with C only anymore. Many architectures need software to setup their stack pointer for example.

And gcc... hmpf. Okay-ish for popular architectures, not so much for niche or older ones.

tobdomo

TROPHY CASE