A crop helps

I recently had a drive fail in my 4 bay nas. Amusingly, synology branded drives seem like they’re pretty close to p ice parity with OE drives these days.

Solid natural wood is a horrible material for loudspeaker cabinets. Granted, this fact isn’t limited to just speakers. Wood expands and contracts with humidity, which means making boxes of any type out of solid wood complicated. Cabinet doors have floating panels in the center for exactly this reason. That’s why you should use breadboard ends if you want to frame a wood table, otherwise your table will risk warping and cracking. There’s also the whole non-uniform density thing. Most loudspeakers use something like MDF as a substrate and will veneer the outside. MDF is both stable and uniformly dense, which makes achieving a “dead” (or non-resonate) enclosure a lot easier.

I started photography in the mid 00s with a D40 and moved to a D5300 in the 10s. My most beloved lens from that era was a Nikon 70-300mm VR FX AF-S f/4.5-5.6 G.

There isn’t really an equivalent of that lens these days as it seems like everyone is making a 100-400 instead and those are generally bigger dimensionally and weight wise. That lens was not particularly sharp once you got out of the center, although it wasn’t much of an issue for me thanks to the APS-C crop.

There are some lens designs that have been basically the same for decades now (hello Sigma DG DN) and are still excellent, but I wouldn’t paint 00s glass as all being mature. I’m using a Tamron 150-500 these days on a Sony FF body and the Tamron focuses way faster, is sharper in the center and across the frame, has great bokah, and offers better micro contrast.

00s glass is in somewhat of a weird spot. It doesn’t have as much “character” as the glass that came before it and it’s also not as technically excellent as the glass that came after it. That said, it’s pretty affordable these days and is completely useable to get great photos. I will say that photos, even taken with the D40, have held up really well.

As someone with a foot in Windows and Mac, they both suck for different reasons and you’re trading pain in one for pain in the other.

Windows sucks because of all the stupid one drive and AI garbage. No, I don’t want my desktop and tons of other directories in one drive, stop asking me. The constant migration of settings out of control panel is maddening. Windows 10 end of life is fine, but cutting off older PCs from windows 11 for “reasons” was an absolutely horrible choice.

Mac is fine if you do super basic computing, but if you want to do much of anything it’s very annoying out of the box. Window management is annoying unless you get an app like magnet, the ribbon can’t be displayed on dual monitors and there’s no way of fixing the primary monitor, keyboard shortcuts are inconsistent across applications like command delete and keyboard shortcuts in general suck (command + shift + 3-5), the OS greatly dislikes network storage, etc etc. Macs were somewhat isolated from marketing needing a “new” OS every year until recently. Now they’re in the change for the sake of things to list on the new OS page trap.

Linux isn’t without fault, but my experience has been much more pleasant.

When I was college back in 2009 I was dual booting Ubuntu and Windows Vista on a gateway laptop. I never fiddled with Ubuntu at all. The things that worked out of the box worked reliability and I never bothered fighting with things that didn’t work like the stylus.

The reason why I didn’t make the switch back then was not the OS or the drivers. It was the lack of support for the software I needed for school, like Matlab and orcad pspice. Things have improved substantially since then between first party support (Matlab started supporting Linux with R2016a) and wine/proton letting windows applications run mostly normally without their developers needing to make any changes to support the OS.

IMO the thing that’s most in the way of adoption these days is the lack of mainstream OEM support. Until the masses can easily buy a computer with Linux pre-installed and the driver niggles sorted they’re not going to switch.

More work location flexibility is certainly something I would appreciate. The company I work for is hybrid and with the looming economy mess I’ve been putting off job hunting. I would much rather be somewhere with a network should things go sideways.

I bought a used workstation (xenon, ecc memory) pre-covid hit. I swapped the processor with the highest spec one that would fit the socket (thanks for changing sockets so frequently intel… not) and 64 GB ecc momory. Both were cheap because they were used. About 6 months before the GPU crazyness I bought a used 1070 TI for around $200. Upgrading the GPU a few years later was out of the question and now upgrading the whole thing is out of the question.

Due to the processor age I’m just going to install Linux on it and cozy into my older game library. Gaming time is pretty limited these days anyway due to having kids and these days I’m doing most of my gaming on a handheld.

Noise cancelling headphones and background music helps a ton when I’m in the office. Stupid open office…

White collar professionals who spend their days developing and deploying software or working on compute infrastructure? Sure, some of them have been on Linux for decades. Although many big corpos love Windows and Microsoft products, so at best you’re going to have a foot in both worlds if you work at one of these companies.

Some admin jobs that don’t require bespoke software (ie very little beyond say an office suite) have started making the jump recently to save $$.

Basically every other white professional that needs to work on a computer with industry specific software like people in medical, engineers, business? Odds are they use windows since the software they use for their job is probably only built for Windows and maybe Mac if they’re lucky. Very few employers are going to mass deploy Linux to run applications via Wine. These employers have support contracts for the major software products their employees use and they won’t get support if they’re not running software on its native OS.

Straight up vibe coding is a horrible idea, but I’ll happily take tools to reduce mundane tasks.

The project I’m currently working on leans on Temporal for durable execution. We define the activities and workflows in protobufs and utilize codegen for all the boring boiler plate stuff. The project hasa number of http endpoints that are again defined in protos, along with their inputs and outputs. Again, lots of code gen. Is code gen making me less creative or degrading my skills? I don’t think so. It sure makes the output more consistent and reduces the opportunity for errors.

If I engage gen AI during development, which isn’t very often, my prompts are very targeted and the scope is narrow. However, I’ve found that gen AI is great for writing and modifying tests and with a little prompting you can get pretty solid unit test coverage for a verity of different scenarios. In the case of the software I write at work the creativity is in the actual code and the unit tests are often pretty repetitive (happy path, bad input 1…n, no result, mock an error at this step, etc). Once you know how to do that there’s no reason not to offload it IMO.

For passive, and even now some active loudspeakers, very much so.

Links for passives: https://sites.google.com/site/undefinition/diy https://www.zaphaudio.com/ https://www.madisoundspeakerstore.com/speaker-kits/ (etc)

Active speakers are usually things like this and use commercially available parts with commercial software. But if you want you can build a DIY DSP and DAC and DIY amplifier. Note that there are tons of other designs for both available.

The DIY audio community is very vibrant. There are tons and tons of forums collaboratively iterating. You can build DIY headphones and DIY headphone amplifiers. Hell, you can even build DIY speaker drivers.

Anything I missed was not an intentional omission, lol.

I’m not an Apple fanboy, but arm based processors seem to be working out fairly well for them.

I own an Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x, which was one of the OG snapdragon x laptops released a (two?) and a half year(s) ago. It took a while for folks to get Linux to run on them and there’s enough of a barrier to entry that it’s still not very common. Most of the initial hurdles were due to Qualcomm bootloader shenanigans.

You’re 100% correct at a sane company. At my employer the hardware team is incentivised to cut costs and impacts to productivity are someon else’s problem. Corporate metrics lead to some pretty hilarious situations.

Same, but I do have some level of worry regarding portability. My solution isn’t local or self hosted, as I was looking for easy and works across Linux/Windows/Mac/Android/iOS. I do not look forward to needing to change to a new password manager in the future, but given the way everything seems to be going it seems likely that I’ll have to at some point.

So much the same. In this market I would rather stick around with the devil I know beii have a good reputation and network. I don’t want to be the new person somewhere else should things go sideways. Grated, I am very much on the chopping block at my current employer given the waves of layoffs and “performance frings” that have been happening…

It depends who you’re trying to protect. Joe consumer doesn’t know what OpenWRT is.

Assembly is relatively straightforward, but sourcing all the components locally is likely getting harder and harder. Granted, for DoD contract reasons there’s likely a cottage industry that relies on government rules to keep things onshore. That’s part of the reason why we still have some made in the USA clothing.

This is worth a listen or a watch if you’re interested.

Not sure how up to date this is, but synthetic fibers are the #1 source of micro plastics, followed by car tires and city dust. Car tires are absolutely a contributor and we should cut our reliance on personal transportation for more reasons than just micro plastics. In addition, we need to move away from polyester, nylon and a slew of other materials.

Most household furnishings used to be made of natural fibers. These days carpets, couch covers and filling, curtains, clothing, etc are often derived from a petrochemical. I suspect oil companies will continue to pivot into these areas to continue as we very slowly ween ourselves of gasoline.

I still have a sweet spot for canned corn, especially creamed, as well as canned green beans.