Posts by Henry Hallan 119 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Oct 2014
For me (bangle.js not pebble) the advantages of a watch form factor are
1) monitoring things like pulse rate
2) the ability to check who is calling/messaging without the disruption of getting the phone out. Meetings are the obvious example, but a more dubious example (that no-one here would condone, I'm sure) is that it is not normally illegal to look at your watch when driving.
Those "proprietary blobs" include software like DSP/Layer 1 and protocol stacks, which form part of the unit that is type approved to make the phone legal to transmit.
Replace them with something else and you invalidate that type approval - or take the phone into a radio lab and hook it up to protocol analysers in anechoic chambers etc. etc.
I used to work in handset development and those "proprietary blobs" represent millions of person hours of development - as well as hundreds of thousands more annually as the signalling protocols evolve (6G and so on)
It's nice to have a hobby, but the FCC part is more than legal. Getting type approval is a significant engineering challenge in itself.
That's not how air accident investigation works. In almost all cases (the ones that don't get politicised) the primary function of the investigation is to find learnings to stop it happening again.
Any of us who fly as well as drive will know this.
One "concern" is that, faced with conflicting legal instructions from EU and US, American social media companies might give up on the EU altogether.
That would leave Europe's population served only by homegrown social media, cut off from the likes of Meta and the site formerly known as Twitter.
However will we survive?
In fairness, if the dev knew that they had to abnormally terminate the session, checking how much the customer was charged should be obvious. If the charge had been reversed before the customer noticed then most of the anger and embarrassment would have been avoided.
This is other people's money. A dev that is careless with that doesn't get much sympathy from me.
(And yes, I've done development in payment processing systems.)
"Who cares if consumers use AI for helping a friend plan a road trip, informal therapy sessions, or astrological readings? The stakes are low, and the providers of wrong information derived from the internet are generally not held legally liable."
https://www.techspot.com/news/107925-woman-divorces-husband-after-chatgpt-reads-coffee-grounds.html
That's probably not low-stakes to the people involved.
An external clock isn't needed - the grid can provide that. What is needed is to vary the phase of the current fed to the grid according to the frequency of the voltage received from the grid - just as the armature of a real alternator would.
If the grid is running slow, current leads voltage. If it's fast, current lags voltage.
This effect can be powered by local batteries which can also be used for storage.
The algorithm should be trivial for any competent DSP engineer
If your neighbour uses your car or electricity you experience real loss: fuel, wear, maintenance for the car, and an increased bill for the electricity.
GPS can't be "used up" or "worn out."
At best the loss is similar to that of patents or copyright. And the solution is the same - DRM GPS and watch the world switch to GLONASS or Galileo
It's not quite as bad as it seems. Lots of devices that are abandoned by the manufacturer have open source software - projects like OpenWRT and LineageOS breathe new life into old hardware
What we do need is for the manufacturers to be compelled to release design information on products they have abandoned. This is part of right-to-repair.
Hobbyist makers will do the rest
The whole back-to-office thing reeks of the management anti-pattern that "personnel" are "resources" - fungible, interchangeable parts that can be moved or ordered around without consequence.
The survey says that 1/3 are seriously considering quitting, which means that 5%-10% actually will. But quitting is easier for those whose talents are most in demand - the ones managers can least afford to lose.
Will managers realise this? Some will, most won't. But you can help them to realise it, especially if you are "top talent" yourself.
You might even get more money as well as more time with your family!
Many years ago and in another country, a security company ended up one digit away from our home phone. That meant calls from their customers when alarms went off in the small hours.
The only thing we found that would fix things was answering the phone, assuring them that someone was on the way, and going back to bed.
I don't know if they changed their number or went out of business, but the calls stopped.
Cell transmissions do include timing data and location data - you just have to interpret it. There is a network-wide timebase transmitted in the control channels (4G and 5G use these to share access) and the pilot channel will include a unique cell ID which can be used to find it on a map.
Using the time delay part of neighbour cell measurements of three cells can give location to within a few metres - technology that has been available since the 2G days.
The networks know where you are - they always have. Anyone who can access your neighbour cell measurements does.
There is nothing new about this
Mistake, no. "Could-have-been?" Absolutely so!
Of all the quirky and oddball things I remember in my forty-mumble year career in IT and telecoms, ARM is the most incredibly successful - and the reason it succeeded against incredible odds is because it was so outrageously better than the competition
ARM is the hardware equivalent of Linux in that regard. It came from a nowhere budget and it is driving the corporate competition slowly but surely to oblivion
Of course my own memories are coloured by a short stint working in that old waterworks. Good times
The part of the story you've missed is that the project that Furber and Wilson worked on in a downstairs room in the old Fulbourn Road waterworks turned out to be the dominant CPU for ... well, pretty much anything with a battery.
Which means phones. So. Many. Phones.
Apple might not have stuck with ARM - although I do wonder what pressure Intel exerted - but ARM devices are now in pockets around the world
But that seems to be a common theme: the right decision but a decade early
I live in rural Ireland with no charging infrastructure nearby - except the electricity supply to the premises.
We have a cheap EV *and* one of those secondhand diesels: a 4WD Duster. The Duster does about 5% of our household miles, because the EV saves so much money
Since I commute we needed two cars anyway, but diesel compared to cheap-rate electricity is a no-brainer. It really is
The only reason we would not have an EV is if we couldn't charge overnight at home
If you can charge at home, your budget for car payments will be offset by a reduction in fuel bills. How much impact that makes depends on your mileage, but the high-mileage cars are the ones we want to go electric first.
For my commute the monthly car payment would have been (I paid cash) less than my monthly payments for diesel. It was a no-brainer to replace my ancient Ford Focus with a new EV.
This. This here.
If our lords and masters want EV adoption, they need to provide cheap AC charging in the places where people park overnight.
Overnight AC charging is better for the grid (low demand, at a time when there is surplus capacity) better for the batteries (because slow) and cheaper (because AC chargers are cheap and don't require enormous infrastructure.)
All this idea of more and faster DC chargers is distraction. EVs should be charged while their owners sleep and the grid is idle.
I have owned an EV for years, but I wouldn't own one if I couldn't plug in overnight.
The company I work for (and, incidentally, one of the nicest employers I've ever worked for in 40+ years of mostly contracting) has an explicit "speak up culture" that should catch this sort of thing.
We also have a system of security emails and other communication designed to educate people in how to spot phishing and the like.
I suspect this is one case where doing the right thing is good business sense
The Arduino chips are programmed in C, but PIC devices are in assembler. If you really want to go low level, gadgets like PAL/GAL devices are still available.
The larger SMD packages (I use 2512 resistors, for example) are really no harder to solder than through-wire components - but they give significantly better RF performance. As I approach my 6th decade, my hands and eyes seem to still be managing
The last assembler I used was Blackfin - and I was paid to do it.
I disagree. The maker movement is active and growing and feeding into the amateur radio community. Yes, you can build using modules, or you can combine software with Pi or Arduino, or even construct with discrete components.
Thanks to Internet, webpages, YouTube and social media, constructor knowledge and knowledgeable advice is easy to access, and projects on GitHub and the like allow makers to cooperate on things far outside the scope of one hobbyist.
We literally have never had it so good
Given that the whole shape of my life was altered by the old schoolfriend of one of my lodgers visiting and deciding that she should be married to me, it's hard to imagine what predictor would suggest that.
Maybe it could have predicted her choices - I don't know - but I can't imagine how it would have predicted the effect on me
(Get my coat because, well, I pulled. :-) )
The sort of manager responsible for this sort of directive often doesn't realize that they employ people at all: they think they employ "resources" - interchangeable units rather like coffee-powered photocopiers.
Then they're surprised when productivity falls off.
Think of it as economic Darwinism
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