Sam Archer

Started the process of replacing my router with IncusOS running OpenWRT.

One of these days I'll just leave well-enough alone, but so far I've been super impressed with Incus.

Great. Just learned that the word "dinner" comes from the Latin for "to break one's fast".

What is English even doing? How am I supposed to teach this to my children?!

A PCB wired to a breadboard and another PCB, with an oscilloscope connected to some of the connecting wires.

I still only vaguely know what I'm doing, but it looks super sciencey!

YouTube video by Technology Connections The "standard" car charger is usually overkill—but you electrician might not know that

It's time for another electric vehicle charging video.

Too many people believe EV charging solutions require expensive, huge electric circuits (or worse: service upgrades).

The really high-power ones people tend to go with can be a headache, but there are many other options!

youtu.be/W96a8svXo14

hook it to my veins

Seriously tempted to try to replace Docker entirely with Incus, but without stacks I feel like I might have a few too many containers to wrangle.

Sure enough, OpenWRT up and running smoothly via Incus.

Gave up on Technicium and going to try AdGuardHome for DNS. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Oh man, Incus might have saved the day for these containers... we'll see but it looks promising.

Specifically, networking anything other than the most basic scenario seems either impossible or undocumented. I don't, at the moment, have the time to trial-and-error my way through undocumented software to eventually find out it's impossible, so Docker it is.

Oof, thought I'd try Podman again. Nope, still not ready; back to Docker (but might at least try rootless this time).

Like it's very good at giving a list of pros and cons to justify *any* choice it suggests. Which as a user feels nice to be told, "oh yeah, your idea is the best," but I'm very distrustful of these because it thinks *every* new idea in the chat is the best idea.

"this is a good way to do this thing," and I'll say, "can it be done this other way?" and it'll say, "it can be done that way and that way is much better."

...So just suggest that way the first time? But obviously it can't really *reason* so it doesn't. But then how's it so sure it's better at all?

2. It's been a bit lackluster other times; it'll suggest something that works and is fine, but there's a clearly better way to do it. (Again, still points me in the right direction, so I'll take it)
3. It's really weird about assigning qualitative descriptions to things. Like it'll say

1. It's been factually wrong quite a few times-- like it would suggest a particular circuit component that doesn't exist, or would get some stats wrong. But it *conceptually* pointed me in the right direction so I could go search out a component myself more confidently.

Alright, look, controversial take, but:
Google's Gemini has actually been a pretty useful tool lately for both PCB design and preparing to set up a new router.
The *huge* caveats are:

Well, as a birthday present to myself I ordered a new x86 mini PC to use as a firewall/router earlier this week.

It arrives tomorrow, and I'm unreasonably excited about doing basically some IT work. 😂

May the fourth be with you...

I don't have much in-car time to listen to podcasts these days so I just finished episode 2, but it's been fantastic so far and I'm looking forward to episode 6 by, like, fall 😂.

Success! (Sort of)
Finally got a Matter over Thread light switch added to Home Assistant, but it's *super* fragile. I have to manually add a route on the matter server, so if it ever restarts it breaks...
Somethingsomething VLANs and RAs or something?

I love that someone decided medium gray was the best default background color.

No Description Available (November 01, 1974)

[Source on Mediagraph]

Okay, quick poll though: Should I reply to:
a) The top post of a thread.
b) The last post of the thread.
c) Whichever post in the middle I want to talk about.

I lean toward B because that's where I am after I've read, but sometimes feel like A displays better?

What, download all of it?

Phew, finally got some orders for PCBs and cases out the door, so it's time to do all the stuff I've been ignoring in the meantime.

(And also, the weather is suddenly very nice and I should take advantage of that)

The best feeling in the world is showing someone you deeply respect something you made and them not going “well now I understand what’s wrong with you…”

(The feedback was good and constructive and useful, and I got to talk about my brainworms!)

Okay, that's reassuring. I'm using an ESP32, so most of the discrete components are like decoupling capacitors, or diodes on the power supply, etc..

I'm starting to suspect that actually there's a lot of leeway and it doesn't matter *that* much. But then also why are they picking *those* values?! What do they know that I don't?

Why don't I have any friends who are electrical engineers? 😜

Okay, hadn't planned for this account to just be IoT griping, but:

It's weirdly hard to find answers for some circuit design things. People will *very* confidently choose e.g. different values/types of capacitors for the same circuit.

Daily reminder to you all that not all is lost. There is hope despite the constant deluge of horrible things. We are in a bad state, but there is a path to get out of this if you commit now. We will survive this and come out better if we choose to stay productively engaged. ✊🏽