Mike O’Connor

The Best Crispy Roast Potatoes Ever These are the most flavorful crispy roast potatoes you'll ever make. And they just happen to be gluten-free and vegan (if you use oil) to boot.

If you’re looking for a candidate for best version, Kenji Lopez-Alt has an amazing method for crispy oven roasted potatoes. I make them at family gatherings and there are never any leftovers.

www.seriouseats.com/the-best-roa...

Damn that’s no I joke. Why on earth do you have that??

Got a babysitter tonight for the first time since the hellbeast was born. Holy shit y'all.

Right now, somewhere out there, a company is fine-tuning an LLM on old company documents before deleting them in the name of "efficiency" and I can't wait to read about it in WIRED.

He gets that from his mother

A baby sitting in a pram at a crosswalk, as viewed from above and behind. The top of his head, and his little feet are visible. The crosswalk is in the UK, and has “<- look left” written on the street so that pedestrians know where the traffic comes from.

London with a baby is a different experience altogether.

Really hard to overstate how amazing it is to be able to flash totally new firmware to my ESPHome devices wirelessly.

Photo of the distribution block for my floor heating system which sends hot water to different parts of the house. The hot side is above, with labels corresponding to each of the rooms served by this circuit. There are thermistor probes zip-tied to the hoses. I later insulated them so that they more accurately measure the inlet and outlet temperature of each loop. The flow gauges on top of the hot water manifold indicate the volume per minute of water moving through the system. Water is precisely 1kg per liter, which makes it very easy to estimate the mass flow rate of the system. All I need to compute the heat dissipation is the specific heat of water, which is easy to obtain.

Installed the unit in my utility closet this week. Two temperature probes for each loop - one for hot and one for cold. The flow gauges tell me how much water is circulating, so I can estimate the watts of thermal energy sinking into the floors in real time. Kind of amazed that it works so well.

This is all amazing, thank you! I think it'll all be useful to me at the end of the day. I find maps fascinating for how densely you can pack information into them. So I guess there's only a tiny leap between a scholarly application and one where I'm hanging geospatial infographics on the wall.

Maybe a long shot, but have you published any guides like this for people who want to make maps purely as art? I've been toying with QGIS to generate vector graphics that I can draw on my pen plotter, but the software is a bit overwhelming and I wish I knew where to begin.

bsky.app/profile/mike...

Went with through-hole components because it's what I had on hand, but I think my next foray into this world will be entirely SMD. So much smaller and cleaner that way.

Bare black PCB in my hand, with component footprints visible in the silkscreen. The board is titled "Raspberry Pi Pico W Thermocouple Multiplexer"

The PCB with a handful of components placed on top of it, including the pico board and the two ADC chips with their corresponding screw terminals.

View of the board in its enclosure from an off-axis, where the holes in the side of the enclosure are visible. The USB port on the long side of the enclosure allows the Pico to be plugged into power.

Top down angle of the assembled board placed inside of a 3D printed enclosure. There are NTC thermistor leads strung through the side of the enclosure and connected to each of the 16 terminal blocks.

Finally mustered up the courage to design a custom PCB in @kicad.org and send it off for manufacture. Only one bodge wire required, to deal with an island in my 3.3v plane. Very pleased with myself. This is a 16 channel temperature probe that I'll be using to monitor each loop in my floor heating.

I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. But I can't wait to find out.

That makes sense. I guess somewhat similar to why diesel tends to be cheaper than gasoline in Europe, but the opposite tends to be true in the states.

Makes me wonder how much of this is the result of kerf wastage.

Travel websites should let you filter out properties with squeaky floors and door hinges.

People look at you differently when the only thing you’ve got in your basket is 4 packs of diapers, 2 beers, and a huge block of cheese.

I used it as an excuse to have a cookout and invite the neighborhood. I might need to make this a regular thing.

the lack of sleep was comfortably offset by the knowledge that there were no leftovers at the end of the party.

total cook was 16 hours.

5 hours into a brisket cook. Ask me anything.

Hell yeah

Comments are part of the code, as far as I'm concerned. And any healthy code review process should involve them too.

Wait, there are people out there who don’t believe in code comments?? Yikes.

Wait, so Apple doesn't offer 64 gigs of ram in a mobile platform anymore?

"Horfling" is the perfect word for the sound made by a disgruntled lab.

Scala is weird.

Time series chart of the freezer ambient temp as well as the water temperature. The water remained at the same temp from 9:30 until about 1:15, and has finally started getting colder again.

I love it when a plan comes together

Shade tree engineering is the grease that keeps the world spinning. I enjoy living vicariously through your exploits.