Category: Technology

Writing bootable disk images (.iso, .img, etc.) to a USB stick from Windows

Because Windows doesn't have dd, and I want to write the latest Mint LTS release to a USB task, I had to face the unpleasant task of finding a Windows tool to perform what's a basic Unix operation. The good news is that I found one, and it's open source: Win32 Disk Imager. It even has a version ≥ 1, titled: “Holy cow, we made a 1.0 Release”. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 2 years ago, on December 17, 2017, at 19:12 | Comments closed

Low noise linear power supply

Just as a note to self mostly: this is an interesting article about the noise in a LM317/LM337 based power supply. Read More »
By halfgaar, 2 years ago, on November 26, 2017, at 15:11 | Comments closed

Web print is still shit, even for CSS2 print features

Having spent ten yours out of the loop, I had somehow expected browser makers to take some time out of their favorite hobby—moving knobs and settings around—to implement CSS printing support. I'm all for saving paper and all, but requiring me to pipe my HTML through LaTeX to produce halfway decent documents doesn't feel very 2017ish to me. In 2007, it already didn't even feel very 2007is to me. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 2 years ago, on October 14, 2017, at 21:10 | Comments closed

5.25″ Drive bay for 3.5″ slot

Just to save this link. Read More »
By halfgaar, 3 years ago, on September 23, 2017, at 22:09 | Comments closed

Termination of High-Speed Converter Clock Distribution Devices

Clearing up something from my inbox: Termination of High-Speed Converter Clock Distribution Devices Read More »
By halfgaar, 3 years ago, on September 06, 2017, at 16:09 | Comments closed

Hike for Pie – clear lakes

There has been much talk of the "Hike for Pie" in my family-in-law, and we finally figured our for sure where it is. It's the trail to clear lake, trail head parking lot at GPS coordinates: Read More »
By halfgaar, 3 years ago, on August 17, 2017, at 16:08 | Comments closed

Which context does the circumflex accent (^) refer to in BULL?

^ refers to the last step left in the superpath, never to a step right. (In the A4 notes below, in red, I seem to disagree with what I say here.) Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 3 years ago, on August 13, 2017, at 09:08 | 1 comment

BULL TiddlyWiki

At some point, I started condensing some paper and digital notes into a TiddlyWiki, which seemed like an appropriate tool for a personal project. Looking at the timestamp (July 26 of 2013), this choice doesn't make sense, because at that time I had already started this blog and discovered the joy of indexical knowledge management based on links between temporal blurbs (as within a blog) rather than links between named blurbs (as within a wiki). I guess it had everything to do with wanting the execution of the BULL idea to be perfect before daring to share. It's definitely time to get over that. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 3 years ago, on August 12, 2017, at 13:08 | Comments closed

BULL progress and stagnation

At work yesterday, during lunch, I started a lengthy discussion that stretched out long beyond the boundaries of regular lunch hours. The discussion topic was my surprise that IT practices—particularly programming methodologies—hadn't changed much, if at all, between my leaving the industry in 2007 and re-entering the industry in 2015. My surprise wasn't a rethorical technique; my unpreparedness for this lack of change has lost me a long-running bet with Wiebe around 2007, when we stopped being colleagues for about 8 years. The content of that bet was as follows: I predicted that in 10 years time—now—computer science would have sufficiently evolved so that software would behave intelligently. In fact, I didn't believe that AI would have emerged by now, but I did expect software architecture to have changed in such a fundamental way that computers would at least have behaved intelligent, even if they weren't self-taught and self-learning. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 3 years ago, on August 12, 2017, at 13:08 | Comments closed