Notices by emily, blinkenlight witch (emily@sparkly.uni.horse), page 2

think I'll put this project off for a bit until I'm up to doing serious metalworking again, because I'm going to need some bigger brackets

and also maybe design another combat robot around one of these servos, because *damn*

got some chonky servos a while back because I wanted to build a chonky robot arm, just got around to testing them

servos: very strong

included servo brackets: less strong

@nekoewen try my new thing

@nekoewen you can also use it for split keyboards

@nekoewen "aren't split keyboard halves usually further apart than that? also aren't power and ground usually on opposite corners of an IC with two rows of pins, and it's kind of weird to have to run power to one side of your keyboard and ground to the other?"

yes, good point. fortunately we have 0-ohm resistors, which are just the thing to solve both problems

@millihertz I oscillate between wanting to release some of my tiny tools and scripts, and wanting to stay far away from ever feeling the need to document them or change them for anyone else's needs. Building for yourself is so good.

@burnitdown you know what linux? fuck you

yes I am very good linux expert

*accidentally uninstalls her kernel*

defining ad hoc protocols for things is a wonderful vehicle for silliness

for example, there is absolutely nothing stopping you from declaring that all messages must be delimited by ~*{ ... }*~

There's an email thing called dovecot. (Details irrelevant, if you've never heard of it all you need to know is it's an email thing.)

TIL there's a physical thing called a dovecot, which is a cot (bed) for doves and pigeons.

Upon learning this, I was like "oh! like carrier pigeons! that is a clever pun!" but no it turns out they mostly just kept pigeons to eat their eggs and use their poop as fertilizer :( (I probably have vastly inflated ideas of how often pigeons were used to carry messages)

Also I realized just now while typing this that the word "cottage" comes from "cot". Language is fun!

we desperately need a better way to share modifications to an upstream software project (for the case where they won't be merged and the customization away from upstream is the point)

I have no idea what that looks like but "here's a fork I made two years ago and will not be regularly rebasing on upstream" isn't it

I stepped away for dinner after writing this and then remembered that patches are a thing

Bring back patches

@MekahimeAkari do you mean "decentralized" as in the people making it are, or as in the computer itself is?

I'm intrigued either way but also I do not know what a decentralized computer would look like

@MekahimeAkari I could be convinced to join this project if you actually do a thing (my skills range from the making-PCBs-with-existing-parts level of hardware all the way up the stack)

the silicon level is the hardest imo, since (that is the highest level I know essentially nothing about so it seems scary and intractable but also) we don't really currently have a good, accessible-to-individuals way to make any sort of nontrivial ICs afaik? but I would also like to see this change

@MekahimeAkari I'm trying to find if anyone has made open hardware FPGAs yet (because that seems like a good place to start with this sort of thing) and that is shockingly hard because everyone's like "I made an open hardware FPGA board! it has this xilinx FPGA on it"

it blows my mind how big fully-built source trees are for embedded stuff

I have several copies of the QMK source, at 2GB each, each of which produces at most tens of kilobytes of stuff to flash onto a microcontroller

there is probably a neat filesystem thing that'll let me share the data of all the copies of that and just overlay the minor changes I make to each one

but also I live in the future and we measure drives in terabytes now

somewhen in the past, child me is sitting there wondering how anyone could ever fill up a 3GB hard drive

things that would have blown child me's mind, an ongoing list:

- future them can not only afford to just waste 2GB of space building firmware for a trackball, but forget to clean it up for months without having constant "your machine is out of space" warnings

- future them wound up using a trackball that needs 2GB of space to build its firmware

- future them wound up using a trackball at all

- surprise, you're not a boy

- under the floor is just another solid surface that is less aesthetically pleasing and comfy to stand on. it is not an infinitely deep hole. you will not fall into an infinitely deep hole in the floor and die

@olivvybee wait what, I thought literally everyone but the US used km/h for car speeds

@olivvybee I was going to make a joke about metric miles but uhh

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_mile

reality itself is the joke