Notices by jaseg (jaseg@chaos.social)

I think it should be the law that every laptop that has more than one Type C port capable of charging the device must have at least one of them on either side of the device.

gitlab has like three functions I ever want to use, "repo", "merge request" and "issue". Why they are hidden among three dozen useless features I'd never use under multiple levels of headings in a sidebar is beyond me.

#gitlab is such a UX/UI shitshow. I was looking where the fuck they hid the issue tracker when re-designing their clusterfuck of an UI this time around. Turns out, issues are now "work items" because clearly the term "issue", used by every single git hosting platform ever, was just too obvious and easy to understand.

@whitequark it has been a while, but I was actually pretty happy with altium. My main annoyance with it was that it’s windows only.

@whitequark I'm trying out codeberg at the moment, and so far I really like it.

@whitequark took me way to long to understand the branding of grebedoc

@david_chisnall @whitequark If you’d implement this in git, it wouldn’t even be the first use of in-tree metadata (see .gitmodules) and it also wouldn’t be the first instance where the output of git log etc. could change after the fact without rewriting history (see branch names). maybe this would actually be worth an RFC in case this hasn’t been proposed before.

@david_chisnall @whitequark you could even stay backwards compatible by adopting some well-known syntax to put into the author fields that points to the in-tree author aliases file.

This likely wouldn’t completely solve the GDPR issue since you would still be able to access old versions of that author name mapping file, but you could even work around that by doing sparse checkouts and only keeping the latest version of that file.

@david_chisnall @whitequark branch names and tags work kind of in a similar way, they are synchronized as needed, things work without them, and they are not part of the history.

I've got a new paper out on eprint: Monitoring tamper-sensing meshes using low-cost time-domain reflectometry.

In the paper, I wrote up how you can build a ~200 ps resolution time-domain reflectometer from an STM32 and some cheap display bus redriver ICs. The circuit is sensitive enough to distinguish several identical copies of the same test specimen PCB from manufacturing tolerances!

blog post: https://jaseg.de/blog/paper-sampling-mesh-monitor/
paper preprint: https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1962

#electronics #embedded #security

I just arrived in Toulouse, France for a conference next week and I think I’ve found some original French baguettes and their offspring in the wild 🤔

@whitequark this sounds like the kind of thing that even in case you can find out easily you're better off not knowing

The new modal dialogs in GTK/gnome that are nailed to the parent window's center and can't be moved are such unintelligent design. Libreoffice now uses these for the paragraph style editing dialog so now you can't move the dialog anymore to look at the effect of your settings on the actual document. A similar issue happens with the "save as" dialog in many GTK applications. Often you'd want to look at the content of the document to decide on a file name.

#gtk #gnome #ux

@whitequark ngl a set of RF-blocking silver fabric Pyjamas would be *the* perfect swag for an RF test & measurement company

@whitequark @gsuberland sorry, I meant 500 W electrical input, so more like 1 ~ 1.5 kW cooling. Still not great though.

@whitequark @gsuberland I've seen they make 12 V-powered minisplits with short hoses for installation in RVs, and I've actually considered buying one to cool down a single, 20 sqm-ish room. They're kinda expensive though if you consider they are only about 500 W.

@whitequark next version of Glasgow with DAC-controlled varactors on all pins for programmatic application of capacitive fiddle factors

@whitequark Yeah, I see industry inertia as more of a limiting factor in these applications. Technically it should be fine with proper bandwidth planning.

@whitequark something like 6LowPAN might be neat, but I don’t think anyone ported that yet?

@whitequark Since you just read up on it, do you happen to know what the upper protocol layers in this stuff are projected to be? I was kind of wondering since IPv6+TCP or whatever is cheap to do with today’s chonky MCUs, but it adds a bunch of bandwidth overhead if all you’re sending is short packets.