Z1515M8147

In systems engineering, negative feedback is viewed as one form of 'unexpressed system requirement' for that stakeholder. Surprise negative feedback can be even better, as it may be a sign that your system has a stakeholder you weren't even aware of but which you now are.

My high school math tutor's cute thing to point out was that for asymptotic functions like the graph of y = 1/x [1], since the universe is spherical, the asymtotes will travel off the page in a straight line around the universe and eventually meet, coming back onto the graph in another quadrant from the other direction, so in fact it is one single connected line.

I went into engineering and not physics, and never learned enough of the latter to question whether he was serious. Furthermore, since this was the first time any math tutor of mine in 18yrs had ever related anything to the real world, it seemed like magic to me and so I still ignorantly tell people it to this day.

[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Y%3D+1%2Fx

This approach is covered extensively in the book 'Getting to Yes And: The Art Of Business Improv' by Bob Kulhan, which is one of the few books I would consider a must read for anyone interested in technical leadership.

Article is not correct: not every device on the planet will roll over.

Many GPS chipsets, such as many uBlox devices, program an offset such as the date of device firmware compilation. This means that the rollover will in fact occur decades out from when users are expecting. The way to discover the real rollover date for ublox devices is to interrogate them with the ublox software to find the relevant message and add 20 years on top. For old ublox devices this field can actually be modified by the user to effectively reset the countdown. For other brands it could be a lot more difficult, though manufacturers docs should cover it.

https://portal.u-blox.com/s/question/0D52p00008HKDTlCAP/gps-...

It's cheap but what's the 0power consumption? This tutorial from Eric Tsai covers a similar architecture but a lot more extensible, with a lot more explanation, and each end node can be powered from a coin cell for many years:

https://www.hackster.io/erictsai/lora-tooth-small-ble-sensor...

'Moar speed' is not really the point of 5g, and as usual the main advantages are not widely talked about because a lot of the media doesn't understand them and how to communicate more advanced concepts to readers. In my mind the biggest advantages and shifts in thinking are virtualization and network slicing [1], and enabling IOT [2].

[1] https://www.sdxcentral.com/5g/definitions/5g-virtualization/

[2] https://www.ericsson.com/en/about-us/india/authored-articles...

In some countries, employment law has driven us to this, and it's widely seen as optimisation and culmination of what we know about employment best practice.

Some UK examples..

No longer does anyone bother getting letters from past employers as references, since none of the information in the reference can be verified as true or false employers cannot legally form a judgement based on this. Consequently all an employer is allowed to say is 'yes, they worked here, regards, x'.

Another example, every candidate at interview must be asked the same 'opening' questions, otherwise a failed candidate could bring legal action because they were not given the same opportunity as other interviewees. Candidates are also legally allowed to ask to see interviewer's notes (even during the interview) so interviewers should not be writing anything besides 'scores' for interviewee competancies, unless they want to get into legal trouble.

Competancy is assessed at interview, not at sift. The sift simply identifies that candidate meets the minimum possible spec for the role and can be interviewed. They may end up well exceeding the job spec after competancy based interview.

I hire on anonymized data. I can tell you that it works well. The only flaw is that if your pool of application sifters is not diverse, bias will start to creep back in. For instance, in a group of several application sifters of a single gender who are collectively deciding which applications to progress to interview stage, one may frequently encounter presumptions of gender and age of the applicants due to implicit bias by the sifters.

The organisation must have a very respectful culture in which colleagues feel comfortable calling out others on their biases when this happens.

For thia reason I hire based on anonymized data that also discards all place name locations and institutions. The result is quite effective, as you are presented with an applications that show only the bare bones of someone's experiences without context that might bias you.

I hire with anonymous data. I would look at a statement like '25 years experience' on a CV and completely ignore it, as I have no idea how competant the candidate is based on this. I would look for the key technical words and impact statements in the CV to show depth of experience rather than general statements like this.

Just a stab, but it could be PTC Creo using wiring looms.

Example image of wiring an assembly in Creo:

http://www.arbortext.com/-/media/Images/CAD/PTC-Creo-PCX---1...

I am not aware of the interface method Creo uses for wiring or resolving connections, it could be purely graphical with no resolving at all. If so I would assume that the electronics/pcbs you can see in the original article are likely just 3D STEP models exported from the ECAD package into Creo.

Sadly, the market does not currently (to my knowledge) present engineers with one single software solution for ecad->mcad>wiring>assembly>release, instead relying on various software packages, licenses and extensions on these with each user (company) forging their own local workarounds to bridge or replace specific steps of the process.

The best way out of unconscious incompetence is having a mentor, but knowing to get a mentor is often a test of your ego, which can be the hardest part to overcome.

From what I can tell of the latest release trailers it looks to me like the bulk of Laz's work is still in there despite it having 10 years more dev since I played it, a majority being after Laz handed it over to the community, so I would be cautiously optimistic that it's still the transformative mod it once was!

I'm also tempted to reinstall it!

Back in 2009 I put several hundred hours into the diablo 2 mod called Median, which turned into Median XL. Should you ever want a successor to Diablo 2 this was it. The craft that went into this by its original author BrotherLaz was exceptional, who was outstanding at creating content within the games restrictive modding mechanisms. The balance of all the content was just so finely tuned; BrotherLaz really had an instinct for this stuff and the effort really showed. Whenever we complained about anything on the forums BrotherLaz wouldn't just give in to the whining; instead disappearing for a few days and coming back with a complete solution that nobody saw coming, whether that was an overhaul of a whole skill tree or something way out from left field, as if there was a whole room of experienced game designers behind workshopping every idea. But there wasn't. And every time we would all love the mod even more.

BrotherLaz went on to operate under the pseudonym Enai Siaion on Skyrim mods (including the very popular Apolocypse spellmod) but I've no idea what he/she has worked on since then. A content creater to watch out for.

I was recently trying to find a solution like this after discovering that my car cannot have an aftermarket radio or hud install without ensuing a whole world of pain. The alternative I landed on though was this:

https://www.autopi.io/hardware-dongle

I struggle to get creative when constrained to the chair and have noticed I go a lot more frequently to the whiteboard to brainstorm a problem now that I'm already standing at my desk. That doesn't mean I get better results, only that I find the office space offers more to me in general when I adopt that active stance. This is going to sound lazy, but I'm in an open office and i also find I am less resentful about having to walk out of the room to get some thinking space when I'm not having to sit down and get up again all the time.

One thing to note vis a vis long term health is that standing with good posture requires using your glutes, hamstrings and abdominal muscles. If you fully commit to a standing position and don't do some basic strength exercises in these areas you may end up tilting your pelvis forwards a lot, which makes the whole body tighten up. Ironically its people with back problems who are the most keen to adopt standing desks, but if you have a history of back problems or a diagnosed condition often the last thing you want is your whole body tightening up as this could encourage injuries. This is one reason why the general advice is not to underestimate the effort or concentration required to transition to a standing lifestyle, and to take it slowly and mindfully.

I am the only person with a standing desk in an open style office layout of a few dozen people, and i can tell you that this anxiety is increased by several orders of magnitude when everyone else in the room sitting down can see what you are working on at a glance.

I have persistently encountered the same problem in this space. Most people I've worked with write documents using the last formatted document they made as a template for the next. Tracing back through their history of documents you find that they are all based off one person who decided it was a good idea to mix fonts and colours of headings, and mess around with font sizes and then save it all as default heading and text styles, and then everyone after them just uses these saved styles to save time because changing them would mean having to work with frustrating aspects of the tool (MS Word).

So my question is, how can I get people to care about this? I've argued for a properly defined corporate style guides as well as adoption of typesetting systems like LaTeX but nobody wants to hear it. Am I just in a minority by being put off by poor typographic and formatting choices and should find more important battles at work? It concerns me that customer facing documentation is severely lacking in quality.

I wasted so many years trying to learn electronics from books when this is one subject that cannot be mastered without practical work. If reading from books you should at the very least grab yourself a copy of LT Spice and simulate to death absolutely every circuit you read about until you understand what's going on in each one. Do not move on until you do because a firm grasp of the basics is what will take you far in this field. After you've analysed each circuit go hunting online for the devices you used in your simulation and look at their data sheets. Find out through internet research what the most important datasheet characteristics are for different types of devices in different applications (e.g. transistors), for example a MOSFET datasheet might be ten pages long but for digital applications you might only care about only 5 characteristic values on the entire datasheet and never have to look at anything else on there. If you can identify what sort of space you are working in you can cut down the time it takes you to work things out by a lot.

I've found that a good way to learn electronics systematically is not to think about components but to think about requirements and applications in industry. An example in the digital domain: most things have a button on them, so start by wiring a basic momentary switch to a microcontroller and code it to count the signal and output in binary on a bank of LEDs. Now look online to try and find how you might make a latching signal in hardware from a momentary switch signal. Simulate it on LT Spice. Build this new circuit to confirm the signals. Now, wire this into the enable pin of a basic linear regulator IC and get it to latch power on/off to your bank of LEDs. Next try a switch circuit allowing you to perform a short-press latches on, long-press latches OFF function. Etc. As long as you are patient and take time to simulate and understand each signal the understanding of the components themselves should drop into place, at least in my experience.

Can anyone share good sites or resources for a frequent 'technology-watch' of the latest embedded hardware platforms and platform developers such as this? I do a quick scan of the various embedded hardware brand websites (RPi, BB, Gumstix, etc.) every few months but I'd like to be more ahead of the curve.

> It even has it's own subway covering the whole city!

Not the same I know, but Milton Keynes (a UK garden city supposedly planned and designed like an American city) has a mostly interrupted cycle path network covering the whole city, which to some hugely preferable to a subway network. The only problem with this is that things are too spaced out for the average person to want to cycle so barely anyone uses it, which is strange because Milton Keynes buses charge £4-5 per person to travel only a couple of miles.

Credit goes to Hirose for the idea on USB Micro B, as they hint at it their ZX catalogue [1], but logically everything on USB devices is normally a receptacle_ so custom cables really is the only use for a PCB mount _plug_. If you download the catalogue and scroll to page 3 you can see example 3D renders on the second half of that page that might make it a bit more obvious what I was describing.

In actual fact for USB C you'd probably end up having to mount all connectors in the cables on tiny PCBs regardless, because of the potential requirements for signal conditioning and electronic marking ICs unique to USB C implementations. With so many pins on usb C without a doubt you'd need these tiny PCBs to be double sided to get all the traces to the PCB edge, and I wouldn't be surprised if some commercial usb C leads have PCBs with 4 layers.

I've only designed PCBs myself for the traditional USB PCB mount USB A plug (an Amphenol part) and Micro B plugs (Hirose ZX series parts) as these are very simple pinouts and are perfectly doable for a hobbyist I'd say if you want custom cabling. USB C looks significantly more complex and an in-cable PCB interface is the only way to go for that level of complexity.

[1] https://www.hirose.com/product/en/products/ZX/

I have found the best way to get right angled USB connection that can be repeatably and reliably wired and is robust for rugged use is to create a small interface PCB in CAD software like Eagle and use a PCB mount receptacle rather than a straight inline/wire-to variant.

The PCB only needs to be big enough to land a through-hole usb connector [1] and then bring copper traces from each pin perpendicular to the connector to the edge of the PCB. You can even make the PCB quite long If you want to you as this will give you long copper traces you can expose to land the wire ends on, which is very useful if you don't have a great soldering iron or don't have much experience soldering. You could even 3D print an overmould to make it look professional, otherwise epoxy. Using this method you can get an right angled usb that's a tighter angle than anything you'll find online because it doesn't rely on cable bend radius to make the angle.

[1] https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/mill-max-manufactu...

A friend of mine recently told me about his partner who has been issued with a device by doctors to manage a long term health condition. It was provided with a USB A to USB Micro B cable, which it uses for its power, but no additional peripherals (i.e. no proprietary mains-USB power supply) were provided. A week after getting the device, it's needed in an emergency while on holiday, so they run to the car to get a usb cable to power the device from a USB power bank. Surprise surprise, the device would not power on. The workaround in this case was that they fortunately had a very short 10cm usb cable stashed away in the car from an old Raspberry Pi project, and this short cable worked.

The current theory (no pun intended) is that the VBus and ground wires within the provided USB cable (which they had forgotten to bring) are thicker than standard guage and/or that the power management circuit on the input to the device has an undervoltage limit set in hardware that is set too strictly, effectively locking you out from using any standard usb cable (30AWG wires typically), even though the provided cable looks totally ordinary from the outside. I would not be surprised at this as there are many companies that make 'data block' USB cables that omit D+/D- wires and instead beef up the VBus and ground wires, but look like a totally ordinary USB cable. There are also companies that parallel the D+/D- with VBus/GND for greater current capacity, but you wouldn't know without taking it apart.

I find it astonishing that a device designed for use in potential medical emergencies could have been designed this way with no warning of this in its manual, or if if this is a hardware bug that this issue was not discovered very quickly during hardware verification tests (if indeed any were performed).

Coincidentally i was recently having issues with charging of USB power bank. Very similarly I was trying to charge the power bank with a USB A to Micro B cable from a mains USB charger and thought that the power bank was charging quite slowly. I hooked it up to a current clamp and it turns out that wiggling the micro B end of the cable when it's mated to the Micro B receptacle on the power bank swings the charge current anywhere from from 100mA to 1A. I borrowed a 'custom' USB cable that a friend had bought off Amazon and it was even worse, not budging above 300mA. Incidentally, the power bank states it can handle 2.1A charging current on its micro B input (which curiously appears to be above the specification of a micro B receptacle but that's a separate issue). Only by making a custom cable myself, using 20AWG power and ground wires, using a high quality $5 Hirose micro B plug and then epoxying the connector ends to make a tight fit was I able to get the 2.1A charging current.

I find it concerning and I'm really not convinced adding charging capability to the USB specification as early as they did was a good idea. Having said that, they were probably just trying to standardise what a lot of people were abusing USB for already.

TLDR; not all USB cables are made equal. We live in times of mass usage and abusage of USB. Be careful out there.

It's an obvious one, but I think there's something to be said for a simple three-in-one chess, draughts and backgammon set. The upfront cost is small but the long term benefits are vast.

Last night after reading about the Parity Multi Sig attack I decided to finally try and read up on this subject, but quickly got annoyed with all the 'how bitcoin/blockchain works' videos that repeat the same high level points without scratching any of my technical itches. That was until I found this very concise gem of an introduction:

http://www.imponderablethings.com/2013/07/how-bitcoin-works-...

Via. https://blog.zeppelin.solutions/the-hitchhikers-guide-to-sma...

While we are on the subject, here is another video from the same site on becoming a machine. Stumbled across this lecture while looking for more Curtis documentaries and thought it was a very good guide through a cybernetics roadmap of the recent past, focusing on the work of Professor Kevin Warwick, who makes this subject quite entertaining and very accessible for the general/non-technical viewer.

https://thoughtmaybe.com/the-cyborg-experiments/