Author Archives: pappp

A Quick and Dirty Workbench

Posted on 2021-01-07 by pappp
New workbench with powered CNC router system.

Since I moved in to my current house in May, I’ve been thinking about putting a (n additional) workbench in front of the inscrutable 7ft wide projection screen (?) thing some previous tenant built in the basement. I sketched out what I wanted early summer, and drew a proper design and cut-list in September – but by then the grueling part of the break-less fall semester had started, so it never got to the top of my list. This week I finally got around to picking up the parts and building it. This has been a rate-limiting step for other projects, since it was partly needed as a home for my CNC router.

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Kentucky breaks daily record for new COVID-19 cases by more than 1,000

Posted on 2021-01-06 by pappp

Source: Kentucky.com -- State

Article note: Happy holidays!

Gov. Andy Beshear announced a record 5,742 new cases of COVID-19 on Wednesday and 34 additional deaths from the coronavirus. Wednesday’s new case total is a head and shoulders above … Click to Continue »

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Does Coconut Oil Deserve Its Health Halo?

Posted on 2021-01-04 by pappp

Source: NYT > Health

Article note: Yesss, hipsters, notice that coconut oil is just oil that comes out of the plant hydrogenated and does not convey magical health properties, and stop encouraging manufacturers to put it in things. There are enough products unnecessarily contaminated with allergens because of the natural == healthy fallacy (see "Pear juice is just fructose syrup with contaminants" rant), plus coconut is already in everything because of surfactants.

“It’s been known for a long time that coconut oil raises blood levels of artery-damaging LDL cholesterol,” one expert said.

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From microops to abstract resources: constructing simpler CPU performance models

Posted on 2021-01-03 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: We've made our processors so godawful complicated by layers of local optimizations that humans can't understand them, so in the way of computing, we're going to throw another inscrutable layer of abstraction on top to model them so we can still tune our similarly over-complicated code interfaces.
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AMD Patent Reveals Hybrid CPU-FPGA Design That Could Be Enabled by Xilinx Tech

Posted on 2021-01-03 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: ...Like were hot a decade ago with those FPGA-in-Hypertransport-Socket designs like the Convey HX machines. I think it's basically the cisc/risc was the wrong question lesson again, it's shuffling around where and when optimizations happen and trading off general applicability vs. special purpose efforts.
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Working from Bed Is Great

Posted on 2021-01-03 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: My articulated bedframe came from my studio (where it was universal bed/couch/recliner furniture) to my office in the current house, because I like a good recumbent-with-laptop work session to break up the desk chair discomfort. I don't like it for interaction, but reading/writing/coding tasks? Awesome.
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SolarWinds hack may be much worse than originally feared

Posted on 2021-01-02 by pappp

Source: The Verge - All Posts

Article note: This is what SaaS and especially bolt-on security gets you. Breach of the vendor = breach of all clients.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

The Russia-linked SolarWinds hack which targeted US government agencies and private corporations may be even worse than officials first realized, with some 250 federal agencies and business now believed affected, the New York Times reported.

Microsoft has said the hackers compromised SolarWinds’ Orion monitoring and management software, allowing them to “impersonate any of the organization’s existing users and accounts, including highly privileged accounts.” The Times reports that Russia exploited layers of the supply chain to access the agencies’ systems.

The Times reports that early warning sensors that Cyber Command and the NSA placed inside foreign networks to detect potential attacks appear to have failed in this instance. In...

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Plus1: A Linux Chip for IoT and Industrial Control Applications

Posted on 2021-01-02 by pappp

Source: adafruit industries blog

Article note: Neat. Competition for those Octavo OSD335x super-SoC parts. This has 5V tolerant IO/s and more flexible IO muxing, those have PRUs.

Plus1-Cpu

we saw this chip on the /r/nicechips subreddit.

its a $20 (qty 1) TQFP all-in-one processor with quad 1ghz A7, 3.3V power, 5V compliant GPIO, 128 or 512MB DRAM integrated, all the peripherals you expect plus MIPI & HDMI. What an adorable chip! would make for a great little single board computer.

https://tibbo.com/store/plus1.html

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Peer-reviewed papers are getting increasingly boring

Posted on 2021-01-01 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Yup. And it doesn't even hit the reviewer-bait parts of the fucked-up incentive structure.
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Judge: UK students’ suit on fee refunds from COVID semester can proceed, but not tuition

Posted on 2020-12-30 by pappp

Source: Kentucky.com -- Education

Article note: This'll be fun.

A lawsuit seeking tuition and fee refunds for University of Kentucky students enrolled during the spring 2020 semester was allowed by a judge to partially go forward on Wednesday. University … Click to Continue »

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