Great writeup! You show things are difficult to debug even when you have a board where all of your signals of interest are easily accessible.
It's a bad week when you have a bug that only is reproducible on form-factor hardware. Imagine something like a tiny earbud where the only pin accessible while the device is assembled is a single UART (bidirectional) pin? Ouch. Then, if you can manage to disassemble the earbud - the PCBs are usually so small most signals never appear on the outer layers - so you can't probe them even if you want to! Oh, and the issue is only appearing on one out of every few thousand earbuds? Better not break your failing unit while taking it apart! Good luck!
Just watched the Kickstarter video too -- looks like a great product y'all! Best of luck :)
I cannot stand the lack of SVG support in Google slides. When I worked on the hardware team there I hated that I had to import my polished vector block diagrams into slides as PNGs.
There was a 10+ year old bug thread with 100s of +1s for SVG support in Docs. IIRC the reasoning behind the delay was security concerns - seemed like a bit of a cop out, but what do I know?
There’s still one painful workaround to get SVGs into Google Slides! I actually posted it in that bug thread at Google and then ended up with people attacking me like I was on the team and claiming the workaround is good enough. Anyway, here’s how to do it:
Download Inkscape and then convert your SVG to EMF (some PowerPoint vector format I think).
Right-click on the file in Drive and open in Google Drawings (if Google Drawings isn’t an option, you don’t have the right content-type set on the file.
Copy from Google Drawings to Google Slides.
Enjoy your painful-but-at-least-possible vector objects in Google Slides!
This is the second time that the EMF file format has come in handy for me. In college I used to export my Matlab plots as EMF so they'd import into my Word documents all crisp - it was the only format which enabled that (please don't tell the LaTeX folks I did my lab reports in Word).
Sweet! Would love to host this myself and get rid of my Strava subscription.
I wrote a Python script that iterates through all of my activities there and downloads the `.gpx` for each - I could share the code if interested! Not sure how you'd integrate it into your app - maybe a "import from Strava" page could handle the Strava API auth?
I also love this idea of self-hosting some web apps (especially if they're containerized). I setup a `util.` subdomain and have started putting a few things there at different root directories. It's fun!
I love simple light-based data transmission stuff. I've seen it included in things like guitar pedals that have just a few config bits that someone might want to change infrequently. An app to change some settings can be as simple as just a little webpage! So simple!
Here's a (tiny) demo of this for my PCB business card project from years ago [1]. If IIRC this proof of concept was as simple as using a phototransitor on a GPIO connected to the UART peripheral with a very low baud rate.
Like others have mentioned, Sumatra is one of a few Windows-only utilities that I routinely miss when on Mac or Linux, primarily due to two simple interactions which I miss every day viewing schematics, mechanical/technical drawings or datasheets -- Alt + Scroll == Zoom and Right Click + Drag == Pan.
Does anyone know of any viewers on Mac or Linux that provide these two features? Skim on Mac implements Option + Scroll and Left Click + Drag Pan, but it's not reconfigurable to any other keys or mouse buttons.
Zathura does that under Linux, with the difference that zoom is achieved with Ctrl instead of Alt. Right-Click dragging = pan.
One feature I absolutely love is that Page Down goes to the top of the next page. It's very practical when you want to skim something quickly, with a zoom level that doesn't fit a page size perfectly.
I really like Okular (especially with the theme that allows me to read PDFs with dark red background and yellow text), but haven't been able to run it on my Mac Mini with Apple silicon. The brew formula appears to be broken for newer macs.
FoxIt does zoom on Ctrl+Scroll, and Pan on Left Click+Drag. Runs on Mac and I'd assume linux.
Close enough?
I assume if you REALLY want to go nuclear on it, there is some shareware app that will let you do per-app keyboard emulation and rebind inputs "in flight" or something.
evince (linux) does Zoom with Ctrl + Scroll, maybe yours does too? I don't think it has Pan, but I'm keyboard-heavy and use horizontal scroll with Shift + Scroll.
Middle button and drag moves the text wherever you drag it.
The evince feature I can't live without is the find, which shows a side panel with all matches in the document along with a bit of context. I wish all document find everywhere did this.
Cool to see this here and people talking about it. I volunteered with the American Chestnut Foundation during my summers in high school. Usually spent a few weeks on the Meadowview research farm collecting catkins off trees, “processing” the catkins to bottle the pollen, bagging trees to prevent uncontrolled cross pollination, and pollinating trees by hand.
My uncle and I also usually took hikes in NC to try and find remaining trees with pollen in the wild. From what I understand, the pollen from these few remaining living trees is used to help re-introduce regional biodiversity into the backcrossed American/Chinese hybrids.
Highly recommend going and helping out on the farm if you can spare a week or two, or joining your state chapter if you’ve got one - or sending your kids!
It's too late this year but would they want me to mail catkins from a chestnut producing survivor up in NJ? I also have chestnuts collected from prior years and 2 seedlings growing from some of the prior collected ones that were planted.
The survivor has 2 branches coming out of trunk each roughly 42" in circumference, it is not as tall as the one in the article but it's probably got similar girth. The tree is at least 70 years old, I'll confirm with the landlord whether he planted it or if it survived from before his time (he's been here approx 90 years, and I know one red oak and an eastern red cedar is older than he is). We do have Chinese/Japanese chestnuts on the grounds here that are more prolific and it's likely the seedlings I have are hybrids, but who knows?
One interesting thing I noted from the American vs. Chinese/Japanese chestnuts is the chestnut weevil does not appear to infect the nuts.
I grew up on a farm near Media, Pennsylvania. We had quite a few American Chestnut trees. One of my first childhood memories is picking up the nuts off the grass. I doubt those trees are still there. I should go back sometime and see.
Before COVID I was going to Endgames almost every week, sometimes 2x a week. Highly recommend.
Thunderdome on Wednesdays was also great. It's a "running bracket" competition. Two teams, 25 minutes each, audience votes on which performance they liked better, winning team continues onto the next week.
Can someone help me understand something regarding gift cards as a way to support businesses during this shutdown?
Gift cards are basically outstanding liabilities, right? If they're not accounted for correctly, when large amounts of people are able to redeem them again, they're left with no money to pay those expenses in the future. Obviously, things aren't as bad if ratio of gift cards to cash spending is somewhat reasonable when the business reopens.
Seems unless you can commit people to not redeeming the cards, you're essentially time-delaying the reduction in revenue.
Also, it's my understanding that gift cards are pretty difficult to account for normally (requiring looking at historical redemption data to prevent liabilities from growing indefinitely on the balance sheet). Some of these places are going to be accepting gift cards for the first time in their history. Is there any room here for a guide to help these places navigate the accounting of them?
- Interest-free loans are valuable. Small businesses that want to borrow would normally have to pay relatively high interest rates to do so.
- A $20 gift card only results in a $20 reduction in revenue if that customer was definitely going to buy something from you even if they didn't have a gift card. This isn't true 100% of the time: X% of gift cards will be given to people who wouldn't otherwise have been customers, X% will be bought by people who aren't regulars, but would like to support a local business, X% will be bought by people who have always thought about going to that business, but wouldn't have checked it out without this push, etc. For gift card holders who wouldn't have been customers without a gift card, your loss is just the marginal cost of serving that customer. Maybe for they buy $20 worth of stuff from you, but your marginal cost to serve them is only $8. That's still $12 you otherwise wouldn't have had.
- In the right circumstances, gift cards can be a cheap way to acquire customers. Some number of customers are going to discover businesses through this and other similar efforts. If this brings in customers at a lower customer acquisition cost than typical channels, then that's a benefit, particularly if the customer sticks around even after they've used up the gift card balance.
- A substantial portion of gift card balances never get used. People forget, they move, they use part of the card and end up with an inconveniently small balance, etc. That ends up being free money (admittedly free money that's difficult to account for).
Regarding the future reduction in revenue- I consider this to be just another way to “flatten the curve”. Spread out some of the money to help during this time of emergency, and when things are getting back to normal, they’ll figure it out.
Regarding the accounting of these gift cards, it appears that this functionality (the ability to sell them) has to be activated in the Square POS system, and upon use, becomes just as easy to redeem as cash. Square does all of the accounting for you.
In theory, redemption would be distributed over time vs. the abruptness of our current situation. And, as you mentioned, there will be other forms of payment. I would expect most people would by the gift card for less than what they expect to spend.
Most US taxpayers that this will "help" are small businesses that utilize the cash basis of accounting. There is no deferral for cash basis taxpayers and the accounting is simply you get cash, you have income.
Does that mean small business shouldn't track their gift cards? No, they should have some way to track them because they are outstanding liabilities.
Financial reporting and accrual basis taxpayers have a different answer. The difficulty in accounting for gift cards applies to this group of business owners, which is probably a lot smaller than most people realize.
Imagine rent is coming due at the end of March, and you're $1000 short. But you expect to have $5000 more than needed to get by, by the end of April. You'd be happy to take $1000 in March in the form of gift cards and have them redeemed in April.
To be safe, though, I plan to wait a few months, and maybe space it out across a couple months.
Correct. Of course you could have the gift card expire after a year, letting you remove those liabilities from your balance sheet eventually.
Otherwise you could antipate that say 1% of your customers will use a gift card on any particular day, and hopefully you have that spaced out far enough that you can survive paying your liabilities over time.
There exists a significant set of businesses who are overall profitable, but cannot manage cash flow. This mechanism robots the cash flow from incredibly bad times, into the future.
I had a similar idea on a flight last week and decided to implement it using Love2d's shader support. It works with Love 0.10.0. Had some fun with it, if you hit "h" while it's running, it spawns a grid of gliders across the entire window, which you can then disturb by clicking on a cell. It's fun to watch the disturbance propagate.
It's a bad week when you have a bug that only is reproducible on form-factor hardware. Imagine something like a tiny earbud where the only pin accessible while the device is assembled is a single UART (bidirectional) pin? Ouch. Then, if you can manage to disassemble the earbud - the PCBs are usually so small most signals never appear on the outer layers - so you can't probe them even if you want to! Oh, and the issue is only appearing on one out of every few thousand earbuds? Better not break your failing unit while taking it apart! Good luck!
Just watched the Kickstarter video too -- looks like a great product y'all! Best of luck :)