Adding an ultrasonic rangefinder makes the robot I'm assembling resemble Wall-E.

Finally its done and can avoid obstacles! :)

This Chinesium power supply looks disgusting 😷 I have no idea what shit this manufacturer put their hands into when they built this piece of garbage (that nonetheless works without blowing up, go figure) but it's all sticky 😐 I want to clean it up before putting it into a new enclosure, but I don't have an ultrasonic cleaner and don't really feel like desoldering all the components and giving it a washing. Are there any other cleaning options that are inexpensive and don't damage the components or the solder joints? Pure alcohol perhaps?

Wrote myself a flight stability controller for a drone I built - used an ultrasonic sensor for altitude so it should've maintained a constant altitude, but I had the throttle increments too high...
Hooked up the battery - off it fucked, hit the ceiling, bounced off a wall, and broke 2 props before I could grab it and yank the battery off.

Protip - if you're building a drone, tie it to a heavy fucking rock for your first flight test!

I thought I'd opened every shitty type of Chinese-grade electronics by now. Glued in shit, ultrasonically welded shit, potted shit. And occasionally the now very rare piece of electronics that has actual screws.

Until now. Remington, apparently yet another company filled with certified enganeers. My razor is from them, and I wanted to open it up to see why the lithium cell inside was failing, and to replace it with a bigger one. 2 screws in the back of the unit, Phillips head. But holy fuck, those things sat in there more tightly than the glory hole of the Asian girl that probably assembled this thing. Externalizing our own features in our craft? Check!

Pretty hard to remove them but that's fine. But the unit didn't open up, and there seems to be no screws left. I guess that they leveled up their level of certified enganeering and actually used both screws and ultrasonic welding. Because why wouldn't you, right?!

Motherfuckers.

My arguments about Apple:
- "iPhone 12 camera can be better than anything else because it's more advanced, it has LiDAR and 10-bit codecs"
- "I can copy on my iPhone and paste on my MacBook and vice versa out of the box"
- "My Beats can seamlessly switch from playing from my MacBook to my iPhone to my Apple Watch. I can be exercising with only my Apple Watch and my Beats, no need for iPhone"
- "2K screen with nice colors in a 900g laptop is rare if you consider the price. Apple one is the cheapest one with that characteristics"
- "Apple Pay is convenient"
- "Fingerprint scanners fail with wet fingers no matter if it's ultrasonic or optical, LiDAR Face ID is objectively more secure than any camera-based unlock mechanism"
- "Stainless steel frame feels better than aluminum one"

I'm not saying Apple is the best. I'm not saying that Google Pay doesn't exist or that Apple Pay is better. I'm not saying that Apple has no downsides.

However, these are responses I get:
"But Apple IS crapple, immutably"
"Why are you even looking at apple crap if you want something good"

If you want to bash Apple, bash it for something real like that butterfly keyboard fails, unconventional AirPods shape that makes most people's ears hurt, screen coating fails on MacBooks, App Store commissions.

ZNC shenanigans yesterday...

So, yesterday in the midst a massive heat wave I went ahead, booze in hand, to install myself an IRC bouncer called ZNC. All goes well, it gets its own little container, VPN connection, own user, yada yada yada.. a nice configuration system-wise.

But then comes ZNC. Installed it a few times actually, and failed a fair few times too. Apparently Chrome and Firefox block port 6697 for ZNC's web interface outright. Firefox allows you to override it manually, Chrome flat out refuses to do anything with it. Thank you for this amazing level of protection Google. I didn't notice a thing. Thank you so much for treating me like a goddamn user. You know Google, it felt a lot like those plastic nightmares in electronics, ultrasonic welding, gluing shit in (oh that reminds me of the Nexus 6P, but let's not go there).. Google, you are amazing. Best billion dollar company I've ever seen. Anyway.

So I installed ZNC, moved the client to bouncer connection to port 8080 eventually, and it somewhat worked. Though apparently ZNC in its infinite wisdom does both web interface and IRC itself on the same port. How they do it, no idea. But somehow they do.

And now comes the good part.. configuration of this complete and utter piece of shit, ZNC. So I added my Freenode username, password, yada yada yada.. turns out that ZNC in its infinite wisdom puts the password on the stdout. Reminded me a lot about my ISP sending me my password via postal mail. You know, it's one thing that your application knows the plaintext password, but it's something else entirely to openly share that you do. If anything it tells them that something is seriously wrong but fuck! You don't put passwords on the goddamn stdout!

But it doesn't end there. The default configuration it did for Freenode was a server password. Now, you can usually use 3 ways to authenticate, each with their advantages and disadvantages. These are server password, SASL and NickServ. SASL is widely regarded to be the best option and if it's supported by the IRC server, that's what everyone should use. Server password and NickServ are pretty much fallback.

So, plaintext password, default server password instead of SASL, what else.. oh, yeah. ZNC would be a server, right. Something that runs pretty much forever, 24/7. So you'd probably expect there to be a systemd unit for it... Except, nope, there isn't. The ZNC project recommends that you launch it from the crontab. Let that sink in for a moment.. the fucking crontab. For initializing services. My whole life as a sysadmin was a lie. Cron is now an init system.

Fortunately that's about all I recall to be wrong with this thing. But there's a few things that I really want to tell any greenhorn developers out there... Always look at best practices. Never take shortcuts. The right way is going to be the best way 99% of the time. That way you don't have to go back and fix it. Do your app modularly so that a fix can be done quickly and easily. Store passwords securely and if you can't, let the user know and offer alternatives. Don't put it on the stdout. Always assume that your users will go with default options when in doubt. I love tweaking but defaults should always be sane ones.

One more thing that's mostly a jab. The ZNC software is hosted on a .in domain, which would.. quite honestly.. explain a lot. Is India becoming the next Chinese manufacturers for software? Except that in India the internet access is not restricted despite their civilization perhaps not being fully ready for it yet. India, develop and develop properly. It will take a while but you'll get there. But please don't put atrocities like this into the world. Lastly, I know it's hard and I've been there with my own distribution project too. Accept feedback. It's rough, but it is valuable. Listen to the people that criticize your project.

Hey guys, my gf and I want to do something with the Arduino we got. We are getting a CS degree, so programming is not a problem, but we have quite basic knowledge of electronics.

What could be a cool simple (but not too introductory) project we could do?

The arduino came with a bunch of sensors (ultrasonic distance sensor, humidity, ...) some input (joystick, RFID reader/writer, buttons) and some outputs (LCD display, 8x8 LED matrix, bunch of color and RGB leds).

Kids these days and their ultrasonic scalpels. Back in _my_ day, we were doing sugreries with _real_ scalpels made of bare metal. Who cares that ultrasonic ones are way less invasive and it heals faster! If you’re using an ultrasonic scalpel, you’re not even a real surgeon. What’s next? Computer does a surgery for you while you wiggling around the controllers? WHAT DO YOU MEAN ITS ALREADY BEING DONE!? What happened to this country!

Things I loved doing.
Measuring a ToF between two ultrasonic transducer !!

So there is this thing called chirp.io which allows you to transmit data via ultrasonic sound. No special hardware needed. Only a mic and a speaker. I wonder why this isnt used in smart watches instead of BLE as it requires even less power. Probably because sound is less penetrating than radio waves??!