So I was designing a transformer and was looking up toroidal cores. The one I had in mind was made of a material the manufacturer calls “3E5”. Looking for a material datasheet I found a website with a download link for a material “300000”…

Dear web devs: How the fuck is that even possible? I can see what happened here but who thought whatever they were doing there was a good idea?

Hooray for open source!

So my mother's Model M died. I didn't think that was possible but it looks like even the best ones have to die eventually.

I was one click away from ordering a replacement controller board for around the same price I had bought the keyboard for, when I duck-duck-went one last time for a service manual. Because maybe there was a error code table and maybe that flashing num lock light would tell me something about the defect. Then, I could investigate further and maybe repair the keyboard. I didn't find one.

What I did find was someone who made a USB controller board back in 2008, documented it well and published everything. It fit my Model M and I had all the parts at hand so I could fire up printer, etching bath, drill and soldering station and make that thing.

Now there's a working Model M on my table just because a guy named Ronald Schaten thought of future people having the same problem as he had.

Be like Ronald. How specific your issue might be, someone /will/ have the exact same one. Document and publish your solutions!

Step 1. Get a large touchscreen monitor. Connect it.

Step 2. Modify the driver so touches don't actually cause clicks or anything.

Step 3. Let it play a sudden, loud BEEP instead. Increase the volume for each subsequent touch.

Step 4. Lean back and watch people learn that you don't like your screen being touched.

I just realised “CSS stylesheets” is basically the same as “LCD display” or “PIN number”.

Although I've heard “LC display” a few times I've never come across something similar for different acronyms. Maybe I'll start saying “CS sheets” or “C stylesheets” 😈

And by “some” you mean “all”, of course, VS Code 😒

Now that I've spent a few ineffectual hours too many trying to get it working, I'm starting to think VS Code wasn't built for the purposes I wanted to use it for. I still can't get breakpoints working anywhere close to reliably. And I'd say breakpoints are pretty important.

On a related note, if anyone here has used VS Code together with arm-none-eabi-gdb, I'd love some pointers. I've yet to find any traces on the web of people doing that…

Should I ever design a programming language, I'll aim for the golden middle course and let arrays start at 0.5.

To the web devs here: What resources would you recommend for catching up a little to the web development state of the art? The last time I have designed anything HTML5/CSS3 were just being introduced. So my knowledge is pretty outdated, but I'm note starting from zero. I'm looking for some best practices and something framework-agnostic would be nice. Unless you say “Dude it's 2017, nobody even boils water without using *.js”, of course.

When the program exactly fit on the MCU, using up every available byte of flash. It was just a small display unit, but it felt nice that I had chosen the smallest possible controller for the job.

That moment when you're dual booting to have Windows for gaming and Windows decides it would be nice to reboot and install updates, while you're gaming of course. Without any sort of visible notification. Any. And then it fails to install its updates, because updates are hard to install, you know? Sometimes its just not the way you'd like it, you know? It's probably best to revert everything, yes? It only takes an hour after all! An hour of the lovely “Windows was too dumb to update and now has to try to make itself work again” screen with its lovely moving dots. Oh and of course you'll have to sit there and watch it because Windows has to reboot at least twice during the process. And if you're not there to tell GRUB you want to boot into Windows again Linux won't boot properly because Windows keeps the filesystems write-protected. Just to be safe you'd let it complete its marvellous ways!

I wish this was the first time this happened. But it wasn't. Fuck Windows.

Ah yes, “Defaults insults”. Always one of the first settings on a new installation.

Anyone know a good android keyboard for people who don't want any autocorrect?

Gboard has an empty top row wasting screen space if you disable suggestions. AnySoftKeyboard seems pretty slow. At the moment I'm using Chrooma, but its backspace has really annoying bugs.

What I'd really love would be a keyboard with macro functionality and where you could configure your own layout. But I guess that doesn't exist :/

So I want to inform my internet provider of my new phone number, but I can't remember any of my login info for their web interface because I never used it. Luckily, they have a "forgot my username" function, where I submit my email address and get a confirmation that my username has been sent to me.

Yet, I just don't get said email. I try again, but no avail. So I just guess my username and use their "forgot password" form, which – hooray! – confirms it just sent my an email.

But I don't get any email. I retry, I retry after a day, but no automatic response. I remember a incident a few years back when I didn't get some automatically generated mails from a company and decide to contact their support if they could just reset my password manually.

Nearly a week passes.

Now I received the answer. I just don't have an account.

Lesson learned: Next time I'll just input garbage first to check if those forms are sane.

Make. Set it up once and it does what it's supposed to. Repeatable.

Although I'm a vim user, I think make would be harder to replace for me than my editor.