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Nanite | 3 years ago | on: Norwegian Meteorological Institute has an excellent free weather API

Which, at least for the Oslo area, offers more reliable predictions than Apple's weather app (which is always weather.com, afaik) Having said that, and having the Norwegian Meteorological Institute down the road from where I live, their local predictions are often completely off on rain, to the point I always bring a raincoat when going out.

Nanite | 3 years ago | on: Why do USB-C hubs still have USB 2.0 ports? (2021)

Can confirm, but not sure about better QA of the branded ones. Company issued macbook came with a "Satechi" hub, which died within 6 months, while two other noname AliExpress ones have worked with no issue for 2 years now

Nanite | 3 years ago | on: Everything with a battery should have an off switch

Examples lying around in my house:

Bathroom scale: lovely it powers up when you tap it, but eats up 2 button cells a year for a few dozen uses a year

Kitchen scales, bit more use, at least once a day but again 2 button cells a year

electronic caliper: Same, eats up 1 button cell a year, just sitting in my toolbox

Strangely enough none of our kids toys with batteries seem to suffer from this problem

How much extra cost does a hard on/off switch add to the bill of materials?

Nanite | 7 years ago | on: UCLA researchers have produced X-rays by simply unrolling Scotch tape (2008)

They went on an founded a startup called Tribogenics, raised a total of about $20M over the years (among others from Nikon and Founders Fund), They worked on developing lower cost portable XRF scanners, but apparently went out of business earlier this year. From what I've heard the tech didn't work quite as well as they had hoped and their market fit wasn't that great.

Nanite | 7 years ago | on: The case for electric scooters

Unfortunately for e-scooters and other novel vehicles, the government agency in the Netherlands that handles vehicle certification (RDW) is notoriously bureaucratic. By default any new type of vehicle is forbidden to use on public roads until they certified it. On several occasions, e-scooter owners had their vehicle impounded and in one case even scrapped. Which is a real shame, as the infrastructure is perfect.

Nanite | 7 years ago | on: TSMC Kicks Off Volume Production of 7nm Chips

The main issue with using a synchrotron or Free Electron Laser EUV source might not be so much about the technology, but more about the mindset of the clients (Samsung, TSMC, Global Foundries, Intel). Up until now lithography has been something they would buy as a "box" which would be shipped to their fab, "plugged in" and commissioned.

A Free Electron Laser EUV source would be a facility on it's own, similar in size to a small powerplant built adjacent to your fab, and multiplexed to a dozen or so EUV wafer scanners, that's quite a different endeavor.

Nanite | 8 years ago | on: The ASUS Tinker Board is a compelling upgrade from a Raspberry Pi 3 B+

I have both Raspberry Pi's and a few of the cheap "clones". So some takeaways:

The good: they're definitely cheaper, I paid about a third of the raspberry Pi 2 price for a comparable Orange Pi. Other models seem to have similar aggressive pricing.

The bad: Armbian distros are a mixed bag, I had the impression some of them were put together by developers who didn't even have the particular board on hand. I spent a good three hours just getting WiFi to work (not being familiar with linux didn't help either though) , while putting up with an invisible cursor editing config files. Setting up a raspberry pi zero W in comparison was 5 minutes. Also I found out later that the pin header was 180 degrees rotated compared to the Raspberry, which made it not compatible with standard hats.

In retrospect I did learn a lot, and the Orange Pi has been running without issue for 2 years now. But Raspberry's have my definite preference.

Nanite | 8 years ago | on: AV1: A new general-purpose video codec

If you don't want your macbook to burn a hole in your lap, potentially. I'm sure most recent processors will be able to do playback, just not optimized, and at high cpu load.

Nanite | 8 years ago | on: Ratings inflation on Uber and elsewhere

Recently spent a few weeks in Nairobi, drivers accepting the ride and then spending 10+ minutes parked a few hundred meters down the road seem quite common. Could be misaligned incentives, the cancelation fee is typically half that of a ride within downtown Nairobi. Also my rating took a massive hit, dropped down from 4.8x to 4.6x! over nearly 40 rides. I did occasionally tip for great service, but also encountered some fairly obvious cases of account sharing by drivers, and downright dangerous driving.

Nanite | 8 years ago | on: Prototype to production: How to build and design a PCB prototype

When I tried KiCAD several years ago, I was drawn in by the extensive feature list only to find that it suffered from the same issues as Blender, another mayor open source project, it was mainly feature driven, and the UX was horrible. Enough at least for me as a hobbyist PCB layout software user to leave it be for a few years.
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