Chris Gammell's Analog Life

Buying a new computer or laptop in the age of countless YouTube reviews has all the fun of buyers remorse before you even hit the purchase key…

Old San Juan, as seen from a WW2 turret installed onto a fort/castle built in the 1600s

When you see a strip of thin green plastic on the grass, think “weed whacker cord” and not “a 3D printer is missing some PLA”.

Rereading what I just posted and realized how trite it sounds.

Feels like one of the most immediate acts of service one can do is to take photos of the internals/seating layout of restaurants and post those to Google Maps.

After years of saying I’ll never go back to a dedicated RSS reader, I have finally gone back.

Sniff sniff sniff Oh yes, I did mean to use that hot glue gun I turned on an hour ago

Spent an afternoon spent chasing answers on how to expose a locally hosted app while I’m away from home (Tailscale, caddy, etc).

These books are so gimmicky and I’m totally here for it

Given how I am almost always starting out my measuring process with “where the heck are my calipers”, you’d think I’d give them more of a vaunted place on my bench…

In my post the-power-didnt-fail-during-the-ice-storm moments of revelry, I continue to marvel at how dependent I am upon electricity and having it continuously delivered directly into my home.

Everyone in the southeast of the US watching the weather forecase with an approaching ice storm, I’m over here smashing F5 to see if my JLC boards make it into the queue before CNY

When I am doing a KiCad layout, it is almost never the DRC that gets me.

Of course I need to spend hours designing this extra BGA part onto a board for an obscure use case, I’ll be able to hand populate it no problem.

Excited to try out and start daily driving KiCad 10.

The perfect invention?

Usually reaching out to one or two former co-workers from my early days of work will have me crawling LinkedIn seeing where others have landed and what they’ve done.

Listen, I know.

I know being Google-able isn’t a thing that everyone wants, especially in the age of Clankers ripping of info as if it came up with it…but man, so much human knowledge will be lost to time in the depths of Discord servers.

In trying to make good on my goal to federate posts here to the wider web and in testing shortlinks, I was informed I spammed RSS feeds today.

I have set up my computer/phone to try out “Doom Coding” (link below) because I was tickled by the novelty.

I deleted a Digital Ocean virtual server today, having migrated the 3 Wordpress sites it hosted to static sites.

I think I am going to start printing t-shirts for all of the ridiculous brand names for Amazon sellers I have bought from and start wearing it around.

I was just saying the other day how it would be so much easier to build and maintain an unbelievably massive military so we could go and invade a country based on oil reserves, as opposed to investing and building renewable infrastructure that would actua…

Have been working on a new website where all pages are in JSON format and then rendered at the time of pushing to site to CI.

I am not a sentimental person about old toys, childhood art, achievements, or anything that my mother lovingly and regularly calls to ask if I want to keep.

I broke my only 10mm socket today (right at the end of some work).

My goal for the new year is making this site syndicate out to the social places on the Internet that I have had trouble keeping up with.

This started out as an innocent, “I should make an old school video about something i learned and share it”, to “oh surely I need to edit this”, and evolved into “huh, I should do A/B testing to try out thumbnails” (ironically contributing to the algorithm

Every time I go back onto social sites and start browsing and getting sucked back in like the algorithms are designed to do….I realize it’s all quite hollow.

I feel like a part of getting older is being less impressed by the plastic of the toys and more impressed by the cardboard boxes themselves and all the logistics that bring safely them to our doors.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays I hope this year is the Greatest Of All Time holidays for you and yours…

Google: We’re, like, SO good at AI Also Google: We can save you 20 milliseconds on your navigation, so we are sending you through a circuitous route through the dodgiest part of town

[Old guy rant] Back in my day, you didn’t need to scroll a third of the way down the page to get past AI and sponsored results on Google!

I know I am just joining the chorus, but if the coding tools out in the world are so groundbreaking (as every new tool release and every evangelist talks about them that way), why aren’t software and software products…better?

I recently found out about some data scraping stuff that Roku does.

Sometimes explaining something you’ve been working on to a friend really makes you stop and say, “wow, I know more about this area than I thought!”

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas (ornament printing season)

After more than a year at my current home, I finally opened up the silver box on the side of my house and answered my own question of, “huh, I wonder why these patio lights come on at a random time?”

Had a chance to catch up with former guest on TAH Tom Lee (Stanford EE prof, scope nut, RF wizard).

It feels like the whole world is passing me by when it comes to Discord.

Hell is other peoples’ schematics OK, yeah, and often my own as well

Getting older is not remembering where I set my car keys 2 minutes ago, but still being to remember intricate plot details of the California Raisins Christmas special I watched on VHS 25 years ago

My label printer gets a lot of workouts during the holidays.

LLM credits are the AOL CDs of the 2020s.

For real though, how do I get to a place where an RSS reader is something I joyfully open each day?

I am so sick of algorithms.

Me, around this time of year: “Oh yeah, tea!

Looking back through the guest list on The Amp Hour over the past 15 years.

You never realize just how bad overhead room lighting is until you have really good lighting on temporarily in a room…and then you turn it off