Chris Gammell's Analog Life

It’s pretty amazing how far FreeCAD and open, plain-text format based tools have come (KiCad being another obvious example).

This morning I was chatting with the clanker and having it work on some firmware for me throughout the day.

Humans don’t need to do many of the activities we did as a primitive species.

For almost 3 years now, I have had the LinkedIn headline of “Hardware Engineer, Aspiring Firmware Engineer”.

I’m starting to get why there are all these humanoid robotics companies.

The best tutors were the ones that gave you a task and then let you grind and self-learn; seeking help too early was gently ignored or chastized.

Perhaps training some of the most powerful computing elements off the whims of a bunch of users on reddit wasn’t the best idea

I’d say we’re already some amount of the way into the phase of the internet where “sameness” is everywhere.

When Gibson talked about the future not being evenly distributed, was it uh…this?

Dear Audacity: Given the true variety of available pre-filled genres in the metadata listing, perhaps we could consider adding “Podcast” so I don’t need to type it each time?

I know humanoid robots are all the rage, but as I sit here on the 3rd day of a broken dishwasher, I find it’s appliances that I’m really partial to.

I recall writing a diary entry about a young crush on the family i386 desktop, naming it something innocuous, and saving it to a 3.5" floppy disk and hiding that in my desk.

Dad, what were video games like when you were little?

This ain’t a lake, it’s a dammed river!

I have visceral memories of coming home from school and my head feeling overflowing with new things that I learned.

Did I spin up a bunch of new infrastructure for t-shirts just to make this silly new design idea available?

I was going to make a MicroPub front end clone, but decided on a CMS instead

It’s the particular stage of life I’m in where I get in my car and the smart functions are like “oh don’t worry, I put on an Elmo song for you” (no children currently present)

I love Crepe Myrtle season where I live.

Thanks, Instagram, for reminding me every time I go to your trash site that I don’t need to be in a place that recommends violent, terrible content.

Waiting around for the clanker to finish processing code feels like my first job when I would stand around in a bunny suit waiting waiting waiting for a dry etch machine to tell me a batch of silicon wafers were done and to move them to the next step.

Taking a moment to admire a grand ol’ country at 250, despite all the things we know are challenging right now https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Ultimate dad mode: taking on a golf announcers voice and quietly narrating as I find places for luggage in the trunk of the car.

It is downright amazing that i can put a model on my mac mini m4 and it can crunch through the 750+ episode back catalog of The Amp Hour for transcripts.

I want to bottle the energy and joy of “first goal scored by team/country that has never been to a World Cup before”.

How have I lived this many years of my life (MANY of them in the nerd realm) and I only recently discovered ssh-copy-id?

The one saving grace of being an inside-kid nerd in the American south in the summer is, “oops, I forgot to go outside today” can be easily explained away by “…because wow, it was just TOO HOT”

for some reason “i have a fully functional chatbot running on my computer” became a lot more real when I found out “oh yeah, it also speaks like…every languge”

That moment when you think “wow, I could go for another cup of coffee” and in fact, you haven’t finished your coffee your travel mug (so it’s still hot).

I have been leaning into the combination of laptop and comfy chair for writing lately, and that has been having some positive impacts.

“Never meet your heroes” generally doesn’t apply when your heroes are just random nerds from the internet who are unassuming yet brilliant people

I figured out the building where they store all the capacitors in Madrid

Just found a to-do item I don’t remember adding to my journal that says “cheeseburger robot”.

Just held a 3rd “AI Tooling for HW/SW” meeting.

A modern day Loki that really only unmutes microphones on video calls at inopportune times

I have been getting exposed to more programming paradigms via the Clanker explaining what it is doing for projects.

This AI generated video could have (no should have) been a slide deck

“Have we considered making electronic components sufficiently stabby?"

For some reason I have put off replacing broken speaker for my computer (perhaps “oh, I should really repair those”?

In my 40s, I find that there is a direct correlation of my happiness and neighborliness (probably also could be called “friendliness” or “social activity”).

“It’s fine”, my wife says after I nod towards it.

Most uncontroversial opinion ever: laminating things is incredibly satisfying

You need to learn all the long form calculations: 80s - you won’t always have your slide rule on you!

It’s late night, you hear your partner whispering into their phone.

I get a chuckle how webpage design has looped back around to the answer being “static HTML”.

After a few weeks of doing demos, I think it’s always good to remind myself: no one cares as much about a demo as the person making it.

The best part about travel in the age of working on the Internet is 3Dimensionalizing faces on the screen.

There is seemingly no digital equivalent of a fancy fountain pen that people used to ceremonially sign contracts/agreements.

True wealth comes not from income or holdings, but from the variety of coffee one can buy from Costco

All throughout my time at my old job at a component data company and since then while looking at AI tools, I kept saying “all I want is a tool that will fill in resistors and component values for me”.