Jeff Martin @cuchaz@mastodon.technology
Entrepreneur, Developer, Scientist
Joined Mar 2019
Pinned toot
Finally got my single-board-computer working as a USB device! 
Now to get the host side working.
And here's a shoutout to the Linux kernel for letting me do almost all of this in user-space! 
Jeff Martin
boosted
I'm always grateful when tech folks blog about their knowledge so I can search for it on the interwebs and learn new skills quickly and easily.
I wouldn't mind returning the favor and writing blog posts of my own, but I don't have a good sense of what I know that other people don't, but would like to. I'm not sure what I would write about that's useful.
Shout-out to this awesome blog post for helping me get a linux USB gadget working correctly in Windows!
https://irq5.io/2016/12/22/raspberry-pi-zero-as-multiple-usb-gadgets/
Windows is especially painful as the non-default option at boot. All those forced reboots during updates means you have to vigilantly babysit the updater to catch the boot screen at just the right time to pick the Windows boot, or your entire update process will stall.
4 reboots and counting now... over an hour of waiting, and the computer is completely unusable while updating too.
I never appreciate how painless and effective operating system updates are in Linux (Mint) until I have to install Windows 10 updates. Windows could learn a lot from Linux about good user experience here.
Jeff Martin
boosted
Hills seem bad.
People complain about the struggle of going up hill.
It is also considered bad when things "go down hill"
And hills are places on which people choose to die.
Avoid hills, just go around.
Jeff Martin
boosted
I was pretty fed up with the behavior of 'df', so I wrote my own diskfree tool.
It's called 'duf', it's written in #golang, and you can get it here: https://github.com/muesli/duf
On ArchLinux, you can simply install 'duf' from the AUR.
Interesting stats from StackOverflow. Like what languages, tools, frameworks, etc do programmers like and dislike.
Jeff Martin
boosted
"Optimism is an occupational hazard of programming: feedback is the treatment."
-- Kent Beck
Jeff Martin
boosted
"Just because there is now a multi-billion-dollar industry based on the abject betrayal of our privacy doesn’t mean the sociopaths who built it have any right whatsoever to continue getting away with it"
Great post!
https://daringfireball.net/2020/09/online_privacy_real_world_privacy
Spot-on academic hot take:
My search-fu only turned up this one JetBrains discussion on the topic:
This was apparently an unsupported feature circa Jan 2019. But it's mid 2020 now. Surely Kotlin/JS has a better story for extending JS classes by now.
I think I've found another compiler bug in the wild... Kotlin/JS doesn't seem to know how to instantiate a JS class properly. The compiler keeps emitting code to call the constructor as a function instead of using the new keyword. I can't seem to figure out how to nudge the compiler to do the right thing. =(
Jeff Martin
boosted
"I use Linux as my operating system," I stated proudly to the unkempt, bearded man. He swiveled around in his desk chair with a devilish gleam in his eyes, ready to mansplain with extreme precision. "Actually," he said with a grin, "Linux is just the kernel. You use GNU+Linux!" I don't miss a beat and reply with a smirk: "I use Abyss, a distro that doesn't include the GNU coreutils, or any other GNU code. It's Linux, but not GNU+Linux."
The smile quickly drops from the man's face. His body began convulsing, he foamed at the mouth, and he dropped to the floor with a sickly thud. As he writhed around he screamed, "I-IT WAS COMPILED WITH GCC! THAT MEANS IT'S STILL GNU!" In a cool fashion, I replied "Abyss uses the LLVM compiler suite, GCC uninvolved."
With a sickly wheeze, the last of the man's life was ejected from his body. He lied on the floor, cold and limp. I've womansplained him to death.
The smile quickly drops from the man's face. His body began convulsing, he foamed at the mouth, and he dropped to the floor with a sickly thud. As he writhed around he screamed, "I-IT WAS COMPILED WITH GCC! THAT MEANS IT'S STILL GNU!" In a cool fashion, I replied "Abyss uses the LLVM compiler suite, GCC uninvolved."
With a sickly wheeze, the last of the man's life was ejected from his body. He lied on the floor, cold and limp. I've womansplained him to death.
Favorite quote of the day: “... vs a bloated behemoth feeding the VC monkey on it's back.”
Jeff Martin
boosted
this is a good article about the failure of f/oss:
https://www.boringcactus.com/2020/08/13/post-open-source.html
https://www.boringcactus.com/2020/08/13/post-open-source.html
Oh man... staring at datasheets all day will definitely fry the brain.
Fantastic analysis of the Beirut explosion from a biomedical engineer who specialized in blast physics and chemistry.
https://www.wired.com/story/tragic-physics-deadly-explosion-beirut/
TL;DR, the explosion was definitely not caused by a weapon, just careless storage of low explosive materials.
Jeff Martin
boosted
Did you know most file managers on Linux support a ".hidden" file in your home directory?
It works pretty much as gitignore does: it hides everything that you list in this file, one file/dir per line.
https://fosspost.org/tutorials/hide-files-folders-linux-file-manager
Jeff Martin
boosted
@ashfurrow "If you can think of it, there's a fediverse server for it"
Entrepreneur, Developer, Scientist
Joined Mar 2019
