I haven’t posted since May 2018, breaking my plan for a post every month. Let’s catch up, I’m now 7 posts behind. So this is the post for June 2018, about when I started playing Factorio.
So let’s talk Factorio. Specifically, let’s talk the math of turning crude oil into material goods. The usual goods I care about are lubricant, solid fuel/rocket fuel, batteries, processing units, raw sulfuric acid (for uranium mining), and plastic.
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When I moved out, I thought I was pretty much done with hardware projects. I hadn’t done any in the year prior, but I had done a lot of software projects. So when I moved, I left behind a lot of my bulky hardware, like my oscilloscope.
As anyone who follows my blog knows, that prediction turned out wrong.
It turns out that PCB production costs have fallen, and my salary has risen, to the point where I can afford to custom-make PCBs.
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I come from a long line of radio engineers (my father’s brother, his father before him, and before that they hadn’t invented radios, so they were just normal engineers). I’m even licensed as a hamateur radio operator, KF5NJG. However, I’ve never operated on my own, seeing as I have never had a radio.
This has changed - for my birthday I received a HackRF One software-defined radio.
I could do an unboxing video.
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So over Thanksgiving weekend my family and I went go-kart racing at K1 Speed, a multinational chain indoor electric go-kart racing establishment.
I too didn’t think that indoor go-kart racing was a thing. I stand corrected.
Before you read any of the things I write, I want to say that I enjoyed the experience. It had an appropriate mix of adrenaline and skill. I walked away bruised and bloodied, but still had lots of fun (just kidding on the bloodied part).
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Let’s talk about Star Wars: The Last Jedi. By Rian Johnson. Rian Johnson the Great. Rian Johnson who brought his legendary vision to Star Wars and made everyone happy.
Honestly, I have yet to find a negative review of The Last Jedi. So here I will write a negative review of something everyone loves.
There’s already been a major backlash against the movie, by die-hard fans. I am a die-hard fan of Star Wars, but I’m not one of those fans.
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So, I was thinking about the “Bechdel test” the other day, since sexism has been the “in” thing for the past few weeks. Also other reasons. Basically, it’s a test to highlight gender inequality in fiction (thank you, Wikipedia, for that description). There are three criteria that must be met to pass:
There must be at least two (named) women in the movie, These two women must talk to each other, About something other than a man.
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I don’t really like food. This is surprising, since being a programmer I get exposed to a variety of foods from around the world, ranging from Greece to the Golden Triangle to America (U.S., Canada, and Central America).
I guess “around the world” actually means “the Northern hemisphere” in this context.
And yes, I recognize that what I eat from restaurants near my workplace hardly counts as authentically from those locations.
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So I recently moved, in case you’re new to the blog, which has entailed me becoming comfortable in a new home. Or, making the new home mine.
It has also entailed me learning about apartments. This being my first one, I’m… a little surprised by the cost cutting measures. The apartment’s great, don’t get me wrong, but I think it would’ve been nice if during the recent renovation (which I’m paying premo for) they had bothered to install actual drawer mechanisms that, you know, actually open and close without sticking and going all over the place.
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Welcome back to month two of Lane Kolbly’s “I have a blog, I should probably write in it, but I’m tired and doing other things so I’ll wait until the last possible minute.”
In my defense, I moved and there was a hurricane 100 miles away from where I lived. It was quite nice (I like rain, at least when I can curl up under a blanket and watch movies while it pours outside.
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I’m back from Europe, then took a short jaunt up the road to Dallas with the family before changing gears.
I spent a few weeks cranking out pull requests for cuberite, a lightweight Minecraft server written in C++ (and so avoiding the myriad problems of Java). Being essentially a fan project run by a small core group, without any support from Mojang itself, the server is perpetually behind the curve of the latest features Microsoft has released.
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