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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • dragontamer@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldRah rah Rasputin
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    2 months ago

    Anastasia survived as an amnesiac who was taught by a con-man to act like a Princess again but then slowly regains her memories before shattering the phylactery of Rasputin because Rasputin’s incompetent bat familiar couldn’t catch it.

    You know. Once upon a deceeeeeeeemmmmmbeeeerrrrrrrrr!


  • dragontamer@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldRah rah Rasputin
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    2 months ago

    The rumor of Rasputin and the Russian Queen is much much older than the song though.

    I don’t think it was ever confirmed either. Tzar Nicholas did often leave to WW1 front to inspect troops (and other kingly duties), so it’s just Rasputin and the Queen left in Moscow…

    It might be bullshit. It might not be. But Rasputin’s family line were dealing with said rumors for a century or more.











  • Universal Paperclips is one of the best clicker games.

    In particular: because it isn’t a clicker game. It only starts off as one. There’s only about 2 sections IIRC that are “clicker”, the start (before auto-clippers kick in), and then the quantum computer.

    I guess you have to launch your first 20 or 30 probes at the space stage and that’s done one-click-at-a-time… but I don’t think that counts as a “clicker” game since its so few clicks in the great scheme of things. At no other point is rapid-clicking that useful.


  • I had a pretty standard linear-list scan initially. Each time the program started, I’d check the list for some values. The list of course grew each time the program started. I maximized the list size to like 2MB or something (I forget), but it was in the millions and therefore MBs range. I figured it was too small for me to care about optimization.

    I was somewhat correct, even when I simulated a full-sized list, the program booted faster than I could react, so I didn’t care.


    Later, I wrote some test code that exhaustively tested startup conditions. Instead of just running the startup once, I was running it millions of times. Suddenly I cared about startup speed, so I replaced it with a Hash Table so that my test-code would finish within 10 minutes (instead of taking a projected 3 days to exhaustively test all startup conditions).


    Honestly, I’m more impressed at the opposite. This is perhaps one of the few times I’ve actually taken the linear-list and optimized it into a hash table. Almost all other linear-lists I’ve used in the last 10 years of my professional coding life remain just that: a linear scan, with no one caring about performance. I’ve got linear-lists doing some crazy things, even with MBs of data, that no one has ever came back to me and said it needs optimization.

    Do not underestimate the power of std::vector. Its probably faster than you expect, even with O(n^2) algorithms all over the place. std::map and std::unordered_map certainly have their uses, but there’s a lot of situations where the std::vector is far, far, far easier to think about, so its my preferred solution rather than preoptimizing to std::map ahead of time.



  • How many layers does the Orange Pi Zero pcb have?

    Answer: Good luck finding out. That’s not documented. But based off of the layout and what I can see with screenshots, far more than 4 layers.


    A schematic alone is kind of worthless. Knowing if a BGA is designed for 6, 8, or 10 layers makes a big difference. Seeing a reference pcb-implementation with exactly that layer count, so the EE knows how to modify the design for themselves is key to customization. There’s all sorts of EMI and trace-length matching that needs to happen to get that CPU to DDR connection up-and-running.

    Proving that a 4-layer layout like this exists is a big deal. It means that a relative beginner can work with the SAM9x60’s DDR interface on cheap 4-layer PCBs (though as I said earlier: 6-layers offer more room and is available at OSHPark so I’d recommend a beginner work with 6 instead)


    With regards to SAM9x60D1G-I/LZB SOM vs Orange Pi Zero, the SAM9x60D1G-I/LZB SOM provides you with all remaining pins of access… 152 pins… to the SAM9x60. Meaning a full development board with full access to every feature. Its a fundamentally different purpose. The SOM is a learning-tool and development tool for customization.


  • Well, my self-deprecating humor aside, I’ve of course thought about it more deeply over my research. So I don’t want to sell it too short.

    SAM9x60 has a proper GPU (albeit 2D one), full scale Linux, and DDR2 support (easily reaching 64MB, 128MB or beyond of RAM). At $3 for DDR2 chips the cost-efficacy is absurd (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/issi-integrated-silicon-solution-inc/IS43TR16640C-125JBL/11568766), a QSPI 8MBit (1MB) SRAM chip basically costs the same as 1Gbit (128MB) of RAM.

    Newhaven Displays offers various 16-bit TFT/LCD screens (https://newhavendisplay.com/tft-displays/standard-displays/) at a variety of price points. Lets take say… 400x300 pixel 16-bit screen for instance. How much RAM do you need for the framebuffer? (I dunno: this one https://newhavendisplay.com/4-3-inch-ips-480x272px-eve2-resistive-tft/ or something close).


    Oh right, 400 x 300 x 2-bytes per pixel and we’re already at 240kB, meaning the entire field of MSP430, ATMega328, ARM Cortex-M0 and even ARM Cortex-M4 are dead on the framebuffer alone. Now lets say we have a 10-frames of animation we’d want to play and bam, we’re already well beyond what a $3 QSPI SRAM chip will offer us.

    But lets look at one of the brother chips really quick: Microchip’s SAMA5D4. Though more difficult to boot up, this one comes with H.264 decoder. Forget “frames of animation”, this baby straight up supports MP4 videos on a full scale Linux platform.

    Well, maybe you want Rasp. Pi to run that, but a Rasp. Pi 4 can hit 6000mW of power consumption, far beyond the means of typical battery packs of the ~3-inch variety. Dropping the power consumption to 300mW (SAMA5D4 + DDR2 RAM) + 300mW (LCD Screen) and suddenly we’re in the realm of AAA batteries.


    So we get to the point where I can say: I can build you a 3" scale device powered by AAA batteries that runs full Linux and supports H.264 decode animations running on a Touch-screen interface, fully custom with whatever chips/whatever you want on it. Do I know what it does yet? No. Lol, I haven’t been able to figure that out yet. But… surely this is a useful base to start thinking of ideas.





  • dragontamer@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlLost my F-35 in my couch
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    1 year ago

    Because putting a beacon on a stealth aircraft is like installing a flashlight onto an invisible car.

    Even if people can’t see the rest of the invisible car, they’ll see the flashlight and track that instead. At a minimum, such a feature would be ‘default off’, and never default on.

    A stealth aircrafts literal design is to be invisible to enemy radio waves. The last thing you wanna do is you know… Emit a radio beacon.