BC SCIENCE
Saved by @jacobhtml

I think I've permanently confused KiCAD
it's reminding me that I need to connect this capacitor to Nothing

 attach this end to ground, this end to +5v, and this end to THE VOID
I accidentally made all the capacitors gigantic and they won't fit anymore

halp
gonna design an ISA card using some of these

it's gonna be tricky to fit in the case
that's from this video:
https://t.co/FyMofzOFEX
those kicad motherfuckers
they have an ISA footprint but it doesn't show up when you search for "ISA" because they called it BUS_AT despite it being clearly called "ISA" since THE LATE 80s
and even worse, it's actually the AT bus

The full AT bus, the 16bit extension to the 8bit PC/XT bus!
but surely they included the PC/XT bus as well, since it's just a minor variation of the AT bus, right? You'd just need to make the same design but slightly smaller?
1. no, because
2. fuck you
gotta do it myself like some kind of caveman
ok, finally I can update the ratsnest and fix my board and OH GOD WHAT HAPPENED
apparently I have now fixed the issue of connecting to the void at the expense of every single item on the board deciding to roll scatter dice
I thought I'd quickly google "what size are ISA mounting bracket holes?" and it quickly led me to JOGGLE TABS by GOMPF BRACKETS and I think I wandered into the part of the internet that's generated by markov chains
FUCKING SHIP IT
hang on I'm doing an update of all my symbols & footprints & 3d models.
this will fix and/or cause all my problems
does all software have to constantly gaslight me?
look at this.
it's the wrong 3D library, as that's just the footprint not the socket. I don't even know if here's a socket, so I'd like to look.
See the 3D model path? it's in Package_LCC.3dshapes
so I hit BROWSE and scroll to package_...

there's no LCC
there's no LCC and yet it apparently is working?
even though it doesn't exist?
HOW? WHY?
(my guess is that either it's being cached and doesn't exist anymore (or has been moved), or it's aliased from somewhere else, or autogenerated from the footprint, or any number of things)
but the end user experience is that it makes you think you're going fucking insane
amusingly if I google for "PLCC-68_THT-Socket.wrl" there's two results:
1. the source for kicad which points at this non-existent file
2. @TubeTimeUS's PlaidBib project which points at "Housings_LCC.3dshapes/PLCC-68_THT-Socket.wrl", which is a slightly different path!
which also doesn't exist.
so I'm guessing the answer is that there is no WRL file for this part and this is just a placeholder for in case anyone ever makes one, and it's instead just getting autogenerated from the footprint
computers are one of those fun subjects where the more you learn about them, the more you hate them
oh no

updating the libraries brought back the void
https://t.co/Sunhq9SZuH
FINE
YOU WANT ME TO CONNECT TO THE VOID?
I'LL DO IT. BUT I'LL DO IT RIGHT.
THERE.
We've got out power connectors.
5 volts
ground
and the fucking VOID
pins 11, 10, 9, and 7?

connect them to the void.
mmm, tasty.
https://t.co/6pHY6xZkCZ
fun fact: I couldn't remember how I'd phrased that one and searching "the void" didn't find it, so I had to google "the void drinks machine" and it found a couple reddit posts that screenshotted the tweet and cropped off my name, so I then could search for "diet coke" and find it
less fun fact: that shitpost is probably the most popular thing I ever ever done, and it's all because of people reposting the screenshot without credit!
I seriously only opened up this PCB editor so I could do a shitpost followup to something I said last night and now it's 2 hours later and I'm mostly done setting up a 4-drive floppy controller
why
people like to complain about ADHD keeping you from getting anything done, or only letting you concentrate on "pointless" things like games and TV shows, and that's definitely a big part of it
but the other side is that sometimes you CAN CONCENTRATE and you can do it VERY WELL and FOR A LONG TIME but you have zero ability to control what you're concentrating on
I wanted to wake up and make a quick joke on twitter and then go get some coffee and start the day and NOPE
TWO HOURS LATER I'M DESIGNING A FLOPPY DISK CONTROLLER
JLCPCB here I come
OK I know that one won't work. There's too many overlapping parts.

I fixed it now. This'll work.
I did this one manually but I have seriously considered writing a plugin for kicad that goes through every part and picks a random orientation out of 360 degrees and applies it
and by "manually" I mean I clicked each part and adjusted the properties.
Obviously I let a computer generate the randomness, I'm not a barbarian.
this may be a tad hard to route, though
I'm pretty sure if I pointed an autorouter at this my computer would collapse into a black hole
especially since I have all these pads I need to connect to THE VOID
done routing the ground.
I decided not to use a ground plane fill. it's too easy.
I'm just gonna do point-to-point traces for all the ground points
I may need more than 2 layers
hey what if I just give every major component their own layer?
kicad only supports up to 32 layers, but that should be enough

More from foone

foone
foone
@Foone
Everyone likes to forget this episode just because it's terrible, but we were really sleeping on inherent comedy in a unfreezing an investor 300 years in the future and having them discover we've transitioned to a moneyless post-scarcity utopia.


it's like a classic twilight zone episode.

in fact, it IS a twilight zone episode.
The Rip Van Winkle Caper, Season 2, episode 24.
Four criminals steal a million dollars of gold bars, then put themselves in suspended animation for a hundred years to hide from the law.

they wake up, then start killing each other from mistrust, then the last one dies in the desert, as he offers a gold bar to the driver of a passing car, asking for water and a ride into town

the confused driver walks back to his car with the bar, and his wife asks what the gold bar is.
he says something like "It's gold... they used to use this for money, before we figured out a way to manufacture it."
He tosses it away, and drives off.
CULTURE
foone
foone
@Foone
So I was talking to @gewt about Job: A Comedy of Justice and I came up with a theory that I think explains why Heinlein's late-period work is so kinda-terrible and why I still enjoy it so much


So Heinlein had always been very interesting in the short parts of his novels, like the little snippets inside chapters. He had a very fun writing style, and wrote some fun dialogue with fun characters, right?>
It probably comes from how much of his early stuff was short fiction

And I think what happened with a lot of his longer works is that he'd just start writing fun bits and hope it would end up going somewhere or having a bigger plot by the end. like eventually he'd figure out where this was going, then go back and rewrite it into a cohesive whole

and I'm sure he had editors that'd help this process. No editor would let you publish something as rambly and changing-gears-every-other-chapter as The Number Of The Beast, for example... unless you were God-King Of Science Fiction 1980s Robert Heinlein.

so basically I think what happened is that by the 80s (when he was in his seventies!!) he lost the drive to go back and rewrite and he was too Untouchable for editors to make him.
CULTURE
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foone
foone
@Foone
Check out what I got today. You can tell it's something weird as fuck just from the box...


So this is a FISK ... thing.
It's a floppy disk fax machine! You can fax floppies to other people who have these things.


Apparently you can connect it to external drives, computers, or printers?


So I'm gonna do more research into this thing and how it works, but while I'm here, some of the other stuff I got today. Some 3.5" floppy disks. Single sided, double density ones! These were some of the very first 3.5" disks and basically nothing used them.


I also got this book: AutoSim, the Marketing Laboratory.
It's some software to help you sell cars, apparently! it was weird and cheap, so I got it. I'll of course image it.
ALL
foone
foone
@Foone
1. in the beginning, browsers didn't have download statusbars
2. firefox got a browser statusbar extension. it was configurable and worked well
3. chrome cloned it without options and it didn't work as well

4. firefox realized chrome was faster and more secure at everything and therefore dropped extensions
5. now firefox doesn't have a download statusbar either

6. someone reimplements download statusbars in firefox's new web-extensions format. it's terrible because of the inherent limitations of the significantly less flexible and powerful extension format

7. CHROME WINS! (with its terrible download statusbar implementation which can't be fixed by users, because No Options and No Skins and No Extensions)

this is where we are now
SOFTWARE
foone
foone
@Foone
Bad news:, everyone: I got my next keyboard


The front folds down


Honestly I've seen much worse keyboards


It's got buttons on top


The back is molded but has no functionality except the battery compartment
FUN

More from Science

Navin Kabra
Navin Kabra
@NGKabra
Did you know that all the nuclear bombs we exploded in the '40s-50s-60s have permanently contaminated all the steel the world has produced since then? All steel in the world is divided into two categories: pre-1945 non-contaminated steel, and post-1945 contaminated steel.

How?

Nuclear bombs (including the tests) create a lot of radioisotopes that are not found in nature. For example Cobalt-60 (a radioactive version of Cobalt-59). And since the 1945 Trinity test, these have all dispersed in the atmosphere.

What does this have to do with steel?

The process of manufacturing steel uses atmospheric air (or atmospheric oxygen). Some of the radioisotopes like Cobalt-60 get pulled in too, and as a result, any steel produced after 1945 has embedded in it some of these radioisotopes, sitting there emitting gamma rays.

Why do we care about traces of radioisotopes in steel? When making Geiger counters, or medical devices to check for radioactive contamination, or astronomical instruments, the emissions from the contaminated steel would interfere with the measurements.

So we need pre-1945 steel

Pre-1945 non-contaminated steel is called "low background steel". And when we need it, where do we get it from?

We go, find pre-World-War-II sunken shipwrecks, and then salvage the steel (and lead) from those to build our instruments which need heavy radiation shielding.
SCIENCE
Sonja Schiffers
Sonja Schiffers
@sonjaschiffers
I recently submitted my PhD dissertation titled "Illiberalism Beyond Borders. Dissecting Russian and Turkish External Influence in Bosnia and Georgia" at @FU_Berlin. Interested in what I found? Read this thread ⬇️


To begin with, I hypothesise that illiberal external influence (IEX) is more likely to contribute to the contestation of #democracy in a given polity when it appears in the context of a favorable domestic environment and the absence of liberal external counterpressure.

I particularly scrutinise the role of domestic elites in facilitating/obstructing IEX, based on findings by J. Tolstrup, @otansey, R. Vanderhill et al. I also look at how liberal ext. counterpressure can help prevent a major contribution of IEX to the contestation of #democracy.

Between 2016-2018, I conducted 95 interviews in #Tbilisi, #Moscow, #Sarajevo & #BanjaLuka (thx to all interlocutors!). Given the increasingly unfree environment in Turkey, I didn't dare to make a trip to Ankara, but talked to local experts about Turkish IEX in BiH & Georgia.

In #Bosnia, #Ankara has engaged in illiberal sponsorship of the Party of Democratic Action for many years. However, in both Bosnia and #Georgia, Ankara mostly exerted illiberal external influence after the 2016 coup attempt, following which it exerted pressure on the rule of law.
SCIENCE
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Benedikt Kuhnhaeuser
Benedikt Kuhnhaeuser
@BenKuhnhaeuser
The calamoid palms 🌴 have over 500 species spread across the world, but their higher-level relationships were a bit of a mystery. Until now.

Out today in #MolecularPhylogeneticsAndEvolution:

A robust phylogenomic framework for the calamoid palms https://t.co/JiCbSUlheH

1/10


First some background info, so that you know what we are talking about:

Calamoid palms look a bit like snakes 🐍 (don't they!?!), because their fruits are covered in overlapping scales. And with their often fierce spines, they are equally fearsome. 😱

2/10


They are classified into 17 genera, 10 subtribes and 3 tribes. They have an amazing variety of growth forms, from stemless to climbing to tree habit. 🌱🌴

3/10


But as I said, their relationships have been a bit of a mystery. Here's the varying relationships previous studies found over the last 20 years.

4/10


We tackled this mystery with a phylogenomic approach: we sampled almost a thousand genes (a hundred times more than previous studies!) of 75 species representing all calamoid tribes, subtribes and genera.

The resulting data matrix is pretty massive...

5/10
SCIENCE
Lior Pachter
Lior Pachter
@lpachter
"The new answer to a 77-year-old problem"

😭


https://t.co/hm9NoaU4nr


https://t.co/8fKDiKjSWc


https://t.co/jkaicC1F2x


https://t.co/PpxWT4Jef4
SCIENCE
Jim Bancroft, 6%
Jim Bancroft, 6%
@JEdward02
1/This is a rant I had with someone while texting, and I thought it would make an interesting thread:

2/ Jim, If you come across any information, I still desire to hear any information on the state of our beleaguered union.
FOR LATER READ , SCIENCE

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Danielle \U0001f1e7\U0001f1f4
Danielle 🇧🇴...
@dinkydani21
❤✈️🌎 2 years ago today @JamesIvings and I sold all our belongings and left the UK to travel for a year. We've never been happier and we have no plans to ever return there 🙂

Thread 👇

Since then we've started a remote web dev company @SquarecatWebDev and been lucky enough to have completed several freelance projects 💻 that have kept us on the road.

In the last few months we've become a huge part of this amazing new Maker community and have found so many new friends from @makerskitchen, @women_make_ and several others! 🥰

We love travelling together (even if I'm only a glorified laptop watcher 😒) but we're both much happier being able to share our ideas outside of our own little bubble and our products have benefitted too!

Here's to another year of nomading with my favourite person and to the Maker community continuing to grow with our help! Maybe one day we'll all get to meet each other ✌️ 💛
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Raman Shalupau
Raman Shalupau
@ksaitor
Maker movement is doing to startups what startups did to corporations.

Here is why 👇

Startups fixed the problem of innovation, that corporations lack.

In big, slow corporations, innovation is a RISK and distraction from the core $$$ profitable business.

Agile startups could launch, iterate fast and eventually stumble upon new growing market opportunities.

However,

When a startup reaches product-market-fit, it has to 🚀 "grow at all costs" and reach market dominance before some giant corporation can replicate their new product and distribute it to their existing giant customer base.

Startup's "growth at all costs" often means growth at the expense of charging customers $$$ money.

Hence, to be sustainable, startups have to constantly chase investor money.

Startup teams spend more time finding and pleasing investors, than finding and pleasing customers.

95% of startups die because they run out of (investor) money + no business model + crazy investor expectations.

Same way corporations die, when unable to adjust to new technology and market shifts.
MAKERS
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Emma Hilton
Emma Hilton
@FondOfBeetles
This is Kuinini ‘Nini’ Manumua, the woman who was ultimately displaced by inclusion of Laurel Hubbard.

She’s 21, and it would have been her first Olympics.
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Damodar Hegde
Damodar Hegde
@DamodarHegde4
MUST READ TILL END:
FB POST BY MR PRABEER BASU,
IAS-1976(BIHAR)
" Received a hurtful post from an old friend and colleague. He was on my daily Broadcast list of WhatsApp. He requested that I do not send him any of my posts on 'political' issues. I gave him a long explaination
>2

2/29
on why I write and what I write. But he was not convinced.

Being alerted by him thus, I felt I should clarify to all who read my posts on what exactly I think and do.

The charge against me is that I wrongly support our current Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi..
>3

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and that it establishes I am not rational and impartial anymore.
Let me try and explain.First and foremost,I do not write on 'political' issues. I write on 'national' issues. For example, I have no opinion on whether Rahul Gandhi should be President of his party or not.
>4

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Similarly, I have no views whether BJP is a better party than Congress or vice versa.
Even after 36 years in the IAS I have no MLA, MP or anyone involved in politics whom I can classify as my friend or even acquaintance.
>5

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So, naturally I don't care which party wins or loses as long as the winning party runs an honest government doing good to my nation.
Now, why I speak in favour of Shri Modi:

1. Ever since the beginning of my service I realised that Planning Commission was not serving..

>6
INDIA
Anu Satheesh
Anu Satheesh
@AnuSatheesh5
Story of Thumba Poo and Shiva

Thumba poo is a tiny white flower which grows in all areas. These flowers are used for treatment for sinus. Small children who have polyps in Nose are told to crush tumbha leaves and apply in nose part.
There is an interesting story of Thumba and


Mahadeva. Thumba flowers were not taken for Shiva Pooja. Saddened to this Thumba prayed sincerely and Mahadeva appeared before her.
She was surprised that Shiva had appeared before her. Instead of saying that she wants to under his feet always, she said
@SriramKannan77


She said that her feet should be on his head. Shiva accepted her prayers. It is because of this Thumba flower is placed in the head of Shiva Linga.
Shambo Mahadeva
Om Namah Sivaye
🙏🕉🙏
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