northernscrub
@northernscrub@lemmy.world
- Comment on My Mastodon instance refuses to federate with a specific instance, and nobody seems to know why. 2 weeks ago:
Oh, no, sorry. I mean that I can’t appear to get any posts from mastodonapp.uk, whether by relay or federation
- Comment on My Mastodon instance refuses to federate with a specific instance, and nobody seems to know why. 2 weeks ago:
fedibuzz alleges that you can follow a single specific instance with their relay, and I see nothing to suggest that I can’t use it better federate with mastodonapp.
I did note, though, that both my instance and mastodonapp are connected to relay.intahnet.co.uk - and whilst it has a few issues in the logs, it has none since i reset the instance again after attempting limited federation mode.
- Comment on My Mastodon instance refuses to federate with a specific instance, and nobody seems to know why. 2 weeks ago:
But ruby is so hard :(
I come from c# land and my skills are soft and squishy
- Comment on Do I need a NAS ? 2 weeks ago:
You don’t need something huge. Remove the DVD drive and the old mechanical drive from a USFF machine, stick a pair of 4TB drives in it, and put a basic debian image on it. Configure SMB with a shared folder or two, and voila: you now have a comfortable NAS for maybe £20 plus drives. Add in a sata pcie card if you can find a decent low-profile one, and that’s an extra four or even six drives. It won’t give you the cream of top performance, but it will be perfectly serviceable for a homelab.
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to fediverse@lemmy.world | 7 comments
- Comment on Building a USB-C DAC in as small a package as possible 2 weeks ago:
Hmm. Git is far too organised for my play style. I may take photographs at some point, assuming I can actually find components (and learn how to do… well, any of this).
- Comment on Building a USB-C DAC in as small a package as possible 2 weeks ago:
After a night’s thought, this might be an interesting idea. Although I’d need to figure out how to add a programmable interface to it.
- Comment on Building a USB-C DAC in as small a package as possible 2 weeks ago:
Neither. This is a purely personal project, and I’m using as much off-the-shelf as possible. The dac itself doesn’t have to be top of the line, just decent. The PCB itself I’ll probably just have printed, rather than trying to breadboard it or make some ungodly wire mess.
Some stuff I can get for almost pennies, like a USB-C controller and the actual sockets and plugs, so this is a non-concern. The actual dac chip though, I’m expecting (or at least hoping) to find something around the £30-£40 mark, although this may well be aspirational. That said, this is something I can theoretically transplant to my next device, and the next after that, assuming I create custom housings for them.
- Comment on Building a USB-C DAC in as small a package as possible 2 weeks ago:
I’ve put some thought into it, but realistically I lack the experience to flesh out the idea.
I’ve seen a few small DAC concepts out there, like www.elektroda.com/rtvforum/topic4091483.html or that iPhone modification that Strange Parts did a few years ago, but none of these really 100% match my needs. As for the sizing, the only real answer I have for you is “small” - whilst it is intended for integration into a phone, I’m going to be building a housing for that phone from scratch, so the size requirements are somewhat led by the dac itself. I had a few ideas about using a flexi-strip in place of a solid PCB too, but I think that’s aiming too high for my non-existent skillset. Instead, I have no problem redesigning the board to be long and thin if necessary, or squat and fat in the alternate. Realistically, it’s probably going to be somewhat L-shaped, but there’s a good two inches or more of width and something like six inches of height to work with - minus the PCB of the phone, that is.
The actual handset it will be accompanying is a Sony Xperia 1 IV, but that’s largely meaningless as we can add pretty much any additional size to it up to a reasonably large handset within the last ten years (preferably with an OLED display, but I’ll be somewhat limited in terms of compatibility anyway and might have to end up running the screen in an alternate fashion somehow, I haven’t thought too hard about that side of things because the project is useless if I can’t design a DAC inthe first place).
The heatsink stuff was really just a suggestion, I’m not actually sure if it will be necessary, but it’s good to have the option.
Specifications wise, it essentially needs to do four things:
- Pass any connected headset microphone through to the handset
- Run an EQ that is addressable and configurable from the handset
- Have a volume ceiling at least comparable to a fifth-gen iPod video (i.e. a wolfson chip)
- Take power from, and pass data and power through to, the existing USB-C socket on the handset.
The bit that I’m stuck on, really, is the addressable EQ. I could possibly go with some sort of Arduino-esque solution, but that’s a lot of lifting for a single-purpose device. I have no idea where else to start looking - I know there are RISC chips out there that run on nothing but a button cell, but again I’m clueless as to whether or not this is a good idea.
- Comment on Building a USB-C DAC in as small a package as possible 2 weeks ago:
I’ve looked at these, but they lack the integrated amplifier (afaik) and the configurable equaliser. Those are two super important features that pretty much break the idea for me.
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to askelectronics@discuss.tchncs.de | 10 comments
- Comment on UK government says anyone working in Britain for the Russian state will have to register and declare what they are doing or face jail 8 months ago:
They’ve been interfering with the UK since the 70’s. We have neo-liberalism as a result of their meddling. We could have had a nice, well-regulated economy that was far less prone to market fluctuations but nope. America doesn’t have friends, it has business interests.
- Comment on UK government says anyone working in Britain for the Russian state will have to register and declare what they are doing or face jail 8 months ago:
Great idea! Now do this for the americans too.
- Comment on School phone bans don't boost grades or wellbeing, study suggests 9 months ago:
I, too, am aware of zlib and librera reader. But there’s a difference between a curated selection of books in physical form in front of you, and deciding to read a book on an electronic device. The former dissuades the reader-to-be from abandoning the idea over too wide a selection, and removes other electronic distractions from asserting themselves over the reading material - I refer here to notifications that flash over the current window.
Plus, there’s plenty of people who choose not to read, despite the option being available. Having the option physically there in front of you is far more encouraging, in my opinion. And once they start reading, they might go on to seek titles outside of that curated selection. Great success!
- Comment on Robot packers and AI cameras: UK retail embraces automation to cut staff costs 9 months ago:
Artificial merely implies manmade, as opposed to naturally developed IMO.
As for the hypothesis, a few years ago I took a crack at designing a system like that as an on-paper exercise. The vast majority of it was just…pushing data around and using existing data to suggest new data. Not all that dissimilar to how human beings think, to be honest. The big hurdle was optimisation and context, and allowing the platform to “grow” without letting it metastasize and without improperly restricting it. There are some hardware limitations to consider too - a storage backbone, for one, and interlinking every thread as opposed to having them wholly isolated from each other. There’s the potential for thread interruption too, which as far as I’m aware is not something that any microcode packages support.
But despite all that, I’m still fairly certain one could build an approximation therein. The complexity of inter-stimuli input (read: input from audio, visual, and potentially sensatory endpoints, replicating vision, hearing and touch) isn’t to be underestimated, though.
Perhaps one day I might take a crack at it - but its also a morally gray area that has quite a few caveats to it, so… uh… maybe.
- Comment on Robot packers and AI cameras: UK retail embraces automation to cut staff costs 9 months ago:
On the contrary, I’d argue that its entirely feasible to create an artificial intelligence. “All” you need do is replicate the concept of thought - which is a never ending train of relational contexts that are entirely dependent on the individuals life experiences. Putting that into practise is a huge job, but arguably not an impossible one. Such a creation, presuming it could create new concepts along the way, would certainly be deserving of the title “AI”.
- Comment on School phone bans don't boost grades or wellbeing, study suggests 9 months ago:
I’m neurodivergent. Wanna know what would a been great? Easier access to the library and more books.
- Comment on What is everyone using as a HTPC? 9 months ago:
I have an SFF PC currently running Mint, with Bello and steam as well as xemu and a few other goodies. The flexibility is great, if something is a bit borked I can usually just play it in VLC, and the compute allows me to run pretty much any emulator besides Xenia or that PS3 one. Once I plug a GPU into it, those should be fine too. Not bad for a cheap i5 system.
- Comment on Robot packers and AI cameras: UK retail embraces automation to cut staff costs 9 months ago:
They’re not intelligent, though. The only thing they can do is repeat patterns according to prompt. That’s literally all an LLM is - a massive relational database hooking up words and phrases, or repeating the laws of physics on a vast scale, or copying out design principles. Its nothing more than a stochastic parrot. It has no sentience, and sentience cannot be romanticised into it.
- Comment on Digital driving licences to be ‘put on phones this year’ 10 months ago:
LaNd Of ThE fReE
- Comment on Digital driving licences to be ‘put on phones this year’ 10 months ago:
Fuck no. Not happening.
It was already a monumentally stupid idea to bank with your phone. This is catastrophic.
- Comment on Robot packers and AI cameras: UK retail embraces automation to cut staff costs 10 months ago:
AI
Its. Not. Fucking. AI.
Jfc this muck is going to make us as blind as a bat when an actual artificial sentience appears. An LLM does not an intelligence make.