hardware twitter always gives me my daily hit of imposter syndrome. And that’s a good thing.

Walking around the neighbourhood testing wifi range, let’s hope no one calls the cops. Needs to span around 200ft for use at a marina as a high-water alert system for boats

To say the thing: Canada and the US can win together. Anti-US rhetoric in this country is doing untold damage. It doesn’t have to be this way. We can make different choices.

REMINDER: Starting Friday, May 8th, Instagram DM's will no longer be end-to-end encrypted. Instagram hasn't explained why they're dropping end-to-end encryption, which raises some pretty obvious questions about what they plan to do with your private messages.

I’m an eternal optimist and will always want to highlight good progress. But the more I sit with yesterday’s economic update, the more concerned I get. 1. This government is falling into the trap of focusing on messaging and optics over outcomes. Claiming the new investment fund is a Sovereign Wealth Fund when it’s clearly not is a prime example. 2. There’s a concerning approach to shifting numbers to make our financial position look better than it is. Most Canadians will miss this, but this government has adopted an approach of presenting figures that show on all-government net debt-to-GDP ratio is at just 10.2 percent while in reality it sits at 75 percent of GDP. The 10.2% figure only works when the assets held by the Canada Pension Plan and Quebec Pension Plan are subtracted…. funds that appear on no government balance sheet and are not available to any level of government to pay off their debts. 3. Spending is still out of control and is leading to rapidly growing interest payments. Our debt is growing so quickly that interest on debt is now the fastest-growing government program, expected to cost more than $80B in four years. 4. There is still no action on the well known, fundamental ways to boost productivity: capital gains and corporate tax reform; aggressive red tape reduction; and bold opening of protected sectors to competition. Without these reforms, Canada is cooked. Our productivity will continue to slide regardless of the other efforts we make, no matter how well-intentioned.

Self-guaranteeing promises Companies break promises all the time. A self-guaranteeing promise does not require you to trust anyone. You can verify a self-guaranteeing promise yourself. File over app is a self-guaranteeing promise. If files are in your control, in an open format, you can use those files in another app at any time. Not an export. The exact same files. It’s good practice to test this with any self-proclaimed file-over-app app you use. Terms and policies are not self-guaranteeing. A company may promise the privacy of your data, but those policies can change at any time. Changes can retroactively affect data you have spent years putting into the tool. A self-guaranteeing promise about privacy gives you proof that the tool cannot access your data in the first place. Examples: Google, Zoom, Dropbox, Tumblr, Slack, Adobe, Figma (see links). Encoding values into a governance structure is not self-guaranteeing. Given enough motivation, the corporate structure can be reversed. The structure is not in your hands. Example: OpenAI. Open source alone is not self-guaranteeing. Even open source apps can rely on data that is stuck in databases or in proprietary formats that are difficult to switch away from. Open source is not a reliable safeguard against the biases of venture capital. Examples: Omnivore, Skiff. When you choose to use a tool, the future of that tool is always ambiguous. On a long enough timeline the substrate changes. Your needs change, the underlying operating system changes, the company goes out of business or gets acquired, better options come along. It is possible to accept the ambiguousness of a tool's future if you choose tools that make self-guaranteeing promises.

To all my EE and PCB designing friends, is the following possible? (it's for an upcoming project im working on) - Low-power Transmitter (433mhz?) that can reach ~25m radius in a normal house (wood/drywall walls). - Transmission bandwidth does not matter, 1-bit of data needs to travel related to the on/off of a button press. - Transmitter/PCB needs to fit in a tight package... MAX 20mm x 40mm x 10mm I've talked to some clankers but I get conflicting information related to antenna orientation. An antenna would need to run parallel to the PCB because the small package. Is 433mhz suitable for this application? or should I look at a different frequencies

so I guess you need to be 16 or older to change the config on a router now? Never thought we'd live in a world where it's required to confirm your age just to change your wifi password, or port-forward your Minecraft server. so dumb.

I officially passed the mom test, I made a web app for my mom... and now im getting feature requests and bug reports*. I also self-host it off my laptop so I get a text "can you turn the website on?" randomly throughout the day. Random side project officially passed The Mom Test.

My friend watched the boat next to his nearly sink at the marina. Nobody noticed until it was almost too late. So we built a bilge monitor for his own boat that alerts his phone within 10 seconds if the water gets too high. The project is almost done, and the hardest lesson was to just do the boring work of collecting real sensor data when debugging. The final battle is getting it all packaged so he can easily set it up in the Spring!