Luke Weston
@lukeweston
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Electronic engineering, physics, biomedical engineering, plasmonics, using nanotechnology to manipulate light. He/him. Favourite programming language is solder.
Melbourne, Australia
Joined April 2009
Good old electron microscope running Windows XP.
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Is there a non-vulgar, more professional word for enshittification? I want to explain what enshittification is to business people and why they need to select technology services and devices to avoid enshittification risk without saying enshittification.
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You could do that with a phone app. Or plasticine. Or pencil and paper. Or a photo. But no, we have to demonise Flipper like itâs some magical evil thing only Flipper can do?.
The Flipper Zero has an app called "Key Maker" that allows users to copy the cut pattern of some physical keys. Scary isn't it? .
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There are two kinds of people at Microsoft. The guy who found that SSH was taking a few extra milliseconds to connect and was insistent on knowing why. And the person who has decided the Microsoft Mac RDP client will be rebranded to âWindows Appâ.
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I remember when Raspberry Pi used to be heavily publicised as âthe $25 computerâ. And now Iâm paying $100 for a Raspberry Pi.
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@Themightyhutch The bike rack is âclosedâ for royal mourning but the people who remove your bike are not?.
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In the mid-1920s, Germany taxed radios based on the number of vacuum tubes in the receiver. In 1926 Loewe Radio decided they could make a much cheaper 3-tube radio but only tariffed as a one-tube radio. To do this they invented the 3NF tube, the first integrated circuit.
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@EERandomness Iâm thinking more of annoying corporate software tools like email swear policing.
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Rotman lenses are still the best unhinged electronic component ever invented.
I've set up a simulation of a Rotman lens to drive a phased array in Elmer. The matching of the ports is poor, causing lots of internal reflections, resulting in unwanted side lobes and poor channel separation. Nonetheless I think it still demonstrates the principle nicely đ
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A ârealâ crystal radio. With a rock. This is temperamental and insensitive - but itâs working. This is pyrite, galena also works. An active semiconducting device- and itâs a rock. Excuse the messy soldering to the brass, I donât have the ideal iron and flux here at the moment.
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@chubbyemu @6502_ftw There is no way thereâs an intersection between âhas girlfriendâ and âleaves poo on the computer chairâ.
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Me: Please send me the API documentation for your device. Company: Please tell us everything about you, your application, what youâre doing and why you want documentation. Me: Please provide documentation for your product or product will not be in consideration for our needs.
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The Cromemco Cyclops digital camera was absolutely groundbreaking in 1975. A commercially available CCD sensor was unheard of in 1975. So somebody took a 1-kilobit 32x32 DRAM and cut the front off, and by constantly refreshing and reading out the DRAM, the chip could see light.
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New rule for hotels:.Give people access to the TV HDMI input. No app installation, no signup for an account, no giving a third party your PII for some cast service. Bring a HDMI patch out to a wallplate, then ppl wonât try to take TV off the wall. Just give people a HDMI port.
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@TheBobPony If anyone is wondering wtf this is, itâs a Toshiba backdoor technique for resetting the bios password when the parallel port data bus is looped back onto certain parallel port control lines.
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How-to-vote card which is informal is such a One Nation on brand thing. Numbers are hard!
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A feeding electric eel can cause transfection of plasmids from the surrounding environment into nearby organisms - natural, eel induced, electroporation.
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I found this little vase, eyeballed it, maybe 1930s, hand glazed. Itâs absolutely flaminâ hot cheeto, uranium glazed, maybe 10x more radioactivity then Iâve ever seen in a consumer item. Gonna wash my hands after handling it - these glazes are usually lead oxide plus uranium.
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A multi-kilogram bulk ingot of radioactive glass. This is newly manufactured material, US made. Contrary to popular belief, new uranium glass stock is actively made and sold today from a few glass craft suppliers.
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I noticed on a Windows computer that Windows is allowing malicious scam/malware âalertsâ *natively in the Windows environment* as ânotificationsâ. Thatâs ridiculous, Microsoft. Itâs a massive threat to non-expert users. Weâve been doing this for 25+ years, do better.
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TIL: US Coke has corn syrup in it. Corn syrup is not Passover compliant, so they have special Passover-compliant coke with cane sugar in it, only sold for a small window each year.
The Yellow Top Coca-Cola is here. Passover is coming. Now freak out!!!
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Thatâs a cute idea - just an offset dish, no electronics, no power. Phone sits at the offset focus. Itâs pointed at Alice Springs some 50+ km away, thereâs enough 900 MHz dish gain for reliable phone calls.
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TIL some people cheat at CS:GO by chucking a Xilinx SP605 (or similar board with PCIe-capable transceivers) onto PCIe and using it to implement basic player âradarâ from direct memory. Big money for pro gaming means big money for doping I suppose. Example:
i challenge anyone to explain to me why it is not absolutely fucking insane for a video game to require its own kernel driver
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RIP Google. You had one simple, deterministic, elegant algorithm in 1996 which utterly transformed the usability of the Web for the better. Thatâs over now. You had a good run.
This week's big search news is Google's continuing transition to "AI search" - instead of typing in search terms and getting links to websites, you'll ask Google a question and an AI will compose an answer based on things it finds on the web:. 1/
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Compare and contrast these reports - Obama (3 pics) and Trump (1 pic) physical exams.
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That INL video has a great photo of some of the clad 238Pu sources on Perseverance - they just stay like that, every day. They stay glowing orange hot for a century.
I was always fascinated by plutonium 238 and its use for spacecraft power and heating. Most of the flagship interplanetary missions use it including Mars rovers. This just popped in to my YouTube feed. Prepping the Perseverance Power Source via @YouTube.
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@KathrynTewson The picture of the presumptive test appears to be (although the photo is bad) a Nark II #10 reagent test (âspecial opiates reagentâ) where the yellow colour indicates a presumptive positive for oxycodone.
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I feel like the Web died when you could no longer simply copy and paste a URL without this sort of crap
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These little âprecious bullionâ of cheap base metals are stupid but kind of cute.
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I have also built a breakthrough quantum processor that can detect surface vessels using quantum algorithms!. (The Iranians should have at the very least added a FPGA mezzanine card to the board, to make it look fancier.)
Last week, Iranian Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari announced Iran had built a breakthrough quantum processor that can detect surface vessels using quantum algorithms. You too can get this "quantum processor" for the low price of $589 on Amazon!
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@_joshyoung @elizaorlins A screen that grabs your attention to look straight at it is great for facial recognition, too.
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Putting 0603 SMD LEDs onto a mirror so I can easily see the orientation marking on the bottom when picking them up and placing them.
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To achieve a full five-star safety rating, the Euro NCAP will soon require carmakers to have physical buttons, stalks, or dials for indicators, hazard warning lights, wipers, SOS calls, and the horn.
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@destructionset @evenwhennoone Itâs not a technology (e.g. smartphone) thatâs the problem, itâs people (parents) who have absolutely no concept of respecting any boundaries, either towards the kids or the teacher.
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Building a modified electric unicycle to go 126 km/h and fanging a 126 km/h unicycle down the Darebin Creek Trail is just not something that regulation is going to prevent. Iâm sorry the guy passed away, but âmoar regulationâ canât prevent everything.
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@rob_grey @DillsFTW @mcagney72 @DrRachaelF @musko101 Honestly, the school is not being run by Zero Cool. USB power adapter with an implant that can compromise phone data is possible in theory but realistically a school is not going to spend the money and effort on this malicious hardware. iOS âtrust this device?â will catch this.
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âAs a user, I would like the program to not close when I have told it to close, so that the software can do literally the opposite of the behaviour I have commanded it to do.â
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And the horrible scary AstraZeneca led them straight into the clutches of⌠not dying.
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Very dry, strong, not hoppy, poor mouth feel, no colour, no head, not sessionable.
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Crystal radios have a bit of a reputation for being hard to build or not working properly, but there are some tricks. Here are a couple of mine that are simple built but work well. The classic simple design found in almost all books and websites doesnât work well. Donât use it.
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I made up a short Apple AC cable as I donât want the excess cable mess but I donât want the âduckheadâ plug with no earth connection. The leakage current capacitively coupled from SMPS hot side has been notorious on metal Macs for years but they still donât earth them properly.
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@Sciencing_Bi Nothing a few well placed signs wouldnât fix - âchlamydia cultures only to be handled on this lab benchâ or similar. :).
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Watch its expression just after the brick falls down. This cockatoo doesnât take any shit from anyone. Can you rotate a brick onto its end with just your teeth? No you canât.
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Conical inductor - itâs shaped that way to minimise parasitic capacitance and maintain very broadband RF blocking, maintaining the RF/DC isolation well up into the GHz range.
ç§ăĺăŤčŚăčŠäžĄăăźăăăăă ăźăăŞăă§ĺ°ăăŁăăłă¤ăŤä˝żăŁăŚăăăŽă¨ăăčŹă解ăăăăĄăŞăżăŤHMC788ă¨ăă10GHzç¨ăŽă˘ăłăICă§ăă6GHzčś
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@skankydev @eevblog But - like with computers generally - youâre basically forced to use faster hardware because of software bloat. The hardware resources expected by software doubles every 18 months. :). The older hardware variants only maintain acceptable performance if you use the older OS etc.
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This is a simple task for an industrial robot, this sort of thing is proven and mature at high speed. It doesnât need any âAIâ, it doesnât need any neural network, it doesnât need to look humanoid at all. I suspect the best way of performing that task doesnât need an arm at all.
New Optimus video! đŽ. ⌿ Sorting battery cells using end-to-end NNs; recovers autonomously from failures. ⌿ Currently being tested at one of Tesla's factories, with a continuously decreasing rate of human interventions. ⌿ It's also taking regular walks around the office.
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Schlaepfer and Oskayâs âOpen Circuitsâ is going to be a remarkably good resource for teaching EE students, particularly familiarity with real-world physical implementation of components and familiarity with them which isnât taught well in EE textbooks ever. Itâs really very good
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Chemist Warehouse is out of control. 90% of the crap they sell should be banned by the TGA or ACCC.
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Beautiful fluorescent cake with chlorophyll(?) added to it as a fluorescent colour, with a uranium glass plate.
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@drewtoothpaste They will be shocked to find that vegetables get weaponised too.
found the woman who knocked down a Russian drone with a jar of pickled tomatoes. She wants to set the record straight: those were NOT picked cucumbers. The gist of her story is in this thread 1/.
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Stop using Class IV lasers in free space on an open table with no controls. If you *must* use open beam it should be fixed to bench, stationary, in a dedicated light-tight room with interlocks and laser on indicator outside. Donât move anything in or near the path when laser on.
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âUltimate solution for AIâ. Itâs a MOSFET. Not even literally *one transistor* is safe from AI marketing bullshit.
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The Bone Hurting Juice has appropriate instructions to stop people fucking around with the Bone Hurting Juice. (And a primary plastic bottle inside the outer container.)
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@LucreSnooker Carbogen is a funny drug. The bodyâs hypoxia âsenseâ is not actually sensing lack of oxygen, it senses the presence of CO2 and assumes that is a proxy for lack of oxygen. This is why inert gases like nitrogen can easily kill people, as they donât trigger the feeling of hypoxia.
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G.C. Dobbsâ Ladybird Transistor Radio book from 1972 is cute, but itâs practically impossible to reproduce the build today due to characteristics of the ancient transistors. So I built this to try and capture the same aesthetic but with modern components. Low cost, works okay.
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This optical filter, with 105 nanofabricated thin film layers and deliberately designed so that the transmission and reflection spectrum draws a moose head (!?) is absolutely wild.
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@joncruz @profanegeometry Vegemite has enough NaCl to make it somewhat conductive and suitable rheology (shear thinning) to fabricate lines easily.
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@83dollaroring Methylene Blue is increasingly promoted as a scam medicine (interestingly, in the COVID era, they seem to have dropped the naturalistic / herb obsession and are increasingly happy to sell synthetic chemicals as woo.). It has never been approved or marketed as an antidepressant.
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@chordbug I have questions about the parents. Like, are they meteorologists, are they astrophysicists, is one of the parents Katherine Johnson, or are they from the land of Q-clearance? . Thereâs not that many possible options.
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Does the USA not have UHT milk? Genuine question.
â ď¸Attentionâ ď¸.Unrefrigerated box milk spotted in America.This is not a drill.
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Iâm sure Iâve seen workholding like that somewhere before.
Professional Machinists: Please rate my workholding setup.
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@BadVaccineTakes Itâs not just anti-vaccination. Anti-vaccination is just a part of this anti-medicine radicalisation. Anti vitamin K supplementation and anti RhD immunoglobulin, anti hospital birth, anti medical professionals at the birth. And yet again Facebook is a central part of this harm.
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@signor_molevol Even if the person *was actually a child* in school, you donât freaking email the teacher and say you donât like the grade your child was given and you expect the teacher to give your child a higher grade.
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Well, you *can* have an instant sterilising wand that sterilises the restaurant table, the air and items around you instantly. But you donât want to.
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@RyanMarino A common, everyday drug you use, but they treat it like itâs some apocalyptic alien pathogen.
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There must be some trick to working with camera image sensors - buying them in small volumes and getting the proper datasheets for them. In my experience camera sensor manufacturers are most difficult in the semiconductor industry - you usually canât buy them and canât get data.
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AMS NanEye camera module (!!) with 0603 capacitor for scale. Yes, there are multiple lens elements, image sensor with Bayer, readout electronics and serialiser in there.
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ânuclear slows renewablesâ . The bloody objective is not ârenewablesâ! THE GOAL IS DECARBONISATION. Only a shill trying to make a fast buck selling solar panels thinks that ârenewablesâ is the objective in and of itself.
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After the fake germanium diodes from China I picked up these Đ9Đ (D9B) USSR-era diodes from a Ukraine seller. They all test good, Vf about 0.28V at low current bias. Thereâs a whole family of different USSR Ge diodes and theyâre easily available and cheap. They look brand new.
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This is so going in my lab notes for students . good breadboard, bad breadboard, very bad breadboard
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@SOS149 NewsCorp should be doing a story on this cooker criminal behaviour and lack of police action.
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If we had a Chernobyl explosion every two days, with the same Soviet denials, the same lack of response and coverup and inaction, we might reach the same morbidity and mortality as coal.
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They should have named it Ponzi Buddy.
This is fucking wild. Norton "Antivirus" now sneakily installs cryptomining software on your computer, and then SKIMS A COMMISSION.
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3D printed horn antennas after metal deposition. The copper layer doesnât look very bright, but it is ~0 ohms between surface points đ
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