Nuke

i might do a maintenance release down the road as i still got to fix my particles. also need to set up my unity+part tools which is a project in of itself.

im working on putting the current dev version up on ckan. mostly for my own convenience. need to edit op though.

thats one hell of an acronym.

poor kitty. i had one die of old age a few years ago. i got another one thats getting up there. hes going to be 16 in a couple months. plus we got 2 others, a fat 5ish year old tux and a 9 month old kitten. one day the chubby one came in with something on her stomach. they were working on our decks at the time and i thought she might have snagged her stomach on a nail and spilled some guts. upon closer inspection it turned out to be a large banana slug that had got stuck in her fur. a little water got it off and it was still alive so i chucked it back into the yard (the slug, not the cat). kitten got her spay op last month, so she was out of it for a few days. shis back to normal now but her fur hasnt grown back from where they shaved her belly.

did the fruit flys ever hatch?

i remember one time i flew through seattle i had some spare scratch and a two hour wait for my connection. so i went to the airport bar. needless to say by the time boarding came i was drunk as a skunk. of course i usually dont cause a ruckus when drunk so i just snoozed the whole flight. i dont think anyone noticed.

i have to say i liked the original title better.

always wonder if dark matter has anything to do with the lack of antimatter.

i wonder if a human landing on an neo would be a better stepping stone option for future mars missions. provided you can find one that is easier to get to than mars.

i remember ftp

i wonder if relativistic applesauce would go good on pork chops?

the best christmas album ever made

no mud but i did almost fling my grandma out of the back of a pickup truck while racing my sister around a gravel pit in southeast alaska. id never driven a truck before that day, nor sense, which is probably good because i grew up playing carmageddon.

when you are learning basic operations, no. the point there is to learn to figure out how to solve basic math problems, and learn to do it quickly. however once you start getting into higher math, like trigonometry and calculus, forcing students to do things the hard way is sadistic and frankly a waste of time which could be put to better use. its also not the way people use math in the real world. because humans are relatively bad at math when compared to technology, it is both more efficient and more accurate to use the calculator, i even got reprimanded at a job doing math on paper when there was a calculator nearby. like most cashiers are not trusted to do math on their own when the system crashes and so they twiddle their thumbs while someone finds the technician (ive actually been that technician, with a business loosing hundreds of dollars every hour for a problem that can be solved with four keystrokes). construction workers on the other hand do a lot of math, like when they redid our decks last summer it wasn't unusual to find a scrap of wood with trig calculations penciled on it. so it is still useful skill to be able to do math to solve problems in the field where you might not have access to a calculator (though to be fair the omnipresence of smart phones is changing that). the higher math you do the more likely it is you will use spreadsheets and other mathematics tools as time savers. that said i think we spend way to much time on basic math in school. i hated coming to class, and get handed a page of 50 long division problems and that was it. i wasnt learning anything, all you are doing is drilling for speed. which in a technological society is better done with a piece of silicon. the amount of time spent on review was absurd. thats time you could be using to teach higher math.

the idea wasn't that it was efficient but quiet and useful for stealth modes. and having a nuclear reactor onboard certainly eliminates your needs to worry about efficient energy usage. though id love to see some acoustic data to see if tom clancy was onto something.

ever seen/read the hunt for red october.

i have one cat that expresses her affection by biting my nose while im asleep. i also have to watch where i put my hands/feet when im asleep because if they end up dangling off the edge of the bed i have a kitten that will attack them, shes probibly also one of the most affectionate cats i have right now.

been trying to convince everyone that slayer's reign in blood album is actually christmas music.

there are four lights.

i have not made much progress on linux pcs, but i am pretty good with the raspbian distro on the pi. turns out that a lot of my favorite 90s games have pi ports. so that makes that platform a great portable.

another thing about strings on mcu is they love to eat your memory, things to think about when you only have 2k. avrs provide ways to stick strings in flash or even the eeprom. ive written robust cli interfaces for things just to have them eat all the memory because i put all my strings in char arrays.

anyway if you still have problems with garbled data, look up manchester coding. it will halve your throughput but will give you much cleaner data. you can also stick a checksup or crc at the end to confirm the data is good.

you want to learn how to do things on the arduino, get the datasheet for the microcontroller. its a tresure trove of useful information, and tells you how to use features arduino never tells you about. and as much as they like to tell you there is an 'arduino language', its all c++. while most sketches use functional programming, you find that libraries tend to just be c++ classes though sometimes you find libraries done the c way. if you want to use classes you usually have to put them in a separate file, which is kind of confusing, especially when its just a small class used in a not very complex sketch. when you write libraries you pretty much use the headers that come with winavr. in fact you can get win avr and ditch the arduino toolchain all together. arduino libraries do come in handy if you need to make something work in a short period of time. like on halloween i had 12 hours to blink some leds and add sound effects, and i managed to get it working about 15 minutes before trick or treat started. i could have made a more robust design but i only needed it for one day. think next year il just get some led strips. also if you want to transmit data, cheap rf modules are available. like the $3 esp8266 wifi module. the board is sufficiently powerful that you can usually ditch the arduino and just use it directly as your mcu board. the esp32 that followed it up was even more powerful and has bluetooth as well. doing ir usually requires using a timer to generate your carrier wave which is anded with your data. then have another timer drive an isr to shift out data. its easier to read ir data as you just need to do a pin change interrupt to detect the carrier and count out the pulses for timing. this is where reading data sheets comes in handy.

c teaches good fundamentals, so its a good first language. python is good if you are going into any scientific field. c# is ok, but id rather use c++. if you are going into programming, then learning as many programming languages as you can will help a lot.