Thread to discuss positive things in a general manner

[GearsNSuch]

Spoiler

So. We have a thread to talk about negative things.

We have a thread to talk about interesting things.

And we have a thread to talk about random things.

But we don't have a thread to talk about positive things.

Now, I know that negative things are more fun / beneficial / whatever to talk about, but people should have a place to discuss successes as well, and not have them lost in the sea of "What funny/interesting thing happened..."

 

State and discuss triumphs, congratulate other forum members, and, in a general manner, talk about the sunny side of your life.

[cubinator]

I'm starting a new job today, at a museum and planetarium! And then later I'm going to see Avengers: Endgame.

[Shpaget]

On 5/17/2019 at 7:56 PM, cubinator said:

I'm starting a new job today, at a museum and planetarium! And then later I'm going to see Avengers: Endgame.

That sounds awesome! The job, that is. So it's been a few days give us an update.

As for a positive thing on my side, I've been working on a control box for a kids model layout, and I'm just very appreciative of a good crimping tool for connectors. Compared to soldering, it's faster, much less fiddly. less prone to failure, and looks better.

[YNM]

Now I can officially roam about nearly unhindered in a railway station, yay !

Spoiler

On the other hand, I found out the whole project has been delayed by a whole decade, and it has started since I was a small boy... boo ?

 

[RealKerbal3x]

Half term holiday starts on Friday!

It's only one week, but it's still a well-deserved school holiday.

[Nightside]

2 hours ago, YNM said:

Now I can officially roam about nearly unhindered in a railway station, yay !

  Hide contents

On the other hand, I found out the whole project has been delayed by a whole decade, and it has started since I was a small boy... boo ?

 

For work? Are you inspecting construction?

[cubinator]

10 hours ago, Shpaget said:

That sounds awesome! The job, that is. So it's been a few days give us an update.

Sure, not much to tell yet but lots of training/shadowing. I got briefed on how to operate the planetarium, which has a very high quality projection system and runs a software that's a lot like Space Engine, but more point-and-click to control and a little less visually realistic. (I still want to try to get permission to actually install Space Engine on it...  Pretty sure this one doesn't do procedurally generated exoplanets in complete detail.) I'll be doing museum tours (mostly with kids) and planetarium shows, among other events and generally being helpful and educational.

[YNM]

6 hours ago, Nightside said:

For work? Are you inspecting construction?

Internship, yes.

[StrandedonEarth]

I suppose this thread is a good fit for this....

I have my desktop background image set to shuffle pics from a folder I throw all the desktop-worthy pics in. Most are Kerbal or space related of course, But I think this is the first time I saw this pic come up, when I closed all the windows preparing for bed. It immediately triggered my inner Tim Allen and had me grunting with 5+million pounds of delight!

Spoiler

If a moderator thinks there's a better thread for this, go ahead and move it

[Geonovast]

16 hours ago, StrandedonEarth said:

[snip]

I have that same picture set as the background on my center monitor.

With this on the left:

And this on the right:

 

 

[Shpaget]

HA! It took me only 15 minutes to find a bug in the piece of code I wrote that made the thing I made not work.

This is a thing I made some 4 years ago that scans barcodes, decides if the ticket is valid or not and lets the visitor enter the exhibition or not. The first time the device failed about two years ago was due to the battery for the Real Time Clock overcharging and becoming dead. Not entirely my fault since I used an off the shelf RTC module. My part of the fault was that I failed to make proper backups of the software and make a simple way to change date. I wanted to rectify this problem so just reprogramming RTC was not enough and since I was rewriting the entire code I might as well make some hardware changes, right? I rotary encoder for date and time change and added a display for setup and debug. This version work fine for about a year when we started noticing a problem. The bar codes were not read properly. It took me quite a while to figure out the problem since it was intermittent, but over the last few months it became pretty much completely nonfunctional. Except on my workbench in the basement, where it worked flawlessly.

A lot more hours than I am comfortable to admit I spent on the problem I narrowed the issue down to stray IR from the Sun. Shielding the enclosure made no difference so I ended up ordering a new barcode scanner. The problem was that the old scanner was old PS/2 keyboard port and the new one USB, which meant that I had to rewrite the interface part of the code. Luckily I found a USB host module that came with a bit of a sample code that I managed to borrow and implement.

Not without an ugly bug, though. On my workbench everything seemed to work fine, but when I installed it and tried scanning a ticket, the little display said that the ticket was all used up and the piezzo buzzer kept buzzing angrily.

Through my boundless wisdom and forethought regarding the installation of a display, and a decent amount of debug printouts I managed to figure out that I was trying to cram 100 000 bytes into an array that can hold no more than 1 000. At least it was a quick fix. The new scanner is now happily bodged to the microcontroller and seems to work fine. Now I just need the weather to clear up to double check if it works in the Sun (it's been cloudy and rainy for weeks with only sunny periods when I didn't need the sun).

Now I just need to figure out what additional bugs I introduced.

[Guest]

Protons, they're positive, generally repel stuff, or attract stuff. Kinda both useful and desirable in our day to day lives. I support them.

[kerbiloid]

Why be negative like an electron, when you can be positive like a positron?

[Guest]

I know, right? I mean, electrons be like this:

 

the entire time man, why would someone want this

Edited May 28, 2019 by Guest

[kerbiloid]

So, positive people atrract negative particles.

[Guest]

No, negative people attract positive charges.

[razark]

I have tomatoes.

The tomatoes from my father's garden are finally ripe, and since he's out of town, I have been picking the garden¹.  I brought more than seven pounds² of ripe tomatoes home today, and there's three times that still ripening on the counter for me to pick from tomorrow.  Fresh tomato sauces; bacon, lettuce, egg, and tomato sandwiches; tomato in salads; just plain tomatoes, eaten over the sink with a bit of salt and the juice dripping from your chin.

And I forgot to get some basil while I was there...

¹I am so very tired of green beans right now.  At least those are almost done.  And the cucumbers.  And the corn.

²The scale only goes up to seven.

[Bill Phil]

Got some dentistry work done. Hurt a lot while happening but it’s a positive thing since dental health is important.

[IncongruousGoat]

I moved into a new apartment on Saturday. This has mostly been an enormous hassle, and a chaotic and unpleasant process, but there is one notable bright spot:

My apartment has an induction stove. Today, I got to finally use it to make dinner, and it was amazing. Seriously. Induction stoves are awesome. They're as responsive as a gas stove, as user-friendly as an electric stove, trivial to clean (the stovetop is completely flat), and completely safe if you accidentally leave one on, since they don't produce any heat on their own. Plus, they just look so futuristic.

Modern culinary technology is so cool.

[Shpaget]

But you can't cook in glass dishes.

[qzgy]

Or abuse a nice gas flame for heating stuff up.... 

[YNM]

Good Lord.

 

[Shpaget]

And that's just the drums. It's not even finished yet!

I've been following the progress for quite some time, and the machine is amazing.

[Bill Phil]

I’m losing weight. I hope it’s fat. I feel stronger than before so I think I am losing fat.

[kerbiloid]

4 hours ago, Bill Phil said:

I’m losing weight. I hope it’s fat. I feel stronger than before so I think I am losing fat.

As weight = mass * gravity, try to push objects horizontally.
If this requires same force as previously, then it's not the fat, it's locally decreasing gravity.