ExtremeDullard

I know they're supposed to be good for the environment but... God I hate those caps.

Remote control your Flipper in a text terminal

I just discovered this repo: Mitsubishi AC remote.

I have a reversible Mitsubishi AC.

Cloned the report, ufbt-launched it, and hey presto! I now have a second AC remote to fight my wife over the temperature in the living room with 🙂

Thanks Anton!

And now I have a Flipper Zero weather station:

Two years ago, I bought a cheap Denver WS-520 weather station. The head unit's LCD display turned out to be bad that I quickly shelved the device and bought another one. But I forgot the temperature sensor outside on the wall.

Today I was goofing around with Flipper and I started the weather station app just to see what it did. And lo and behold, after a few seconds, it unexpectedly beeped and reported a temperature! Then I realized the temperature sensor was still outside, still alive and is in fact a rebranded ThermoPro TX-4 supported by the app.

I'm glad I didn't resell or junk the weather station. Now I can use it again. This is awesome!

I coded my first "serious" app for the Flipper Zero this week, and it's the first time in my 30-odd years as a programmer that coding something felt slightly weird for two totally silly reasons:

• Each time the Flipper crashes, the dolphin makes a sad face. I know it's just an animation but... somehow it bothers me each and every time 🙂

• Most of the API calls start with Furi-something. And each time I write one, I can't help but think of this. Also, there's nothing furious about cute dolphins - apart perhaps when I keep clubbing them with null pointer dereferences... And yes, I know its stands for Flipper Universal Registry Implementation. Yet my brain can't help conjuring up images of cute dolphins being clubbed in a post-apocalyptic desert.

Call me weird I guess...

I haven't been able to update my cellphone anonymously with Aurora since January. Every time I try, Aurora errors out with "Oops, you are rate limited".

This isn't the first time Google plays at making non-normies' lives difficult. So I tried the usual tricks, updated Aurora, tried the nightly build, waited, tried again... for months - to no avail: Google just won't play ball this time.

Last week, Signal stopped working and demanded to be updated. Fortunately, Signal offers the APK as a normal download without having to get it from the hateful Google Play store.

Today, my home banking identificator app did the same thing and stopped working. I needed to make a payment right now, and I had no way to update the app: "Oops, you are rate limited". And my bank sure doesn't offer the APK outside of anything but the goddamn Google Play store.

So I relented and created a Google account. Which of course entailed giving Google a phone number. I sure didn't give them mine, so I phoned a friend abroad who doesn't care to ask him to receive the verification SMS on his phone and read out the code to me. Which worked long enough to set up 2FA and do away with phone numbers altogether. And finally, after an hour of fucking around, annoying other people and compromising their phone number, I could update my banking app and make my payment at last.

All that because Google has decided they want to control my phone.

Fuck Google.

Seriously, how they are allowed to hold the Android world hostage like this without getting their monopolistic ass Sherman'ed AT&T-style, I'll never know. It's long overdue.

Oh my!

I thought I had been spared phantom pain, but it looks like my luck has run out.

I've been having lower back pain for the past 3 months. nothing terrible, but constant and annoying enough that I finally booked a doctor's appointment for next week.

And today things took a turn for the worse: I was doing the groceries when electricity started shooting down my right leg all of the sudden. Clearly sciatica has just kicked in. And my missing limbs came back to life with a vengeance too. First time in 5 1/5 years!

Now I'm lying in bed. The pain in my leg had subsided, but the phantom pain hasn't 😢

It's quite unbearable. If anybody has good advice, I'm all ears.

My mom had sciatica for 9 months before she finally got back surgery 30 years ago. I remember she went through 9 months of hell - and she had all her limbs. If I'm looking at the same ordeal with phantom pains tacked on, I don't know if I'll be able to go through it... This truly scares me.

I know they're supposed to be good for the environment. But... Holy smokes they drive me up the wall. They really do!

I had no trouble adapting when aluminum can pull-tabs got replaced by push-tabs, because it was pretty much the same movement, and I could see the immediate advantage of not getting cut by a pull-tab.

But the tethered cap is fighting decades of muscle memory in me: I'm used to taking the cap off with one hand and keeping it there while taking a swig with the other. Now I unscrew the cap with one hand, but I still have to hold the cap so it's out of the way. It feels like drinking in handcuffs each and every time...

So unlike the pull-tab, the tethered plastic bottle cap is one of those compulsory eco solutions that constantly make you feel ever-so-slightly more miserable all the time, and I hate that because ecology only works when it brings something of value both to people and to the environment.

My company offers 3 days of unjustified sick leave for things like colds or minor health issues that don't really require seeing a doctor.

And sure enough, that guy - always that guy - got sick on Monday, then took a day off on Thursday, and now he's sick again on Friday. Strangely, his company car reports being at a ski resort 200 miles away.

Because you know, when you're bedridden, at least you should have a nice view out the window...

Hopefully a new class of drugs to tackle phantom pain is on the horizon.

I'm playing with OpenSCAD, which is a text-based parametric 3D modeler. It comes with its own built-in editor, but you can also open the source file in your favorite editor and when the file is saved, OpenSCAD recompiles and re-renders the model.

I know it's nothing particularly novel, but it's kind of awesome to type :w and see the 3D object immediately show what you just typed. There's even a degree of rendering control from within the editor: for example to highlight a feature, like an subtracted volume, simply type # in front of the corresponding operation, :w and hey-presto, the feature appears in the model.

And sure enough, there is OpenSCAD syntax highlighing for vim. How cool is that!

If someone had told me 40 years ago that I'd be doing 3D modeling in VI one day, I would never have believed it 🙂