#PCB Level

[futureelectronic1527]

Würth Elektronik: REDCUBE Terminals (Innovative High Power Contacts)

https://www.futureelectronics.com/resources/featured-products/wurth-elektronik-redcube-terminals . REDCUBE terminals are the most reliable high-power contacts on the PCB level. Low contact resistance guarantees minimum self-heating. Four different designs cover all leading processing technologies and offer a wide range of applications. https://youtu.be/8EjH-SM1azE

[ohgodimyearning]

^ next time I'm on the computer, I'm officially adding him to my F/O list... Gay clock #2

[systemrestart]

"I should probably stop doing challenging runs at work" (immediately throws myself into another Hard mode)

I mean. it paid off...... lol. Hard 1cc of SoEW, with ReimuB!!! That makes this the 8th Touhou game I have cleared on Hard mode :^)

[mobifirmware]

Buy Borneo Schematics 1 PC Activation Code 1 Year

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license grants full access to these features for one year on a single computer, making it a valuable asset for any serious repair technician.

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What is Borneo Schematics?

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[foone]

the sort of thing that happens me all the time is stuff like:

so I want to post a picture of a PCB and go "hear me out... this is a sexy pcb" in a kinda half-joking/half-objectum kind of way, right?

but I can't, because I realized that this is a PCB designed by the hobbyist community, and I'm in so many of the same circles as the designer of this PCB that there's too great a chance that they'll see it.

and apparently I have a very specific comfort level with the idea of posting "ooh this is a sexy computer thing" on main, and it's a little bit under the level where I'm willing to say that to the person who made it.

[wirewitchviolet]

How a Computer Works - Part 1 (Components)

I am about to teach you on a real fundamental, connecting up electronic components level, how a computer actually works. Before I get into the meat of this though (you can just skip down below the fold if you don't care), here's the reasons I'm sitting doing so in this format:

Like a decade or two ago, companies Facebook pushed this whole "pivot to video" idea on the whole internet with some completely faked data, convincing everyone that everything had to be a video, and we need to start pushing back against that. Especially for stuff like complex explanations of things or instructions, it's much more efficient to just explain things clearly in text, maybe with some visual aids, so people can easily search, scan, and skip around between sections. It's also a hell of a lot easier to host things long term, and you can even print out a text based explainer and not need a computer to read it, keep it on a desk, highlight it, etc.

People are so clueless about how computers actually work that they start really thinking like it's all magical. Even programmers. Aside from how proper knowledge lets you get more out of them, this leads to people spouting off total nonsense about "teaching sand to think" or "everything is just 1s and 0s" or "this 'AI' a con artist who was trying to sell me NFTs a month ago probably really is an amazing creative thinking machine that can do everything he says!"

We used to have this cultural value going where it was expected that if you owned something and used it day to day, you'd have enough basic knowledge of how it worked that if it stopped working you could open it up, see what was wrong, and maybe fix it on your own, or maybe even put one together again from scratch, and that's obviously worth bringing back.

I'm personally working on a totally bonkers DIY project and I'd like to hype up like-minded people for when it gets farther along.

So all that said, have a standard reminder that I am completely reliant on Patreon donations to survive, keep updating this blog, and ideally start getting some PCBs and chips and a nice oscilloscope to get that mystery project off the ground.

Electricity probably doesn't work like how you were taught (and my explanation shouldn't be trusted too far either).

I remember, growing up, hearing all sorts of things about electricity having this sort of magical ability to always find the shortest possible path to where it needs to get, flowing like water, and a bunch of other things that are kind of useful for explaining how a Faraday cage or a lightning rod works, and not conflicting with how simple electronics will have a battery and then a single line of wire going through like a switch and a light bulb or whatever back to the other end of the battery.

If you had this idea drilled into your head hard enough, you might end up thinking that if we have a wire hooked to the negative end of a battery stretching off to the east, and another wire stretching off to the east from the positive end, and we bridge between the two in several places with an LED or something soldered to both ends, only the westernmost one is going to light up, because hey, the shortest path is the one that turns off as quickly as possible to connect to the other side, right? Well turns out no, all three are going to light up, because that "shortest path" thing is a total misunderstanding.

Here's how it actually works, roughly. If you took basic high school chemistry, you learned about how the periodic table is set up, right? A given atom, normally, has whatever number of protons in the core, and the same number of electrons, whipping all over around it, being attracted to those protons but repelled by each other, and there's particular counts of electrons which are super chill with that arrangement so we put those elements in the same column as each other, and then as you count up from those, you get the elements between those either have some electrons that don't fit all tight packed in the tight orbit and just kinda hang out all wide and lonely and "want to" buddy up with another atom that has more room, up to the half full column that can kinda go either way, then as we approach the next happy number they "want to" have a little more company to get right to that cozy tight packed number, and when you have "extra" electrons and "missing" electrons other atoms kinda cozy up and share so they hit those good noble gas counts.

I'm sure real experts want to scream at me for both that and this, but this is basically how electricity works. You have a big pile of something at the "positive" end that's "missing electrons" (for the above reason or maybe actually ionized so they really aren't there), and a "negative" end that's got spares. Then you make wires out of stuff from those middle of the road elements that have awkward electron counts and don't mind buddying up (and also high melting points and some other handy qualities) and you hook those in there. And the electron clouds on all the atoms in the wire get kinda pulled towards the positive side because there's more room over there, but if they full on leave their nucleus needs more electron pals, so yeah neighbors get pulled over, and the whole wire connected to the positive bit ends up with a positive charge to it, and the whole wire on the negative bit is negatively charged, and so yeah, anywhere you bridge the gap between the two, the electrons are pretty stoked about balancing out these two big awkward compromises and they'll start conga lining over to balance things out, and while they're at it they'll light up lights or shake speakers or spin motors or activate electromagnets or whatever other rad things you've worked out how to make happen with a live electric current.

Insulators, Resistors, Waves, and Capacitors

Oh and we typically surround these wires made of things that are super happy about sharing electrons around with materials that are very much "I'm good, thanks," but this isn't an all or nothing system and there's stuff you can connect between the positive and negative ends of things that still pass the current along, but only so much so fast. We use those to make resistors, and those are handy because sometimes you don't want to put all the juice you have through something because it would damage it, and having a resistor anywhere along a path you're putting current through puts a cap on that flow, and also sometimes you might want a wire connected to positive or negative with a really strong resistor so it'll have SOME sort of default charge, but if we get a free(r) flowing connection attached to that wire somewhere else that opens sometimes, screw that little trickle going one way, we're leaning everyone the other way for now.

The other thing with electricity is is that the flow here isn't a basic yes/no thing. How enthusiastically those electrons are getting pulled depends on the difference in charge at the positive and negative ends, and also if you're running super long wires then even if they conduct real good, having all that space to spread along is going to kinda slow things to a trickle, AND the whole thing is kinda going to have some inherent bounciness to it both because we're dealing with electrons whipping and spinning all over and because, since it's a property that's actually useful for a lot of things we do with electricity, the power coming out of the wall has this intentional wobbly nature because we've actually got this ridiculous spinny thing going on that's constantly flip flopping which prong of the socket is positive and which is negative and point is we get these sine waves of strength by default, and they kinda flop over if we're going really far.

Of course there's also a lot of times when you really want to not have your current flow flickering on and off all the time, but hey fortunately one of the first neat little electronic components we ever worked out are capacitors... and look, I'm going to be straight with you. I don't really get capacitors, but the basic idea is you've got two wires that go to big wide plates, and between those you have something that doesn't conduct the electricity normally, but they're so close the electromagnetic fields are like vibing, and then if you disconnect them from the flow they were almost conducting and/or they get charged to their limit, they just can't deal with being so charged up and they'll bridge their own gap and let it out. So basically you give them electricity to hold onto for a bit then pass along, and various sizes of them are super handy if you want to have a delay between throwing a switch and having things start doing their thing, or keeping stuff going after you break a connection, or you make a little branching path where one branch connects all regular and the other goes through a capacitor, and the electricity which is coming in in little pulses effectively comes out as a relatively steady stream because every time it'd cut out the capacity lets its charge go.

We don't just have switches, we have potentiometers.

OK, so... all of the above is just sort of about having a current and maybe worrying about how strong it is, but other than explaining how you can just kinda have main power rails running all over, and just hook stuff across them all willy-nilly rather than being forced to put everything in one big line, but still, all you can do with that is turn the whole thing on and off by breaking the circuit. Incidentally, switches, buttons, keys, and anything else you use to control the behavior of any electronic device really are just physically touching loose wires together or pulling them apart... well wait no, not all, this is a good bit to know.

None of this is actually pass/fail, really, there's wave amplitudes and how big a difference we have between the all. So when you have like, a volume knob, that's a potentiometer, which is a simple little thing where you've got your wire, it's going through a resistor, and then we have another wire we're scraping back and forth along the resistor, using a knob, usually, and the idea is the current only has to go through X percent of the resistor to get to the wire you're moving, which proportionately reduces the resistance. So you have like a 20 volt current, you've got a resistor that'll drop that down to 5 or so, but then you move this other wire down along and you've got this whole dynamic range and you can fine tune it to 15 or 10 or whatever coming down that wire. And what's nice about this again, what's actually coming down the wire is this wobbily wave of current, it's not really just "on" or "off, and as you add resistance, the wobble stays the same, it's just the peaks and valleys get closer to being just flat. Which is great if you're making, say, a knob to control volume, or brightness, or anything you want variable intensity in really.

Hey hey, it's a relay!

Again, a lot of the earliest stuff people did with electronics was really dependent on that analog wobbly waveform angle. Particularly for reproducing sound, and particularly the signals of a telegraph. Those had to travel down wires for absurd distances, and as previously stated, when you do that the signal is going to eventually decay to nothing. But then someone came up with this really basic idea where every so often along those super long wires, you set something up that takes the old signal and uses it to start a new one. They called them relays, because you know, it's like a relay race.

If you know how an electromagnet works (something about the field generated when you coil a bunch of copper wire around an iron core and run an electric current through it), a relay is super simple. You've got an electromagnet in the first circuit you're running, presumably right by where it's going to hit the big charged endpoint, and that magnetically pulls a tab of metal that's acting as a switch on a new circuit. As long as you've got enough juice left to activate the magnet, you slam that switch and voom you've got all the voltage you can generate on the new line.

Relays don't get used too much in other stuff, being unpopular at the time for not being all analog and wobbily (slamming that switch back and forth IS going to be a very binary on or off sorta thing), and they make this loud clacking noise that's actually just super cool to hear in devices that do use them (pinball machines are one of the main surviving use cases I believe) but could be annoying in some cases. What's also neat is that they're a logical AND gate. That is, if you have current flowing into the magnet, AND you have current flowing into the new wire up to the switch, you have it flowing out through the far side of the switch, but if either of those isn't true, nothing happens. Logic gates, to get ahead of myself a bit, are kinda the whole thing with computers, but we still need the rest of them. So for these purposes, relays re only neat if it's the most power and space efficient AND gate you have access to.

Oh and come to think of it, there's no reason we need to have that magnet closing the circuit when it's doing its thing. We could have it closed by default and yank it open by the magnet. Hey, now we're inverting whatever we're getting on the first wire! Neat!

Relay computers clack too loud! Gimme vacuum tubes!

So... let's take a look at the other main thing people used electricity for before coming up with the whole computer thing, our old friend the light bulb! Now I already touched a bit on the whole wacky alternating current thing, and I think this is actually one of the cases that eventually lead to it being adopted so widely, but the earliest light bulbs tended to just use normal direct current, where again, you've got the positive end and the negative end, and we just take a little filament of whatever we have handy that glows when you run enough of a current through it, and we put that in a big glass bulb and pump out all the air we can, because if we don't, the oxygen in there is probably going to change that from glowing a bit to straight up catching on fire and burning immediately.

But, we have a new weird little problem, because of the physics behind that glowing. Making something hot, on a molecular level, is just kinda adding energy to the system so everything jitters around more violently, and if you get something hot enough that it glows, you're getting it all twitchy enough for tinier particles to just fly the hell off it. Specifically photons, that's the light bit, but also hey, remember, electrons are just kinda free moving and whipping all over looking for their naked proton pals... and hey, inside this big glass bulb, we've got that other end of the wire with the more positive charge to it. Why bother wandering up this whole coily filament when we're in a vacuum and there's nothing to get in the way if we just leap straight over that gap? So... they do that, and they're coming in fast and on elliptical approaches and all, so a bunch of electrons overshoot and smack into the glass on the far side, and now one side of every light bulb is getting all gross and burnt from that and turning all brown and we can't have that.

So again, part of the fix is we switched to alternating current so it's at least splitting those wild jumps up to either side, but before that, someone tried to solve this by just... kinda putting a backboard in there. Stick a big metal plate on the end of another wire in the bulb connected to a positive charge, and now OK, all those maverick electrons smack into here and aren't messing up the glass, but also hey, this is a neat little thing. Those electrons are making that hop because they're all hot and bothered. If we're not heating up the plate they're jumping to, and there's no real reason we'd want to, then if we had a negative signal over on that side... nothing would happen. Electrons aren't getting all antsy and jumping back.

So now we have a diode! The name comes because we have two (di-) electrodes (-ode) we care about in the bulb (we're just kind of ignoring the negative one), and it's a one way street for our circuit. That's useful for a lot of stuff, like not having electricity flow backwards through complex systems and mess things up, converting AC to DC (when it flips, current won't flow through the diode so we lop off the bottom of the wave, and hey, we can do that thing with capacitors to release their current during those cutoffs, and if we're clever we can get a pretty steady high).

More electrodes! More electrodes!

So a bit after someone worked out this whole vacuum tube diode thing, someone went hey, what if it was a triode? So, let's stick another electrode in there, and this one just kinda curves around in the middle, just kinda making a grate or a mesh grid, between our hot always flowing filament and that catch plate we're keeping positively charged when it's doing stuff. Well this works in a neat way. If there's a negative charge on it, it's going to be pushing back on those electrons jumping over, and if there's a positive charge on it, it's going to help pull those electrons over (it's all thin, so they're going to shoot right past it, especially if there's way more of a positive charge over on the plate... and here's the super cool part- This is an analog thing. If we have a relatively big negative charge, it's going to repel everything, if it's a relatively big positive, it's going to pull a ton across, if it's right in the middle, it's like it wasn't even in there, and you can have tiny charges for all the gradients in between.

We don't need a huge charge for any of this though, because we're just helping or hindering the big jump from the high voltage stuff, and huh, weren't we doing this whole weak current controlling a strong current thing before with the relay? We were! And this is doing the same thing! Except now we're doing it all analog style, not slapping switch with a magnet, and we can make those wavy currents peak higher or lower and cool, now we can have phone lines boost over long distances too, and make volume knobs, and all that good stuff.

The relay version of this had that cool trick though where you could flip the output. Can we still flip the output? We sure can, we just need some other toys in the mix. See we keep talking about positive charges and negative charges at the ends of our circuits, but these are relative things. I mentioned way back when how you can use resistors to throttle how much of a current we've got, so you can run two wires to that grid in the triode. One connects to a negative charge and the other positive, with resistors on both those lines, and a switch that can break the connection on the positive end. If the positive is disconnected, we've got a negative charge on the grid, since it's all we've got, but if we connect it, and the resistor to the negative end really limits flow, we're positive in the section the grid's in. And over on the side with the collecting plate, we branch off with another resistor setup so the negative charge on that side is normally the only viable connection for a positive, but when we flip the grid to positive, we're jumping across the gap in the vacuum tube, and that's a big open flow so we'll just take those electrons instead of the ones that have to squeeze through a tight resistor to get there.

That explanation is probably a bit hard to follow because I'm over here trying to explain it based on how the electrons are actually getting pulled around. In the world of electronics everyone decided to just pretend the flow is going the other way because it makes stuff easier to follow. So pretend we have magical positrons that go the other way and if they have nothing better to do they go down the path where we have all the fun stuff further down the circuit lighting lights and all that even though it's a tight squeeze through a resistor, because there's a yucky double negative in the triode and that's worse, but we have the switch rigged up to make that a nice positive go signal to the resistance free promised land with a bonus booster to cut across, so we're just gonna go that way when the grid signal's connected.

Oh and you can make other sorts of logic circuits or double up on them in a single tube if you add more grids and such, which we did for a while, but not really relevant these days.

Cool history lesson but I know there's no relays or vacuum tubes in my computer.

Right, so the above things are how we used to make computers, but they were super bulky, and you'd have to deal with how relays are super loud and kinda slow, and vacuum tubes need a big power draw and get hot. What we use instead of either of those these days are transistors. See after spending a good number of years working out all this circuit flow stuff with vacuum tubes we eventually focused on how the real important thing in all of this is how with the right materials you can make a little juncture where current flows between a positive and negative charge if a third wire going in there is also positively charged, but if it's negatively charged we're pulling over. And turns out there is a WAY more efficient way of doing that if you take a chunk of good ol' middle of the electron road silicon, and just kinda lightly paint the side of it with just the tiniest amount of positive leaning and negative leaning elements on the sides.

Really transistors don't require understanding anything new past the large number of topics already covered here, they're just more compact about it. Positive leaning bit, negative leaning bit, wildcard in the middle, like a vacuum tube. Based on the concepts of pulling electrons around from chemistry, like a circuit in general. The control wire in the middle kinda works in just a pass-fail sort of way, like a relay. They're just really nice compared to the older alternatives because they don't make noise or have moving parts to wear down, you don't have to run enough current through them for metal to start glowing and the whole room to heat up, and you can make them small. Absurdly small. Like... need an electron microscope to see them small.

And of course you can also make an inverter super tiny like that, and a diode (while you're at it you can use special materials or phosphors to make them light emitting, go LEDs!) and resistors can get pretty damn small if you just use less of a more resistant material, capacitors I think have a limit to how tiny you can get, practically, but yeah, you now know enough of the basic fundamentals of how computers work to throw some logic gates together. We've covered how a relay, triode, or transistor function as an AND gate. An OR gate is super easy, you just stick diodes on two wires so you don't have messy backflow then connect them together and lead off there. If you can get your head around wiring up an inverter (AKA NOT), hey, stick one after an AND to get a NAND, or an OR to get a NOR. You can work out XOR and XNOR from there right? Just build 4 NANDs, pass input A into gates 1 and 2, B into 2 and 3, 2's output into 1 and 3, 1 and 3's output into 4 for a XOR, use NORs instead for a XNOR. That's all of them right? So now just build a ton of those and arrange them into a computer. It's all logic and math from there.

Oh right. It's... an absurd amount of logic and math, and I can only fit so many words in a blog post. So we'll have to go all...

CONTINUED IN PART 2!

Meanwhile, again, if you can spare some cash I'd really appreciate it.

[techav]

Looking Back

Today, 26 March 2025, is the tenth anniversary of the first time I put power to a Z80 microprocessor in a breadboard and watched it blink some LEDs.

Within a few weeks that Z80 would be completely surrounded by other chips and hundreds of wires to form my first functioning homebrew computer.

Another week and I was already removing a 68000 from a (presumed) dead motherboard, with grand ideas of moving up to the 16-bit era (but absolutely no understanding of what that would entail)

It would be another two years before the first time I put that 68000 in a breadboard and successfully used it to blink an LED.

By the time another year had rolled around that 68000 was living on a soldered breadboard and for the first time on one of my projects, it was running real software — EhBASIC.

Always looking to more challenging projects, while I was building with a 68000, I was already reading through the manual for the 68030 trying to understand how to build with a proper 32-bit microprocessor. Just one more year and I had that 68030 on a wire wrap board, blinking an LED.

The next year I was doing the most ridiculous thing I could think of — free-running a Pentium CPU on a wire wrap breadboard to blink an LED. Because I could.

By the end of the next year that 68030 had moved from its wire wrap board onto a proper printed circuit board — my first ever 4-layer PCB.

The next year saw the towering expansion of the 68030 build, adding new peripherals and functionality.

Another year and I had an all-new 68030 build on a Micro-ATX form-factor motherboard developed in just a couple months ahead of VCF Southwest 2023.

The next year I focused on developing software for my existing 68030 board stack, rather than building something new from scratch. I succeeded in developing a minimal multi-user kernel to run four instances of BASIC simultaneously.

All along in between working on these projects I have done component-level repairs on various computers, developed expansion cards for the Mac SE, built PCs both new and old, burned out hard, developed some smaller homebrew computers, had a lot of false starts, failed projects, and abandoned projects, and completed some massive projects in my day job.

Looking back at everything I've worked on over these past 10 years I am absolutely amazed at how far I have come and what I have been able to accomplish. Much of it I still don't understand how I managed to actually pull it off, and I'm not entirely sure I could duplicate my successes.

Here's to the next ten years

[kathunim]

And there it is, an XFL10K LED installed on a 2x40mm copper pcb, slightly modified to fit this enormous chip's footprint.

Should be able to handle the neccessary power to drive this thing at the levels it wants to run, target is around 25A which should bring a 400% output, still putting it comfortably below the maximum recommended 32A. At a nominal 4300 lumen at 4.2A that means the output should be a permanent eye damagingly powerful 17200 lumen!

Now to figure out how to supply that kind of juice...

[alacants]

hi, I think I remember Carlos talking about PCB being his friend on tour. They also played doubles a decent amount

oh, yeah, i think he has plenty of friends! he's a super friendly and likable guy! but that's also sort of the point—pablo is 12 years older than carlos. when all your peers are a generation ahead of you, that makes a difference.

of course you don't have to be the same skill level to be friends. obviously. (though to bff's point about marketing strategy, we wouldn't necessarily hear about it otherwise.) but you get close to people by spending time with them. training every day, or boarding for years far from home, or traveling together on the junior circuit, or running into each other all the time in local tournaments, or slugging it out in futures/challengers, or breaking into the tour.

carlos went from zero to sixty so fast he skipped all of that. he spent, what, four years at equelite and then won the us open. pablo would have been the only other player from his training base that he saw around tour on the regular. (this is why we all got so excited about luca nardi for a hot second!) the tennis players he was around the most—doing promos or appearing at events or making deep runs or asking to hit together—were all suddenly top players. none of whom were his age, and many of whom were married with kids.

so like, no fucking wonder he was losing his mind over jannik lol. fwiw carlos is obviously close to his friends from home, he's got his brother, he's got his team, he's no longer the youngest face on the block and after a couple years on tour experience starts to count for as much as age anyway. i don't think he's suffering or anything. but he did miss out on something. that's what happens when you're a prodigy.

[adafruit]

Festival of Lights… A 'USB Stick' Sparkle Motion WLED driver ✨💡🔌🌟

To wrap up this year, we're doing 8 days (maybe!) of light-filled designs. We started with the Sparkle Motion Mini

which can drive thousands of shimmering RGB LEDs. Next, we were going through some of our NeoPixel samples today and found some "LED Christmas light kit" with star LEDs, its basically these stars

with a little USB plug that has IR, a crummy mic, a tactile switch to cycle modes manually, and a tiny microcontroller that turns the LED selections to different patterns - kinda like this:

The idea is cute - but the implementation could be improved with a lil sparkle motion

! we made a PCB that would fit into the same plastic enclosure but with an ESP32 instead. it's got an IR receiver, ICS-43434 I2S digital microphone

https://www.digikey.com/short/mmv3tthz

gpio 0 button in the 'right' place, 5V 2A fuse, USB-serial converter for uploading/debugging, and two level-shifted outputs. We can probably get the case in quantity or have this be a 'DIY replacement' that folks can use to make their existing setups WLED/xLights friendly.

[andmaybegayer]

Last Monday of the Week 2025-05-26

You must believe that it will go on forever

Listening: Listened to the soundtrack from The People's Joker, which you can roughly find here

There are a lot of bangers in this one but I do think I have to put down Back of the Truck

You should definitely watch The People's Joker it is a truly incredible piece of art. It is literally the only piece of Batman media I have ever consumed start to finish.

Reading: A bunch of scattered articles on ocean plastic in an attempt to better understand some of the claims made in a book I read a while ago, still piecing those together.

Also a lot of electronics part specs because I'm trying to do another PCB project and I am in the hell that is finding parts that are cheap, in stock, and well documented. This is a fight you can win but it involves giving up the part of yourself that doesn't understand how Molex names their parts.

Watching: Watched Les Barbouzes/The Great Spy Chase, a French spy comedy film from the 60's where the conceit is "what if five different countries sent their spies to recover some valuable documents at the same time and they all had to play nice while trying to get one over on each other.

It's very funny! Genuinely some incredible comedy in this movie, but also, Le Racisme! Le Racisme is relatively limited and you should still probably watch this.

In addition to this, at bad movie night Rollergator, a movie by a director who has featured here before when he did Legend of the Rollerblade Seven which is the worst movie we've ever run at Bad Movie Night. Rollergator is about a girl who finds a tiny purple gator puppet who raps and also does one Le Racisme (American) when he does impressions as a bit.

The director of these movies (Donald G. Jackson) Made a like million dollars on one movie and then pioneered the concept he called "Zen Filmmaking" which is when you don't write a script and just wander around easily accessible sets freestyling it. The movies he produces are both unwatchably bad and have negative production value, with untraceable plots, inaudible audio, and pointless dialogue. I cannot really recommend that you watch this one.

Playing: A few more levels of Skin Deep, in part because my partner wanted to see it. Playing or talking video games around them (and a few of my other friends) is funny because it makes me feel like the Video Game Ulysses Ogre. I'm all "Aaaah ogre so stupid ogre can only just make use of smoke grenades, ogre not even begin to correctly employ jiggle peeking" meanwhile they're like "yeah I get frustrated at Arkham Asylum on easy."

Also more Echo Point Nova which is rapidly becoming one of my favourite shooters. I feel like I'm not doing myself any favours refusing to use a controller here, aim assist would probably be great, but I am getting shockingly good at playing Clay Pigeon on the hoverboard guys with my shotgun.

Making: 3D printed speaker stands for my PC speakers, which need some work or maybe just some cleverer design to prevent them from leaning way forwards. Still working on it. Continuing to fiddle with various designs for my new desk setup.

Tools and Equipment: I finally bought some noise cancelling wireless earphones and they are kind of killer for the metro. I have previously worn earplugs on the metro but they are way more inconvenient. I have known how good ANC is for a long time but it really cannot be overstated how nice it is to be able to a) listen to music on the metro without blowing your eardrums out and b) just suppress ambient noise for a bit. Sometimes I've been throwing them in if I want to keep listening to a podcast while I boil the kettle or turn on the microwave.

These are the new CMF Buds 2 which were like USD 50-ish? I'm sure if you get a new Sony it's better and these definitely struggle with more variable, less monotonous noises, but they're great for the price.

[autoledledming]

LED CM11118 Flashing Lights

LED CM11118 Flashing Lights

Description:

1.Power Supply: Designed for 12/24VDC, ensuring compatibility with a wide range of vehicles.

2.LED Specifications: Features 6 high-power SMD3030 LED chips (1W per chip), capable of emitting Red, Yellow, White, Green, Blue, or other colors based on customer requirements.

3.Appearance Dimension: Compact design with dimensions of L111.5mm × W41mm.

4.Wiring Specifications: Comes with a 190mm 22AWG wiring system (Red/Black/Yellow). The yellow wire functions as a synchronization line for easy coordination.

5.Waterproof Level: IP67-rated shell ensures strong protection against water and dust, suitable for various environments.

6. PC plastic electroplated plastic base: Made of aluminum PCB, which enhances heat dissipation and durability while maintaining a smooth electroplated surface.

7.Fitment

This product is compatible with a wide range of vehicles, including:

Passenger cars

Pickup trucks

SUVs and vans

UTVs and ATVs

Trailers and construction vehicles

Emergency response vehicles (police, fire, and ambulance)

＊Synchronized Strobe Light -HP LED 6

[metsn]

HARM ENGINE - square wave harmonics or digital sonic filth in +/- 5 octaves with 3rds and 5ths

The HARM ENGINE is based on the CIRCUITBENDERS 'Harmonic Engine' PCBs, it's "a clone of the E&MM Harmonic Generator. This was a project by Paul Williams, published in Electronics & Music Maker magazine way back in 1981. The circuit uses a 4046 Phased Locked Loop (PLL) to generate a squarewave output at harmonic intervals to the frequency of the input signal. The squarewave can be set to +/- three [5 + a chaos noise mode in the METSÄÄN version] octaves, and can also produce 3rd or 5th harmonies. That's the theory anyway. In practice this only works reliably if you use very basic waveforms at the input. If you use anything else, then everything very quickly descends into a beautiful kind of chaos, with all kinds of bizarre gurgling digital squeaks and squeals vomiting forth. Its especially effective with percussion sounds, converting each hit into some kind of warped electronic splatter." The controls from top left to right are: SENSITIVITY - controlling the level at which the harmonics will be played. Turning the pot clockwise increases the gain of the signal (it also boost with a slight distortion, the DRY signal). In higher settings, the squarewave harmonics can form a modulated drone voice. Activity of the HARM ENGINE is indicated by a green LED, that turns on when harmonics are produced. 3RD/5TH - the 3 position toggle switch activates the corresponding detuning. The middle position is neutral. MIX - is a blending function to dial in the balance between DRY and HARM signal. If something is plugged into the DRY and HARM outputs on the rear of the machine, MIX stops working, because the signal is split before. OCTAVE - with a 12 position rotary switch, +/- 5 octaves are selected, 12o'clock is neutral and 6o'clock is the chaos/noise mode. TRUE BYPASS - The footswitch is configured for true bypass and has a pink indicator LED inside the machine, the glow can be seen through the vent grills in the enclosure. Build into a scavenged high voltage converter housing made from plastique painted in the 'burned out industry' camo pattern in matte black and chrome. Hand made by grm for METSÄÄN.

Sold.

...

[batsplat]

I think this should be a fun one for you: rank 00’s-early 2010’s spanish atp tennis players from most beloved/underrated/least beloathed to your most behated.

I love when you’re mean about atp 🥰

incredible hater ask. love to see that me just endlessly lobbing potshots at male tennis players has finally found an audience. the inclusion criteria for this list is extremely vibes-based - they need to have had some of their career-best results in the 00's or early 2010s and I can't primarily associated them with 90's or 2020's. so no moya or alcaraz... rba marginal inclusion but not pcb. (ramos vinolas would've come top but he just... didn't really get going until late 2010s.) cut-off is top twenty peak ranking. so let's go

MOST BELOVED/UNDERRATED/LEAST BELOATHED

bautista agut: horse girl!! horse girl!!! a bit of a journey of how I learned to stop worrying and love the pusher. I've occasionally had a slightly troubled history with the guy, not least because sometimes it does feel like he crawls out of the woodwork literally just to piss me off? like, I'm sorry, check out this string of results from last year (I've conveniently highlighted the irritating result)

first time since JANUARY he'd strung together back-to-back match wins. feels a little personal!!

beyond spawning out of nowhere to hand medvedev a yearly defeat, he has also been done a fair bit of torturing of murray. that 2022 match at doha with the foul scoreline... that being said, if you're a fan of a high-ranked player it is extremely poor form to be too annoyed by this kind of thing. medvedev should maybe consider stop losing to inferior pushers and even at the time I did find it pretty funny, rolled my eyes but fundamentally idc that much about how he does in halle. and I am obviously a big supporter of pushing... rba is quite an un-spanish players in some ways - doesn't play with a lot of spin, not bad at clay but it's not where he shines. idk I'm a big fan of pushers, rba has been a stalwart representative of the pushing lifestyle on the atp tour, he's kind of in that gilles simon camp where I was always happy enough to put on a match with them in it. and y'know, he seems like a nice enough guy. a fixture of the atp tour who I'm just kinda fond of

ferrer: always felt kinda sorry for him. destined to be #2 spaniard forevermore. thing is, with his game, you do have to say he didn't massively underachieve - like in a way a slam final is a pretty impressive showing. he's not one of the players TO ME where it feels super painful they never won a slam, even though arguably he's had a better career than some of the guys I'd put in that camp. funny how that works out!! I actually quite like ferrer's game, it's very bread and butter, spanish clay court style... and y'know, I grew up on clay, it's probably still my favourite surface all things considered, and we did always joke about the grinding from ten metres behind the baseline thing. I respect it. gets annoying when someone is nadal-levels good, but ferrer is very much not that so I quite enjoyed watching him play. idk, I did always vaguely like those second tier players during the big four era - childhood nostalgia of watching them in a bunch of slam matches without my negative feelings towards the big three. he's not my favourite of those, but he's all right. just quite inoffensive really

costa: oh man, I just don't really have any particularly strong feelings towards this guy. I think it's pretty funny how he won a slam and does just reflect where the clay game was at for a few years before nadal, like none of the post kuerten pre nadal rg winners were particularly serious characters. still, beating ferrero in that 2002 final is something I will gladly applaud, especially absolutely walloping him in the first two sets. this is very firmly before my time and perhaps a year or so before I even held my first tennis racquet as a kid, and while I obviously have quite a few past players I have strong feelings about... costa is not one of them. he is not actively offensive to me, let's put it that way (which I retroactively realised I'd put for two players in a row, but I'll leave it because it's funny that this is how I classify spanish players)

verdasco: now, look. verdasco doesn't hate nadal, but I am more than happy to do so on his behalf. I wasn't a sentient enough person yet in 2009 to have particularly sophisticated takes on the tragic inevitability of sports narratives, but if I HAD been I think I would've gone insane at some point during That Australian Open Match. basically redlined for hours and it still wasn't enough, never reached another slam semi, just kinda sucks man. (not that it matters but I'm glad he did at least manage to beat nadal in five at ao 2016 in the first round, just for the vibes.) I do also have a fair bit of sympathy for him over the two month doping ban he got in 2022 for failing to renew the therapeutic exemption thingy he had for his adhd medication - that was just so obviously a case of someone not really doping and tbh a lot of people (including some players!!) were pretty cruel about that shit

all that being said, can't say I've ever particularly been a fan. idk he was just one of those vaguely frustrating players to me who theoretically had a lot to their game but never was quite... on it enough. I do like some players who build their games around big booming forehands, but it's not really what I've ever gravitated towards. I think we have now reached the part of the list where most of these guys get a bit of a nadal tax. as in, I've seen them pal around with nadal, it has been forced in front of my eyeballs, and I simply do not support that kind of behaviour. (true of ferrer too but he has just about enough accumulated good will to be ranked higher up.) it's nothing personal, it's just that they're associated with nadal in my mind. I don't like it

robredo: is it bad if I say I got him confused with verdasco as a kid. too many spaniards. well, first off, go watch the valencia 2014 final against murray (I got a kia ad for nadal when I tried to open this video which ramped up my internal haterism for what is to come). what people sometimes forget about this horrifically painful final is that it was the second time in like?? a few weeks?? where he was playing murray in a final... I think he blew five matchpoints in both which. ouch. anyway the point is that valencia match is great - and unlike when the big three inflict horrendously painful defeats on their opponents, this was good and moral and fun. robredo was probably the most... invisible of this lot, if that's not too mean. his biggest contribution to tennis history is defeating federer once and only once at the 2013 us open, ensuring that federer and nadal wouldn't play - which ensured they never played at the us open which means it is an incomplete and quite frankly fraudulent rivalry. they missed out by one match on six occasions. the list of players who stopped them reads murray, djokovic, del potro and.... robredo. a hero tbh

other robredo thoughts... I mean, he was a bit top twenty filler if we're being honest. the thing where he won three consecutive slam matches from two sets to love down was pretty neat. he's basically ferrer but worse. I rank him at basically the same level as verdasco but I remember more verdasco matches than robredo so. there we are

ferrero: okay. look. I'm aware some of this might be coloured by my extreme irritation at his presence in alcaraz's coaching box these last few years. man will simply not shut up. I can't help it - sometimes this stuff colours my opinions on someone

(not a player but the swiftest downfall in this regard has been darren cahill, who had a base fondness for as 'notable agassi coach' that he's steadily pissed away in this sinner partnership. zero respect for how he dumped anisimova so soon after she hired him because he just couldn't handle the strains of travel, throwing himself a pity party... before almost immediately linking up with sinner. a tangent irrelevant to this post but I just needed to get that in there!!)

I get that coaching's legal now!! and I am NOT a conspiracy theorist about the timing of that change happening right during the golden boy's rise to the top, but!! it's still obviously been pretty convenient, like surely the umpires could not have ignored that for all that much longer lol. and I hate the rule change, idc how little practical use it is - it's antithetical to the spirit of tennis. I know coaching happened before then too but it makes a difference if you have to at least be sly about it (not that this guy ever really was). also beyond my principled opposition, he's just annoying. it's annoying. I'm sick of his face by now. get him off my screen

but to rewind twenty years, it's still aggravating that his one and only slam came at the cost of what would have been one of the all-time great slam fairy tale runs. it should have been verkerk!! ik that it wasn't even particularly close, I don't care. verkerk also just had a more compelling run to the final - sure jcf beat defending champion costa but he wasn't in particular good form, and verkerk took out both moya and coria. some random dutch bloke took out former champion moya in five sets... should have gotten the title. I'm sure you'll be delighted to know the match is indeed on youtube. isn't this cool:

don't you want to root for this guy!!

anyway yeah idk you're a top player for years you win one slam and THAT is how you won it? by stomping on a fairy tale? the counter-argument is that jcf SHOULD have won in 2002 but, well. just an awful performance wasn't it. like I know I said I like grinders and chokers but the first two sets of the first slam final you compete in being 1-6 0-6... hm. idk man. just don't think he was a good enough player to have earned a slam or indeed to have been number one, and in that case I would prefer the fairy tale slam. I will say he was an underrated hard court player, but yeah just didn't like his playstyle. a lot of these spaniards are way too big on their forehands. and I cannot forgive his role in blighting the game with another spanish prodigy. we're just never going to be free

lopez: okay, look, admittedly the fact that he seemed so close to nadal didn't make me particularly keen on him, but it's more than that!! another one where his activities post-retirement have hardly done much to endear him to me. I do unironically loathe this guy for his work running the madrid open, I think he's an incompetent sexist cunt who needs to be kept far away from women's tennis as possible. these last couple of years have made me more and more furious about the current situation with women's tennis - the game is in an excellent place but it might as well be being sabotaged by the people who are supposed to promote it. it's disgraceful he is still even in the job after the women's doubles finalists were prevented from speaking during the trophy ceremony, and it's as good a demonstration as you're going to get of the wta's luck of power. just makes me sad man

also, I never liked him as a player. idk man hating's not rational but I'm trying to come up with something I feel like I can defend a bit more than 'I was sick of people talking about how attractive this guy was to women'. but well, I was! oh wow, he's a heartthrob?? you think he's good-looking?? you want to make a joke about how he makes the ladies swoon?? original! never heard it before! look, I support straight women in their lifestyle choices even if they differ from my own, but more than anything else I just find this shit cringe. 'deliciano' is cringe. calling a bloke vain can be a pretty charged insult, but in this case I stand by it - shallow man with shallow tennis. just this gross macho energy that I personally have always found off-putting. he's also a commentators' pet where they want him to unlock his inner potential and become the player he could be with all that talent inside of him... literally shut up

nadal: if nadal has a million haters, I am one of them. if nadal has five haters, I am one of them. if nadal has one hater, that is me. if nadal has no haters, then I am no longer alive. if the word supports nadal then I am against the world

I ended up writing paragraphs and paragraphs worth of why I hate him for One Match Specifically but then I realised that wasn't really part of the remit for a jokey hater post and was also getting a wee bit TOO earnest and emotional. it has been cut out but lmk if you want to read an extended scream into the abyss I suppose lol

anyway! my number one enemy. djokovic might be the worst of the big three on moral grounds, federer's whole aesthetic and vibe is horrendous, but as an actual tennis player? oh, nadal, they could never make me like you. instinctively the least appealing playstyle... I love watching djokovic move around the court, even I can appreciate clean federer hitting. nadal is just... well, look, I'm not a forehand girl. and when I AM a forehand girl, I tend to like mine a bit flatter. penetrating. I can appreciate nadal's forehand is a great shot, but it doesn't really do much for me. all the good and appealing parts of nadal's game... low key are better from djokovic. the athleticism, the counterpunching, high margin game etc. if I want this stuff, I go to djokovic. also, look, I don't like the grunting - but what I really don't like is how completely accepted it is to hound wta players for grunting while nobody bats an eyelid when nadal sounds like a flock of seagulls is dying in his throat every single point. and I get that the double standards aren't exactly his fault, but you know what is his fault? his repeated and consistent opposition to equal pay in tennis! admittedly women's rights aren't exactly an issue you want to interrogate too closely with any of the big three, see the utter cowardice and moral void surrounding the zverev case

which I think gets to the part that really pisses me off about nadal. it's just... the hypocrisy. his pr is all about being this big fighter, big fighter, big fighter, he's so tough, he never gives up, what a fighter. such a big song and dance is done about what a great sportsman he is, him and federer obviously - how respectful they are, how civil and composed and isn't it great that we have two such great role models for the sport. people won't stop banging on about the fucking racquet smashing thing, as if we have to declare sainthood because a multi-millionaire tax evader has decided not to break a stick that clocks in at maybe a hundred fifty quid retail price. I'm biased in that I like racquet smashes, I think they're funny, they're ultimately not that serious - I don't particularly mind giving them a code violation but I do think it's remarkable that breaking a racquet isn't allowed but smashing up your own body with a racquet is. which is a separate issue! point being, it's one of those things that get used to paint nadal as the fairest most respectful most humblest bestest sportsman of all time. but he's not!! of course he engages in gamesmanship, of course he did some blatant time violations every time he could get away with it, of course he loved disrupting the rhythm of the other player serving, of course some of his medical timeouts were awfully convenient. of course it's pretty rich of him to complain about other blokes grunting

which I literally would not mind - I am a justine henin fan - if it weren't ignored due to this guy's insane pr. I also think it is awfully like tennis, in all its hypocrisy and fundamental conservatism, to judge someone's moral character over the number of racquets they have smashed - rather than literally anything else. this OBVIOUSLY isn't his fault, but I find the way many of his fans glorify the abuse his uncle subjected him to as a child beyond distasteful. federer fans are the cockiest and at times most fanatical (though For Some Reason they've quietened down these past few years), djokovic fans are the most flat out insane, but I find something about the conservatism of the nadal fanbase particularly pernicious. all in on the macho culture, endless wanking off to his masculinity and traditional values and whatever other bullshit

and to bring it back around - he's also fucking boring lol. like at the end of the day all this stuff just eats away at his appeal for me. so committed to never saying anything controversial he never says anything at all. I've already expressed this opinion before on this blog, but I firmly believe if you are an athlete that good and that dominant then you NEED to have more going for you. you need more character, more narrative juice, more interesting interpersonal relationships with your fellow competitors. tbh I think it's probably quite hard to keep me invested if you're THAT dominant, but let's be honest - men's tennis hasn't even been trying since agassi and sampras retired (rip to my men's tennis goats). serena on the women's side is way less annoying because she faced a changing cast of characters throughout her career, everyone in noughties wta had crazy narrative juice, and she is also exponentially more interesting than the big three combined. she really WAS an asshole at times, and I mean that in the most complimentary way possible!! all the gamesmanship people use to insult her honestly just makes me like her more. people complain about the chaos at the top of the wta tour but like... first of all, obviously we've left that era, and secondly I'd take that any day over stagnation at the top of the men's. the big three for all their incredible tennis have stifled the men's game, nadal's the worst of them, glad he's retired

MOST BEHATED

[lilyblackdrawside]

I played the Touhou 20 demo and have mixed feelings.

Overall it's good, the boss patterns are nice, though I'm not fond of the second boss's nonspells that stuff is a bit too encroachy for my liking.

The stage portions have been getting more aggressive as time has gone by. I recently replayed PCB and this game's level 1 bullet density on Normal feels like level 3 stuff in that game.

I don't like that the stones can show up in boss fights. Feels like it could really screw you over in a bad way when they add their own shots to a spellcard pattern.

I've never been fond of UFO's UFOs, because they're a gimmick that really demands your attention as opposed to working itself into gameplay passively, like DDC's collection border or any of the games that want you to be grazing for various reasons (SA, LoLK, HSiFS for example).

This game's stones show up when the vertical bar at the bottom left fills and then you have to deal with them. It seems to fill from picking up the gems that drop from enemies and from grazing, so it's just something that happens, and they come in four colours that seem to show up at different quantities based on how you play. I spent a lot of time in Focus Mode and got mostly reds, but then the gems in the thingy on the menu sidebar that presumably have an effect on my shots are also all red, so maybe it's because of that.

When you clear, you get a gem of some kind and can from then on slot it into one of the three options - Focus Shot, Wide Shot and Assist. I don't know what this does, but I don't like the idea of these stones presenting a persistent increase in power from having cleared the game several times. I don't like these kind of progression mechanics in these games. However, I'll see how it plays out when the full game comes out.

There's also another Trance mechanic that gives you a powerful shot for a while and also negates the next hit at the cost of ending early. It's alright. This one's governed by the vertical bar, which also probably fills up with gems but maybe differently compared to the horizontal one.

The horizontal one also gets longer the more stones it summons and changes colour, which seems to indicate what colour is going to be summoned, but I could swear it was red and I got a different gem once. It's difficult to pay attention to, since it's small in the corner where I really don't have much time to look at.

I'm also not a big fan of Marisa's shottype. I like it being all missiles, but this isn't it. Missiles only fire in straight lines, they don't wobble or go diagonal. The only spread you get from them is your options being spread out in non-focus mode. Also missile shottype shouldn't be using Master Spark. Lasers get Master Spark, Missiles get Stardust Reverie or whatever starry projectile spam Marisa thinks up for each game.

I really miss shottype selection. MoF, SA and UFO really were the high point of fun and weird shottypes. Don't even need unique dialogue or endings for each, I just want to play with a shitty shottype like Ultra Shortwave or something interesting like Cold Inferno again.

So yeah, it's alright but has some aspects I'm worried about.

[invisibleicewands]

Michael Sheen was relaxing at his Los Angeles home when something caught his eye on Wikipedia.

It was a single line about a man named Douglas Gowan, who had discovered dangerously high levels of a toxic chemical escaping a landfill near farmland in south Wales.

Disturbed and intrigued, the Hollywood star reached out to Douglas, who by this point was seriously ill and had a matter of months to live.

Sheen arranged to meet Douglas to record his final testimony - sparking a journey into a dark environmental secret.

'A life changing moment'

The story begins in 1967 when Douglas, who was working as a consultant for the National Farming Union, was called to look at a badly deformed calf at a farm near Llantrisant, in Rhondda Cynon Taf.

Douglas had heard odd reports from the area, but what he saw was to change the course of his life.

“I see this calf lying on the grass. Three legs, no tail. Piteous look on its face. No genitalia. It's there in my arms. And it was a life changing moment,” he later told Sheen.

"I wanted to know who was responsible for this, what had caused it. And I wanted those people to be held accountable."

Douglas knew where to start.

The farm was next to a landfill site, called Brofiscin Quarry.

He collected samples from the water escaping the landfill and sent them to a laboratory, where scientists found a famous fire-retardant type of chemical called poly-chlorinated biphenyls - more commonly known as PCBs.

PCBs are now known to be highly toxic and production of the chemicals is banned in 151 countries, including the UK.

But back in the 1960s, the chemicals were celebrated and used in products like paint and paper to stop them from catching fire.

The chemicals were largely associated with one company - a US chemical giant called Monsanto - whose European factory was in Newport, south Wales. The company is no longer in existence.

The company had produced thousands of tonnes of surplus PCBs which were being buried in dumpsites.

Douglas began to fear that the chemical was getting into the food chain - via fields, cattle, meat and milk.

He also feared that PCBs were so-called forever chemicals, meaning they would never biodegrade.

All the episodes (10) here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/m0020jnd