i've been running octoprint for a long time, but i'd love to try klipper just to experiment because i hear such glowing things about it.
the main thing that stops me adopting it is the absolute inability to get a raspberry pi right now to run mainsail on. i've got alerts set up for stock on plenty of sites, but they're basically like gold dust.
foobar2k + soulseek was a heady combination. one abiding memory was how fragmented the components for fbk2 were and how you had to search through the hydrogen audio forums for updates and they often got abandoned/picked up by someone else, and the forum community was incredibly unwelcoming!
even though spotify has almost completely destroyed my need for fb2k, i do still use it for listening to radio streams. i'd love if there were fully fleshed out components that let you use spotify with fb2k.
the shortcoming with that, at least in my experience is that you cannot just quickly pull out your phone and glance at something, unless you want to accidentally pull your headphones out of your ears when you raise the phone to your face and tug on the wire that's trapped under your shirt.
With this setup you have to be a bit mindful for sure but if your cable is long enough, pulling out phone and using it as you would normally is no issue. You also keep slack cable on your pocket as other commenter has mentioned.
i've destroyed so many wired headphones by forgetting i'm wearing them and trying to take off my bag and tearing them out of my ears forcefully. it got to the point where i ended up using wired headphones like a consumable. switching over to wireless has been bliss just for this simple reason.
my biggest gripe with wireless so far, and this might be specific to galaxy buds+ is that their batteries suck after a years use. otherwise, all the things you describe are why they're great.
I once saw a person walk away from a mixing desk in a studio wearing headphones. He got janked back violently enough that he lost his balance and fell. Pretty good cable!
Mixing desk outputs are typically either on the very front of the desk or at the back for a less ergonomically designed deck and at right angles to the plane of the deck for top mounted and sticking out the font for front mounted. So which ever you've got you'll never be doing a nice straight pull. Magsafe would be a nice solution to this (but back then nobody thought of this).
The mixing consoles I've used had the 1/4" coming vertically out of the top of the board. For other equipment, it might be coming out facing the user in a vertical rack piece of gear. Never have I seen it on the very front of the desk. that would be very prone to getting sheered off when a rolling chair slides across the front of the desk.
if it's safe enough to run power to a computer, it would easily be able to handle the electrical requirments for any other connector, right? you just need an adapter.
luckily, apple has you covered. you just need $19.99. /s
that would be a weird idea though. 1/4 TRS female -> magsafe-male magsafe-female -> 1/4 TRS male. i'm guessing it would look like a sort of inline coupler or similar in final design. essentially, it should be totally doable. i look forward to your pitch on Shark Tank, er, to YC, yeah, that's what I meant.
I recently bought a foundue set; the hotplate it comes with has a magsafe regular 110VAC wall cord (no DC adaptation) that's magsafe on the device end. I wondered why I had never seen one of these before. Then I realized that that flat device end is actually incredibly dangerous to the touch when plugged into the wall. It's just slightly less dangerous than potentially knocking over a pot of boiling cheese. For regular appliances that aren't going to give you third-degree burns, it'd probably be preferable to just let the device get yanked off the table, than to risk exposure to live current.
I wonder if, in the future, we could have household wall sockets and extension cords with "sense pins" ala USB PD; where the mains-voltage live "rail" isn't energized unless a device hops on the logic-level control rail and negotiates for it. Then we could truly live in a MagSafe-everything world. (Then again, to block that kind of current, they'd probably need to use relays and other non-solid-state parts, so they might not be the most durable things...)
This is how every single Apple charging cords with the green/amber light in them has behaved. There's a bit of communication between device and cable before juice flows.
Did the end of the cable not have recessed "pins" specifically to avoid accidental shorting? Seems like it would never be U/L certified without some safety.
> This is how every single Apple charging cords with the green/amber light in them has behaved. There's a bit of communication between device and cable before juice flows.
Yes and no. MagSafe is safe because of the sense current and the handshake; but it's able to do that because it's just not driving very much wattage through the cable; it's low enough that it can direct the power with a simple transistor.
To make mains-voltage AC cords do that, you need a lot more than a transistor. A 1500W current (from e.g. a microwave, or a kettle) can arc a gap much wider than most transistors are printed at. Which is why, in even the most modern smart-home remote light-switch doodads, mains-voltage gets toggled using relays, rather than anything solid-state.
It's lovely to say "just do what MagSafe does", but with electricity, "quantity has a quality all its own" — i.e. very different engineering challenges to overcome.
> Did the end of the cable not have recessed "pins" specifically to avoid accidental shorting?
It has recessed pins (pads, actually), but only barely (by about 5mm); basically to the point that a round metal table leg could make contact with the live pad within the recess.
And, as far as I can tell, there's no sense logic in the cable, either. No click of a relay coming from the cable when it gets connected; and no place for a transformer to live (not that it needs one—it's a hotplate, i.e. a big thick piece of iron you run mains-voltage AC current through.)
There is a relay inside the hotplate itself, which roughly acts as a thermostat (rather than a rheostat) to toggle the coil on and off to keep the cheese at temperature. You can hear it ticking on and off, and an indicator light goes on and off along with it.
But for that logic to work, the cable has to be drawing power to power it. So, AFIACT, the cable itself is always live.
A downside being that backpacks (outside of hiking context) are so visually associated with schoolchildren that wearing them as a professional is kind of impossible, image-wise. For someone fresh out of college maybe; for thirty+ it starts communicating a very juvenile appearance. The key with messenger and shoulder bag ergonomics is all in positioning (vertically and in orientation relative to body).
Or to give more than a second's through to someone wearing a backpack, beyond "oh hey they have a backpack".
For one, if you're carrying enough crap isn't a backpack more ergonomic (assuming you wear both straps and aren't one-strapping it like the cool guy you are)
Image is one of those laws of society that we all wish wasn't true, all believe shouldn't be true, but is intractable and almost certainly derived from evolutionary pressure.
"Vestis virum facit", or clothes make the man is extraordinarily powerful in business and social dealings. Clothes signal a lot of information quickly. So this isn't about you caring what other people think, it's about how what other people care about affect your options. I could prescribe a few experiments to witness the differences directly but I'll tell you from personal experience that the A-B differences are stark.
There was a time when I was younger that I raged against this rule, but it's a youthful variation of "old man yells at cloud". You can try and create a new reality in your head and believe it fervently, and cut your nose to spite your face, but image matters greatly to other people, at a deep level.
techpod did an episode recently with the engineering camera payload uplink lead from nasa jpl doug ellison. it was very cool.
from the episode summary:
> "Friend of the podcast Doug Ellison from NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab stops by to give us the lowdown on the newest Mars rover Perseverance, which will be landing on the red planet in just a few weeks, plus all kinds of fun info about Lagrange transceivers, making oxygen out of thin air, flying helicopters on other planets, and recording home movies at mach 25."
honestly i dont know why more people dont use tweetdeck. i have my timeline, it's not controlled by an algorithm, it's always chronological, i'm not constantly being suggested stuff, i can split out topics into columns that i'm interested in, i can filter the columns to show exactly what i want.
also can i suggest that filter:follows is super useful if you want to search a term exclusively among your follow list.
Funnily enough recently I've started using tweetdeck on my phone too. I use Firefox and an addon called better tweetdeck to adjust the column width to the same width as my phone screen. There's some jank, but the value of having a Twitter client on mobile that's not the official mobile app, and not crippled like many third party apps are now, it's enough to compensate for that jank.
I would say as a heavy Twitter user my needs are probably not typical, but imo tweetdeck with its live updating columns is the true nature of the firehose that Twitter is, and I love it.
honestly i feel unmoored without tweetdeck on my second screen ticking by. i realise this is probably a bad thing, but getting my daily news and info, i'd say 90% comes from twitter.
https://vdn3.vzuu.com/HD/7d42236a-3065-11ee-a787-7e9db7aa394...