Niche interest: recursive photos

This is my laptop, with Pittsburgh in the background viewed from Flagstaff Hill, in 2024; on its screen, a photo I took of my laptop, with Pittsburgh in the background viewed from Flagstaff Hill, in fall 2009. (Also a MacBook, very different hardware; very different cfallin too.)

TODO: visit Pittsburgh again in 2039 and continue the recursion

I don't know what it is about them but nixie tubes are the most beautiful digital display devices ever created; 4K OLEDs can fight me

(latest nixie clock design almost done! this is my second, more integrated, no cheating with prebuilt power supplies. somehow got the software-feedback high voltage supply working while only blowing up one MOSFET...)

how I spent a few hours of my sunday: depositing a few micrograms of solder in *exactly* the right place on 32 pins, with 250 micron gaps between them, and maybe regretting my life choices a bit. this looked way easier in the cad tool at 10x zoom!

(surprisingly I've made it this far in life without any surface-mount soldering experience. solder flux, surface tension, tiny tweezers, and willingness to chuck the board over your shoulder and start over help a lot here, I've learned)

Found the reason my nixie-tube clock has died: the HV supply's flyback diode had too many electrons inside and couldn't hold them in

(it's the little cylindrical part behind the 8-pin chip that looks too crispy for its own good)

Visited Pinnacles Nat'l Park yesterday. About 90 mi (150 km) south of home, closest national park to the Bay Area, but less well-known, as it only became a nat'l park in 2013. Some pretty unique volcanic rock formations, and we had a rain/hailstorm roll up the valley and over us as we hiked, giving a sort of misty otherworldly feeling to it all.

(If you thought you followed me for compilers and are surprised by nature: don't worry, I was thinking about DWARF debuginfo much of the time)