This was surprising. I was trying to figure out the dimensions of a storage box I could build out of a single 8x4 ft sheet of plywood. And it turns out there is a single solution, that is, only one size it can be.

I had an idea of how to build a box out of a single sheet of plywood. But what dimensions should it have? All the sides depend on other sides, so solvespace to the rescue. I can put the relationships between sides into it's constraint solver and have it tell me the dimensions I need to cut. I was expecting to be able to change it's aspect ratio and find one that I liked(one degree of freedom) but to my surprise when I got all the constraints in the thing was completely solved. There is only one size it can be. I mean, I can flip it, tall vs wide. but there is nothing in between. I think, after studying the drawing a bit. It is because the sides have to be half a sheet wide, and this sets the floor to a set size which sets the height to the rest.

And on that note solvespace is an amazing program. Sure in many areas it is not as capable as other cad programs and it's models have a tendency to explode. but huge salutes to whoever designed it's UI, it is so fun to use.

You know those tier list things, I saw some guy whip one out on a video, and all I could think about was that when faced with choosing from among several items I get hit hard by the paradox of choice, I just freeze up. But if I only had to choose from two I could do just fine.

This nerd sniped me. I had to see if it could be done. Along the way I made the mistake of thinking I could make it a web application so I could see pretty pictures. And Wow... I guess this is why I am not a web programmer. But I pushed through, and here you go, a better tier list.

https://compare.outband.net

Or Perhaps not. It is very weird. and I suspect I am the worlds worst designer. But it was a fun experiment to put together.

For fun: here are my thoughts on japanese funiculars

https://compare.outband.net/compare/app/compare.html?pop=funicular%2Ftsukubasan,funicular%2Fmaya,funicular%2Fikoma,funicular%2Fmyoken,funicular%2Fhobashira&role=dapper%20tram

@stsp Thank you so much for all the work you do.

I always feel like the 802.11 stack on obsd is surprisingly good and when I looked into it I found out it is largely due to one person who cared enough. Nobody really wants to deal with the insanity that is the 802.11 stack. But you keep plugging away at it. making things better for all of us one small commit at a time. Salutes.

That stupid new california law requiring age verification, I finally read it and my conclusion is that on unix like systems compliance could be as simple as

echo $YEAR_BORN > ~/.config/ca_ab_1043

That is, all the required interfaces are already present, an os vendor does not need to change anything to be in compliance in the peoples republic of California. and if the user fails to run the age tracking, then it is them that is out of compliance.

For truly malicious compliance it looks like the application could then check for the age wherever it feels like it. "I tried, but I could not find any information at .config/ca_age_cat the user must not have filled it out"

But really, it is such a stupid law that it smells of a frog boiling scheme to me. "If we can get away with an easy change on the os vendors today, we can get them to do anything we want in the future.... for the children of course"

anyhow for grins and giggles here is the actual text of the law. don't lose to many brain cells.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1043

Anyone else have a problem with the spell checker on firefox/openbsd? Or is it just me.

It barely works for me, it will identify the misspelled word but almost never provides a correction suggestion. I have gotten to the point of writing a short script that pulls from the select buffer sends it through aspell then back into the select buffer for me to paste back into the field.

On the plus side aspell is a much better spell checker than the included hunspell was. On the downside it's an involved process whenever I want to spellcheck something.

And on the griping side, I find myself spelling much better in general, so there is that.

Ha, the infernal thing sort of works.

How we got here: I have a linux install I use as a gaming system. but the gpu fan map is not working correctly, But I can still change the fan speed by hand. And while I was poking at it trying to understand the system I had a terrible idea.

"Why are we using temp maps to control fan speed, wouldn't it be better to have a closed loop controller where you set the temp you want the card at and it figures out what speed to set the fan?"

Now completely derailed by my own nerd snipe. I know more about pid algorithms than I ever wanted to know. and have some janky python code that can keep my gpu at a atable temp.

The worst part is, the pid stuff is the easy part. but I also built a gpu heat simulator so I could get some intuition tuning pid variables before I inflicted it on an actual gpu. then I wanted to use a midi dials box to control the tuning parameters. then I wanted a curses interface so I could see the state. then I wanted to run the pid core separate from the control interface so needed a client server architecture...

Sometimes I am my own worst enemy.