As we stand here looking at the brand-new year ahead, we find ourselves taking stock, and maybe thinking how we can all be better people in the next year. More exercise, being nicer to your neighbors, consuming more or less of this or that, depending on whether it’s healthy or un. Those are the standard fare. But what’s your hacker new year’s resolution?
Mine, this year, is to branch out into a new microcontroller family, to learn a new toolchain, and maybe to finally dip my toes into Bluetooth Low Energy. Although that last one is admittedly a stretch.
But the former is great resolution material, if you allow me. New programming tooling is always a little unpleasant to set up, but there’s also payoff at the end of the ordeal. It’s a lot like picking up a new exercise – it makes you stronger. Or course, it helps to have an application in mind, the equivalent of that suit you want to be able to fit into at the end of the diet. I’ve got one. I’ve also been out of programming in straight C for a year or so, and I’m faced with a new HAL, so there’s bound to be enough of a challenge to make it worthwhile.
Honestly, I’m looking forward to getting started, but with the usual mix of optimism, over-optimism, and mild dread. It’s the perfect setup for a resolution! What’s yours?
(And yes, the art is from another story, but setting up a good backup regime isn’t a bad resolution either.)
No specific New Year’s resolution, but I always keep to my motto: A day on which I learn nothing is a day lost.
A day without laughter is an utter waste, may as well take up smoking three packs a day at that point
“(And yes, the art is from another story, but setting up a good backup regime isn’t a bad resolution either.)”
Needs to be as easy as possible so there’s no excuse not doing, and correctly.
Love the image. Though actually backing ALL of everything is such a pain.
Be so much easier if a decent tapedrive was more affordable or there had been a bit more uptick in the optical media data density… Don’t get me wrong I think the archival blueray is darn impressive, disc that haven’t got bigger yet now have all those Gigabytes, but when just my personal music library would still take 5 discs.. Tapes on the other hand the media isn’t exactly cheap but the capacity or the latest generation is great, it is the drives that are ruinous, and almost only available as SAS drives.
Just buy a couple of cheap multi-TB harddrives and rotate between them. Sure, they are not archival quality, but it’s unlikely that they’ll all fail.
That soon adds up to a heap of money too though, especially if you want to backup of ALL the data (at least for me, and probably most folks now) – for instance that video game library you can’t be sure you will always be able to download again if you play any more modern games at all could rapidly spiral to filling multi-TB drives as each game is 100+GB on its own, add in ideally having a snapshot or two of history (at least for the backups of directories you actually change), while also having enough copies of it all for that offsite backup.
Which is why I don’t back up ALL the data, and do have a few large drives backup what I do backup – even without the video game library looking at a price in drives to do it all properly that isn’t far off a previous generation tape system and tapes, with it I’d absolutely have to get a tape drive for sane costs.
Personally I don’t find it necessary to spend much money on backing up things I can easily re-download from the internet.
I keep backups of my whole laptop onto my NAS, but the media on my NAS isn’t backed up since I can fetch that again if necessary. I also back up my laptop’s home directory to a cloud backup service, but I don’t bother adding this extra level of redundancy for applications or the whole OS.
Rather risky to trust you can easily re-download, while it seems unlikely Steam could disappear overnight and all those games your bought may well never reappear on any other service or the high-sea – nobody at the publisher or developers is going to put effort into republishing old titles that were no longer selling, and your peers may well have thought like you that everything would always just be recoverable.
Also I’m not going to sort all the music etc into the stuff I expect to remain easy to get and the stuff we recorded off the pile of demo tapes and records of bands long extinct most of whom never made it big enough to be available. Not to mention without at least a cached filelist somewhere some great bands that are still easy to get would be forgotten and not having come from the web initially or not from the still existent web services its not like the purchase history on my account lets me know either…
So while I don’t as its currently too expensive do the ALL in the article header image really is what we should be doing (at least to everything we actually care about).
I’ve been meaning to get a new monitor.
My wife gave me one of my those NZ-1 coil winders for Christmas, so the 2024 list includes adding a motor, controls and some sort of wire handling to that basic machine.
I plan to pick up programming again. My skills have stagnated so badly and I’ve forgotten so much. Additionally, I plan to document and write about more of my projects and share them.
Being better at documenting is on my list as well. Both because i’d like to share with people and for my own sake. I can barely remember half the things i work on and end up (not) learning the same lessons over and over.
When I put something down, I resolve to remember where I put it….at least for 30 secs anyway.
FOIA for
Poseiden P-8A November 20, 2023
Kanehoe Bay crash
software certification information
Happy new year.
Albert Gore willing, of course.
https://www.prosefights2.org/irp2023/usnavy2.htm
new year’s resolution? 4k, hopefully!
Obfuscated c/c++ to cause stock market crash in 2024?
Tech Wreck
The magnificent seven stocks (AAPL, AMZN, GOOG, MSFT, META, NVDA and TSLA) accounted for the majority of the returns in the S&P 500 in 2023. Until recently the other 493 stocks were even on the year. These seven stocks amount to over 30% of the S&P 500 valuation, the highest in history. Their valuations are at the higher end of the range. Their combined market capitalization exceeds $12 trillion. This clearly will not continue. Much like the year end 2021, it will be very difficult to hold these seven stocks up once they lose momentum, given their market capitalization is 50% of the total US GDP. …
Wall Street is presently pricing in 5 1/2 interest rates cuts for 2024. This is a rate cut at almost every Fed meeting next year. This is unlikely to happen without a material slowdown in the economy. This will hurt corporate profits. With no slowdown their easing expectations are too aggressive. Either way it is not positive for stock returns.
MaxOut Savings Report
Ted Geoca
12/28/23
Christmas card to Ted Lewis contained “AI?”.
Response;
Bill, is that you?
Got your card just now. AI next big fraud. Overhyped,
but Silicon Valley will spend next decade and $billions promoting it.
Ted Lewis bios.
https://www.google.com/search?q=TED+LEWIS+COMPUTING&sca_esv=596408074&rlz=1C1QCTP_enUS1084US1084&sxsrf=ACQVn08LTi3G1hipDPvn7g-v3xu7h834JA%3A1704659958630&ei=9gubZZGJJqHE0PEPiaKIoAU&ved=0ahUKEwiR3K-akcyDAxUhIjQIHQkRAlQQ4dUDCBA&uact=5&oq=TED+LEWIS+COMPUTING&gs_lp=Egxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAiE1RFRCBMRVdJUyBDT01QVVRJTkcyCBAAGIAEGKIEMggQABiABBiiBDIIEAAYgAQYogQyCBAAGIAEGKIESOUtUOYkWOYkcAF4AJABAJgBY6ABY6oBATG4AQPIAQD4AQHiAwQYASBBiAYB&sclient=gws-wiz-serp
Transparent portable certifiable gcc c software modules running on x86, ARM A and M series, RISC-V, .. . <$150 computers the future?
Can any money be made doing this type of work?
2024:
I will not snark on Hackaday.
I will not snark on Hackaday
I will not snark on Hackaday.
I will not snark on Hackaday.
Awwww screw it!
B^)