Adrián Pérez @aperezdc@mastodon.social

For those inside the EU interested in a second hand camera, I am selling my trusty Canon PowerShot S95: https://www.ebay.es/itm/173901354232

For a nine-year old camera it can still produce very good pictures. The fast F/2 lens has been great to get pictures in concerts and festivals. You can see many of those here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/aperezdc

Sunday reading for today's morning coffee: The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs. This is a great book that tries to explain city population dynamics and how it relates to city planning, from an observational point of view. This is, of course, more scientific and realistic than what “idealized common knowledge” about planning.

While the book was written in the sixties with a focus on the US, it is still very valid everywhere.

Today I made an update to my #Zsh RockZ plugin, so now it uses #LuaRocks 3.1.2 by default, and fixed a small bug which fixes using the newest versions with #LuaJit — Grab it while it's fresh from the oven! → https://github.com/aperezdc/rockz

Having to use Ghostscript in the command line to join a few JPEGs into a single PDF with multiple pages is why #FreeSoftware is not winning: Even for people comfortable with the shell and using tools with random crappy #CommandLine syntax, doing things with “gs” feels like the ninth circle of hell 🙃

The camera I bought second hand just arrived today, and I couldn't be happier: practically it is in mint condition, without a single scratch, it came very well packaged, and the previous owner even threw in a round-the-neck strap which fits the camera.

Of course I gave them an excellent review and sent a personal “thank you” email to spread the #GoodKarma. The seller replied immediately with a “Great to know it arrived well, I hope you have a lot of fun with the camera”, which just made my day.

The other day while randomly walking in the neighborhood I randomly spotted a #theremin in a small office where people usually just work with their laptops. Cool.

Tired: pdnsd, dnsmasq, systemd-resolved...
Wired: dqcache

https://mojzis.com/software/dq/

The battery inside the Polaroid series 600 cartridges actually has two 3.1V cells, wired in series. I do wonder why the diodes are needed between the two connectors of each cell 🤔. Ideas?

#electronics #teardown

Well, I pried one of the cartridges open: officially they are rated 6V, 750mAh. Quite workable, I'd say. Once out of the cartridge, the batteries are remarkably flat, somewhere between 2 and 3mm thick.

Well, it turns out that the #batteries from #Polaroid cartridges provide a steady 6.2V — there's many around the house because it felt wrong to just throw them away knowing there's a battery inside. Surely I can turn these old guys into a flat, small package that supplies 5V for DYI stuff. I wonder how long they can power a small ATTiny85. They need to charge the flash for the cameras, so they might still pack a good punch in them 🤔

Ah, the ATTiny85 would need VUSB, somehow I was forgetting

Maybe it's a good time for some soldering. I have a few ATTiny85 and ATmega32u4 laying around which could use proper headers for prototyping and playing a bit with USB HID 🤔