Russ @russss@mastodon.social

I hear you like data structures

There's - thankfully - an XML interface definition available, so a code-generation approach is obviously the right way to do it.

Someone who makes cycle race tracking software already did that in Python so I'm using it.

I was writing all my RFID stuff in Rust, but I gave up writing an LLRP implementation in Rust because someone's already done the lower-level work in Python and I don't have enough patience.

The only way to interface with these RFID readers is this horrendously complex binary protocol and I'm slowly losing the will to live while implementing it.

https://www.gs1.org/sites/default/files/docs/epc/llrp_1_1-standard-20101013.pdf

Got a few of these $11 HF RFID readers from Aliexpress. They spit out the card ID over Wiegand. IP68 rated. Useful if you need a nice external RFID reader.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000480079132.html

If anyone missed it over on the birdsite, I made a website with COVID-19 stats for the UK, including a nice map.

https://russss.github.io/covidtracker/

At least one of the remaining broken ones has a novel self-reflow feature. I powered it up and a diode melted off the board.

Back on my UHF RFID bullshit today. I bought a batch of 6 of these for £99 off eBay as "broken". They're worth >£600 each if they're working.

Managed to fix 2 of them so far - the TVS diode on the power input had failed short, and it was the first component I checked.

Amidst all this talk of a second wave of in the UK, I've compiled some of the metrics I've been looking at into a small site:

https://russss.github.io/covidtracker/

A lot of what I do is navigating this kind of tedious legal/tax/accounting stuff. I don't really *enjoy* it but it helps me facilitate cool stuff. I would find it super difficult to live in another country where I don't speak the language or know the legal system...

I decided to try the EU cross-border VAT refund scheme for the stuff we hired for our village at cccamp. Partly because it was easy and this was the first and only time I'll be able to use it...

Got a letter from the Bundeszentralamt für Steuern today saying €54.71 of my €307.80 claim was approved due to...inscrutable tax reasons which are way beyond my German reading comprehension skills.

At least the private doctor who I have to pay to clean my ears out is still open and managed to get me an appointment for tomorrow.

The last update on playdar.org was almost exactly a decade ago.

And I'm still complaining about the Spotify client being so shit.

I'm deaf in one ear and grumpy that none of our dreams about an interoperable music streaming ecosystem came true. Tuesday.

I'm captivated by all the open science going on during this pandemic. This is how all science should work.

Imperial College released their decade-old epidemic modelling software written in C under GPL, cleaned up with the help of John Carmack (!). (It's still fugly.)

I'm kind of amazed that this approach works, since I've heard a lot of epidemiologists say that granular models don't help that much.

https://github.com/mrc-ide/covid-sim

Immunology papers are the only ones which are consistently indecipherable to me. This figure might as well be conceptual art.

One month into lockdown. I have just ordered 16kg of flour from a bloke on WhatsApp at midnight.

Having to completely rewrite the EMF refund system to automate thousands of refunds isn't the most relaxing thing to do at the moment.

First stage is now ready though...