Co-lead (Near-Term Detection) at the Nucleic Acid Observatory in Boston. Speaking for myself unless I say otherwise.
jefftk
Karma: 21,265
Nucleic Acid Observatory Updates, April 2025
Risers for Foot Percussion
Electric Lunchbox
do you already know that a piezo signal is much improved by a preamp with >1 meg ohm input impedance?
Very much so, yes! And input impedance this high pretty much requires an active circuit.
Quarter Inch Cables are Devious
I have never met anyone, nor heard of anyone, who was somehow under the impression that cream cheese frosting is in any way incongruous or weird.
Strange; I’ve run into this multiple times. Most memorably, when my five year old younger sister was really upset that her birthday cake has cream cheese frosting—“cream cheese goes on bagels”. At a time when she already had had and liked cheesecake.
Cheesecake Frosting
Scaling the NAO’s Stealth Pathogen Early-Warning System
That’s elegant in some sense, but somehow doesn’t feel like the right way to do it.
Attending LessOnline
I like this idea a lot, but I’m nervous about setting the right CPU threshold. Too low and it never shuts off, too high and it shuts down in the middle of something when waiting for a slow download. But possibly if I looked at load logs I’d see it’s so clearly either ~zero or >>zero that it’s not fussy?
Auto Shutdown Script
Pictures for 2024
Why?
Silly Time
Counting Objections to Housing
Fixed! I was missing a comma.
They’re weird: input and output in the same jack. They’re for connecting to external effects, often through a cable that splits TRS to dual TS.