🇨🇦 tunetardis

That’s Swedish isn’t it?

My dad had this brilliant idea for everyone to say “cheese” in the local language every time he took a selfie of us when we were travelling around Europe. Let’s just say even though that was years ago in my childhood, I can look through that album and know instantly which photos were taken in Sweden!

I saw a meme going around about our guy in Canada who met a similar fate. It compared him to a toilet, noting that while both are full of shit, the toilet at least has a seat.

I work with 32MHz microcontrollers at work and you can do plenty with them. It’s a different world from say general CPUs where speed is king. You’re often more concerned about timing reproducibility than outright clock rates. There are also considerations about power consumption, electrical noise, functioning in extreme environments, etc. that may inform your decision to go with one controller over another.

In Sweden, about 40,000 users have joined a Facebook group calling for a boycott of US companies – ironically including Facebook itself – which features alternatives to US consumer products.

The Made In Canada Facebook group now has 1.2 million users, which is pretty insane considering the population of the whole country is 41 million.

I guess the central premise of capitalism is that while every society has its haves and have nots, capitalism is supposed to encourage the haves to invest in the economy rather than hoarding their wealth. In return, they stand to get even wealthier, but a stronger economy ought to generate more employment and generally improve the lives of commoners as well.

Unfortunately, in a never-ending quest to make wealth-generation more efficient and streamlined, employment is being eliminated through automation, outsourcing, etc. and the system is eating itself out from the inside. I doubt it can persist much longer, but what will replace it remains unclear. I pray that it will be something sensible that ensures everyone has their basic needs met and can still find rewarding pursuits in life. But there are so many ways it could go very wrong, and that includes staying on the current course.

I am also fairly new to the game. I had an iMac from around 2010 that was starting to show its age. Newer macOS versions were glacial on it. I eventually realized they were meant to boot off SSDs, but my options in that regard weren’t great. I would either have to take the whole thing apart to replace the internal drive or live with USB2 speeds on an external SSD. Then it dawned on me I could just put Ubuntu on there and call it a day. This worked great and bought me a few more years out of that machine.

More recently, we started buying threadripper workstations at the office for scientific modelling. These have since migrated into a server room where they are currently acting as a small compute cluster.

And most recently, I’ve been tinkering around a bit on my Steam Deck. It’s a little walled-garden-ish but it let me put VSCode and a few tools on there so I’m playing around.

zmodem. It was the fastest way to move data back in the day and was a trailblazer for streaming protocols. It excelled over dialup connections. Moving a file by say ftp over tcp/ip was painful by comparison.

Speaking as a Canadian, the Bush presidency was certainly wince-inducing. I was genuinely surprised he got re-elected after that clusterfuck of a first term. By the end of the 2nd, I was fairly convinced the best days of America were behind it.

But the difference between him and Trump is the wounds were more self-inflicted on the country with Bush. Still not great for Canada, whose fortunes rise and fall on what happens on the other side of the border.

But Trump had a genuine animosity for freedom-loving, democracy-respecting American allies and a love for oppressive dictatorships. He tore up trade agreements, levelled tariffs, etc. against Canada and Europe while advancing diplomacy in person in the likes of North Korea.

And on a more social level, he poisoned public discourse and stoked right-wing authoritarianism all over the world. I have family members I can’t talk to anymore. And the lunatic fringe came out of the woodwork under his term. We even had a mosque shooter here in Canada who was quite candid about Trump being his inspiration.

Within the US, Americans hate Americans with a passion. What a mess. Another civil war is not out of the question. As such, I am coming down on Trump being far, far worse.