Author: laptopheaven

Hey everyone! This week’s post covers a range of exciting topics: impactful communication tips from Jay Sullivan, how to create your own presence sensor, building a mini-ITX server, the future of newsletters, reliable software design practices, hosting personal retreats, and announcing the 4th edition of an open introduction to discrete mathematics. Check out the links for more details!

• How to Communicate With Impact as a Software Engineer: Guest post by award-winning author, Jay Sullivan
• Roll Your Own Presence Sensor: [Mellow_Labs] wanted an Everything Presence Lite but found it was always out of stock. Therefore, he decided to create his own. The kit uses a millimeter wave sensor as a super-sensitive motion tra…
• When An Intel N100 Mini PC Isn’t Enough Build a Compact Mini-ITX Server!: This really depends on what you mean when you say that a Celeron N100 mini pc isn’t enough. If an N100 mini PC isn’t powerful enough, you …
• SBSQ #11b: On the future of the newsletter — and the sports models: Plus, we’re launching a new subscriber Chat platform. And: hardcover or audiobook?
• Practices of Reliable Software Design: These are things that make software engineering easier, but that I know I wouldn’t have considered when I was less experienced.
• How to Host Your Own Personal Retreat: A quarterly Personal Retreat is a great way to make sure that you continue to live your life in alignment with your vision and your values. In this post, we’re going to dive deeper into the Personal Retreat process so you can make your next Personal Retreat more effective.
• Discrete Mathematics: After many years of development, I am please to announce that the 4th edition of Discrete Mathematics: an Open Introduction is now available

Hey there! In my latest blog post, I dive into some fascinating topics, from solar panel technology with the Sunchronizer, new AI advancements like Hermes 3, and brain research breakthroughs, to industry shifts in fashion and gaming. Plus, I explore UX pitfalls, Olympic home workouts, and why anthologies are becoming the new literary magazines. Dive in and explore with me!

• The Sunchronizer Keeps Your Solar Panel Aligned: In the past few years, the price-per-watt for solar panels has dropped dramatically. This has led to a number of downstream effects beyond simple cost savings. For example, many commercial solar fa…
• The n-Category Café:
• Cloud: Introducing Hermes 3 in partnership with Nous Research, the first fine-tune of Meta Llama 3.1 405B model. Train, fine-tune or serve Hermes 3 with Lambda
• Cleaning Up the Aging Brain: Scientists Restore Brain’s Trash Disposal System: Scientists have restored the brain’s waste-clearing process in aging mice, offering potential new treatment for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s using existing drugs.
• We’re Cutting L40S Prices In Half: We just lowered the prices on NVIDIA L40s GPUs to $1.25 per hour. They’re like two 4090s stapled together
• ‘We don’t want to dress like our parents’: If young people no longer wear trainers, what do they wear?: The decline of the sneaker as the shoe par excellence represents an earthquake in the business model of giant urban fashion brands. But it’s also an opportunity to reclaim and modernize other footwear models, such as moccasins
• Guy Sets World Record by Plugging 444 Gaming Consoles into a Single TV: He’s the cable management God.
• TBM 303: The Current Tech Puzzle (With Diverse Takes): Managers are bumping up against many dependencies, duplicative administrative tasks, an onslaught of mind-numbing meetings, constant calls to detail tradeoffs, shifting strategies, and a call to focus more on performance management. To quote a manager friend: “The work around the work is drowning me.”
• Things that Used to be Impossible, but are Now Really Hard: Kevin Scott, CTO of Microsoft, framed the opportunity in AI this way : work on problems that used to be impossible, but are now really hard. My immediate reaction : what technical problems are now possible but still hard? What can computers achieve by themselves that two or three years ago would be intractable? But, this point isn’t purely about technical innovation. What business problems are newly solvable? Nearly 10 years ago, I wrote a post about the minimum viable average contract value to justify a sales team.
• The Current State of Homepage and Category Navigation UX: 76% of Sites Have Mediocre-to-Poor Performance (12 Common Pitfalls) – Articles – Baymard Institute: Our latest Homepage & Category Navigation UX benchmark reveals that the desktop performance for 76% of leading US and European sites is still “poor”. Here are 12 UX pitfalls to avoid.
• 🧠Knowledge Series #42: What is RAG?: Retrieval-Augmented Generation explained. Why every product team needs to know more about RAG.
• Best Woodstock Performances: Hendrix, The Who & More at 1969 Festival: Here are the 20 most iconic performances at Woodstock 1979, featuring sets from Jimi Hendrix, The Who and more legends who graced the festival.
• Miss the Olympics? Try these Olympic workouts at home.: Four Olympic or Paralympic athletes share home workouts to improve your fitness.
• Returning to growth: The latest publishing news, jobs, analysis, comment, interviews and in-depth features about UK newspaper, magazine and online publishers.
• 4 Reasons Why Anthologies Are the New Literary Magazines: And Why That’s Good for the Reading Community: Here are a few ways anthologies have advantages over the traditional magazine format.

Hey there! I just shared some fascinating reads on my blog, ranging from why Ozempic is being touted as a miracle drug to insights on how AI tools are really impacting software engineers. Plus, I’ve got tips on overcoming mental blocks and even a discussion on ending the traditional 40-hour workweek. Don’t miss out, especially if you love tech, health, or productivity hacks!

• Why Does Ozempic Cure All Diseases?: …
• Wisconsin .NET User Group: Talk: Getting Started with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)
• Researchers figure out how to keep clocks on the Earth, Moon in sync: A single standardized Earth/Moon time would aid communications, enable lunar GPS.
• Leaked Secrets and Unlimited Miles: Hacking the Largest Airline and Hotel Rewards Platform: A technical blog
• AI Tooling for Software Engineers: Reality Check (Part 2): How do software engineers using AI tools view their impact at work? We sidestep the hype to find out how these cutting-edge tools really perform, from the people using them daily.
• It’s OK to abandon your side-project – Robb Owen: In an industry that pressures developers to always be shipping side-projects, it can be helpful to be retrospective with the projects that don’t make the cut
• This is how we finally end the 40-hour, 5-day workweek: California Congressman Mark Takano, who introduced a 32-hour workweek bill, discusses how we can transform how we think about the workday.
• Beware of the Hidden Time Costs of Each New Commitment.: One of the most powerful time management and productivity strategies is learning to say no without offending other people.
• Tips on How to Overcome Mental Blocks: What is a mental block, and why does it happen? Here are some helpful tips for overcoming mental blocks at work and improving your productivity.
• No Wrong Doors.: Some governmental agencies have started to adopt No Wrong Door policies, which aim to provide help–often health or mental health services–to individuals even if they show up to the wrong agency to request help. The core insight is that the employees at those agencies are far better equipped to navigate their own bureaucracies than an individual who knows nothing about the bureaucracy’s internal function. For the most part, technology organizations are not complex bureaucracies, but sometimes they do seem to operate that way.
• audioFlux: A library for audio and music analysis, feature extraction. – libAudioFlux/

Hey there! Check out my latest blog post where I dive into my portable router build and how you can choose the perfect CPU for your own projects. Plus, there’s more! I discuss my thoughts on frequent medical surveys, share top tips for developer happiness, and even review Naomi Klein’s fascinating book. Catch all this and more on my blog!

• Portable Router Build: Picking Your CPU: I want to introduce you to a project of mine – a portable router build, and with its help, show you how you can build a purpose-built device. You might have seen portable routers for sale, bu…
• An open letter to the medical profession: Dear medical office: I’d like to thank you for sending me a survey about my recent experience at your medical office. You are extremely consistent. Every time I visit a doctor or interact with anyone at your office or any other, I get a survey. I’m sure you’re using those surveys to learn ways you…
• The ultimate guide to developer happiness: Five actionable tips and strategies to supercharge developer happiness—and a more innovative workplace.
• Create a bootable installer for macOS: Use an external drive or secondary volume as a startup disk from which to install macOS.
• Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein: What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired another self—a double who was almost you…
• Sponsored by multiple corporations with anti-LGBTQ ties, Lexington Pride Festival held indoors for a second year: This year’s Lexington Pride Festival was very different from years’ past. Instead of an open-air festival in the Courthouse Plaza, the event was held indoors at the Central Bank Center on Saturday, June 29th, 2024. Traditionally, the Lexington Pride Festival had been a free event hosted outside in downtown Lexington but since the move inside, attendees must now pay a $10 admission fee. The venue change, first instituted in 2023, elicited some negative reviews from attendees.
• Why print won’t lie down and die: For a format that’s dead, a projected 75% share of consumer-magazine revenues in 2026 seems pretty healthy to me.
• Settle this household fight: What’s the best way to load a dishwasher?: Tines up? What belongs on the bottom shelf?
• Tending and Bettering: Escaping our problems, whether in our homes, our marriages, our careers, or elsewhere, is easier than remaining where we are and doing the hard work of repair.
• Codenames: I’ve wondered how good a bot that plays using only position information would be (you might also call this an AI, but since we’ll discuss using an LLM/AI to write this bot, we’ll use the term bot to refer to the automated codenames playing agent to make it easy to disambiguate).
• Federal Appeals Court Finds Geofence Warrants Are “Categorically” Unconstitutional: In a major decision on Friday, the federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals held that geofence warrants are “categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.” Closely following arguments EFF has made in a number of cases, the court found that geofence warrants constitute the sort of “general,…
• Oh My Zsh – a delightful & open source framework for Zsh: Oh My Zsh is a delightful, open source, community-driven framework for managing your Zsh configuration.
• Okay, I really like WezTerm: A guide to configuring WezTerm using its Lua API. Focuses on appearance, keybindings, multiplexing, workspace navigation, and status bar (powerline) setup.

Hey there! This week, I’m diving into the role of community in youth mental health, whipping up a creamy tomato pie, and exploring tips to avoid losing items with holding pens. Also, check out some recipes our staff tried, learn how to say “No” effectively, and get some insights on building strategies. Happy reading!

• The Upstream Cause of the Youth Mental Health Crisis is the Loss of Community: We’ve forgotten what community really means.
• Tomato Pie: This homemade tomato pie recipe is the perfect way to use up fresh summer tomatoes. It’s creamy and tangy, and the leftovers are fantastic!
• How to avoid losing items? Holding pens.:
• Juicy Tomato Sandwich and More Recipes We Made This Week: Here’s what our staff cooked this week, including frozen mango margaritas and make-ahead bean salad.
• How to say “No” and win back your time as a software engineer: Guest post by Meta Staff Engineer, Sidwyn Koh
• How to build a strategy: Strategies are pretty tough to design and build – and often even harder to bring to life. In this article I share some guiding principles.

Hey there! In this blog post, I dive into a range of fascinating topics, from understanding how French drains work to building a two-stroke engine from scratch with basic hardware store parts. I also explore why you should do quests instead of goals, share a life-saving sleep study experience, offer tips on improving your math skills, discuss Airbnb’s transition from monolithic architecture, and explain how AI models can diagnose HVAC issues. Enjoy!

• How French Drains Work:
• A Two-Stroke Engine Made From Scratch Using Basic Hardware Store Parts: How hard could it to be to build a two-stroke internal combustion engine (ICE) from scratch? This is a challenge that [Camden Bowen] gladly set for himself, while foregoing such obvious wastes of t…
• Do Quests, Not Goals: South Island, New Zealand, a.k.a. Middle-Earth If you were to make a list of what you want to get done this week, it would mostly consist of things you have to do. Get groceries. Book a hair appointment. Get back […]
• I Got a Sleep Study in My 30s. It Probably Saved My Life: Millions of men don’t know they’re suffering from sleep apnea. Consider this a wake-up call.
• How to improve your math skills: There’s a lot we learn that we instantly forget. In fact, depending on who you ask, up to 60 percent of high school goes straight into your mental recycling bin, and for quite a few of us, that includes our math skills.
• Why Airbnb moved away from a monolithic architecture: 4 lessons from Airbnb’s Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) migration, with comparisons to other big tech companies
• Building AI Models To Diagnose HVAC Issues: HVAC – heating, ventilation, and air conditioning – can account for a huge amount of energy usage of a building, whether it’s residential or industrial. Often it’s the major…

In my latest post, I dive into three fascinating topics. First, I explore optimizing file placement to double your hard drive performance. Second, I share some creative alternatives to epic corporate jargon. Finally, I discuss how technology can help publishers foster a more human connection with their readers. Catch all the details in the blog!

• Getting the Most Performance out of Spinning Hard Drives, Part 2: How to Optimize File Placement for Top Speed: With just a little extra effort, you can ensure your hard drive performance is 1.5X to 2X faster than it would be otherwise. Here’s how to do it with two optimized file placement methods.
• Epic corporate jargon alternatives:
• Use technology to create a more human touch: Summary: It’s important for publishers to strive for a more direct relationship with their readers. This article reflects on “direct” and “relationship,” then discusses how technology can help. Note: This article is an expanded version of a story from the August issue of The Krehbiel Letter. An ad in an industry newsletter said, “In the…

Hey there! In this blog post, I’m sharing some insightful reads I’ve recently come across. From navigating the trenches of .NET migration and understanding the widespread disdain for generative AI, to exploring code-free workflow automation, and diving into the role of magazine media in advertising—there’s something here for everyone. Plus, a thoughtful piece urging a genuine rethink in digital advertising by publishers. Happy reading!

• Tales from the .NET Migration Trenches – Middleware: Posts in this series:

  * Intro
  * Cataloging
  * Empty Proxy
  * Shared Library
  * Our First Controller
  * Migrating Initial Business Logic
  * Our First Views
  * Session State
  * Hangfire
  * Authentication
  * Middleware

  In the last post, we looked at tackling probably the most important pieces of middleware – authentication. But many ASP.NET MVC 5 applications will

• You Guys Have No Idea Just How Much People Hate Generative AI: “Tis tech tis trash”
• Automatisch: Build workflow automation without spending time and money. No code is required.
• Magazine media and its role in the media mix: Amanda Wigginton, data and insight specialist, shares her pick of campaigns that demonstrate how magazine brands deliver for advertisers. With a presentation to brand marketers as part of ISBA’s ‘101
• Digital advertising crossroads is time for ‘genuine rethink’ by publishers: Advertisers can also do more to better support the publisher ecosystem.