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• Post #3930533

  From a systems perspective the (Airbus A320) Lufthansa 1829 flight situation asks the question what happens when the majority of the sensors are wrong. Well worth the ~47 minutes to watch if you have any interest in systems thinking. (Mentour Pilot video released today. As a minor spoiler, the plane landed safely. The how and why is the interesting part.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpJM0_4PQaM

• Post #3797539

  @stephen@ephemera.vital.org.nz for temperature monitoring many of them are Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). Either as generic beacons or with some query protocol. Home Assistant will in theory support a bunch of variants, although in some cases it needs a special association process. For Smart Plugs I think people who want locally only end up having to reflash them. But that’s fairly well supported for some models (eg up thread).

• Post #3154844

  I knew that banks had been closing branches (especially accelerating in 2020 with the Covid-19 lockdowns), but it’s only now, looking at all the major banks for branch locations, that it’s obvious how much that’s happened. Even in major cities each major bank has one (or sometimes two) branches, total, in the whole city 😮 (There used to be a branch every second suburb, and half a dozen branches in each CBD. Now it’s at most ATMs every second suburb.)

• Post #3090798

  FabFilter Pro Q3 as an instrument — as all the instruments really (the only other thing is pink noise, and inverted pink noise). Turns out being able to have 24 EQ points comes in handy! (5 minute video, released last week) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Rk-hmIMv6I

• Post #2007316

  Really cool 15 minute documentary (released this past weekend) on how (cassette) “pause tapes” influenced early hip hop sampling and beat looping. The street finds a way :-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkZ-8gcgyCE

• Post #1740222

  An insightful breakdown of Bohemian Rhapsody (Queen song), from the 24 multitrack which has a combination of individual voices, bounces of multiple voices, and instrument tracks. It’s interesting just how multitracked it is for the time (lots of voices bounced down at least once, to regain more tracks). And how it used the “not to a click track” floating timing as an asset (TIL: tempo rubato) (20 minute David Hartley video released a few days ago.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLqhOEzpWyo

• Post #1621494

  If you remember the various 74xx series gate families (H, L, HS, LS, etc) you’ll probably be as fascinated as me by this Curious Marc video deriving the gate families from first principles, starting from diode-resistor logic and working forward. Both gate schematics and practical breadboard demonstration of each variant, with an explanation for what the new variant is fixing in the older variants. (28 minute video, released today.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdn024FdUFg

• Post #1621489

  TIL that someone (Bryan Keller) ported (Mac) OS X 10.0 to the Nintendo Wii (both of which are PowerPC). It supports 640x480, with a SD card as the disk, with a USB keyboard / mouse (and not much other hardware). But it boots and can run apps that fit into the Wii’s RAM (less than the official minimum RAM for OS X 10.0). Video is someone else trying it out, last week, on real Wii hardware (~40 mins). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PybalkEHwXY https://bryankeller.github.io/2026/04/08/porting-...

• Post #1502178

  Those who remember AUX ports on routers and cabling to CON ports might appreciate Wetatronics design of a SFP that provides an AUX port (or two with a breakout adapter). Connects outbound to a meet me server (cloud or run on-prem) over TLS. Seems like a clever idea, for a “zero U” console server. (As announced at #NZNOG lightning talks.) https://www.wetatronics.com

• Post #763462

  NZ on Air and Stuff sponsored the creation of an 8-part “podcast” (audio series, all released together) called “Quarantine Nation”, about the Covid-19 lockdowns in Aotearoa in 2020-2021. It’s well done and interviews many of the key insiders, as well as having some fun audio side quests. It covers up to early 2022, with a whirlwind update since then in the 8th episode. (8 x ~40 minutes, released Feb 2026) #nzcovid19 https://nzpod.co.nz/podcast/quarantine-nation https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-ne...