The best mechanic I ever had kept my ‘98 Subaru going past 200k miles. Once during a repair I asked him to do an inspection and tell me if there was anything else I should replace. He told me not to do that, and that any mechanic would always find something, but not necessarily the next thing to break.
He said it better using an expression I hadn’t heard before or since, something like “don’t go looking for goats when your herd is already with you.”
When I was quite young I attended a lecture by Bill Watterson held at the Akron Art Museum. He spoke without notes, with an easel and a large pad of paper, describing his career. He illustrated his story with the pad, drawing his unsuccessful characters (I remember one looked like a short Hobbes) as he told his story about how he created Calvin and Hobbes. I was really struck by how much Watterson looked like Calvin's dad.
I stayed after the end of the lecture hoping that he would give me one of his drawings. He politely declined. As I recall, he said he had to be very careful about how his work was distributed. I don't know if this was b/c of his contract with the syndicate, or b/c he was already thinking about the legacy of the strip.
Yes, literally this. No verilog decode, just looking for signals in the image of a 1 vs. a 0. For example, a 1 may be the existence of a transistor at a particular intersection of wiring.
Done! Thanks for coming here to read the tough hacker new comments. I really like what you're doing with Framework, and I hope you are able to keep iterating and improving.
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Update: Sorry, there is no mistake! The i7 order was my original pre-order, which I canceled. My order is correctly recorded.
I looked up my purchase using my Framework account to confirm my purchase date, and it lists my mother board as System: Intel® Core™ i7-1260P. Sloppy record keeping like this doesn't inspire confidence.
It is definitely not, and /proc/cpuinfo confirms it:
model name : AMD Ryzen 7 7840U w/ Radeon 780M Graphics
I'm also a laptop weirdo and I've had a Framework 13 with the Ryzen 7 motherboard since May of 2022. I run Ubuntu (currently 25.10) on it.
Its a good laptop, but not a great laptop. Its very light and compact (very important to me), and its been reliable, at least since the AMD GPU driver issues were resolved. The matte screen is fine, battery life is adequate, and the CPU meets my needs as a hobby developer.
Overall, I'm happy with it and I expect to use it for many years.
Its biggest issues are the touchpad (it's a diving board design, so you have to always click in the bottom 1/3 of the pad) and the quality of the case. The case flexes slightly if the computer is on an uneven surface, or if you are holding it in one hand by the corner while typing/mousing with your other hand, and this can cause the mechanics of the touchpad to jam. I've trained myself to tap instead of click, but that's me adapting to bad hardware.
I wish the case were more solid, even though I know this would add to the expense, size and weight. I expect to eventually replace every part of this laptop except the case, so I would appreciate more durability.
In the 90s my dad turned into an organic lawn grower. He was always suspicious of Chemlawn but he used the standard recommended treatment of granulated fertilizer and herbicides. Then he had a revelation about root and soil health, and phosphorus pollution, and he never looked back. The result isn’t the “golf course” monoculture of his neighbors, but its good.
When I read "A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" when I was about 18, there is a mention of how in the summer they would get nettles in their gruel at the prison camp. Midwestern American me had no idea of the nutritive value of nettles and thought this was another layer of cruelty that the Soviet gulag heaped on its inmates. I had only encountered nettles on hikes in the woods, and held them in the same category as poison ivy.
Years later, dating the Finnish woman who is now my wife, I learned how to gather nettles, about nettle soup, and even that eating nettles can de-sensitize you to seasonal allergies. I had completely misinterpreted that part of Solzhenitsyn's writing, and that his point was that at least when the nettles were growing the gruel had some additional nutrition (like vitamin c) in it.
A lot of knowledge like this has been lost in suburban America.
the point of knowing the rough conversion is to be able to do head-math to get a close number. I use 30 a lot of the time, b/c most of the time a close estimate is all I need.
if you're cutting off the borders of your map, by all means, use a calculator
I had a SPARClassic at home in 1996! It was pretty underpowered, but it worked great as long as you didn't use X. I worked from my brand new PowerMac 7200 over ethernet to the SPARClassic, which gave me MacOS + Solaris as a development environment.
My own writing and stuff is at https://home.jdblair.org