ɗ𐐩ʃƕρʋ

Radomir Dopieralski

#nobot #robots #python #micropython #vim #pygame #circuitpython #gamedev #electronics

Projects: https://deshipu.art/
Homepage: https://dopieralski.pl/about/

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Last Notes

2026-04-18 07:53:18 GMT

They should make special chairs for ADHD people with extra arm rests, backs, and foot rests in random places so they can drape themselves around them in more ways.

2026-04-12 18:38:20 GMT

If someone got shrunk to the size of a Barbie doll, how would you carry them? It seems that sitting on your shoulder is really hard when you move. Woman's handbag works, what else? Baby carrier backpack? Fanny pack? Cross-shoulder bag? Hat?
I'm thinking about building a wearable robot, and trying to figure out where to best wear it, so that it's stable, doesn't get in the way, but also is visible, and not too much exposed to accidental damage.

2026-01-28 20:30:22 GMT

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welcome to Rust

2026-01-27 19:42:20 GMT

Home computers were famously supposed to become the bicycles for the mind. But what about bicycles for the soul? Well, that's actually easy. Bicycles are the bicycles for the soul.

2026-01-27 06:29:56 GMT

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Do you have to wear them on your legs, or is anywhere sufficient?

2026-01-15 19:46:45 GMT

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Is this why the printer refuses to print even black-and-white things when you run out of yellow ink?

2026-01-11 15:29:22 GMT

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Ignoring the comical aspect, the next size in the A* and B* series is always half of the previous one. So the smaller dimension stays the same, and the other is halved (and becomes the new smaller dimension).

2026-01-10 18:58:19 GMT

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skill issue

2026-01-04 14:26:35 GMT

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No, they run their own flavor of Linux, but it's possible to run homebrew apps on them. There is a small ecosystem of those.

2025-11-06 12:33:45 GMT

FOSS software is not free as in beer or free as in freedom, it's free as in free kittens. You have to take care of them forever.

2025-11-02 19:17:37 GMT

What a (daylight) savings!

2025-10-22 15:10:40 GMT

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Since those cooling systems are not designed and maintained to keep the water drinkable, it becomes "grey water". And sure, you could have a closed system with a cooling tower, like in the nuclear plants, but that costs money, it's much cheaper to just take fresh cold water, run it through your dirty system, and get rid of it back into the river or wherever you took it from.
As usual, it doesn't have to be like that, but in practice it is because it's cheaper.

2025-10-20 12:20:16 GMT

Happy AWS is down holiday to those who celebrate!

2025-10-19 08:16:12 GMT

What if a database query language, but lower case?

2025-09-30 11:22:46 GMT

Every change is for the worse when you are perfectly adapted.

2025-08-30 19:48:34 GMT

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I don't understand why people focus on the least important and least breaking change, and ignore all the other pointless changes that Python 3 does pretty much every release, that each kill off a part of the community's tools and libraries.

2025-08-17 11:02:12 GMT

What if the world is turn-based, but we can't see it, because we have no perception of time while we wait for our turn?

2025-07-31 20:04:09 GMT

Any technical solution that is supposed to block teenagers from anything is not going to work very well, because you are facing an opponent that:
* is smarter than you,
* is very dedicated,
* has a lot of free time,
* has an extensive network of friends,
* faces no serious consequences if caught,
* outnumbers you,
* considers you an immoral crook.
You really, *really* want to have them on your side. That means education rather than control.

2025-07-31 16:09:24 GMT

The idyllic farm life looks much better on photos and movies, when you can't smell it.

2025-07-31 10:50:22 GMT

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or a cured patient is a poor customer

2025-07-31 10:14:48 GMT

Remember when medicine was about curing diseases and not managing symptoms?

2025-07-10 21:44:28 GMT

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Funny how it's fine for them to replace you with automation, but they get all upset if your automate your work yourself.

2025-07-02 21:17:10 GMT

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and that's how brown space was invented

2025-06-27 18:49:28 GMT

A day of tech support role playing. I can't decide if I hate Linux or my printer more.

2025-05-14 18:56:37 GMT

I really miss sitting with some friends and talking about how awesome something is. There are so few things left.

2025-04-24 21:16:41 GMT

I love many old SciFi books for how little politics they have, and for the fact that even when they do have politics, they are dominated by reasonable people trying to do the best they can based on available information. No feuding, no power struggles, no backstabbing or zero-sum games, no ego games. Unless it's a villain, then all that is permitted, but ultimately futile. Fairness always triumphs, even with bad endings. It's really refreshing.

2025-04-20 20:32:47 GMT

How would brutalist computing look like?

2025-04-19 15:09:59 GMT

The performance of coding assistants is a testament to how inadequate our tools are and how they make us repeat the same work over and over again, to the point where most of it can just be done using autocomplete.

2025-04-12 17:35:08 GMT

You know how the generally accepted career advice for programmers is to change jobs, or at least projects, every 2-3 years? I think this may actually explain why otherwise smart people are so easily tricked into using coding assistant tools. 2-3 years is how long it takes to really start feeling the consequences of your technical decisions. Those people never experienced it, because they keep running from the chaos they cause. Any technical debt they encounter comes from other, stupider people.

2025-03-26 09:46:47 GMT

Rest is for the weak!

2025-03-22 21:45:24 GMT

There is more cost to programming assistants than I have realized. I was recently talking with a friend, and I mentioned a new programming language that has some interesting features. The friend told me that they won't try it, because the programming assistant doesn't support it, because there aren't enough examples out there to train it.
We are literally throwing away innovation and diversity in exchange for convenience.

2025-02-25 11:05:54 GMT

You can't beat politicians with politics.

2025-01-10 22:50:27 GMT

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said piggo

2025-01-02 21:29:31 GMT

I could get used to only having to do my "hobby" job and not my "day" job.

2024-12-15 19:08:50 GMT

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When available, a trackball (the kind you use with your whole hand, not your thumb) is best for me.

2024-12-13 15:50:45 GMT

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How does Mac 2024 translate to non-Apple calendars?

2024-11-17 15:09:30 GMT

Every time an author looks at the last 50 years of history, takes what didn't change in all that time, and says it out loud, they are accused of predicting the future. This keeps happening, from Verne to Orwell, from Blues Brothers to The Simpsons.

2024-11-13 15:30:45 GMT

If you think "I know what I need to do, I just have to do it", there are two possibilities. Either you have no actual idea what doing it actually entails, and you are just lying to yourself, or that thing is not in fact what you need to do, and you are completely wrong about the whole thing.
The work that can be planned is not the real work. The goal that can be envisioned is not the real goal.

2024-11-06 20:26:54 GMT

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anarchists organize!

2024-10-26 22:40:50 GMT

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Made a start on the servo horn.
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/113/376/128/098/374/351/original/2e21bcae16bc6188.png

2024-10-25 18:15:06 GMT

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The tibias and the brackets fastening the servos to the body of the robots are going to need some more thought. I want them to snap into place, and I want to be able to disassemble the robot again if a servo needs replacing, but I don't want them to fall apart while the robot is walking.

2024-10-25 18:12:12 GMT

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Of course someone has to design it, and the first step has to be to figure out how to make the femur mate with the servo shaft. For this, I need to know the so called "spline" — the pattern of teeth on the servo shaft and on the inside of the servo horn. To discover that, I used a sharpie to add some contrast to the servo shaft, and made a photo through microscope. A quick count reveals that I have to make at total of 28 teeth. The exact dimensions of the teeth to be determined in the future.
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/113/369/409/875/226/935/original/09d32eecc989ebb2.png

2024-10-25 18:08:10 GMT

Having finally dipped my toe in the 3D printing, and having seen that I can easily order parts made of nylon, I'm now considering simplifying the Wee Bug assembly by using nylon 3D printed legs, instead of the current legs made of PCB that require two dozens of tiny screws. The nylon legs could go directly on the servo shafts, snap over the servo cases, or into the holes in the robot's body. It would greatly speed up and simplify the assembly, without rising the price that much.
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/113/369/393/399/942/193/original/32c8423b19a6dbde.jpg

2024-10-22 17:51:16 GMT

I increasingly feel like I have two jobs at work: the actual work on the project we own, that we carefully planned, and that we keep putting off because there is never enough time for it, and the bullshit tasks that our management drops on us by surprise with short deadlines and no planning, which take most of the time and energy. Sometimes I feel like I should take PTO just to have time to do the first job.

2024-10-21 13:35:49 GMT

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It's an interesting read, and since I've recently read the old "Systems of Survival" book by Jane Jacobs, I wonder if this has to do with leaning more towards one or the other of the moral syndromes (incidentally, that would also fit with the corruption).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_of_Survival

2024-10-20 19:02:23 GMT

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dat antenna...

2024-10-17 19:15:05 GMT

Linux is actually the name of the penguin. The operating system is called Linux's monster.

2024-10-13 18:21:25 GMT

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I'm so jealous when I see people complaining about Matrix, because I still haven't been able to log in, despite repeated attempts and 25 years of experience touching computers.

2024-10-13 17:50:39 GMT

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But think about the poor monster! Why does nobody think of the monsters!

2024-10-13 17:48:44 GMT

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I'm not sure, have you ever had a nightmare about yourself doing horrible things to others? It's still a nightmare, even if it's yourself doing it. In fact, it's even worse because it's yourself.

2024-10-03 18:06:59 GMT

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I'm guessing there, but I think it's because with the regular buttons, you want them to make contact no matter how they are pressed, but with the d-pad, you want it to only react to being pressed straight in that direction, and not to sideways movements. In particular, you don't want it to bounce when the finger on the d-pad moves sideways.

2024-10-02 22:03:37 GMT

I feel like there is a great need for a book about automating things. Not about a particular tool, but about the general patterns and pitfalls of automation. I've been trying to collect some patterns and anti-patterns on the topic, but it seems to me that it's such a common thing, that there should be some resources on that somewhere, or at least some research into what works and what doesn't and good practices and so on. But I haven't really seen anything like this.

2024-10-01 21:42:36 GMT

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That looks a lot like the 8bitdo.

2024-09-25 17:24:09 GMT

Did you mean "Cumbrian explosion"?

2024-09-24 22:48:09 GMT

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Are virtual pets in again?
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/113/194/962/480/153/952/original/c174a125ca854658.png

2024-09-21 09:05:29 GMT

The computers offered a great opportunity for neurodiverse people, who flocked to them and are probably greatly responsible for the computer revolution. It was the perfect mix of formal rules, immediate feedback, logical organization, and safe environment.
But today tech has become a tool of power, and it has changed. It's no longer simple or logical, and definitely not safe. It's rapidly becoming less and less appealing to the kind of people who do the actual hard work.
The normies took over.

2024-09-19 13:36:32 GMT

Here's an interesting exercise. If you were writing a novel set in the 80s, but wanted to have small useful robots common in the people's homes, what kind of invention or change to the world would be required to do it realistically?
A new kind of actuator? A dedicated processor? Power source? Economic changes? Different kinds of research dominating? Different ethics? Politics? Changes in the laws of physics? What do you think?

2024-09-19 07:17:08 GMT

Lawnmower season ends. Leafblower season opens.

2024-09-11 18:48:13 GMT

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I ported a boulderdash-like game that I previously wrote for micro:bit to to CircuitPython, and it works pretty well. I might actually try and extend it.
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/113/120/408/166/382/832/original/67d08098dffebdaf.jpg

2024-09-11 16:30:31 GMT

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It's great to be working on the same project for over a decade. You really get to experience the consequences of your own decisions, and you can really learn a lot this way.
But the deployment system is written by a bunch of 10x programmers, who cobbled it together in a half year, and are now dumping it all on us to maintain. The technical decisions are questionable at best, and we had no say in them in the first place. Now we will be responsible for them.

2024-09-11 16:27:53 GMT

I'm employed by a corporation to work on an open source project, and that's great. All our changes go upstream first.
However, in recent years we've been spending more and more time and resources on maintaining the downstream deployment system for that project, than actually contributing upstream. The project is old, more than a decade, and relatively stable — there aren't many bugs to fix, and we can add features at our own pace.
But the deployment system is a bloated monster.

2024-09-10 20:02:40 GMT

Another iteration on the classic "tiny handheld with oled screen" theme. They all look similar, but this time I used what I have learned about the power circuit. There is a boost converter, so it will run on a single regular coin cell and suck it dry. There is proper switching between battery and USB power. And since SAMD21 is hard to get these days, I instead used a Seeed XIAO board, so you can use a variety of microcontrollers.
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/113/115/035/283/058/105/original/67bf0a8ff12957ef.jpg
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/113/115/036/129/739/809/original/e53b80f307eca6e8.jpg

2024-09-09 18:19:41 GMT

There is something I really don't understand about many open source hardware designs, and that is display modules. Why do authors, who otherwise use SMD components, and dense pitch connectors, go out of their way to accommodate a huge display module on its own board, with a chunky 2.54mm pin header, and often even mounting screws, and a 3D printed support, when the same display is easily available without the board, and only requires like two capacitors, and a resistor to work?

2024-09-07 09:29:45 GMT

I had some stressful news at work yesterday, and now I'm a wreck. Didn't sleep, can't walk because of cramps, can't focus on anything. And worst of all, I have run out of the good tea. Waiting for the lawn mowers to start outside.

2024-09-05 15:22:44 GMT

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There is a nap for that!

2024-09-05 08:27:21 GMT

Here is some reading advice. If the book you are reading is getting boring, or unpleasant, or tiresome, or you just don't feel like reading it anymore, you don't have to. You can skip the boring paragraphs or chapters, or switch to a different book entirely. It's allowed.

2024-09-02 19:55:37 GMT

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Or maybe it's powered through the ESD diodes?

2024-08-21 14:37:34 GMT

You know the 10x developer? You know, that one guy on the team that writes ten times more code than everyone else, because everyone else are too busy fixing everything he breaks?
I have some great news, everyone! We have automated that guy, and put it into your code editor, so that you can be fixing the mistakes of a very confident but hopelessly incompetent developer forever!

2024-08-15 10:23:21 GMT

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Do you know what book or lecture this is from?

2024-08-14 21:57:43 GMT

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I suppose you could summarize it by "don't push ai slop at people, they are perfectly capable of generating it for themselves if they want to".

2024-08-10 08:01:40 GMT

I was thinking about moving out of hackaday.io for some time now, but never really had the energy. Recently, there is a big attack of AI scrappers on that website, so it's frequently down, so I decided to bite the bullet and do it. They provide an API for getting the data, so it was just a question of writing a few janky Python scripts to get the json files, and then one big script to generate Markdown, for use with a static site generator. I went for Sphinx+aBlog+Myst.
https://deshipu.art/
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/112/936/669/399/149/360/original/ad8f4c6461bd1679.png

2024-08-06 13:45:50 GMT

Is there a left handed community? How about color blind community? Maybe allergic to peanuts community?

2024-07-18 19:03:02 GMT

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It doesn't also help that I just spent twice the amount of the main prize on the latest prototype of my would-be entry.

2024-07-18 19:02:04 GMT

The fame and fortune is sure to come my way any time soon now, because Hackaday has mentioned one of my projects.
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/16/show-us-your-minimalist-games-and-win/
They also announced a contest, and I'm in a bit of a bind about it. On one hand, it's exactly up my alley, it's something I've been working on as a hobby for years now, and I have recently re-started work on a new version of my handheld again. On the other hand, I'm being explicitly mentioned, and I'm probably way too serious to be fair competition.

2024-07-15 14:30:09 GMT

Vegan as in dish, or vegan as in diet?

2024-07-07 08:31:02 GMT

While we struggle with robots operating in the real world, where nothing is sure, sensors are inaccurate, actuators imprecise and no assumptions can be made, we have enough knowledge and computing power to program agents operating in virtual environments like computer games. And yet somehow human players still prefer to play with other human players, and not with "bots", which can be used as an addition to the game, but not really the main opponent. I think it's enlightening to consider why.

2024-06-23 15:43:31 GMT

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it's the final countdown

2024-06-23 13:58:42 GMT

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So your salary is determined by your sex, ethnicity and immigration status? I'm not sure what you are trying to say.

2024-06-23 13:55:43 GMT

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So you are saying that is *should* be determined by supply and demand, but really isn't in practice? What determines it in practice then?

2024-06-23 13:43:10 GMT

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So pretty much difficulty, assuming there are fewer people who can do the more difficult work?

2024-06-23 09:27:22 GMT

What do you think is the main factor determining your salary?

2024-06-22 17:58:43 GMT

Is dead-naming countries a faux-pas? I always feel awkward when I read "former Czechoslovakia" or "former Yugoslavia". But you never see "former Canaan" or "former New Holland" much, somehow.

2024-06-13 10:15:34 GMT

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I thought it's implied with all crowd funding projects?

2024-05-28 12:55:04 GMT

Boss battles aren't nearly as exciting in the real world.