Other What currently makes your life awesome?

KiCad, from what I gather it's got a lot better over the last couple of years. I've not really got any experience with any other design software like Eagle or Altium, so I really can't make any comparisons. Contextual Electronics does a good overview of KiCad in the 'Getting to Blinky' series. The circuit itself in the series is rudimentary even for me - it just makes an LED blink using a 7555 - but it does cover the basics of using KiCad.

Before I packed all this in a couple of years ago, I was planning to make a handheld console using a Raspberry Pi Compute Module. Very tempted to pick it up again, but all I really have is a multimeter and a soldering station. I'd need an oscilloscope, a bench power supply, and possibly rework station... That cost starts to add up quickly...

 

...

 

Too late, I saw the email notification

 

Started with a home brewer's set today. In roughly a month I'll drink my first self-made beer.

Also, this weather is just beautiful. Sitting outside in the sun for the rest of the early afternoon, then live footy on the telly for the first time in months.

 

@MLyons I actually like the carboard box design too.

 

Me too, cheap, easy to make, easy to fix. I would suggest using a sharper knife or scissors in future though.

 

This made me laugh stupidly yesterday and caused my brother in law to log off Discord in a mood.

We recently started playing Warzone because of the new Anti-Cheat measures, it's actually now an enjoyable game.

Recently Discord have added the feature to use Webcams when your chatting, so we have been using it quite a lot the group of people I play games with and it's been funny for them seeing me rage at being killed by a cheater in PUBG

So for a few years now, I have been warning my brother in law about Cheat Engine because whilst it may have uses in certain use cases where it doesn't affect anyone else it can be used for some pretty naughty things and I told him he is going to get banned from a game sooner or later.

On Saturday we were playing Warzone, it was litterally the first time we have ever played it and we played 2 games, we all logged off for a bit and then I played a couple of solo games, then yesterday he played a couple of solo games in the morning.

Yesterday afternoon we all decided to play the game, and it just wouldn't find a game for us, it was just basically jumping to finding a game at <350ms ping so we stopped searching thinking the game was broken and we went to PUBG.

Later we went back to Warzone and it was still doing the same with me as the lobby leader, so I started searching google to see what was going on, and low and behold I find a thread on reddit saying that if that happens you have have been shadowbanned.

I was about to say to everyone, try finding a solo game to see who was banned but before I could my brother in law left and it found a game for me and our mate straight away, he tried to find a solo game and it went straight to <350ms.

I burst out laughing and he could see my face followed by the words "I told you *!@% so, I told you that would get you banned 1 day" and it's happened.

Now he has got to wait and see if it's just a suspension or a perma ban but he was/is not happy about it, but I said to him later that if you use something like that then you are bound to get banned eventually even if you didn't use it for the game you are banned in.

So why post this in here, well it's simply because he is now simply so annoyed by this which makes me feel awesome because he finally might start listening to me when I say don't run certain software.

 

Pro tip, mark pin 1 on those connectors (a numeral or arrow works well) as future you will hate past you otherwise (as I've learnt the hard way too many times )

 

It's common for pin 1 to have a square pad instead of a round one. See the 8-pin chip "U1" in the pic.

 

I marked the pin names on the silkscreen in a later revision

I did kinda screw up with the microcontroller header since I didn't mark any of those pins. But there are 30 of them and I got bored! . Thankfully the SCART socket is keyed, so can't go in any other way...

Also this

 

After literal years of trying, the difficulty being pushed up (Seriously.. Was Legendary necessary, 343?) I finally got "Look Out For the Little Guys" on Halo CE.

 

I had to look that up, and chuckled!

Did you do it the hard way, or by getting a second player to kill them for you?

 

Hard way, of course!

The successful play through was a hair under an hour, largely because I spent a lot of time waiting for the flood and the convenant to kill each other before mopping up survivors.

 

The barn owl is back

 

An issue that I've been chasing my tail on for the last two or three weeks (Partly because the customer is working short hours and my primary contact is only available for four hours a day..) has finally been acknowledged as a SAP issue. As well as not being as dramatic as first thought.

That is a massive load off.

 

I'm playing Skyrim, the first game I've played in seven years

(it's of course, very good)

 

Yay !

 

Is that the 27 of 33 previously discussed but now actually 'in hand'...?

 

Yeah. It came earlier with Fedex.