So this went well… The Intel 4004 microprocessor has slightly weird power supply requirements by modern standards. You see, it needs to be supplied with +5V DC, and -10V DC at the same time to work. Now, I found this example circuit in someone else’s project: Which to me looked quite a lot like these…
New Scientist Instant Expert: Human Origins
This book triggered my weak spot. There I was wandering in a book store and it caught my eye. The combination of the promise of instant expertise and and interesting topic area was too much for my already notably poor impulse control with books and a purchase was made. Covering from our distant origins from…
Colony One Mars
I bought this book because Amazon recommended it to me and it got good reviews. There’s a lesson there somewhere. You see, I didn’t realise when I bought it that the book is self published, and its a little bit… awkward. Its little things, like clearly needing an editorial pass to make the phrasing flow…
Project Orion
I was quite excited when this book arrived. It’s a bit old (early 2000s) and therefore a bit hard to find, so when Amazon randomly had a “new” copy I snapped it up. This copy is definitely unread, but yet still yellowed with time and the binding is a bit sad. Project Orion is the…
Non-fiction books you really should read
I read a lot of books, mostly fiction. That said, occassionally I come across a non-fiction book that genuinely changes how I think about something. In general I can tell those books a while later, because they’re the ones I keep referring people to over and over. So here’s a list of the non-fiction books…
Providing stable EBS volume device files
So I had a little adventure at work today and I am sure this is going to come up again. Imagine that you have an AWS instance with more than one EBS volume attached. On modern instance types, the EBS volumes appear as NVMe device files, but the naming of the device files is not…
Issues building Kolla images with recent versions of Python requests
If you find yourself having issues building Kolla docker container images with errors like this: INFO:kolla.common.utils:Using engine: docker INFO:kolla.common.utils:Found the container image folder at /home/mikal/src/kerbside-patches/venv-stable/2023.1-patches/share/kolla/docker ERROR:kolla.common.utils:Unable to connect to container engine daemon, exiting INFO:kolla.common.utils:Exception caught: Error while fetching server API version: Not supported URL scheme http+docker It is likely that you’re running a recent version…
The Innovator’s Dilemma
So David at work has been talking about this book quite a lot recently, and that meant I had to read it despite the failure of Debugging to delight me. Interestingly, the book starts by telling the story of the hard disk industry, which aligns well with Chip War’s approach of telling the story of…
Chip War
I think it was Hugh who recommended this book. I’m greatful as it was an excellent read and definitely didn’t make me duck over to eBay to buy an Intel 4004 chip set to play with. The book uses the backdrop of our current struggles to retain supremacy in high tech manufacturing versus an ambitious…
Dust
Hugh Howey is a master of suspense and as a result I found this book hard to read — it’s clear things are off the rails and characters I care about are going to get harmed (another Howey trademark it seems), but you just have to keep on marching through. As a result I found…