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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: December 26th, 2023

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  • The actual difference between a working new mouse and a failing double click mouse is in the button itself (mechanical parts are almost always the problem).

    However, it is not some exotic failure mode. All mechanical switches have a “bounce”, where the contact makes and breaks a few times before settling into the connected position. Switches are typically designed to make the actual contact spring loaded (which is the origin of the click sound you here). As they age, this mechanism degrades, making the bouncing problem worse.

    However, this is a well understood problem that any electrical engineer should be familiar with. One solution is to install a filter capacitor. Now it takes longer to switch between the on and off state, so the inherent bounce in the switch is smoothed out to the point where you cannot detect it.

    They probably did testing with a new switch, and decided that they didn’t need to include any explicit debounce component, ignoring the fact that the switch would degrade over its lifetime.



  • In addition to the raw compute power, the HP laptop comes with a:

    • monitor
    • keyboard/trackpad
    • charger
    • windows 11
    • active cooling system
    • enclosure

    I’ve been looking for a lapdock [0], and the absolute low-end of the market goes for over $200, which is already more expensive than the hp laptop despite spending no money on any actual compute components.

    Granted, this is because lapdocks are a fairly niche product that are almost always either a luxury purchase (individual users) or a rounding error (datacenter users)

    [0] Keyboard/monitor combo in a laptop form factor, but without a built in computer. It is intended to be used as an interface to an external computer (typically a smartphone or rackmounted server).




  • At a $188 price point. An additional 4GB of memory would probably add ~$10 to the cost, which is over a 5% increase. However, that is not the only component they cheaped out on. The linked unit also only has 64GB of storage, which they should probably increase to have a usable system …

    And soon you find that you just reinvented a mid-market device instead of the low-market device you were trying to sell.

    4GB of ram is still plenty to have a functioning computer. It will not be as capable of a more powerful computer, but that comes with the territory of buying the low cost version of a product.




  • Back when I was learning, I made a flashcard program. It had a class that was essentially a constant array, so you could call get(int i), and it would return an object describing both sides of the card.

    How did I implement such a class you ask? First, I made a spreadsheet with 2 collumns to hold the data, with a third collumn of incrementing integers. Then, in the 4th column, I used string concatanation to right a java if statement that compared a variable against the index collumn; and if they match, return an object constructed from the 2 data columns.

    Click and drag the 1 cell I wrote in the 4th collumn to replicate it in all the rows, then copy and paste the 4th collumn into notepad++.

    I’d like to say I’ve moved past this; but my most successful projects have mostly been code generation ones; so really I’ve just moved past Excell.