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Working on a Christmas gift. I got the wood scrap, but I think it’s walnut. Eventually planning to polyurethane and fill in the engraving with black paint, but I’m stuck on how/weather to stain it.

I have a few stains from various projects, but on a sample piece they showed up really dark, and didn’t show the texture that well. It’s a little too late to do boiled linseed oil.

What would you recommend?

I’m working on driving a very finicky lcd. I have it working now with an FPGA dev kit. I had to use an FPGA because some of the timing requirements are in the tens of nanoseconds.

At the end of the day, I wrote a block for a one shot/continuous clock with a programmable duty cycle and initial delay. This block was repeated six times for the various clocks with their specific values.

Moving to the final product, this feels like overkill. In the past, I’ve managed to make this kind of thing work with a Rube Goldberg collection of on-board timer/counters on the microcontroller.

I’d like to avoid that mess this time around. If I can generate the clocks externally, I can have the host MCU send the data quickly using DMA.

An FPGA works great, but they’re expensive and there’s the issue of licensing for FPGA and and CPLD software.

I’ve seen this problem solved with a lookup table, but there aren’t a lot of cheap/small rom/ram options for what I’m trying to do.

Basically, what I’m asking is is there a component that can be easily programmed to generate a number of clocks, doesn’t need any costly software licensing, and comes in a very small package? (Like wlcsp)

Just finished 12 Minutes and Indika with my wife. Enjoyed the tight 5-ish hour gameplay with decent not-too-challenging puzzles and great story.

Basically 5-hour date night that’s more engaging than a movie.

Any other games that you can recommend in this category?

Given the amount of pull individual influencers have managed to amass over the last decade, it looks like the original 1985 prediction aged better than this 2009 rebuttal.

Back in my day, you could usually sip a few mA from a USB2 port without any trouble.

When I try that now, Windows pops up with a “device not recognized” error. I know you can draw up to 150mA before enumeration, but it looks like after some time, Windows will complain that you haven’t enumerated yet.

Is there an easy way to keep from getting this error without having to actually make the device smart?

I’m hoping for something dumb along the lines of USB-PD but facing the other direction. For the record, it has to work on a USB-A port, so USB-C hacks won’t work.

Just curious because I don’t see people talk about it a lot.

I've been dumbphoning since March 2023, but my wife isn't 100% on board. She has shown some interest in going dumb for certain outings though.

Unfortunately, she has an iPhone 14 Pro which (in the US at least) is eSIM only. I looked into Verizon's numbershare, and picked up a Palm phone, but in addition to being a complete piece of trash, it's also not entirely dumb.

Is there a method for switching Verizon accounts from eSIM to physical SIM or temporarily forwarding all calls/texts to a new number easily? Like the kind of thing that might be as quick as physically swapping a SIM?

Like why do I feel like I’m supposed to be able to name the seven boroughs? I can’t tell you anything about L.A., Chicago, Boston, etc.

Edit: to clarify: I mean that everyone in America are expected to know NYC. Not just New Yorkers. Obviously everyone should know the layout of where they live.

I'm working on a mod kit for a popular item, but my target audience isn't likely to have a soldering iron. The majority of the project connects to an exposed ribbon connector, but I need to short two terminals to force a power supply on.

Any ideas on a method I could provide for people who can't solder? Maybe a strip of copper tape?

I dumped the ROM out of a piece of retro-tech and have been working through the code in Ghidra. Unfortunately, I can’t exactly decompile it because I don’t think it was originally written in a higher level language.

For example, the stack is rarely used and most functions either deal entirely in global variables, or binary values are passed back using the carry or other low-level bits. Trying to turn it into C would just make spaghetti code with a different sauce.

So my current plan is to just comment every subroutine as best I can, but that still leaves a few massive lookup tables that should be dropped into a spreadsheet of some sort to add context. Not to mention schematics.

My question is what’s the best way to present all of this? I’d like to open-source the result, so a simple PDF is not ideal. I guess I should make a GitHub project? Are there any good examples or templates I can draw on?