Open Hardware and Programming Leftovers
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Open Hardware/Modding
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Doug Brown ☛ Fixing more cheap Altera USB Blaster clones: CPLD adventures
As you may remember from my last post on the subject, I fixed a couple of cheap Altera USB Blaster clones in June. I found improved open-source firmware and ported it to the previously useless CH552G-based one while fixing a bug in the process, and I soldered a slower 12 MHz oscillator into the Waveshare FT245+CPLD blaster which magically made it start working reliably in Linux.
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Hackaday ☛ OSHW Model Rocket Kit Embraces The Hexagon
If you’ve ever built a model rocket, you’ll know there’s not a whole lot to them. Essentially it’s a cardboard tube, a plastic nosecone, some fins, and a little clip that will keep it riding the launch rail as it accelerates off the pad. Extra points awarded if you add in a parachute, but strictly speaking, even that’s a luxury. Stick an Estes motor in that thing and send it.
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Programming/Development
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Rlang ☛ Using describeBy() in R: A Comprehensive Guide
Using describeBy() in R, When working with data in R, it’s often necessary to calculate descriptive statistics for each column in a data frame, grouped by a particular column.
This can be a tedious task, especially when dealing with large datasets. Fortunately, the describeBy() function from the psych package in R makes this process much easier.
In this article, we’ll explore how to use describeBy() to calculate descriptive statistics for each column in a data frame, grouped by a character column.
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Tim Kellogg ☛ Accountants Should Do Hackathons!
That’s hacking!
1. He had a problem
2. He built a solution
If you want real business problems solved, enable the person experiencing the problem to solve their own problem.
In a corporate setting, if he couldn’t solve his own problem, he’d have to draw up a funding request with ROI figures and then gain alignment from a software team. But how can you calculate ROI before you even know if it works? This project simply wouldn’t have happened.
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Tailscale ☛ The New Internet
Instead, the tech industry has evolved into an absolute mess. And it’s getting worse instead of better! Our tower of complexity is now so tall that we seriously consider slathering LLMs on top to write the incomprehensible code in the incomprehensible frameworks so we don’t have to.
And you know, we old people are the ones who have the context to see that.
It’s all fixable. It doesn’t have to be this way.
Before I can tell you a vision for the future I have to tell you what I think went wrong.
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Python
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Jeff Triplett ☛ Jeff Triplett's Micro.blog
I spent a few hours this week working with the Ollama project and trying to get tool calling to work with the LangChain library.
Tool calling is a way to expose Python functions to a language model that allows them to be called. This will enable models to perform more complex actions and even call the outside world for more information.
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