domain:ashallowalcove.substack.com
Okay long summer outdoors stuff is winding down. Back to Tron bike lighting!
Seems like I fried my ESP32-C3 by over-tightening the adjustment screw on the 12v step-down converter. Apparently if you break the screw it just kind of wobbles and the "5v" you're reading right now might change in an instant.
Then I broke a second buck converter doing this same oven-tightening before realizing the ESP32 was already fried anyway.
Electricity is kind of unforgiving :/
I did one of these successfully for the proof of concept but I guess forgot or got sloppy in the intervening months. On the bright side, everything involved is only $2-4 each!
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
45m ago
Thanks for this. I grew up in the Deep South but with California parents, mostly irreligious and a mild political divide (red dad, blue mom). My dad the provider, my mom raised us to be broadly liberal, in maybe the best way. I grew up thinking of old stodgy conservatives and young fresh liberals, but not quite in those terms. Around 14 or 15 I had a heavy influence from a big leftist peer, though I didn't recognize this at the time, but also developed my libertarian instincts from a high school history teacher slash debate coach.
I went to college and 9/11 hit, and it was big rightward shift. Atheism, Sam Harris, Muslims, Terrorists. Sam Harris of course at this time is nowhere near the right and remains so IMHO. But I had never considered ROTC or CIA or FBI and all of a sudden these are interesting to me. At this time, I am starting to get psyched about shock-and-awe, learning about M-16s and M-4s and AR-15s, but also drinking Sierra Nevadas and going to Phish shows.
For lack of any wrap-up I'll end here.
I think the case for hope, and the reason I've never been much of a doomer about Trump, is that he's taking up oxygen that could be going to an actual fascist, or some other effective representative of the forces of evil. My bitterest political opponents have decided to spend all their energies pumping up a petulant old windbag who's all bark and hardly any bite. Not to mention his cult of personality becoming synonymous with their values means that his death - which is, in the grand scheme of things, imminent - will deal a tremendous blow to the entire way the Red Tribe is organized. Trump is not Hitler, and to the extent that one is worried about the prospect of an American Hitler in principle, one should therefore be very thankful that Trump is hogging the spotlight. He's like a kind of tyranny lightning-rod, collecting the loyalty of everyone who'd support an actual dictator while having very low odds of actually declaring a dictatorship. Long may he continue to do so.
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