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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Vehicle control systems are overwhelmingly programmed in C, mostly from graphical design tools such as MATLAB Simulink via an automatic process. These are real time control systems which are quite different to an interrupt based operating system such as Linux. The many individual controllers must work in concert according to a strict architecture definition and timing schedule that defines the functionality of the vehicle. It’s not at all like a PC or phone, whose OS become irrelevant over time, with respect to their environment of other systems. The vehicle environment is the same environment that we inhabit i.e. the one with gravity, friction, charge and the other SI units. This is slowly changing with advent of self driving but, yeah.









  • The vast majority of people are techno illiterate, even within firms that make technology. A handful of people (relatively speaking) are making most of the stuff. Everyone else is just feeding that process. The legal system is set up to motivate the concealment of information about products. You cannot find the documentation to repair embedded systems, even if you have the desire to fix them and the ‘right to repair’.

    In our village we have a wildly popular ‘repair cafe’ where people bring their faulty electrical items to be repaired by volunteers. People don’t want to toss their duff appliances in landfill but we need the tools and education.


  • Products are developed and in that process technology is created. Once the technical problems have been solved, manufacturers seek to remove as much cost from the process as possible and this generally degrades the durability of the product. The biggest problem with a lot of technology is that virtually no consideration is given to the long term maintenance of the product. There’s no way to interface the system with other parts and re-use the product. We throw it away and buy the next thing because that’s good for capitalism but it’s horrible for people and the environment.







  • I stopped using PiHole, or more accurately, it stopped working with my router after my provider, TalkTalk UK, updated the firmware. I didn’t want to invest a lot of time finding a workaround so went back to application layer processes like uBlock Origin, etc.

    I’d be interested to hear from people who have something working with a Sagecom Fast 5364. I imagine it’s possible to configure it as modem only and leave routing duties to a Pi.