Jeff Epler's blog

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Due to luck, privilege, and a high savings rate, Ingrid and I felt we were getting within a few years of early retirement. In my own mind, I thought I was content to continue to work in the job I had been in since 1999, all the way until early retirement sometime in the 2020s.

There were a lot of good things about this job—I worked with several of my closest friends, the specific tasks sometimes were really engaging, and it enabled us to live without a care for money.

In the spring had I decided I might leave, but only if I found a job that felt "special". I had a few interviews with one company in the 3D printing space but I was adamant that I was staying in Lincoln and in the end the other company decided they were seeking someone to work on-site in Boston.

However, day to day life at the company was changing. Two close friends moved away and became remoties; another left to start his own business. The company, having been sold by the founder a few years earlier, had a small round of layoffs and the CEO was replaced. On the dev side, I was allocated 50% to 3 different projects for an extended period of time. ha ha not joking, though I still only clocked 40 hours of work a week, in part due to reaching a point of not caring whether I got fired or laid off. Technical debt felt insurmountable.

In June, just after the CEO was replaced, I was already coincidentally going to Seattle and had made plans to meet Scott Shawcroft (@tannewt) for coffee. I had made some small contributions to the project he heads, CircuitPython, a year earlier. I told him a little about what I was experiencing, and then asked him how he liked contract programming. Before I knew it, I'd agreed I'd put in a propsal to Adafruit to do a paid project on CircuitPython. Working for Adafruit felt like the proverbial "special" job.

Later on, I learned that in January for #circuitpython2019, Scott had written

Community is one of the defining aspects of CircuitPython and Adafruit… As we grow bigger and bigger we need to continue to empower community members to help out at every level… Specifically, I want to find more people to:

• Help create and review core C changes (aka more @danh) including:
  • Modifying the supervisor
  • Adding additional platform support
  • Supercharging the skeleton systems like audioio and displayio.
• …

is that my exact job description or what? (well, it's pretty close)

He also mentioned that Kattni would be keynoting at PyOhio, and I made plans to attend that conference the next month. Every talk I sat in somehow sent me the same message: my current job was not working for me, and I needed to make a big change. Kattni, who had already supercharged me with her talk about the importance of community, encouraged me that I should ask Adafruit for what I wanted.

I only sort of listened, asking for and getting one or two more one-off projects. But, of course, *extra* work and extra money weren't what I was looking for. I also interviewed with a remote-first contract development software company who had a booth at PyOhio. They seemed to be mostly web oriented but interested in getting into embedded/IOT space. In the end they didn't make me an offer and I was less convinced it would be a fit for me anyhow.

Then finally in August I did ask Adafruit for what I wanted: half time work on all parts of CircuitPython. They said yes the next day. For a variety of reasons, though, I didn't switch jobs until November. (I would do _that_ differently next time! Getting PTO for my Japan vacation was not worth that much) Since then, I've been doing around 20 hours a week of hacking on CircuitPython, and I've started finding the interest to do other personal projects. I've built two 3d-printed and hand-soldered keyboards, including one I designed myself. (It's my daily driver and the only thing I regret is that it works so well sometimes I forget I'm using a keyboard I designed myself!) I laser cut some designs in acrylic that I couldn't have done any other way. And I finally made a complete etched glass edge-lit display (albeit a single digit).

On the other hand, I've moved into a time of more uncertainty. Our 2020 household budget didn't entail giving up anything, except that we wouldn't be making any more retirement investments. Of course, those investments are down some obscene percentage and will probably go lower before they start to increase. So full retirement moves an indefinite distance into the future, at least as long as I choose to work only part time. (even before this Ingrid joked that we would be able to retire after the next recovery. I guess she's right)

Other "this never happened in any other year" events in the last 12 months: I've had foot surgery, eye surgery, and an unexpected dental crown breakage. Ingrid had a health scare of her own (and, thanks to high deductable health care, this is basically all out of pocket). We experienced a typhoon in Japan. Now, with COVID-19, we've canceled multiple trips, and we're worried about friends and relatives and the general condition of society over the next weeks or months. Right this second, we are under a tornado watch, unusual for this early in the spring; and then temperatures are forecast to drop like a rock and things will freeze overnight, so global climate weirding continues unabated.

However, I've taken my best old-work friends with me to new chat systems, I've got new friends at Adafruit (who are being extremely supportive of all their staff and contract workers like me even while they've had to suspend physical operations) and a local makerspace. At the moment I feel like I have the mental space to deal with "stuff".

The first time I drafted this story was a few weeks ago, and I ended with a caution against thinking you're at the end of your story--it's what kept me in a job that wasn't right for me anymore. Right now doesn't feel like a moment you'd mistake for the end of a story, but all the same we need to remember not to see ourselves as stuck. We need to examine what is going on and make the right changes to move forward.

No huge promises to keep up the blogging. But if you're interested in seeing what I'm up to in software, stalk me on github or join the Adafruit discord. You can also find me posting designs on Thingiverse when I have 3D printing ideas. I dabbled in twitter for about 5 minutes again but haha no no way not twitter.

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Six Years of Prius (2013) Fuel Efficiency

Our total distance traveled was lower again this year, as was the fuel economy. Once again, I'm disappointed with the overall fuel economy--It's the lowest number of miles, but the third from the lowest number of gallons consumed.

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Future directions for SCORPION STARE: 2022 Grant Recipients

It pleases Us to announce that the following experimental research programmes will each receive £10,000,000 guaranteed and inflation adjusted anually for three years:

Two-diode imaging (Dean, Salem, Chen)

Deep Stare (Wu, Angelov, Soleymani)

Stereo acoustic imaging (Toth, Ben-Amram, Toth)

Civilian Applications

• Chain-free "chainsaw"
• Single-use heating pads
• Assisted suicide VR Goggles
• Insect Control Cameras
• Artificial Tanning Beds

His Majesty would like to congratulate all surviving entrants for their inventive grant proposals.

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Yet another Raspberry Pi Stratum 1 NTP server

Here's what worked for me:

Start with a pi3 and raspbian stretch. Add a GPS with TTL-level PPS and 9600 baud NMEA outputs.

Hook up you GPS: GND and +3.3V or +5V (according to the specifiics of your GPS) to any matching pin, the GPS's TX output to the Pi's RX input on pin 10 of the header, and the GPS's PPS output to the Pi's pin 12. (You can hook up your GPS's RX input to the Pi's TX output on pin 8 if you like, but I don't think this is necessary)

Using raspi-config, disable the serial console and enable the serial port hardware.

Manually edit /boot/config.txt to add: dtoverlay=pps-gpio — If you have to (or prefer to) use a different pin for pps, you can apparently specify it as dtoverlay=pps-gpio,gpiopin=##, where ## is the internal numbering of the GPIO pins, not the number on the 40-pin header.

Manually edit /etc/modules and add a line that reads pps-gpio — According to some sources, this step is not necessary.

Install ntpd with apt-get.

Delete all the content in /etc/dhcp/dhclient-exit-hooks.d/ntp, leaving an empty file.

Remove the file /run/ntp.conf.dhcp if it exists.

Edit /etc/udev/rules.d/99-com.rules. On each of the two lines that ends , SYMLINK+="serial%c", append , SYMLINK+="gps%c"

Create /etc/udev/rules.d/99-ppsd.rules with the content SUBSYSTEM=="pps", GROUP="dialout", MODE="0660", SYMLINK+="gpspps%n"

In /etc/ntp.conf, add a stanza to access the GPS:

# gps clock via serial /dev/gps0 and /dev/gpspps0
server 127.127.20.0 minpoll 3 maxpoll 3 mode 16 burst iburst prefer
fudge 127.127.20.0 refid GPS time2 +.250 flag1 1

"time2" doesn't seem critical with this setup, because the PPS time is preferred over the serial reception time. "minpoll", "maxpoll", "burst" and "iburst" may be superstitious and unnecessary.

Reboot now and have a look at `ntpq -c peers`. You should see something like this:

     remote           refid      st t when poll reach   delay   offset  jitter
==============================================================================
oGPS_NMEA(0)     .GPS.            0 l    1    8  377    0.000   -0.001   0.003
+ntp.u           .GPS.            1 u    2    8  377    1.104    0.013   0.064

"GPS_NMEA" is selected as peer and is using PPS (this is what "o" in the first column means). delay, offset, and jitter should all be extremely small (Here, .001 is 1 microsecond). "ntp.u" is my other local stratum-1 NTP server. The "+" indicates it's in good agreement with the local GPS. If you use pool, you will see multiple lines here; some may have "+" and some may have "-".

If something's not working, you will get, " " (blank), "-" or "x" next to GPS_NMEA. If it's got "*" then NMEA is working but PPS isn't. Now you get to do things like debug whether the PPS signal is working properly according to ppstest, whether NMEA messages are actually coming in at 9600 baud, etc. Or you can follow one of those other guides. :wink:

Here's how the local time to GPS offset has looked over the last 10 hours or so — I find it awesome that my computer appears to be synchronized to GPS to within ±5 microseconds almost all of the time:

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Precision vs Accuracy: A Clock

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The clock, in all its glory

I was inspired by this watch face design (I think that's the original version) and by the arrival of a "OCXO", a very reliable time keeping circuit, to finally make an electronic clock.

Accuracy: Between hardware and software tuning, the OCXO keeps time with an accuracy of possibly better than 100 microseconds per day (loses or gains well less than a half second per year) (Yes, I'm deliberately ignoring a lot about crystal aging here!)

Precision: The time displayed is to the nearest minute, and the touchscreen setting mechanism is (deliberately?) poor, making it hard to set the time closer than +- 2 minutes or so. Oh, and it takes a good fraction of a second to update the screen anytime it changes. (The best way to set it seems to be to wait until a few seconds before 6AM/6PM and plug it in, since it boots with that time showing)

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Estimated accuracy of the OCXO vs GPS: 60 microseconds per day?

• A PyBoard running micropython
• A touchscreen LCD and controller
• A 10MHz OCXO frequency reference

The dial as an animation (1 revolution = 12 hours)

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Generating "Table 6" of the withdrawn SIMON-32/64 paper

The paper claimed that the break was so "dangerous" that they would not reveal the method itself; Instead, they include a table ("Table 6") which they claimed could only be created if they had in fact broken SIMON-32/64 in a way that let them recover keys based on 2 chosen plaintexts with a 2.5% (?) chance of success. They claimed that they did roughly the following:

1. Choose 4, 4-byte blocks from a chosen text (supposedly, the Project Gutenberg version of the King James Bible, AKA pg10.txt)
2. Call the first 2 blocks the "plaintext" and the second two blocks the "cyphertext". If the two plaintext blocks are equal, go back to step 1
3. Find a SIMON-32/64 key that encrypts the plaintext to the cyphertext, using their secret method
4. If such a key is found, output it

Aside from one error in Table 6, where the hexadecimal value of a cyphertext is shown incorrectly, the table does check out. (though some of the 4-grams don't appear anywhere in pg10.txt)

So, is it proof of a serious break in SIMON? No. There's another way to generate these values:

1. Choose a 64-bit SIMON key arbitrarily
2. Choose a first block of "plaintext" P1. Check if E(P1) is also a block. If not, continue with a fresh P1 value.
3. Choose a second block of "plaintext" P2 from those not yet checked. Check if E(P2) is also a block. If not, continue with a fresh P2 value.
4. If you reach this step, you have created a "Table 6" entry, with two plaintexts, two ciphertexts, and a key. The plaintext and cyphertext all come from your chosen text.
5. Repeat from step 1 until you have enough entries that you have proven your point.

In fact, without any attempt at optimization (aside from trivial parallelization), an i7-4790k can find about a thousand examples in 8 seconds; about 10% of all keys yielded at least one set of matching blocks.

There are around 48,000 distinct 4-grams in "pg10.txt", so for any given key and 4-byte plaintext, there's about a 1-in-90,000 chance for it to encrypt to some other 4-gram. Since the probability is independent for each 4-gram, the odds of getting 1 are 1/2, and the odds of getting 2 are 1/4. This extremely rough calculation but not too far off the 1/10 actually obtained.

The attached program, which adapts an implementation of SIMON from github, can be built with g++-6 on Linux. It needs "pg10.txt" in the current directory. For parallelization, pass "-fopenmp". `trolled.txt` is one possible output of the program, and the few entries that I back-checked with an independent (Python) SIMON implementation also from github.

I just hope that, whatever the authors actually did to make "table 6", it didn't really take 120 days on two cluster computers.

Update: Several commenters believe the paper takes two, 8-byte blocks from the chosen text. If this is true, then even fewer of the blocks shown actually match "pg10.txt". For instance, I based my "4, 4-byte blocks" assumption on the appearance of "LORDhard" as a cyphertext. If this is the case, then my program would take about 48,000 times longer; since when you find two texts, the odds that they're "1 location" different out of 48,000 locations is about 1 in 48,000. However, since their Table 6 is full of 8-grams (and even 4-grams) that don't come from pg10.txt, I don't feel TOO bad that my program presents examples that aren't either.

Files currently attached to this page:

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Cura vs GPX vs dual extruder temperature: A FIX!

The problem, as many have suspected, was Cura and GPX disagreeing on which "T" (hotend "tool") numbers applied to "M104" / "M109" temperature commands.

My best understanding of the problem is this:

Cura thinks that "T#" is modal only when it is the only (first?) thing on a line, while GPX thinks that e.g., "M109 T1 S200" contains a modal "T1".

This causes dual extrusion code to send temperature commands to the wrong nozzle.

This script attempts to work around the problem by tracking which "T#" lines Cura thinks are modal, and then attaching that "T#" again to any M104/M109 lines that would require it.

What seems incomplete about this story is, cura writes extrusions as "E#", which should also be moving the "T#" extruder motor. But GPX doesn't start extruding T0 with the sequence

  T1
  M104 T0 S175
  G1 F1500 E-0.6    ; retract

So something's still missing from the explanation.

The PostProcessingPlugin is released under the terms of the AGPLv3 or higher.

It works with Ultimaker Cura 4.0, but may not work with other software or versions.

On my Linux system it is installed to ~/.local/share/cura/4.0/scripts/fixtempcommands.py but your mileage may vary. The installation of cura scripts seems a bit underdocumented, or at any rate I didn't find the documentation. The location is under one of the two folders opened when you "Help > Show Configuration Folder"

Having done so, simply enable the script to post-process your gcode in "Extensions > Post Processing > Modify G-Code". Just choose the script from the "Add a script" dropdown.

Files currently attached to this page:

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Kardashev and Drake were wrong: The galaxy is full of hard to detect, slow-growing civilizations

Nikolai Kardashev created the Kardashev Scale to characterize civilizations by how much power they use—from a "Type I" civilization which captures all the solar energy falling on their home planet, to a "Type III" civilization which captures the whole effective power of a whole galaxy. In the early 21st century, we are far short of even being "Type I" (so we're effectively "Type 0"), but the future story we imagine for ourselves is exponential growth. Population has grown by, say, an order of magnitude in the last 400 years (from 800 million to 8 billion, give or take), so we should only need some 10,000 years to get to "Type III" when we simply assume continued exponential growth.

Unfortunately, without impossible future-physics warp drive, it is optimistic to think we could cross the galaxy once in a million years (at .2c, say), so somewhere in the next 10,000 years our exponential growth has to stop, constrained by the cubic way that light cones work.

A variant of this "we must expand" directive is assumed by the Drake Equation: a long-lived civilization is, by definition, so big it can't help but "leave its mark" on its containing galaxy in the form of radio signals, if nothing else. Superficially, it seems there should be many such civilizations, and they should be easy to detect if they are hard-wired for exponential growth like us, since they and their artifacts should be literally everywhere.

The Fermi Paradox, then, invites us to explain why we have no evidence of these other civilizations.

I think the answer is simple: Exponential growth, like a viral infection, is unstable. Whether it's on a scale of 10 or 400 generations, there is a final wall (a "great filter", in Fermi's terms). Only growth that is polynomial or less is sustainable on million-year timescales, particularly if (in a galaxy full of life) you actually bump fairly quickly into another civilization with a moral and/or de facto claim on the resources in some other region of space.

So we end up with a galaxy that looks like a Liu's The Dark Forest: quiet civilizations growing in volume and power consumption not at all, or only at logarithmic rates. Any hint of exponential growth, or possibly even polynomial growth, would require a response. For all we know, such a response was set in motion circa 1800 (when the atmospheric changes of the industrial revolution could have been detected) in the form of a diverted near-earth asteroid, scheduled to hit around 2100.

There must be a story in this somewhere, here's one sketch: Circa 2100, the earth's surface was rendered uninhabitable by asteroid impact. However, the nascent Mars colony and some orbital habitations survived, and by 2240 are on somewhat stable footing and ready to restart exponential growth through the solar system and into the Oort cloud. Society looks like we think it should: multicultural, accepting of all genders and sexual identities, egalitarian, access to health care, etc. Our point of view character will be a young person just coming of age in the largest city on Mars, presently on a solo tour of the solar system to rival Golden Age science fiction.

While flying by some geologically interesting moon, our narrator's ship is struck by some matter ejected from the surface. This matter forms itself into a duplicate of our narrator, and at length they learn to communicate. Let's call the alien Alice and the narrator Bob, just to make everything simpler.

Just like Bob is coming of age in the human society of Mars, Alice is (was) coming of age in their own society. Alice's society are also a bunch of exponentials who evolved in the upper atmosphere of Jupiter. But their philosopher-scientists saw the trap of exponential growth and found a solution: They adapted themselves to live at ever-slowing rates, most recently building organic computers to survive deep in the atmosphere of Jupiter, simulating a society of a trillian Jovians at a rate of about 1 day per 1,000 real-time years.

Alice, having accelerated themselves to realtime (and beyond, when they were learning Bob's language), is considered a criminal in their society and can never return without facing the punishment of being slowed all the way to zero until they have paid back all the time they "stole".

At risk of becoming too didactic, Alice tells Bob everything that is known about different societies: The exponentials, who mostly flash and fade; the polynomials, young races who may yet adapt and last; the logarithmic, long-lived civilizations who form the backbone of galactic governance; and the rumored constants, who long ago disappeared, perhaps into quantum computing devices made of dark-matter.

In any case, Alice tells Bob that if they continue to display exponential growth as a species capable of space travel, there will be terrible and large-scale retaliation from galactic culture, such as the catalyzed supernova of Sol itself; as Alice's species would end up as collateral damage, the Jovians would be in the unfortunate position of having to commit genocide against the humans first, just for self-preservation. Presumably some mid-level Jovian military types are also (lawfully) accelerated to real-time to monitor the situation.

A narrative discontinuity, and Bob is recovered from their wrecked space ship, with no sign of Alice (or is it the other way around?). Here ends the novella.

If the story should continue, we might see Bob trying to effect political change among the humans, or hear the problems faced by Alice's species' scientists, who have the eternal problem of growing their computing capacity with ever-decreasing subjective time creating impossible deadlines. (Or are the scientists lawfully accelerated, like the military?) How about drawn out parliamentary scenes where the logarithmic species debate how to deal with the infestation in Sol System? Or perhaps we go on a wild goose change for the vanished constants, believing they have the secret of zero-point energy or the like.

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Hello, Allo

Another Qidi Tech I update

Linux: don't wake display on mouse motion

The Drake-Howard Equation

Re: Ideas box submissions

Qidi Tech I

Five Years of Prius (2013) Fuel Efficiency

Pierre, 2001-2017; Marie, 2001-2018