I missed last week. I have been extremely under the snow; just a ridiculous amount of work. My therapist actually flagged up that I might be overworking myself. Not great.

No article today either, I’m writing this in the tiny little pockets of free time I have on the day this will go out.

Today is going to be short. Let’s get into it!

8020 sometimes refers to the aluminium extrusion size, sometimes to the fact that someone’s using aluminium extrusions

Sizes are 20, 30, 40 in mm. A 4040 mm extrusion would be 40mm by 40mm, a 2020 would be 20mm by 20mm. 8020 would be 20mm by 80mm, a big slab.

Or just … the fact that you’re using aluminium extrusions at some size.

EL tapes and plates are a thing, you can have glowing strips on clothing

EL stands for electroluminescence. You can buy plates and tapes and glue them onto clothing. What type of glue you use matters! Has to be flexible, and the type that doesn’t cloud plastic. Superglue is out.

CR123 and CR123A batteries are mostly the same

CR123 is the name of the format: size, voltage, chemistry. The “A” is a chemistry/capacity revision. In practice most CR123 batteries are going to be CR123A variants.

Pilots in the UK use the IMSAFE checklist

Illness - don’t fly ill

Medication - don’t take meds that alter your mind

Stress - don’t fly stressed

Alcohol - don’t fly under the influence

Fatigue - don’t fly sleep deprived

Eating - don’t fly hungry

Go version and toolchain version are not the same

Go version: absolutely use this version at minimum, my code depends on it, without it it will not work.

Toolchain version: Ideally use this version, but the Go version requirements are not super strict.

Go version can be older than toolchain, the other way around it can’t.

Toolchain is used for security fixes usually, though if your code has Go version 1.26.3, and toolchain 1.26.4 that fixes vulnerabilities in .3, others using your code as a module can still compile it with 1.26.3, which would reintroduce those vulnerabilities.

See https://medium.com/@alif_biswas/why-your-go-mod-has-two-versions-go-and-toolchain-go-996f8065482e and https://go.dev/doc/toolchain.

Being in a high radiaton zone won’t kill you immediately

I bought a spicy rock detector: a Radiacode 102. One of the reasons I decided on that vs the Zero is that it has spectography, whereas the Zero does not.

The Zero can detect significantly higher doses of radiation where the 102 already tops out. That’s measured in Sv/h (Sievert per hour).

As it’s a dose, the important part is how much radiation you accumulate: low radiation → you can be there longer to hit your limit. High radiation → time window goes down.

You can tell what a rock is by the taste of its spice

As the RadiaCode 102 does spectography, you can sort of see what emissions different materials have: they will show up as spikes on a graph.

The graph is KeV, kilo electronvolts, and each source will emit photons at a different energy level. You can measure that, put them on the graph, and you can infer what it might be, depending on the resolution.

That resolution is FWHM – Full Width at Half Maximum. Instead of having a single thin line at the exact KeV for the rock, it kind of measures around it. The lower resolution the higher the scatter, the harder it is to figure out what the emissive rock is.

Nuclear physics are fun!

That’s it for this week. Next week I’ll have significantly more time to gather information. Right now my Claude subscription is mostly sitting unused, which I’m unhappy about, but life, uh … finds a way.

Let me know if you found this useful, forward it to those who are nerds like me (and you), and hit the usual like and subscribe buttons.

Until next week! Loveyoubai! ❤️