# Notes ## Action cams, underwater domes: https://www.amazon.com/Diving-Trigge-Underwater-Waterproof-Accessories/dp/B08L68TJ72/r https://www.amazon.com/GEPULY-Waterproof-Housing-Underwater-Photography/dp/B08TTP2KB8 ## birding update: don'ts - dye in hummingbird feeders, bread, etc seagulls t-shirts bird nerd ## terms EPC Earnings Per Click: an affiliate marketing term that refers to the average amount of money you earn each time someone clicks one of your affiliate links. CVR Conversion Rate: a marketing metric that tells you how many users are converting on your website AOV Average Order Value. This is an eCommerce metric that indicates the average amount a customer spends during each transaction. GMV Gross Merchandise Volume: shows the total sales value for merchandise sold through a marketplace over a specific time frame. CPA Cost per acquisition: financial metric that is used to measure the revenue impact of marketing campaigns CAC Customer Acquisition Cost: see above # Scratch packages 18x18x18 10lbs # ifixit Hub Solder Iron The right to repair movement has a catchy name, but before you can worry about the right to repair, you need the ability to repair. If you don't know how to take your device apart, there's no since worrying about whether it's legal to do so. Without basic repair skills, and a helping of innate curiosity, the right to repair is useless. This is where ifixit's new Hub Soldering Iron enters the fray. ifixit, a longtime support of the right to repair, with thousands of tutorials online to help you actually repair things, is now making a soldering iron to help you roll up your sleeves and get into the physical world of repair. ## Soldering I grew up around soldering. My father built his own tube-powered ham radio gear, but for whatever reason I never actually did any soldering until rather late in my repair life. An electrician friend of mine was appalled that I didn't solder on a regular basis and gifted me a bare bones soldering iron, which was all I had for an embarrassingly long time. While a cheap soldering iron is better than no soldering iron, I've come to think the reason many people are intimidated by soldering is cheap soldering pens. Cheap tools are the source of many a problem, but with soldering irons the big one is that they don't get hot enough, which makes the solder stick to the tip rather than flowing nicely where you want it. Cheap irons also lack interchangeable tips, which make soldering easy by tailoring the shape to your application. iFixit's new Hub Soldering iron is actually several products. The core is the Smart Soldering Iron for $80. It's powered by USB-C, and comes with beveled 1.5 mm tip. (there are currently six other tips available, and more coming over time. Then there's the Portable Soldering Station for $250 which includes the iron and a battery pack designed for the iron. The final option is the everything version, the $300 Soldering Toolkit which includes the iron, the battery pack, along with useful tools like wire strippers, flush cutters, solder, flux, holder cleaner and more. I tested the latter. The thing that jumps out at you the most when first opening the kit is the magnetic cap. This is a thing of genius. Not only does it cover the tip, you can put it on even when the tip is hot and it will automatically power down to the idle temperature (which you can set in the app). Every soldering iron should have a cap like this and this feature alone makes iFixit's soldering iron great for beginners. There are other user-friendly features too, like an LED light system that warns you when the iron is hot, motion sensors to detect when it set it down for a while (which cause it to automatically shut off). The motion sensors can also detect if you drop it and again shut it off automatically. I tested all three of these features and they worked without issue. Ergonomically the iFixit soldering iron is comfortable to hold, and the trianglular grip means it won't go rolling around if you set it down for a second. The body itself is spare, with just a power button and tk. I love the locking USB-C cable at the top, which ensures you won't accidentally unplug it. I don't currently have an board-based projects to test the iron with, but I soldered a few wires together and fixed a balance lead wire on a home built lithium battery which I've been avoiding because it felt like a job that was too fine for my soldering iron. In every case what impressed me most was how fast the iron was ready to go. Remove the tip and it's ready to go almost instantly (somewhere between 3 and five seconds in my testing). Because I live off primarily solar power, which is mainly (most efficiently) delivered via 12V wall outlets, I have always wanted a USB-C iron. Alas, I don't have any wall outlets that can deliver the needed 100W of power. Luckily iFixit's battery pack solves the problem. But before I get into the battery pack and accessories, a word on the tips. They aren't interchangable with similar USB-C irons like the Miniware or open source Pinecil. The problem is that iFixit's soldering iron is delivering 100W of power while other only manage 60W or 80W. One one hand it's nice that this thing can deliver 100W, because it heats up faster and gets hotter. But it is disappointing not to be able to swap tips if you have a bunch from other irons (unlike traditional soldering iron tip, USB-C powered soldering iron tips the temperature sensor and heater core inside the actual tip). iFixit is selling additional tips for $20 each (which is cheaper than some competitors). If you opt to get the 55 watt-hour battery combo kit, you've got a nice, truly portable soldering station. The battery pack has two USB-C outputs, which churn out provide 100W of power. The unit can also skip the battery and provide passthrough power if it's plugged into a wall outlet. The power pack is also where you can set the temperature of the iron with a good old fashioned knob rather than the web interface. This design is probably going to be main complaint about this iron from those with more soldering experience, namely that there's no way to adjust temperature on the iron, like you can with the tiny, and popular, Penicile. Personally I almost never adjust temperature on the fly. I set the temp for whatever solder I'm using and pretty much leave it there. Because of that I found adjusting the temp through the web-based interface to be easy enough that it didn't bother me. That said, it would be nice to be able to access this interface through the phone. At the moment iFixit's tool depends on the WebSerial protocol which is currently only supported by the desktop version of Chromium browsers (so Chrome, Edge, Vivaldi, etc). iFixit is working on a way to control it via your phone, but at the moment that doesn't work. As you would expect iFixit's soldering iron is user repairable. The company even includes a screwdirver and spudger to help you take it apart. I took apart both the iron and the battery pack and am happy to say there it was incredibly simple, there's no weird glues or anything like that. I think what iFixit has made here is incredibly well designed and goes a long way toward making soldering more approachable for newcomers, which is what iFixit CEO Kyle Weins tells WIRED was a big part of the project -- demystifying soldering. To that end I think this makes a great way to get started soldering. It's on the pricier side for the all-in-one combo package, but it's all you're ever likely to need and it's repairable. This is also just about the only soldering tool I'd be comfortable gifting should you have a repair enthusiast on your gift list. --- Eventually, frustrated by my cheapo for the thousandth time, I upgraded to a slightly nicer soldering setup with a stand (an older version of [this Weller](https://www.amazon.com/Weller-Digital-Soldering-Station-Precision/dp/B09XZBWJ5H/)), but as a tool I never gave it much thought beyond that. That's where But to be more than a consumer of stuff, to not be dependent, you must first believe that you can repair it. That willingness to try—in spite of, or to spite, the stickers—is where it starts, whether you’re trying to fix your laptop or replace your head gasket. One of the cornerstones of repairing any digital device is soldering, a basic repair skill far too few of us pocess. # Outdoor Gift Guide Buying gifts for the outdoor enthusiast is damn near impossible. Your outdoorsy friends are probably gear heads, meticulously pouring over reviews, guides, and the perennial wisdom of ounce-counting, basement-dwelling Reddit users to find THE EXACT RIGHT THING. The chances of you picking THE EXACT RIGHT THING for them as a gift is exactly zero. Don't even try. Instead, buy them one of these thoughtful, always-useful, sometimes whimsical things that are almost guaranteed to not only delight them, but actually be used. Everyone who spends times outdoors needs more merino wool socks. I don't care how many you have, you can never have too many. There's also the chance that your outdoorsy friend of loved one doesn't yet know the genius of good merino socks. Allow me to wax poetic for a moment about merino wool. Okay, I'll spare you, just read our guide to the best merino wool instead. Suffice to say that aside from buying nothing, wool socks are the best gift . We've been testing socks for years now, and Darn Tough remain some of our favorites. They're technically good -- high in wool, low in synthetic fibers, though there is enough in there so they have a nice stretch to them (and note that not all Darn Touch socks are merino, so read the label. Trillium hammock Water bottle hatchet knife Minus33 sweatshirt Snow Peak Titanium French Press Darn Tough socks (bombas for adrienne) Laws Guide to Nature Journaling notebook field notes waterproof binoculars onX subscription Local hiking guide evergoods packing cubes Black Diamond Mission MX Mitts (chris) Opinel No.12 JBL speaker from: https://www.wired.com/gallery/best-bluetooth-speakers/ A donation in their name to a local outdoor group. jefferson's bourbon: https://jeffersonsbourbon.com/whiskeys/jeffersons-ocean-bourbon/ nomad grill # Darktable One of the great myths of free software (free as in freedom, not necessarily free as in beer) is that if it doesn't work the way you like, you can take the code, modify it to suit your needs, and go on your merry way. This is the cornerstone of the Free Software Foundations argument for why free software is better than proprietary software. While this is technically true -- the provisions for copying, modifying, and redistributing are governed by the licence -- it ignores the social reality that there is more to software than code. The code is perhaps the least important part of a software project, particularly a large software project. The other two elements, the human elements, the developers and the users are the important part of software. These are the two elements that determine the fate of the code. While there are doubtless exceptions, most major project splits I've witnessed have been related to personalities within the project more than the capabilities of the code. Think LibreOffice, which spun off of OpenOffice in major part because the developers wanted a more egalitarian project structure, or NextCloud, which was forked from OwnCloud in part because, again, there were cultural differences between developers and the parent company. There are plenty of other examples. WordPress forked from b2, MariaDB, from MySQL, Tenacity from Audacity. In every case the project that ends up continuing is the one that draws in the most developers and consequently users. Software without developers quickly dies. This is obvious. What's less obvious is that software without users quickly does the same. Developers need users. The relationship between the two is what makes software more than code, more human. When we make something public a certain amount of control of that thing slips out of our hands. This is true of any writing, software, fiction, even this column will no longer be exclusively mine once it leaves my notebook. Somewhere in the process of publishing it, I fade to the background, the reader comes to the foreground. What matters now isn't what I have written, but what you think of it. These words don't belong to you in a legal sense, but in reading it you become part of a conversation and any community that surrounds it. The same is true in software development. Whether you are a contributor or just use a piece of software, you are a part of the conversation that surrounds that software and whatever community may exist around it. As with communities in other parts of life, some software communities are better than others. Therefore, you have certain responsibilities if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it: responsibilities to respect the freedom of others The conversation and community look different depending on where you stand. Personally I don't use software made by people I don't like. Somehow segue to darktable. One of the more interesting examples of software like undeveloped film : a raw image can be developed by software in a non-destructive manner to reach a complete image that resolves every pixel in a RGB color space. Raw development adjustments include color, contrast, bjurightness and details recovery. A given raw dataset can be developed many times with different adjustments. When Adobe moved Lightroom to a subscription model I started looking around for alternatives. I tried a few, but quickly settled on Darktable. It has the same conceptualization as Lightroom -- it is both a photo file manager and RAW image editor -- that it felt familiar even if all the tools and workflow was different. According to the commits in Git, Darktable came on the scene in 2009. I believe I first began using it in 2010. So it is literally the raw recording of the camera sensor. It's not even an image file as I understand it, it's just raw data, which is why you need a program like darktable or lightroom to display it. 4:32 PM But it gives you more editing capabilities than jpg. 4:32 PM And ultimately, when you're done tweaking it, you export it to JPG, TIFF, PNG or whatever 4:33 PM Jason Kehe ahh, fun 4:34 PM so the column is about darktable - which is obviously NOT a programming language - but, sure, it kinda sorta qualifies as machine-speak in a way, right? 4:36 PM sng yeah because I really want to talk about the user/programmer relationship. the give and take (give and build?) that happens there. I'm just going to use darktable as an example of how that works in both good and bad ways. # Blurbs ## Urbz Window Planter If space is really tight, consider the Urbz Window Planter, a small plastic orb that moves your counter top garden to the wall. It will attach, and I mean really, solidly attach, to any non-porous surface—windows, a tile backsplash, bathroom mirror, and more. I even got it to stick to some very smoothly varnished wood, although that wasn't quite as secure. These little planting pods are also easy to move around if you change your mind about where to put them. There's a water catcher so your floor won't get wet, and I was also pleasantly surprised to find that window plantings did not fry in summer or suffer from our cold winter. You will want to stick with sun-loving plants if you put the Urbz in a window, but I had great results growing everything from succulents to herbs in the course of my testing. —Scott Gilbertson ## Root Pouch