Saigonauticon @ Saigonauticon @voltage.vn

Posts

5

Comments

453

Joined

2 yr. ago

"You just ate Chinese food"

The CD4069 and LM386 are fun for discrete projects too. Also OPA2132 :)

The Adafruit and Sparkfun stuff is great.

Accessibility is not so much a concern for me, I don't mind reading long datasheets. That's half the fun for me. I also like KiCAD a lot, I've sent off several designs to the factories to make a few units. Was a really cool experience and I learned a lot.

I'm not a super big Fritzing fan (personal preference I guess) but love Tinkercad for quickly designing something 3D printable.

Doesn't work that way here. The tax department already has a copy of all these records. The company just lost their copy. So now that tax department can claim anything they want :)

Also I was not an employee. If I was, then I might have some obligation to do something. However these were former clients who simply didn't pay their bills (so... not even clients). So no contractual agreement existed between them and me -- for a contract to be valid, it has to include due consideration (e.g. a payment received in return for some service). Since I was never paid, no valid contract existed.

I live in Vietnam, this is not unusual. Some of my neighbors have smaller comes. One is about 8 square meters.

Regularly had to use it to do work I was contracted to do.

Company went public one day, they restructured massively to become more efficient. I imagine that kind of stuff stopped then, but don't really know.

Oh that's ancient history. I don't think they are around anymore. Used to be on the one for the local hackerspace before they moved to Mattermost.

Then a few for technical assistance with various tools.

No. He's responsible for caring for those, not me. If I dump my tax records on your front lawn, that's on me -- you can just leave them there in the rain or wait for the city to pick them up. If there was some form of contract in place I would be more careful, of course.

(FYI my current home is 18 square meters. There is no front lawn. Storing them would be impossible even if I wanted to)

Cryptography. Or with more clickbait--

Governments hate this one neat trick you can do with large prime numbers!

Or maybe more modern:

Governments hate this one neat trick you can do with two points on a curve!

Ooh another one -- Pessimists hate that optimists also believe we live in the best of all possible worlds.

I like to program microcontrollers. So that's sort of my creative toy.

The Arduino or Pi Pico are accessible and fun ones.

I like the Attiny10, but I'm some sort of cursed mercenary science hermit.

Oh this happened to me in reverse. My workplace (a client's office, technically) dumped a bunch of stuff at my house without permission, and I did not keep it. Expected me to store boxes and boxes of financial records, for infinity years, no contract or anything. They also defaulted on money owed to me, which I had to pay taxes on, even though I received nothing. Never have I met such an arrogantly entitled company owner.

Sold it all as scrap paper. Recovered 0.005% of the money owed this way. Later their company was dissolved due to nonpayment of taxes. If they ever come back to the country, they may have heir passport withheld until they pay what's owed. Which is whatever the tax department says it is, because they have no financial records.

Hacker News, mainly.

Sometimes I log on to Reddit to help travelers to my country or hobbyists trying to learn engineering. I try to avoid discussion on Reddit as the quality is often not high, e.g. lots of tourists asking how to commit crimes in my country -- better to just not answer.

For discussion I go here, it's much more interesting.

IRC has always been pretty cool. I might go back to that one day. For now this is just the part of my life where I try to make money and don't have much time to socialize.

Lawyers, accountants, and software engineers accumulate these things like you wouldn't believe. We can't tell you about current secrets, only stale ones.

I once knew that the top level password used at a corporation valued at 6 billion dollars was 'password123'. They had no backups, no VPN, and that password was used at all the high-value access points. It's since been fixed, but it was that for years.

I usually get Mebendazole. It's about VND 10.000 at most pharmacies.

It comes in chocolate and fruit flavor. I recommend fruit.

Oh that reminds me, speaking of being infested, remember to take your de-worming pills every 4-6 months.

Lot of people forget to do that here, but it's sort of a good idea.

Oh yeah, local tax/legal compliance stuff is a bit of a hassle as a foreigner. I bet that's easier in Australia. The accounting system is weird, although that's being fixed.

25% of running a company anywhere though seems to be chasing unpaid invoices :P

I do get reminded to vote all the time via text message, but am not a citizen yet, so can't actually do so :P

If you like hủ tiếu, there's a place behind the hindu-looking temple across from Takashimaya that's quite decent and well-regarded (this is in HCMC). They use reasonably fresh squid.

To get there, take the road off Pasteur that's to your right when facing the temple. Before all the sketchy bars (avoid these) begin, there's an alley. Go down this alley until you reach it.

Hey, I own a corporation in Vietnam. I had no idea I dominated anything.

The economic police verify I comply with the permitted activities on my business license, issued in accordance with the 5-year plan before last. If I'm doing something other than that, I get shut down (that's not a problem though, I plan to continue complying).

My employees certainly have legal protections. Heck, they have government health insurance (which is mandatory for me to pay for, and offers OK protection, and honestly I'm quite happy it's a thing that exists). I have never seen a 'suicide net'. There's no at-will employment : I can't just randomly fire people, I need to provide cause, and it has to be sufficient.

The air quality in HCMC an Ha Noi is not great these days, but other than those two cities, is pretty good overall. I would classify it as 'moderately bad' in those 2 places. I drive through it on motorcycle on one of the worst routes in HCMC (D1 to Nha Be). It's not my favorite thing about life in the city, but it's also clearly not the main cause of lung cancer -- that would still be cigarette smoking by a longshot.

8 years ago, I would have called the air quality here 'good', it's a fairly recent problem.

Anyway, it's not paradise but it's no hellhole either. Ask me anything you would like to know!

That looks sort of like a 2-pin M23 connector. Could be wrong though, maybe give that a search.

After having met several humans, I'd be more weirded out if this didn't happen.

So I've already pre-accepted this practice. Go wild, but don't be a jerk!

On a slightly different topic, most of my coworkers are machines. They are collegiate, reliable, helpful, and have no toxic behavior. Recently, they also became creative, rational, and eloquent. Perhaps our machines are capable of reflecting what's best in us.