Thoughts on technology, infrastructure, and AI
I finished the second half of my oscilloscope basics lesson, broke out the Arduino UNO, chased a weird waveform, and learned why AC coupling is not what you want when probing a digital pin.
My new soldering iron arrived, the B-Sides Canberra Amulet of Entry finally lit up, and the FNIRSI DSO-TC4 helped me identify LEDs, capacitors, transistors, and the limits of cheap component testers.
I connected a 100W USB-C soldering iron to a bench supply through a 9V battery snap, looked down, and found the tip glowing orange. The iron probably died, but the resulting lesson in voltage, current limiting, USB Power Delivery, polarity, and improvised wiring was worth writing down.
I started using ShellGPT today with a locally hosted Gemma 4 26B quantized model through Ollama on my RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell workstation. Asking questions in the terminal was fine, but the real value showed up when local AI met the Unix pipeline.
I finished the first lesson in my electronics curriculum: multimeter basics. I measured a fresh AA battery, checked a cheap bench power supply, learned what the dial markings actually mean, and corrected my first wrong electronics definition.