> GNU Unifont is part of the GNU Project. This page contains the latest release of GNU Unifont, with glyphs for every printable code point in the Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP)
Still doesn't exactly say what it is? I get that it's glyphs for printable characters, but honestly it could be a PDF, video, collection of PNGs or SVG files, an Adobe Illustrator file, a linux distribution, a web browser, or pretty much any other piece of software or data format. I presume it's a TTF or OTF font file?
no.
as others have stated too, the following should be mentioned
- what's the 2 meaning in BMP
- it's designed as a monospaced (or proportional?) bitmap font
- designed in a single 16x16 size only (or also 8x16? it's a bit unclear)
- provided as an OTF/TTF font format, which can be scaled by most font rendering engines to other sizes, but u need antialiasing to make it look smooth (this is mentioned, but under the download section only)
- use as a "last resort" default font, according to wikipedia at least
I've been toying with a variant of this project for my Honeywell home air filters. I have one in all my "big" rooms, and I like to keep them running at a low speed most of the day.
But I also have time-of-day energy pricing, and it would be nice to automatically turn off (or at least slow) my air filters during the 5pm-8pm window. This project inspires me to at least look into the feasibility of adding that functionality myself.
Depending on your air filter you might be able to just use a smart plug, I went down a similar route this summer before realizing that mine would remember their power state and settings when powered off.
So now I just have them plugged into a few smart plugs with automations in homeassistant
I would need a device with a physical switch rather than a touch control. Sadly many devices, mine included, have "power was cycled = device is off" logic.
It's been working so well I was actually surprised one night when the dehumidifier in the bedroom turned itself on from the automation (which I have set to do after dark if humidity is higher then 70%).
It had been within tolerance for ages and I just hadn't had to even think about it.
You should, it is very DIYable! I did it and reverse engineered it myself a while back. You dont need to make a custom circuit board if you are fine with losing the touch controls
> They said, “Look at the contrast—here’s Norvig’s Sudoku thing and then there’s this other guy, whose name I’ve forgotten, one of these test-driven design gurus. He starts off and he says, “Well, I’m going to do Sudoku and I’m going to have this class and first thing I’m going to do is write a bunch of tests.” But then he never got anywhere. He had five different blog posts and in each one he wrote a little bit more and wrote lots of tests but he never got anything working because he didn’t know how to solve the problem. I actually knew—from AI—that, well, there’s this field of constraint propagation—I know how that works. There’s this field of recursive search—I know how that works. And I could see, right from the start, you put these two together, and you could solve this Sudoku thing. He didn’t know that so he was sort of blundering in the dark even though all his code “worked” because he had all these test cases.
I love what Norvig said. I can relate to it. As far as data structures are concerned, I think it's worth playing smart with your tests - focus on the "invariants" and ensure their integrity.
A classic example of invariant I can think of is the min-heap - node N is less than or equal to the value of its children - the heap property.
Five years from now, you might forget the operations and the nuanced design principles, but the invariants might stay well in your memory.
That story reads like what happens when the average senior engineer tries to do a hardish usaco problem; turns out algorithm engineering is different from your average enterprise engineering; turns out there are people in both camps
> “Well, I’m going to do Sudoku and I’m going to have this class and first thing I’m going to do is write a bunch of tests.” But then he never got anywhere
There's a blog post I read once and that I've since been unable to locate anywhere, even with AI deep research. It was a blow-by-blow record of an attempt to build a simple game --- checkers, maybe? I can't recall --- using pure and dogmatic test driven development. No changes at all without tests first. It was a disaster, and a hilarious one at that.
That's why I linked to Jeffries' post where he gave more context.
Though, in this particular case, he then went on to go back down the TDD Sudoku rabbit hole and, though he does seem to eventually write a program that works, the path to get there involved reading existing solutions and seems rather drain circly, which makes his post I linked seem a bit like making excuses. IDK. I don't really care beyond mild bemusement.
I think the point Norvig is making there broadly agrees with this post though. In the Sudoku affair, Norvig had the DSA knowledge there, sure, but his point is more that you need to be willing to look up other people's answers, rather than assuming you have enough knowledge or that you can slowly iterate towards a correct answer. You can't expect to solve every problem yourself with the right application of DSA/TDD/whatever.
That's the same as the blog post: you need to know enough DSA to be able to understand how to look for the right solution if presented with a problem. But Batchelder's point is that, beyond that knowledge, learning testing as a skill will be more valuable to you than learning a whole bunch of individual DSA tricks.
This totally misses the point of the article. The article agrees that knowing when a problem is a data structure and algo problem is a key strength. The article also isn’t saying that all development should be done TDD.
The point of the article is that knowing how to test well is more useful than memorizing solutions to algo problems. You can always look those up.
To be fair to the other guy a Sudoku solver easier to bang out than a tiny distributed operating system environment that happens to solve sudoku, even if your language does help you.
I have a BirdNET-Pi in my backyard constantly listening to and identifying bird songs. It's pretty neat. They also sell a purpose built device if you don't want to build a pi.
The data is sent to https://app.birdweather.com/ where I'm assuming bird scientists are doing something with it.
Writing a blog entry to simply clarify your own thinking makes it worth it.
reply