TL;DR: The Arduino language is C++ with an automatically included library, but it’s descended from a Java project with an automatically included library.

Processing is a graphics and art based graphics library/IDE that uses the Java programming language. It basically includes some classes and methods by default on top of Java that makes programming graphics and even simple games a bit more straightforward.

Processing’s IDE was forked by the Wiring project for the purposes of microcontroller hardware programming. Because the Java Virtual Machine is a bit much to ask a 16MHz 8-bit AVR to run, they switched the language to C++ which compiles straight to machine code that runs on the bare metal. Again, it’s just C++ with a library included, under the hood it uses gcc to compile and avrdude to program the chip. I believe the IDE itself is still written in Java.

Arduino took Wiring and painted it teal. They’ve extended it quite a bit since then but in the early days Arduino was really a hardware project. They’ve since added support for non-AVR boards to the Arduino IDE, including ARM-Cortex and ESP32 based boards.

Raspberry Pi offers C and C++ SDKs and a MicroPython interpreter for the Pico series. Someone contributed support for RP2040 based boards to the Arduino IDE; I don’t believe that was done officially by either RPi or Arduino.

I program my EPS32s in micropython anyway.

you can program a Pi Pico with the Arduino IDE in C++. Some projects will just compile if you aren’t using some AVR specific features like the built-in EEPROM that the RP2040 doesn’t have.

Well, I’ll put it to you this way: If I hire a graphic artist to design a logo for my company, and they turn in a .png they drew in Photoshop, GIMP or Krita, they’re fired. Because I’m going to have my logo on my website, printed on business cards, on key fobs, on the side of work trucks, and painted on the side of buildings. I need a four color variant, a black and white variant and an outline variant, and they all need to work when printed at any scale. Raster art can’t do that. “Hey, can you plasma cut my company logo out of stainless?” “Send over the file.” “…what the fuck is this?”

Hell just having it in .svg format rather than .ai format is gonna be a problem, because Adobe Illustrator is a proprietary industry standard. But I mean, the rest of society is dying, why shouldn’t graphic arts also have the disease?

Yeah, that’s kind of a thing; the Adobe suite kind of doesn’t have a raster drawing program, Photoshop gets used for that but Photoshop is meant to be a photo editor.

A “digital artist” or “digital painter” will want to use Krita, a “graphic artist” designing logos or signage is gonna want Inkscape, and people wanting to lie via photograph want GIMP.

It is my understanding that Kriita is a raster art program, while Illustrator is a vector art program. Inkscape is a vector art program.

It might be my pickup truck.

It might be my toilet. Every moving part in the thing can be bought at every hardware store in town.

My washing machine is pretty good, it’s a Kenmore 80 series, it’ll probably outlast me.

Okay, so you know the trope in spy movies where the launch codes or the diamonds or whatever are at the end of a hallway full of lasers, and the protagonist has to do some cool flip moves (if male) or some slinky contortions (if female) to get around the lasers?

I made that as an arcade game with an Arduino. Some red laser pointer diodes, some photosensors, a few lights, bells and whistles, a fog machine, a few big ol buttons, and you’ve got spy laser hallway. It had a separate “break as many lasers as you can” mode as well, played like a combination of DDR and whack-a-mole.

The second coolest thing I ever programmed was probably the GPS MP3 player. A farmer wanted to add an automatic soundtrack to his Halloween hayride, like when the drove through the spooky graveyard it played ghost noises, it would play music for longer stretches on the road. I used a Raspberry Pi with a GPS HAT and wrote up a script in Python that would compare the actual position with a set of coordinates stored in a text file, and if one matched, it would play an associated mp3 file. The effect was kind of lost because the audio was coming from the vehicle itself, but it’s a hay ride, it’s supposed to be kind of lame. The bedsheet ghosts said woo as you drove past, I’m in the special effects industry, dad.

Windows 11’s TPM requirements.

I recently built a brand new computer for my uncle. He was running a 3rd gen Core i7 machine running Windows 7. I get a call that it won’t boot. I do manage to get it booted, the SMART data shows the hard drive is on its last eyebrows, and anyway he’s running an OS that’s three generations out of date.

I’m a big Linux user, I’ve got my aunt running Linux Mint. My uncle is such a dunce at computers I don’t think I can do that, because he lacks the vocabulary to tell me what he wants his computer to do. “I might use it for business.” In his line of work that could mean anything from going to quickbooks.com to needing some piece of Windows-only shitware. So “Get a .exe from somewhere” had to remain intact.

For everything he actually does with that computer, that old 3rd gen i7 was fine. Replace the hard disk with a SATA SSD, maybe replace the weird 2-4-2-4 some but not all of it is dual channel 12GB of RAM with two 8 GB sticks of DDR3 and let it roll…except no currently supported version of WIndows runs on this computer.

For a large number of people, computers became objectively fast enough in 2015. That’s about when SSDs became standard equipment, fixing any hardware reason for “damn this thing is slow” even out of midrange consumer hardware. Gamers, home labbers and AI startups need more power, the rest of the world doesn’t. And that was a problem for Microsoft.

The oldest single player game I keep going back to is Super Mario World on the SNES, Copyright 1990.

I will occasionally play games older than that, but the SNES is where my actual nostalgia begins.

Vorta. Qt based front end for BorgBackup.

I’ve had a few creatures put down. My grandmother’s dog was in such bad heart health she couldn’t really move around anymore. When the creature shakes and whimpers under the strain of standing up, and sometimes just randomly screams in pain, it’s about time to make that difficult trip to the vet.

My old cat Spice lived to the ripe old age of 18, and then she had a saddle thrombus. Essentially a blood clot blocked her aorta where it forks to her back legs. Her back beans turned cold and blue, she couldn’t walk right, she was obviously in distress, so we rushed her to the emergency vet where we were told at her age she probably wasn’t going to survive any treatment, and that she probably had about 3 more horribly painful hours to live. She was actively dying, it was a question of how long do we let her lay there gasping?

I let it get about that grim before it becomes an option.

He finally got his chores done so he can waste time with his friends!

Oh they’re working on bringing that back.

Their parents didn’t hit them hard enough.

Sometimes it’s not about metal hot. It’s about how fast or slowly metal gets hot.

A lot of pans are made of stamped sheet metal and quite thin. They get hot very fast, they cool down very fast. With something like a gas burner, you can get a ring of very hot metal where the flames are, and relatively cool metal everywhere else.

Cast iron is thicker, and has a lot more thermal mass. It heats up slower, it evens that heat out, and it hangs onto that heat.

If you were to try to bake cornmeal in a sheet steel pan, it would burn. The metal would get too hot too fast. I prefer cast iron for making rues as well, because you get much more even heat.

Sometimes you do want a lighter pan for concentrated high-heat applications. Woks are designed for cooking over a very hot, very concentrated flame so there’s one very hot spot in the pan, perfect for stir frying.

If you know what you’re doing, you can cook non-stick in a stainless pan, it just takes some oil. Famously, cast iron pans can be “seasoned” or coated with a thin layer of extremely smooth polymerized oil which forms a non-stick surface, like DIY teflon.

So, honestly, I would recommend having a couple of each and choose the pan for the kind of cooking you’re doing.

Okay, we’ll rename American football to Cricket.

How many moon landings have been done in metric?

Well you see, Americans called the game with goalies “soccer” because that’s what the British called it back when we were crown colonies, so when we invented the game with linebackers, we called that “football.” then everyone else heard our word and decided to change the game with goalies’ name to “football.” So as usual, America continues to be correct, and the rest of the world is bound and determined to fuck it up.

You know, I’ve got one of those who doesn’t have any power. His lack of hilariousness is at a maximum.