• 3 Posts
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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: February 1st, 2024

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  • Pick your favorite tech company, pick a small team with a “nerdy” engineering mandate, and I’m confident you’ll find the academic, geeky science and engineering types you’re talking about.

    They probably aren’t very vocal though, because 1) there’s a huge PR/marketing budget which is responsible for being the face of the company, and 2) well…these are nerdy STEM folks who probably like their job because they get very well compensated to be nerdy STEM types, and not because they’re fanboys/girls.





  • Our experience is that basically the only really expensive thing is childcare. Are you eligible for subsidized, or free, care (or have trustworthy and willing relatives)?

    As for gear, babies don’t need much. But for what they do need, reach out to friends, neighbors, and family! We’re fortunate that we could have afforded everything new, but we really only bought a few things because friends and randos alike gave us so much free kid stuff (we bought a nice stroller, a baby basket, and an IKEA crib — basically everything else was a hand-me-down). Join local “buy nothing” groups, or parent groups (sadly they’re usually WhatsApp, but whatever). Most people hate throwing away stuff, and would rather it go to a good home.

    Look at programs for subsidized/free necessities like diapers. There are lots of resources out there, especially in cities.

    As everyone else said, no one feels ready. We certainly didn’t!






  • So what is an easy to use or no think thing I could use a pi 5 for?

    It sounds like you really want something that works “out of the box,” in which case, I would look for projects that have disk images available.

    This severely restricts what you can do with it, and as others have mentioned, is a bit antithetical to the Pi’s original purpose as a tinkering machine. But you may find something you like.

    The most basic would be to just use it as a desktop replacement.






  • Sounds like maybe you want acoustic impedance ? Just like optical index mismatch, or electrical impedance mismatch, you get reflections at discontinuities. Neat stuff!

    Not exactly sure what you mean by air-water-air “dampening,” but my suspicion is that you’re referring to sound being reflected at each interface, so the transmission is reduced. Antireflective coating, index matching, impedance matching are all rich topics in physics and electronics!