idealstingray

Obviously, people shouldn't do that.

I'm not sure this is obvious or even particularly well-publicized.

The "official recommendation" in the U.S. for many meds is that they be flushed down the toilet, especially scheduled/controlled substances. The FDA maintains a "flush list" [1] of medications that you are specifically instructed to dispose of by flushing. However, even for medications not on the official flush list, it's common to be informed by reasonable authorities that you should dispose of them by flushing -- e.g. I had to sign paperwork at my doctor's office affirming that I'd responsibly dispose of my unused ADHD meds by flushing them down the toilet before my dr would write the prescription. This was seconded by the drug/alcohol training I was given as a condition of attending college, which stated that you should flush all unused medication.

[1] https://www.fda.gov/drugs/disposal-unused-medicines-what-you...

As a robotics engineer, I'm surprised how controversial "hardware can't remote" is turning out to be. Sure, some things can be done fully in simulation or by mailing everyone on the perception team a bunch of sensors. However, existing/popular simulators aren't that good at simulating things like odometry error, and if you're trying to do any object manipulation they're not great at anything beyond "before I run this on the robot, please make sure I'm not going to destroy things" (my understanding is that accurately simulating manipulation is hard because of the various frictional forces involved). And, of course, giving several employees a large, expensive KUKA arm to keep in their house or apartment is impractical on many levels. If people are running code remotely on a physical robot that's in the office, at least one person has to be in the office to keep an eye on it (for safety, and freeing the robot if it gets stuck). This is also not even getting into remote embedded, electrical, or mechanical work -- everything I've listed would affect a garden-variety software developer. So, yeah, I'll endorse "hardware can't remote", and will admit to some frustration with non-hardware-adjacent software engineers, who have a tendency to make over-broad generalizations about the feasibility of remote work.

A few other comments have mentioned the LEGO Mindstorms system, which is a great choice if you don't want to deal with hardware. If you go that route, I would strongly recommend using ev3dev [1] in order to avoid the LabVIEW-based programming language LEGO provides. You can get pretty far in the Mindstorms system, especially if you avoid LabVIEW; my biggest Mindstorms project was a 1v0 tabletop soccer robot using a subsumption controller. I will also note that if you're planning to teach controls at all (PID controllers are easy to implement, and are often used for controlling motor speed), Mindstorms can't really achieve a tight enough control loop; go with an Arduino-based system instead.

If you want something a little simpler than Mindstorms to get started with, you can also get a robot that holds a pen and is programmed in Logo [2]. Logo was designed as a language to teach programming to children, so it's very easy for kids to get started, and drawing on big sheets of paper with a pen immediately gives them the feeling of "doing something".

I would encourage you not to be scared of hardware :) You can build a lot of fun robot projects with cheap motors (you don't necessarily need servos), bump switches, and a cardboard-and-hot-glue chassis, using pretty simple circuits. The two classic beginner projects are wall-following and back-and-turn. At its simplest, a wall-following robot can use a switch touching the wall to control which of two motors turns on. A back-and-turn robot is a robot that backs up and turns in a different direction when it encounters an obstacle (and, if you leave it running long enough, will tend to escape whatever room you put it in). To avoid soldering, you could get started with a solderless breadboard (although make sure the wires don't get jostled out of place by robot collisions or falls).

It sounds like this is probably more advanced than your kids are ready for, but you could also get a Neato robot vacuum cleaner and control it with a Raspberry Pi running ROS [3] [4]. ROS (Robot Operating System) [5] is a very popular framework used by both professional robotics engineers and hobbyists; it's not the most beginner-friendly, but is useful for more advanced robotics software projects, and there's a large ecosystem of ROS packages for things like teleoperation and path planning. Neato vacuum cleaners specifically are great for this because they include a LiDAR, which lets you try out the SLAM and path planning packages provided by ROS.

[1] https://www.ev3dev.org/

[2] https://www.terrapinlogo.com/robots/probot.html

[3] https://www.servomagazine.com/magazine/article/neato-ros-rob...

[4] https://github.com/SV-ROS/intro_to_ros

[5] https://www.ros.org/

My apartment's current A/V setup is an old third-hand projector I picked up for free pointed at a blank wall of our living room. The only thing I paid for was the serial cable so I could configure the correct input port, but even if I'd purchased the projector new it would run me about $150. In comparison, one of the article's top recommended dumb TVs is $450, while the other is "no longer available". Plus we can use a real computer with a keyboard sitting on our coffee table to control it instead of using the TV remote to painstakingly enter every character. Sure, we could have a less janky setup in many ways -- one day I aspire to build an actual wall shelf for the projector -- but the experience is miles better than any TV, smart or otherwise.

Trying to learn frontend so I can make myself a better to-do list/calendar app. I'm a robotics engineer so I have no idea what I'm doing, but it's fun. Due to executive dysfunction, I tend not to have a very good idea of how long it'll take me to finish anything longer than about a day's work (so I assume it "won't take that long", which fuels dangerous amounts of procrastination), so my concept was that each task gets broken down into subtasks that are small enough that I can estimate time for them. These time estimates then get propagated to the root task, and leaf-level tasks can be dragged and dropped into today's calendar (with other events pulled in from Google Calendar so I don't accidentally double-book myself). On the task itself I'll be able to record how much time (in pomodoros) it actually took to complete; in addition to tracking how I actually spent my time, hopefully this will help calibrate my future time estimates.

I also finished knitting a sweater -- my second overall, and first time not working from a pattern. I had to redo the yoke three times (the torso and front/back panels of the yoke are lace, so I wanted to integrate the decreases in the lace pattern), but I'm really satisfied with what I ended up with.

I'm a college student and do most of my work from my dorm room, which is also where I sleep, eat, and socialize. For me, lighting is the main thing that helps me differentiate "work mode" from not-work mode. I have a video light mounted above my desk and a couple of bright 5600k plant lights in my window, all of which are on a light timer, in addition to my desk lamp. When I do work during the day, my desk is very well-lit. At night all of these get turned off (sometimes I turn the video light back on but set it to a much warmer color temperature and lower brightness for ambiance).

Do you have any hobbies outside of tech? You could try talking about those. If not, just about everyone listens to music, so "what kind of music do you listen to?" is a decent opening question that might take you somewhere interesting.

If you're having trouble finding an interest in something your conversation partner is talking about, try asking them what they like about it -- it could help you find the topic more interesting.

I really like this script! My neat trick is to directly ask "Do you just want to vent? Or do you want my advice?" If said in a gentle and non-sarcastic tone, this works pretty well on other engineers with meh social skills. I don't think I know any socially competent people to test it on.

For me, a quick "hang on" or "sorry, one sec" acknowledges people enough that they don't feel ignored while I make my notes, and is also scripted enough that it doesn't usually knock the thoughts out of my head.

I'm at a school where most classes have all of their materials online for free. Usually a professor will post lecture notes and/or slides online and recommend an optional reference textbook.

When I do need textbooks, I generally buy them instead of checking them out from the library, and most of the reason is that the library isn't open 24 hours a day. 90% of the time I can get by with only using books for class during the day, but if I end up having to pull an all-nighter to finish a paper or a pset, or if I've been procrastinating and need to do the readings for a class after midnight, I'm screwed. It's valuable to me to have the mental overhead free, instead of needing to plan when I'll be able to access the books I need. (As a bonus, it's a good start for building up a reference library, and I can mark up my personal copies however I want, but these are secondary reasons.)

I still use the library for studying, finding materials that I only need once and don't want to buy, and checking out items like USB CD drives. (You can also check out soldering irons and small power tools from our campus libraries.) I also made frequent use of the piano in the music library when studying music theory. But I'd probably use the library a lot more if it were staffed between midnight and 6 am.

By way of warning, GMMK uses a proprietary keyboard layout editor that only works on Windows (I tried running it in WINE and got nowhere). If editing your keyboard layout in firmware is important to you, I would recommend the Massdrop CTRL (TKL size) or ALT (67-key), which are similar keyboards with hot-swappable switches that run QMK firmware. (In addition to changing the backlighting colors and basic remappings like capslock to escape, QMK lets you do interesting things like add layers, or have a key behave one way when tapped and another way when held down and used as a modifier.) But if you can take care of all your layout needs in software, the GMMK is a great keyboard.

As a complement to phaus's excellent comment, I'd like to talk a bit about keycap profiles. The two main categories are cylindrical and spherical profiles. Almost all off-the-shelf keyboards have cylindrical profile keycaps on them by default -- essentially, it's as if a cylindrical chunk has been removed from the top of a flat keycap. OEM profile and Cherry profile are the two most common cylindrical profiles (the keycaps that come with most off-the-shelf keyboards are OEM profile). A spherical-profile keycap has more of a fingertip-shaped divot in the top (SA, MT3, DSA, and XDA are the most common spherical profiles). I personally find spherical profiles more comfortable than cylindrical profiles, so you may want to give them a try, but if you're happy with your current keycaps then you're probably not missing much.

The other major factors that describe profiles are height (hi-profile keycaps are taller than low-profile keycaps) and sculpting. With a sculpted profile, the keycaps on the top rows of your keyboard will be tilted towards you, the keycaps in the middle will be flatter, and the keycaps in the bottom row will be tilted away. Many people find this more comfortable than a flat profile (keycaps from any row of the keyboard are shaped the same), but others find flat profiles feel equally nice, and if you're using a layout like Dvorak or Colemak it's easier to switch your keycaps around to match (with a sculpted profile you'd have to buy an entirely separate kit with the alpha keys in the correct location). Hi-profile keycaps will be taller and, if they're sculpted, are generally sculpted more dramatically sculpted than low-profile keycaps. Sculpted keycap shapes are generally described by row number, with Row 0 or 1 used for the F-row and Row 4 or 5 used for the spacebar and modifier key row. (Numbering systems are not standardized, but R3 should always refer to the home row.)

Of the spherical profiles, SA and MT3 are hi-profile and sculpted (except for a few SA sets, which use all-row-3 keycaps and are therefore flat), and DSA and XDA are low-profile and flat. Low-profile sculpted spherical sets are rarer -- MDA profile was recently developed to help fill this niche, but you will have trouble finding an MDA set outside of group buys.

In terms of actual recommendations? Budget-priced spherical sets are unfortunately thin on the ground; they haven't really left the high-end group-buy-only enthusiast market, whereas there's a lot of cheap OEM profile sets with a variety of aesthetics. I own and like the Matt3o Nerd DSA set [1], which is currently in stock and costs $50. (Signature Plastics keeps some DSA sets in stock on pimpmykeyboard.com, but they're all $80-$100.) For a sculpted set, look at Maxkey SA sets on kbdfans.com (also priced at around $100, but it's a slightly better price than Signature Plastics' SA sets).

[1] https://drop.com/buy/matt3o-nerd-dsa-keycap-set-massdrop-exc...