Just some venting,

Why on earth is every interesting technical discussion forum on Yahoo Groups? I absolutely loathe its design. When requesting the main forum it presents you with unthreaded, ungrouped messages by date. To group messages by thread you have to click a link, and even then you have to click each message separately just to view it. It’s 2012 damnit, stupid threaded message boards should be a thing of the past!

It absolutely puzzles me why certain technical stuff ends up on Yahoo Groups. Especially hamradio and geiger counter stuff seems to end up on Yahoo Groups by default. Maybe people setting up these groups favor the usenet style interface because they are somewhat older than me and continue to use the annoying, threaded usenet-style interface because that is what they initially came in contact with when first using the net. Don’t get me started on search results…

(BTW, I found a modern message board focused on geiger counters and all kinds of radiation detection stuff, guess what, it’s only in Italian!)

Another annoyance of me lately has been expensive USB to TTL serial adapters. Most are based on the well known FTDI chip which is used on Arduino boards. Simple adapters using this chip have prices ranging in the €/$10-25 range, just for a simple device presenting a serial port to the host operating system and outputting TTL levels.
I guess the CEO of FTDI gets a nice bonus each year, selling loads of these chips for $3 when they likely cost pennies to make.

I’m still looking into a decent alternative, €15 TTL adapters suck!

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 14th, 2012 at 4:42 pm and is filed under Electronica, english, wetenschap/science, zendamateur/ham radio. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.