I like dark mode because I get migraines and the light sensitivity is brutal.

Another old ex flip phone user, the last flip phone I had broke in half 2 years ago and my wife made me get a smart phone so I bought the cheapest one I found on Amazon, a Samsung Galaxy A03 Core for $200-ish and I'm still getting used to it, but I do like it and would probably not go back to a flip phone now. The only thing I will never get used to is how much bigger than a flip phone it is. Yes, being a dinosaur is tough sometimes ;P

I use Input Director, a very good KVM style tool that has copy/paste among other neat little features. And it is free.

My Classic Intellimouse has a blue LED that started going bad around the 2 year mark. I thought, hey, I'll just put a new LED in it. Well, I did put a new LED in it, but it was ridiculously difficult, the LED was a surface mount 1206 in a very confined recess in the optical IC itself. I used my hot air to destroy the old LED to get it out, then some solder paste and hot air again to put the new LED in. I was very worried that I had overheated the optical IC, but fortunately everything still worked afterword. If I have to do it again though, I will, the Intellimouse is also my favorite mouse, the ergonomics just fit.

Being an old guy, I reminisce about the days when the choice was between the Intel 8051 or the Motorola 6805 ;P Then the MSP430 and the PIC, then ARM came. Now the choices are just too much. Soon time to retire.

I added it to tools.

Realterm is a really great serial comms application that allows you to get right into the nuts and bolts of serial data transmission. If you need more capability than simple serial comms, this is the application for you. https://realterm.sourceforge.io

I really like Realterm. You can really do the nuts and bolts of serial comms with it.

I had a weird one yesterday: "Your call and the hold period will be recorded for training purposes", they want to hear you cursing under your breath about how long you've been on hold?

Oh god, this brings me back 15 years ago when the company I worked for decided they needed to update their aging embedded controller that they used in all their products. These products were ocean-going drift weather buoys which needed absolute reliability since you could not get them back for repair. Back then I was primarily a hardware designer, but I had used assembly extensively. My team was myself, a green hardware engineer I was mentoring, and our firmware guy. Since the old controller used an 8051 mcu, we had a huge library of code and even an in-house developed operating system for the architecture. There were lots of super fast and capable "super 8051" based devices available at that time so for me the obvious solution was to go with one of them. The firmware guy had other ideas. He wanted an ARM based mcu that ST Micro had literally just released, its datasheet was only "preliminary" no app notes available yet. Also his great idea was to "simply" cross-compile all our source code with an ARM compiler and voila off to the races. Me being the grizzled old team leader of course I tried to shut that down right away. He proceeded to go to the VP of operations (whom oversaw the VP of engineering and other VPs) and complain. The VP of operations was also a recent hire and thought that going with ARM was a great idea. Can you see where this going? The near disaster that followed would take up far too much space to describe here but the resulting controller was plagued with bugs both with the ST mcu and of course the cross-compiled code. The firmware guy ended up leaving and the VP of operations demoted to production manager. He left after a short while as well. I was transferred over to production as well. At least I managed to stay employed there. I'll mention the real big mcu bug though, it turned out to be an extreme EMI/ESD sensitivity so when data was transmitted to the satellite, around 2% of the time it would hard lock up the mcu. No amount of shielding helped. The on-chip watchdog locked with it as well. Even the tiny amount of static generated handling the buoy's plastic hull could do it. ST discontinued that mcu after only a year as well and put out an "improved" version, but by then the damage was done. We lost customers over it and went back to the old design until another team developed an MSP430 based controller that eventually replaced it. Good times.