Never underestimate what you can do in excel.

A hobbyist has created a 16-bit CPU that was built and runs inside Excel at a 3Hz clock rate and has 128KB of RAM, a 16-color 128x128 pixel display, and a custom assembly language that all runs in the popular spreadsheet. In fact, you can even try out the CPU with files the creator has made available via Github. 

I've long wanted a mowing robot, but have been pretty disappointed with what is available.  This looks like a promising project.

Maker Clemens Elflein devised OpenMower after being let down by the current generation of robotic lawnmowers. The only models he could find simply drive themselves in a straight line until they hit a perimeter wire buried in the ground, at which point they turn around a bit and then set off in another straight line. OpenMower is able to localise itself using very precise real-time kinematic (RTK) positioning, meaning it can mow a patch of grass much more efficiently.

I'm definitely planning to build one of these!

This Raspberry Pi digital audio workstation (DAW), created by maker and musician Stone Preston, takes the Raspberry Pi 4-powered synth idea to a whole new level. The project, known as LMN 3, is entirely open-source and packed with tons of cool features to make custom jams just the way you want them—with plenty of input options and tons of flexibility when it comes to sound wave manipulation.

I'm very pro monitoring and pre-emptive alerting, but these alerts have to be relevant and the monitoring has to be of the correct thicorrectngs.

The expectation with monitoring is that when you’re paged, the issue is urgent, real and requires your direct investigation and intervention. But the gap between that expectation and reality is bigger than the Grand Canyon: 59% of surveyed cloud native developers reported that only half of the alerts they receive are helpful or usable.

These days These days, I'm more interested in the Razzies than I am in the Oscars.

“After strikes, lingerings of a worldwide plague and a general sense of universal agoraphobia, the decline of the cinematic experience goes without saying,” said the organizers. “Thankfully, a doll pic and a bomb movie jump-started the Industry, which still left behind a trail of Pooh for the Razzies to pick up!”

It's a bit of an older article, but in particular, I loved the highlight on the loss of focus on delivering value toward how to make estimates better. Our job as devs is not to be the best estimators, but to be able to deliver business value quickly and consistently.

To me, the important thing in Real Agile is to pick the next few things to do, and do them promptly. The key question is to find the most valuable things to do, and to do them quickly. Doing them quickly comes down to doing small slices of high value, and iterating rapidly. Story cost estimation doesn’t help much with that, if at all.

So if the existence of an estimate causes management to take their eye off the ball of value and instead focus on improving estimates, it takes attention from the central purpose, which is to deliver real value quickly.

This makes me think that estimation, be it in points or time, is to be avoided.