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katef.bsky.social
Kate
@katef.bsky.social
4.7K followers 570 following 5.6K posts
she/her
If I unfollowed you, it's because you keep posting things without alt text
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katef.bsky.social
WAKE UP
hahgahglahghughlahaha MAKEUP
hsduaasjhuhagaghaghaj SHAKEUP
whywuguhguhlduhahtable WANTEDTO
grugorbrurbrugoglogug WANEDTO
haufhufhalauhfuha WANTETO
100% popey boy pope leo X I V on the mic, singing to a packed room
November 23, 2025 at 2:06 PM
katef.bsky.social
i fed my pitch sequence into a saw mod instead of into the oscillator frequency
November 22, 2025 at 11:26 PM
katef.bsky.social
new tshirt, fuck yea
@sarahmackattack.bsky.social
yours truly wearing a BIOLOGY IS BIGGER THAN BINARIES tshirt. there is a bee, some stylised honeycomb, a flower, and a clownfish. all set in bold block text, solid pink and white on black. did you know clownfish change gender? awesome stuff
November 22, 2025 at 7:24 PM
katef.bsky.social
man these quizzes nail it. "Content not viewable in your region" is *exactly* my ace ass in a poly relationship
i did the same survey thing as everybody else in the QT'd thread. my result is a dot almost dead center on the many/one axis. and almost entirely at the "doesn't limit other" end of the limit axis. however neither axis is visible here, because the image is hosted by imgur. and so instead my result is showing over an image that reads "Content is not viewable in your region". which is exactly how i feel about the subject
November 22, 2025 at 3:25 AM
katef.bsky.social
environmental storytelling
online store Terms & Conditions and Cancellation Policy confirmation options: two checkboxes: One: I have read and accepted the general terms and conditions. Two (hilighted): I understand that this is a (capitalised) Synth DIY store. Most products are DIY kits that need to be assembled and soldered by the customer.
November 20, 2025 at 2:44 PM
katef.bsky.social
here you go
it's my chonky mug of hot coffee sitting on my desk. the mug is unreasonably cute, it has a tiger on the front and is hand-glazed and endearingly imperfect. like you <3
November 19, 2025 at 1:21 PM
katef.bsky.social
drawing 7-segment displays is harder than i thought
okay listen up. we're looking at the silkscreen layer in a pcb editor, zoomed in mostly on one footprint. it's a through-hole 7-segment display. these have rectangular leds arranged in a figure-eight, which is about the simplest way you can represent the digits 0-9, and therefore used ubiquitously on display panels and such. they usually also have a dot for decimal point, whether it's actually used or not. my footprint here indicates the usual pcb footprint stuff, pins, courtyard etc, but on the silkscreen layer here is a simplified diagrammatic representation of the leds in the display, each led is a single thick line. and! the decimal point also serves to help confirm which way is up, since the pins are symmetrical. our same pcb, this time viewed in 3D. the 7-segment display itself, as most are, is oblique at 10 degrees. i don't know why, really. they just look better that way. i'm not convinced the spacing for mine is even, even though i drew it using a grid
November 18, 2025 at 12:30 AM
katef.bsky.social
the boost in the sense of competence for owning a left-handed drill bit when you need one. here i successfully extracted a cammed-out countersunk screw without damage to the panel, what a mood boost
a cammed out screw, which used to be hex. unscrewed slightly from the metal panel where it was stuck. the screw is surrounded by extremely tiny metal chips, evidence of drilling. being unscrewed is evidence that i successfully got it out! good job me. having the right tool really helps
November 11, 2025 at 7:33 PM
katef.bsky.social
nori's website is gone now, i would like to share this one part. they're good values, and i will try to carry them with me. you nailed it on all of them. i am proud to have been able to call you a friend
(an excerpt from nori's website. set in frog green against charcoal grey) Values. 2020-04-07. In 2020 when I was applying for jobs I wrote about my values for my resume. It is “work-forward” (particularly with the first line being the first line) and it is an artifact of its time, but largely these are still values that I hold dearly. * Systems, Wisdoms, Documentation, & Categorization; * Eloquence, Candor, Quiet, & a Good Conversation; * Verbosity, Curiosity, Self-Awareness, & a Stomach for Details; * Help, Interest, Space, & Gracefulness; * Earnestness, Willingness, Openness, Meditativeness; * UnSelfishness, UnSelfConsciousness, UnSelfHatedness, UnSelfGatedness; * Tools, Transposition, Cross-Pollination, Self-Selection; * Commitment, Sharing, Caring, & a Good Metaphor; * && Taking Care of Folks by Being Sweet & Kind & Quick to Help!
November 6, 2025 at 1:39 PM
katef.bsky.social
it plays fine locally! boo
me editing subtitles for the video above, where i spent half an hour lining up every subtitle precisely with the waveform
November 5, 2025 at 10:09 PM
katef.bsky.social
November 5, 2025 at 10:06 PM
katef.bsky.social
i want to explain what i meant by "i can't read". i could *just* about sound out individual words, but definitely not glue them together. when i did try that, the reading direction was "very ancient greek". i knew something felt off, but couldn't work out what was wrong. it felt fluent either way
someone's diagram of different reading directions: latin is left-to-right. arabic is right-to-left except for numbers, which are left-to-right within that. hangul is uh, a spiral for each glyph i presume, and then moves left-to-right overall. devangari is honestly i have no idea what the diagram is showing there, it looks like a coiled up piece of string. rongorongo is a big square spiral circling inwards, pretty cool. "very ancient greek" goes left-to-right and right-to-left on each line, alternating
October 30, 2025 at 1:11 PM
katef.bsky.social
whoops
the same brass widget mounted backwards in a 3-jaw drill chuck. beside it, filled with a small pile of brass shavings, is our M8*0.75 die. the widget is completely stripped smooth, no threads to be seen. the end is a bit chewed up. what i have learned is that you have to turn the die, not the widget. it's now time to source myself a replacement part and try again
October 29, 2025 at 11:09 AM
katef.bsky.social
hello machinist bluesky, i would like help please. i want to cut a thread onto the outer diameter of the black part here, on the region indicated in teal. that part is brass. the red region is plastic and retractable (there's a sprung mechanism inside). how can i mount it while i turn the die?
alrighty. laid alongside a cm rule for scale, one M8*0.75 die, and a disassembled mechanical pencil. the inside clutch mechanism is a self-contained single plastic unit, which is transparent and has a spring and other workings visible inside. the end of that unit screws into a metal cylinder at the front of the pencil. that cylinder comes to a point, where the lead would stick out. it's this cylinder that i want to thread. the problem is, it's very short to hold, and the sticky-out part on the front is mostly (but not entirely) conical
October 28, 2025 at 10:47 PM
katef.bsky.social
so here's what i've made:

this is the same component (a 1608/0603 chip resistor), with pads snapped to a metric and to an imperial grid respectively. the little teal tick marks show my percentage limits for a minimum pad size, assuming a terminal height of 0.45mm
metric layout for a 1608 resistor as a kicad footprint. the layout grid here is 0.1mm, and the pads are centered on that grid. the passive component is drawn above these pads, and they extend a small amount beyond the minimum proportional distances for side, toe, and heel spacings. the pad outer dimensions are also snapped to grid, as is the courtyard it's the same thing! but on a 0.127mm grid. it looks virtually indistinguishable. i've named the footprint 0603I rather than 1608M, i thought that was a handy way to remind myself which grid is in use. again the pads are centered on the grid, as is the courtyard. it's still unclear why this helps anything
October 26, 2025 at 7:59 PM
katef.bsky.social
i drew out a bunch of recommended footprints from trustworthy manufacturers, from their component datasheets. they're all somewhere between IPC7351C-Nominal and the FED proportional size. i took these as sensible bounds. both extremes of this scale have been tested already
an increasingly concerning hand-drawn diagram of pad sizes for a single 0603 resistor, multiple footprints carefully drawn out to scale and stacked on each other. they look a bit like architectural blueprints, nested rectangles, dashed lines, and hatched areas in pencil. this is the kind of diagram you expect from people who claim to have invented new kinds of physics, or uncovered worldwide conspiracies. it is still unclear why doing this is necessary, or why this isn't a problem for anybody else
October 26, 2025 at 7:53 PM
katef.bsky.social
it's sort of like a moire pattern, if i have the smd stuff on a metric grid and the panel components on an imperial grid. it makes it hard to route, because the spaces between pads don't line up
close up on pcb layout for a eurorack module. everything is routed properly. it looks fine. you have no idea why there's a problem here
October 26, 2025 at 7:44 PM
katef.bsky.social
okay so i'm making my component spacing is fundamentally some multiple of a 0.2" grid, which lets me have even spacing both within a module and also between modules.

drawn here are modules of various widths, where i'm trying to figure out a grid that works well for layout across all widths
wireframe representations of various eurorack panel widths, populated with a grid division (the grid happens to be isometric, but it's just one of several ideas i was trying). footprints for panel-mounting components are placed onto this grid, to test out how the spacing and alignments work. importantly (to me), the spacing within a panel is the same as the spacing between panels. it feels nice, sits well, and when i look at this, the world is right
October 26, 2025 at 7:40 PM
katef.bsky.social
i'm designing PCBs with panel-mounting component layout on a grid that fits into eurorack panels. A eurorack panel is some multiple of 1hp wide (that's 5.08mm, or 0.2"), which ultimately comes from dividing down a rack width of 19". we all have to live with this, it's not my fault
3d rendering of a WIP eurorack module, it's not clear what it does. there's an opaque front panel over the top of a pcb, and various UI components stick through the panel: jacks, pots, a switch, sliders, leds and so on the same module, but now the front panel is transparent. behind it, we can see that the components are tetrised around, such that they fit beside each other, mounting to the pcb below. things have various different orientations to make this work; when looking at the front panel, we can't tell that half the jacks and pots are upside down. because the only visible parts are circular
October 26, 2025 at 7:36 PM
katef.bsky.social
okay hello i'm going to try to explain what i've been figuring out for chip component footprints. This has taken me weeks. It's exactly the kind of problem with requirements that make sense to pretty much only myself, but i wanted to try to share what i've been thinking anyway
3d rendering of a surface mount resistor on top of its pcb footprint, with silkscreen and pads sized appropriately. we don't know it yet, but this is one of the footprints from the end of the thread GASP
October 26, 2025 at 7:29 PM
katef.bsky.social
i put fountain pen ink into an isograph and taped it to a plotter
a super low quality photo of super high quality paper, with some extremely messy robot drawings in a gorgeous petrol blue ink. clearly some nighttime engineering is going on here. a roland dxy flatbed pen plotter's test pattern is being drawn, uppercase and lowercase ascii, and a simple demo of a bar chart. it's sloppy like if you asked two people to coordinate drawing by pulling in different directions at once. the lines are inconsistent, too wet in places, skipping dry in others. but the ink, the ink sings
October 26, 2025 at 1:24 AM
katef.bsky.social
some paint i liked
sunlight on layers of peeling paint in cold greys and blues and whites. crisp brown autumn leaves are blown against the bottom of this metal door, patches of intensely brown red rust in the same warm autumnal tones. these are crunchy, inviting colours, we want to jump in the leaves, we want to pick at the crispy flakes of paint, fractured like glazed pottery, like irregular mosaic. we want to hear dry leaves crumble, flakes of paint snap and shatter, dried by the sun
October 24, 2025 at 4:18 PM
katef.bsky.social
2. your cat with alt text: this is probably what i would say about your cat if he were my cat, and if i were a cat person.

i would keep it short, on the assumption that you are likely to post hundreds of similar photos of your cat
cat closeup. my buddy mittens. look at his stupid little grumpy face! ooh, isn't he a grumpy little boy? yes he is! yes he is
October 20, 2025 at 11:32 PM
katef.bsky.social
1. doing beautiful things justice in alt text: if you don't know how to convey something, say that you don't know how to convey it. and then try anyway. tell your reader what you're aiming for
a scene so beautiful that i don't know how to do it justice. coastal housing recedes into the distance, the chaotic and colourful jumble of continental Italy, a small town jammed endearingly between overgrown verdant cliffs and a well-stocked harbour with luxurious (that is, large and uninviting) yachts. clearly a place for people with both style and money. the sun sets, lighting the sky on fire
October 20, 2025 at 11:30 PM
katef.bsky.social
for the most part. i think you're missing three important things here:
- what it is
- the immediate impression, we often take this for granted. this is a joyous, reverent feeling. this hits us first
- you talk about the sign, but you gotta say who's pictured there

i have adapted your alt text thus
No Kings March. Joyful, irreverant, oversized and cartoonish, two (presumed) humans in inflatable unicorn suits hold a sign on green grass in a park. One holds a the sign that says "a felon married to an immigrant is telling us the problem is immigrants and felons". Pictured on the sign, Trump scowls beside Melania.
October 20, 2025 at 11:12 PM