> 1. Use a soldering iron that can hit 400, and use a needle tip
I have to disagree with that. Almost every time I've been called in to rescue a frustrated novice at the soldering bench (which has happened a lot), I've found them using the thinnest tip they could find with the temperature cranked to 400°C or higher because nothing was melting. It's fine to have an iron that can exceed 400°C (and I can't think of any I've used that couldn't), but that capability should be rarely used.
A heavier tip -- generally the heaviest that will fit between obstacles on the board -- at a lower temperature is much more forgiving.
The small tip has little heat capacity, significant resistance between the thermal reservoir (the heavy body of the tip) and the contact point, and usually very little contact area with the work. That makes the temperature at the joint highly sensitive to tip position, surface contamination, and copper geometry on the PCB. A thick trace or ground plane connection sinks heat from the joint so well that it will never melt, but a small pad on a thin signal trace will quickly get hot enough to detach the pad. Gunk on the board or oxidation of the tip adds more variability. And the high idle temperature makes for fast oxidation of the solder coat on the tip and then the plating, which creates more problems and frustration when you're new and don't recognize those symptoms.
A fat tip provides a large thermal reservoir right at the contact point and usually creates a larger contact area that's less disturbed by a bit of contamination. The much lower thermal resistance brings the joint temperature closer to the iron's thermostat setting, allowing you to keep that setting lower -- I'll go as low as 300°C for SnPb on a not-too-heavily-coppered board, maybe up to 350°C for lead-free. That gives you consistent heating of a wide range of targets and is much less likely to lift pads even with the long dwell times that often happen while a novice is learning. At the low end, it slows tip oxidation enough to make it almost a non-issue. And less flux charring means less gunk on the board to interfere with the next joint.
Predictability makes the whole learning process much smoother, and running small tips at high temperatures creates all sorts of issues that are hard to see or understand until you've got some experience behind you. When in doubt, use more copper before using higher temperature.
And do it with enough solder on the iron to get good thermal transfer. "Enough" really isn't a lot but it's also not a tip that's been wiped entirely dry. How you hold the tip relative to the via/component lead matters (because you want the liquid solder to help with the thermal transfer).
Not exactly in the the same class as PCBs, but I've had a lot of success with Codex and Claude producing Fritzing diagrams. I've even got a skill set up with Claude so that it follows my preferences with breadboard wiring, using bezier curves to avoid wires crossing. Also, if it can't find a component in the library, it's quite happy drawing svgs of its own.
Didn't HF use an open weights model running on their own hardware to solve the issue though? Sort of defeats that narrative and plays into one in which frontier == bad_guys and open == good_guys
HF guys, especially those under Julien Chaumond, are fantastic and will use whatever they can to address their issues. Open or closed but they are firmly on the Open side of the fence. However, their storage and model service is about as sticky as you can get so they are in a different position. They don’t have to sell capability, they sell capacity and community.
Yes, they have used GLM 5.2, which promptly did whatever they asked it to do, while their first attempts to use their enterprise access to a "SOTA" model failed due to refusals to investigate anything that is security related.
Farage received a "gift" of £5M. He didn't tell parliament about the gift, which breaks the rules. MPs or campaigning MPs need to declare gifts and donations, as there are strict rules on who you can receive money from. The media found out about the "gift", and Farage was going to be investigated. He resigned as MP for Clacton, which stops the investigation and triggers an election. I think his plan was for him to win again, and then be able to turn around and say "the people have decided, they don't care about gifts I get." However, all the other parties refused to stand candidates in the upcoming election. If Farage wins, then the investigation will start again. However, we have numerous comedic parties that will run in elections in the UK. Count Binface will challenge Farage. Farage won with something like 46% of the vote last time. With the negative coverage he's been receiving, and the option of sticking it to reform by voting for Count Binface, the people of Clacton might end up delivering a very embarrassing defeat for Farage. This is the country that voted to name a research vessel Boaty McBoatFace.
Thank you for the explanation, so this is basically for the election as MP. Does this mean that Farage's party also can't win in the next general election (and make him PM)? AFAIK him becoming PM was a worry.
To be prime minister you have to have support of 50%+1 of the MPs. This means either having them in your party, or having a deal with another party.
You also have to be an MP.
Currently Kier Starmer is a Labour mp in an area of London. He’s resigning and is being replaced by someone (Burnham) who was Labour Mayor for Manchester, but stood as MP in an area of Manchester last month after another Labour MP resigned.
Burnham beat reform in that election, and Count Binface. There was a discussion thy given how unpopular Labour is, that reform might win. In the end everyone who was anti reform (Farage’s party) voted Burnham and he got 55% of the vote.
While the sentiment in the U.K. is that if a general election were held tomorrow, Farage would win his seat, and reform would win a large number of votes. In reality polling puts Farage’s party around 25%, with four other parties on 10-20%. As the election isn’t proportional though it’s possible reform could get 55% of the seats with 25% of the vote, however last time they got 1% of the seats with 12% of the votes.
I don't think that's strictly true. You definitely don't have to be an MP in order to hold a cabinet office. I think that extends to the PM as well. It's never been tried obviously.
It's not strictly law, but at this point it might as well be. The last PM to be appointed without being an MP was Sir Alec Douglas-Home in the 1960s, and he immediately resigned his peerage and won a by-election to remedy that...
Any party can win if it gets the majority of candidates across all parliamentary constituencies. However, a Prime Minister must be elected as an MP somewhere. If Reform got a majority without Farage being elected, they would be in a strange situation where the leader of the party couldn't become the PM. It's amusing to think about, in a schadenfreudish way, but the chances of that are slim. He would certainly stand in a general election for the same seat, other major parties would contest it, and it seems that Clacton-on-Sea supports him over the others. This by-election is special because the major parties are boycotting it for being a self-serving stunt that it is.
I imagine they would do what Labour have had to do with Andy Burnham, and get some no-name MP in a safe seat to resign in exchange for a promise to get in the House of Lords later or some other reward.
> Does this mean that Farage's party also can't win in the next general election (and make him PM)?
Firstly, that election is three years away; it's a separate political event.
Secondly, that depends on the outcome of at least three hundred constituency elections, which would have to return Reform candidates. They did OK for a minor party at the last council elections, but they have a very high attrition rate as candidates are discovered to be above the acceptable racism threshold, bent, mad, or simply never intended to do the job in the first place.
There are very few ways of becoming PM without also being an MP. The PM must be able to sit in the parliament, so he must either be an MP or a member of the Lords. In theory, the current PM or even the King could make him a Peer, and therefore a member of the Lords, but neither is likely :)
The last time a PM wasn’t in the commons properly was 1902, although technically Douglas Holme became PM before getting a seat, however Parliament didn’t resume until after he became an MP
A Lord can’t address the commons, which was most recently an issue when ex PM David Cameron was made foreign secretary in the dying days of the last Tory governemt.
Farage can't realistically be PM in the current parliamentary session anyway. His party needs to win, or do very well in, the next general election instead. At a national level this election is purely symbolic and dictates whether Reform will have 7 or 8 seats out of the 650.
I suppose that in theory if Reform could form a government after the next election, but Farage still didn't get a seat, a party colleague could become PM and appoint him as a peer. There's a rich history of politicians losing elections and getting appointed this way instead, though as far as I know none of them subsequently became PM.
> Farage said the funds are required for his personal security
Nope. If he had declared that then there would be no issue what so ever.
There is no restriction on gifted money, no requirement on what to use it for - simply a common code of conduct that requires gifts to be declared.
Farage could of declared it, but didn't - now he has been outed with his hand in cookie jar in a dark closet he's retconning a reason he simply could have fronted with and taken his cookies with the light on and everybody watching.
There are no qualitative judgements made about what one does with this money, just that it is declared. Looking at the Register of Members’ Interests, you find any number of politicians’ gifts, with varying degrees of information about what the gift was for. Farage could very simply have written “£5m; Christopher Harborne; Security”. If that was too intrusive, he may even have been able to write “£5m; Christopher Harborne; Gift”.
The problem with the Harborne donation, as it relates to the Code of Conduct, is not – and never has been – about what is what for. It is about whether it should have been declared.
"The Exemption Rule: Parliamentary ethics rules generally require MPs to register financial interests and "personal benefits" received in the 12 months before taking office. However, Farage and Reform UK have leaned on the exemption for strictly personal gifts "which could not reasonably be thought by others to be related to membership of the House" or his political activities"
Personal security would come under that.
I mean you may not agree, but it's an arguable case.
He can make that case to the investigating committee. If Farage finds that inconvenient then, well, the easiest way for him to avoid such scrutiny in future is to declare any large amounts of money he receives. Not that difficult, and surely in the public interest to do so.
The standards committee has not yet made any ruling. It would be one thing for Farage to object to a specific ruling by the committee, but to object to the entire concept of a large undeclared personal gift being investigated simply shows a contempt for Parliament.
Are we really still going with the "personal security" story? I thought he had pivoted a couple of times to other, not necessarily more credible, stories.
I guess technically he never said it wasn't for security. Apparently the 5m was an unconditional gift for campaigning for brexit, and how he had spent the money was “not the public’s business”.
I use Ublock on Brave (chromium). Ublock is supposed to be unnecessary with brave alone, but I use it all the time to delete annoying UI elements mostly permanently.
Why anyone still uses vanilla Chrome for personal use is beyond me while brave exists and is actively maintained. It's essentially youtube premium for free even on mobile.
Well first of all, uBlock is a version that was sold to advertising companies many years ago, which is why uBlock Origin was created.
uBlock Origin is the one that Google blocked on Chrome by redesigning how extensions work, creating a big fuss. You could try uBlock Origin Lite but, well, it's called Lite for a reason, as it can't block as much stuff. Or you could switch to a browser that supports adblock extensions, which is Firefox.
I meant ublock origin. I use firefox and brave pretty interchangeably. Firefox is better in some ways but utterly infuriating in others.
Fun fact: internet speed tests have been reliably faster in firefox for years for whatever reason. And the volume boost extension I use there doesn't work in fullscreen on brave for some reason, which is mostly why I watch videos predominantly in firefox.
I just tested with chrome + ubo lite, and it worked perfectly fine with no ads.
People keep complaining about it, so I'd like to ask again... what websites aren't getting ads blocked by ubo lite? Everywhere I go, I haven't actually noticed any degradation in blocking capability.
I seem to recall I had a windows phone at the time, with a full keyboard. I could use OS maps on the thing, and although it didn't have GPS, it could get my rough location by tower.
My mate had an iPhone, and it had an app where you could pretend to drink a pint of beer.
That might prove the novelty of the App Store back then. Also, let’s not forget that its’ screen was better than most other smartphones of its time. It was a rather limited phone, but not bad exactly.
I think this is an area where stricter regulation would be appreciated. Just needs an additional checkbox on the regular MOT forms, and all cars would be compliant within a year.
Additionally, car designers should leave headlights and indicators alone, unless they are making the vehicles safer. The first time I encountered an oncoming car with a horizontal LED strip between the lights, I had no idea what style of vehicle was oncoming.
Incredible: Claude 4.5 was able to answer that quickly and gave the right answer (all NFL teams’ names end whit an s).
But ChatGPT kind of had a meltdown (the Miami Dolphins especially tripped it a few times) and gave a doubly incorrect answer: it said one without telling which team it is.
2. Use leaded solder - lead-free is a pain. If you're not doing this for hours every day, even without ventilation, you'll be fine.
3. Heat the pads you're soldering to, not the solder. I used to tell kids to hold the iron to the pad for a count of three, then feed the solder in.
4. Two additional tools I find helpful - a solder sucker and copper wick.