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alnwlsn
Joined 889 karma
- Not true, you can make one yourself by hand if you want to, it just won't be very high quality:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PzoAReMXOE
If you want a good one, you'll need the materials, machines and skills to make good ones. Probably not too likely unless you like building factories for fun and no profit.
- May not meet your particular definition of small, but my portable printer is a Voron 0.2. The frame is sturdy enough that you can attach a handle to one corner and just carry it around with you, at least for a while. It's not particularly lightweight. But it is small (fits completely inside the build volume of my other printer), and being fully enclosed within the frame, seems more durable than the likes of the other tiny printers (Lemontron, A1 Mini, etc.)
- As my family's computer guy, my dad complains to me about this. And there's no satisfactory answer I can give him. My mom told me last year she is "done learning new technology" which seems like a fair goal but maybe not a choice one can make.
You ever see those "dementia simulator" videos where the camera spins around and suddenly all the grocery store aisles are different? That's what it must be like to be less tech literate.
- I think everyone builds one of these little camera cars at least once.
I made one when I got my NTC CHIP[0] in 2015. This was a pretty big deal at the time because Raspberry Pi were still months away from releasing a model with integrated WiFi, and were sold out for quite a while after that. You had to use USB WiFi adapters, and this was always a little flakey.
I attached my camera to a servo so you could tilt it up and down, and it even had a rear facing camera and a magnetic connector, so you could back up and 'dock' with a power supply to recharge. I wanted to make a little claw arm for it, but I never got that far. Good times, makes me want to do another one.
- If you're looking at the "how" specifically:
This would play MIDI files, not MP3s. Midi files are the digital version of that book with the punched holes, it's a sequence of note events over time.
The physical book with holes forms a series of air valves. So what you do to convert it is attach a bunch of pneumatic solenoid valves instead. Then there is some interface board that lets you control a bunch of solenoids from a laptop. It's not really that complicated but you need one valve for each note, so you need a lot of them, and you have to physically plumb in each one to the organ.
Have a look at Look Mum No Computer, he does this kind of stuff: https://www.lookmumnocomputer.com/projects#/joans-church-org...
- Makes me wonder how many living people on earth have seen a nuclear explosion with their own eyes. It can't be very high, maybe 1-10 thousand? Not a number you would want to see increase, to be sure.
- My dad always pronounced it a-luna-min, so my whole life I thought that there were 3 pronunciations, and the fact that there are only two correct ones feels strange to me. Not sure where he got that from, maybe he had special metal from the moon.
- Most of them weren't, but some were. If all you were doing was looking at screens of text, a long persistence phosphor could be desirable[0].
I've got one that is inside an Apple II monitor. Can confirm, the image looks very flicker-free, but has pretty bad ghosting if you're looking at anything that scrolls. It looks cool but is pretty rough to do any work on. The other green CRTs I have are barely more persistent than a regular black and white TV, and I've never heard of a long persistence color monitor.
- Not sure if you're joking, but of course they already have:
- In my eyes it's quite the opposite: there is almost nothing that exists as a complete product on Amazon. Faster and cheaper? Yes. Better and more complete? Not a chance. But you have to want it bad enough, and have enough skill to do it.
Arduino is (was?) one of those skills. Practice them enough, and you'll soon find the things you want aren't available for sale, at any price.
- Reminds me of when I first started learning computers, there was a version of Windows 3.11 that fit on a single 1.4M floppy. Some of them fit even more stuff by uncompressing the floppy into a ramdisk.
You could even make your own, starting with the file manager from Windows 3.1 and some files from a Windows 95 CD (the installer for 95 ran a stripped down 3.1)
- Our best answer might be film. Some of it has already survived 80 years. (Micro)film is supposed to last something like 500 years, and it's what Github picked for their Arctic Code Vault. I was curious one time so I looked into it, but it seems like most effort is on converting microfilm to digital, not the other way around.
Anecdotally, the stuff my grandpa filmed on Super-8 is still in nearly perfect condition 65 years later. But most of his 16mm stuff from just a few years earlier than that has vinegar syndrome, so it's not "just film it and you're good"
- Texas also has a lot of wind power. I was driving though at night one time and there were turbines on either side of the road as far as could be seen. Thing is, they are tall so they have those red airplane warning lights on top - which would all flash at exactly the same time. A rather trippy thing to see.
- Your mom was probably thinking along the right lines haha.
But don't worry, TV tubes are practically worthless. I've been to swap meets for an antique radio club in my area. Sometimes, there will be a few boxes of tubes from TV sets there (400-500 tubes) and people literally can't give them away. Tubes from audio equipment are the only ones people are after.
- I thought so too, but those aren't normal hobby servos, they are these things [0] at $100-300 a pop. and there are like 20 of them
- I continue to be skeptical of text to CAD, because to make it work, you're going to be doing a whole lot of this [0]. This is an extremely high bar to clear to be better than even the most basic of CAD skills.
I'd wager that for most of the CAD I work on, I would not be able to accurately describe what I want in natural language. If you've been able to, please share examples!
[0] - https://www.nasa.gov/history/afj/ap13fj/15day4-mailbox.html
- Growing up in the 2000s, I've come to associate blue LEDs with tacky cheap garbage appliances, as no sane manufacturer would treat their customers with such contempt. The brightest LEDs were always in the cheapest, lowest quality stuff. Especially the ultra-bright clear ones project onto the wall, with bonus points added for ones driven off unfiltered AC so they flicker as your eyes move around.
It is pretty impressive that such a tiny light can light up a whole room, but it's not the kind of impressive that makes it comfortable to sleep next to one.
- I'm sure part of it is that EE claims probably the widest range out there. You can have kilovolts or microvolts, but mostly the same rules apply. Or you can learn how to power a small sensor for years off one small battery, or how to power a country. I don't know many other disciplines that can lay claim to 10-15 orders of magnitude.
At most levels, software will be in there somewhere, even those fake flickering candle LEDs have RAM, ROM, and a processor these days.
However, it does heavily relay on the internet for setup and distribution (app stores, or else lots of pip install, git clone, pnpm install, etc.)
I've been working on a virtual machine with all the dependencies preinstalled just so I'll have offline access, and it's surprisingly difficult (though I'm not super familiar with typical webdev stuff). I'd have to think a regular user who really needs to rely on it doesn't stand a chance, which doesn't seem to mesh(ha) that well given how loudly the "off gridness" of it is touted.
Then again, you probably need the internet to be able to obtain the hardware in the first place, but that's another problem.