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crb3
Joined 116 karma

  1. So it was double-forks, not pitch-forks, all along?
  2. That's Keith Baar; I looked it up.

    Keith Barr focused on musical technology at MXR, Alesis and eventually Spin Semiconductor. His legacy is MXR pedal effects like the Phase-90, the MidiVerb digital reverb series and the Spin FV-1 digital reverb chip.

  3. > The 8088's chief virtue was that it was readily available at a reasonable price;

    That, and it had a compatible suite of peripheral chips, while the M68K didn't... Something I vaguely recall an Intel FAE gloating about soon after: "And we're going to keep it that way."

  4. If you come across a CZ230S, be aware that you can exfiltrate all 100 of the fixed voicings through SysEx. I got that far, saving those tables to disk; my plan, when I ran out of time and attention, was to SysEx in one of those settings to the last entry in the CZ101's table, which is overwriteable, so as to get 8 notes at a time. Maybe you'll find a place to drop in a ROM with them all.
  5. Thanks, CVS.
  6. It's off the shelf at my local CVS (e: and has been for weeks). I looked.
  7. My anecdata is that, though it's not as effective as pseudoephedrine, phenylephrine actually is effective in an inhaler, and a helluva lot better at clearing up a stuffy nose than "scents and essential oils". Of course, a cylindrical inhaler with a wick inside it doesn't go near my digestive tract... Now I'll have to look around for a replacement inhaler, something quick enough to avert choking-panic. Thanks, CVS.
  8. Lancaster CA is high desert.
  9. The laptop is a Gateway MX8711. I tried the Exe-Gnu 64bit live-USB and it refused to boot, so I shrugged and booted it into the 32bit flavor. Inherent or model-specific (or offended at only having 2G DRAM to play in), it wasn't worth my time to chase down why, not for an ancilliary machine.
  10. Browsing is slow but not that unusable. firefox-esr is in the repos; I prefer palemoon but I'll take what I can get. Gnumeric is faster than LO; both are in the repos. The Broadcom blobs for that Gateway machine are sadly out of date, so I yanked the wifi module out entirely; ethernet works fine, though in most cases I use it landlocked. The editor I prefer (jstar) is TUI, so I mostly work out of xterms.

    Use-cases? Remote and while-you-wait work, RS232 and ethernet test console. It's bigger than a netbook but it's what I've got, so I lug it around.

  11. Commenting to something said within the linked article: 32-bit Devuan (with Trinity Desktop aka KDE3.5 on maintenance) is still available at http://exegnulinux.net/ with Devuan/Debian repos. I'm happily running that on a Core2 Duo laptop.
  12. Disagree.

    I'm a ham; my kids aren't... but they grew up with me using Morse (my computers talk to me when they boot up, and when a 'kitchentimer' goes off, and...) so they were naturally exposed to the paradigm. Maybe that's a limiting factor, but...

    With CW you're limited to two states: key and unkey. Knocking on a wall, you're not: you can go loud and soft as well. A dah has the same pacing as it always does (3 dits in length), but if its knock is perceptibly louder, at least twice as hard as a dit, in practice that seems to make it hold together as readable Morse, at least for us. Certainly our family signal, questionmark (..__..), is usable that way, so is each son's "call-letter".

  13. And (guessing here) you'd be SOL if there were already 9999 Susies registered when you tried to sign up.

    Me, I'm gonna treat it like a firstnick.lastnick format when it arrives at my account. I figure "crb3.cdp1802" is very unlikely to be taken before I get there, but, if I'm wrong, there're lots of other already-memorized device-numbers I can append.

  14. A quick search on 'Ampro' turned up https://www.elite.parts/ampro/little%20board$z80 which might do.

    My first CP/M computer was an Ampro Little Board 1A, sold along with a floppy carrying CP/M-2.2 + ZCPR3. I got a lot done on that machine, including a text-mode MIDI editor-sequencer -- the Z80 DART as set up could run the second serial channel (the first was CON to the terminal) at the MIDI baudrate and slave-interrupt to derive its MIDI Clocks from a sync-track recorded/played on a 4-track cassette machine through a Kansas City tape-modem.

  15. Unless they're talking about layers, with the function prototypes and function calls being declarative, and the next layer down being where the code is actually written out. Even that doesn't really work, though; main() usually has code in it... <shrug>
  16. We get that half dozen as what we call 'ghost calls' -- the caller has hung up by the time the outgoing message ends. It might have something to do with my putting SIT tones at the beginning of that outgoing message. If their autodialer doesn't drop the call entirely, it triggers their message, so we hear it start partway through; either way, we know not to pick up.
  17. Except for (the complicated mechanical mess that is) Black & Decker, the cheap ones I've encountered don't have any one-time-only control mechanism, they just cycle the thermostat if left on long enough, which means the heating element is powered long enough to pop the thermostat again. Then they put thermal fuses in to deal with any heat buildup.
  18. Haven't seen it in years, but I still remember naming the cat: "Script or Five? Which hurts less?"
  19. Old.reddit.com still works -- just use it. So far they're smart enough to realize that some folks like an information-dense display in their browser, rather than a fluffy echo of Yahoo's purple plague.

    I watch slashdot via http://alterslash.org, and occasionally (very occasionally) drop into the main site to add a comment. Are they still adding hot grits to Natalie Portman? Watching just the top comments on AlterSlash, I don't have to care.

  20. I've read that Malda wished a 'dot' TLD was available back then so it could be 'aitch tee tee pee colon slash slash slash dot dot dot'.
  21. mpg123 -C -Z *mp3 works for me.
  22. Maybe what's needed is explicit Agree and Disagree buttons, with indicators, to skim off such pollution of up/downvotes-as-QC?
  23. They could have used matte black tempera (Sanford's IIRC). Back in the day, I played around with (analog) photocopier rendition of pen-and-ink drawings and found that large black inked areas developed faded centers. Coating the ink there with said tempera fixed the dropouts.
  24. That's how I read it too; and then the link could be seen as an elaborate QSL card.
  25. That's when you go out there with a shopvac with a long extension tube; they're already gathered for you. Maybe finish with a long shot of insecticide, then just plug the intake hose into the exhaust port and let it sit for a few days.
  26. I'm using 11CSciCalc on my MotoG7power. It's good (at least for keyboard layout and key-function -- haven't had occasion to try out its programmability for compatibility), but without the tactile feedback of the real buttons I have to visually monitor what actually gets entered, so I can't drop fully into the problem domain, not like I can with my HP11C.

    It's my HP41CV that basically never gets used. Back when, I wrote a program on it, 'ampsr', to calculate ideals and then find the closest standard-value matches for a three-resistor attenuator network used as the gain-and-offset control of an opamp amplifier; it took 16 minutes for my HP41CV to arrive at the answer, and that was just selecting among the E24 "5%" standard-value array. My later Perl version, by comparison, is all but instantaneous even working with the E96 array and running on a 400MHz box. The HP41CV's programmability was great for its era; not so much, now.

  27. Try putting that track into your random-shuffle collection; you might get some more miles out of it that way. That's what I do for my housework music: whether it's in a pocket mp3 player or 'mpg123 -C -Z *mp3', it's all familiar tracks that roughly fit the mood, and the familiarity of the tune is there but there's just enough surprise from its being up next to make it pleasant without being distracting.
  28. I get this by writing in minimal-markdown text, then pushing it to HTML and reading it in a browser. The reformatting breaks the prior spacial relationships of the words; swapping the text editor for the browser framing breaks the context.
  29. For creativity, get used to running a fan nearby. If you're like me, your inbuilt pattern-matcher will autocomplete and drag up 'ghost impressions' while you're otherwise occupied. A fan is better than an electronic noise source because its air, and thus its sound, interacts with the surrounding world; instead of being a point-source, it's a better background.

    For problem solving, dwell on the problem in its domain just before bedtime, and make sure it's the last thing on your mind as you settle down into sleep. Let the subconscious have sole access to your understanding of the problem overnight.

    Everybody's built different, but these work for me.

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