- flyinghamster parentSee also, Crucial exiting the marketplace. That one hit me out of left field, since they've been my go-to for RAM for decades. Though I also see that as a little bit of what has been the story of American businesses: "It's too much trouble to make consumer products. Let's just make components or sell raw materials, or be middlemen instead. No one will notice."
- An additional data point is that Midewin's bison area is surrounded by a double fence - a barbed-wire one to keep the humans out and a stout steel one to keep the bison in.
- Also, you were far more likely to get actual documentation back in the day. You're never going to get a detailed first-party technical reference for today's Apple computers (at least not without being Big Enough and signing a mountain of NDAs); compare that to the Apple II having a full listing of the Monitor ROM, or the original IBM PC Technical Reference Manual.
- Data accuracy can be a problem. It lists 115 counties for Illinois, which is news to me since Illinois has 102 counties.
For example, Kenosha County is in Wisconsin, not Illinois.
- That varied by region. When cable came to my town in the early 1980s, HBO and Cinemax were part of the local cable provider's basic package. That lasted until the next provider bought them out.
- That is fair, though they at least walked back some of those, and self-hosting is still very much a thing if you prefer not to deal with configuring your system through Someone Else's Computer.
- It just seems insane to me that this mentality has been allowed to take root. I live in an area where kids on bikes are a regular sight, any time the weather is even halfway decent. Just last year, I came across a brother and sister riding up the forest preserve bike trail with fishing poles. But the media-driven "fear, fear, fear, nothing but fear" narrative has really done a hell of a lot of harm to society.
- I'd wonder if Hitchhiker's would have some issues with Douglas Adams' estate, given his involvement.
- You might want to reconsider Bosch (or be careful about which model you choose): https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/i-wont-connect-my-dis...
- I had a copy of that as well - I forget whether it was a Christmas gift or if I bought it. The demos were neat, but I was lacking in ideas when I had time to play with it, and the Apple didn't go to college with me.
But if I were going to do some "from the ground up, using first principles, with nobody else's libraries" embedded work, Forth would certainly be something I'd consider.
- You and me both, and that became a cycle with each new generation of technology. I remember that FidoNet (and Usenet, for that matter) had a lot of that ham radio ethos, with commercial messages most unwelcome. But once the internet got too big, Usenet drowned in spam. It was too easy to crapflood newsgroups into oblivion, and once the politicians started grandstanding, ISPs wasted no time nuking their NNTP servers.
- > Recently a local news station in Maine reported a story of some middle schoolers calling their friends with landline telephones.
This reflects on another problem: the sorry state of journalism and willingness to turn press releases into news. That story ran in a wide variety of media outlets, and a Google News search of "children landline phones" turns up a bunch of these.
It turns out that these articles were really ads for "Tin Can," a VoIP phone for kids. Not really a landline at all, it's seriously nerfed, and I'd assume that if it's SIP, it's locked to their service, or else it's their own proprietary protocol. Not really a surprise, given that real landlines are almost extinct, and expensive where available.
- One of my old builds was a Phenom II X2 550 Black, where I found that I could either overclock it, or unlock two more cores, but not both. I chose the cores, and it ran that way for a long time. That was one of the best bang-for-the-buck deals I ever ran into for a CPU.
- Keep in mind it goes further than that. US customary volume units don't match up with British ones.
One British gallon is about 4.5 liters, where a US gallon is about 3.8. Quarts, pints, and cups follow, but fluid ounces are another thing. A US gallon is divided into 128 fl. oz., while a British gallon is 160. This results in a US fluid ounce of about 29.6 ml, vs. 28.4 ml for the British one, and also affects teaspoons and tablespoons.
- Also, premade mixes are a godsend if you or a family member needs a gluten-free diet. I haven't (yet) noticed any shrinkflation, but I've certainly noticed that the King Arthur gluten-free muffin mix is noticeably more generous than any of the others I've tried.
- It has been done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XLZ4Z8LpEE
The old Teletype in question was a Baudot machine with a 60 mA current loop, rather than ASCII and 20 mA loop for the Model 33.
- And in addition, DEC made its name in the 1960s by selling computers at unprecedented low prices. A complete PDP-8/S system was quoted at $25000 in 1965 [0], equivalent to over a quarter of a million dollars today, for a computer that barely had an instruction set. These days we can buy supercomputers for five of today's dollars.
- When my dad's old Sony KV-25XBR bit the dust, he replaced it with a 32" Toshiba flat-screen CRT. That thing was a chunk indeed.
In my opinion, even though it was really quite a good set, you're absolutely right about NTSC looking horrible on big screens. From day one I noticed that the scan lines very much made it look like watching through very fine Venetian blinds.
Upscaling NTSC and putting it on a big flat panel isn't really so great either.
- I'm guessing the author doesn't speak Spanish. :)
- The sheer number of hoops one has to jump through before even getting the image says to me, "Nope." What a shame, because I was just as impressed with that floppy as anyone else.
- People who got too serious about communism tended to get eliminated by Stalin, and then the people in charge of the elimination (Yagoda, Yezhov, Beria) were in turn eliminated in later purges.
- > I'm not into retro gaming (they are unforgiving and often not very fun) and I can't think of anything else to do with it. I've thought about some basic home automation tasks, but these old machines draw so much power it feels bad.
That's what dissuaded me from ever attempting to resurrect overly-old hardware, although at least a KIM-1 isn't going to be a power hog. On the other hand, something like a PDP-11/70 would suck down a ridiculous amount of juice for much less computing power than a modern microcontroller.
Then there's the whole parts problem. Tracking down boards and components that will never be made again is another nightmare. Emulators make far more sense when you don't want to be your own component-level repair tech.
- "Just get LTSC" isn't really an answer when it isn't legitimately available to us plebes.
- Pixel 7a: slow to start, and you must wait for it to finish shutting down (or crashing) before you try to launch it again. Lord help you if Debian pushes a systemd update, since updating systemd is a reliable crash.
- > No physical store would bother to check the ID of anyone clearly not {too young or borderline}.
Except where police cadets or paid informants go into stores to buy age-restricted goods. A convenience store near me got whacked with that recently, and now has a no-exceptions ID policy.
- > I cannot understand why the European Commission wants to reduce our reliance on FAANG services, and at the same time they make Google Play a de facto standard, reinforcing the mobile duopoly.
It's called bad faith, and it's an all too common problem with politicians and business types alike.
- I've been playing with it[0] - it still has a few rough edges. It's rather slow to start up compared to firing up a VM in virt-manager, and when you shut it down you must wait for it to finish shutting down before trying to restart it.
Woe to you if Debian pushes a systemd update. It took repeated incantations with apt to get that update to take, because updating systemd would crash the VM Every. Damn. Time.
[0] The current console-only incarnation.
- My issue is with $URL potentially getting hijacked, or even something like the kerfluffle over the PuTTY SSH client not residing at putty.org.
- I've avoided Python for a long time, but I'm getting roped in myself, mainly because certain tasks seem to require a lot less code than Java or Perl.
That said, call me old-fashioned, but I really take issue with "curl $URL | bash" as an installation method. If you're going to use an install script, inspect it first.
- Since I always answered "Not now" when my phone wanted to replace Google Assistant with Gemini, I still have Google Assistant on my phone. When I try to bring up Gemini settings, it will ask me if I want to replace Google Assistant with Gemini, and not give me access to any Gemini-related settings.