AStonesThrow

"How much" isn't a question that makes sense, unless you are looking at a specific set of images. Astronomical images can be generated in many, many ways from all sorts of processes. Sometimes there is natural color included, but enhanced; sometimes a wider spectrum is mapped into visible colors so humans can appreciate it; sometimes, the colors are codes for different features, and there is a key provided, so that the colors can be interpreted to what they mean, rather than corresponding to visible light.

It's not just astronomical images, but all disciplines of science use color keys to depict things that are not colors. Look at a topographical map, and it may have green and brown areas that are simply abstracts. A political map uses 5-6 colors to highlight the shapes states or nations, but these are not "real" colors either. But usually, you're provided a color key, for interpretation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicast_address

There were more than a few people who spotted how disused this range had become after mbone experiments, and sometimes suggested reclaiming the range as IPv4 address space was being exhausted.

Interestingly, there are reserved multicast addresses (yes, addresses, not ports) not only for OSPF, but for many other interior routing protocols, as well as mDNS, LLMNR, and NTP. Conspicuously absent is any reservation for BGP.

Yes, that is what rlpb wrote: soundwaves are richly descriptive out-of-band notifications!

Surely it must be well-known that it is exceedingly rare, but valuable, for an organization to document why they didn’t do certain things.

Great Work, Range Danger Officer!

JK Rowling, CH OBE FRSL is an author whose corpus of speech is mainly her novel-writing. Now how did nine letters come to be placed after her name, even as she shortened her first two initials? Because her writing (speech) has been in exemplary service and support of the Crown and the British Empire.

So why would police arrest JK Rowling for pushing back against one wedge-issue in the culture war?

The 70-year-old Guy being arrested outside the abortion clinic for holding a rosary and praying, is that the singular offence he committed? Possession of a phoenix feather? Did he rescue Tom Marvolo Riddle's mother? I don't know. Neither do you.

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In the Greek New Testament, many sentences and paragraphs begin with "Kai" which means "And". In English, discouraged just as much as "But".

I tend to type breathlessly, as if speaking; I've done a lot of time in chat rooms. These days, when I'm composing a message, I'll rewind to proofread it, insert commas and semicolons, and break up sentences and paragraphs.

I believe what really drove home the importance of punctuation was singing from sheet music and watching the director. Now there's a job where timing is everything, and it was eventually revealed that a comma (or semicolon) in the lyric text implied a pause in the sung phrase as well. You could take a breath at a comma. In fact, there's a sheet music breath mark that's like a comma above the staff line.

What's more, when a poem or lyrics are presented line-by-line, at the end of a line where there is no punctuation, this does not necessarily mean you can pause or take a breath, because poetry is divided by meter, not by sentence structure. So, when singing with your favorite band, or reciting your favorite poetry slam, try not to insert semicolons where they don't belong!

Cisco offers some simulator tooling. It basically virtualizes a lot of networking devices and allows you to play LEGO/SimCity with them: Cisco Packet Tracer

https://www.netacad.com/learning-collections/cisco-packet-tr...

Now, we built toy networks from scratch while I was working toward my certification. Surely larger-scale simulation files could be loaded into Packet Tracer. And perhaps, vendors have simulators on a larger scale than the free downloads?

https://developer.cisco.com/modeling-labs/

When I worked at a regional ISP, my supervisor was the BGP wizard. He referred to exterior routing as "a black art". Even more, the telcos were deploying their own technologies like Frame Relay and SMDS, which are Layer 1/Layer 2 protocols beyond the standard "point-to-point" leased lines.

We once experienced a fiber cut on our T-3 backbone (construction workers didn't dial 811). So my supervisor arranged the BGP routes to send everything over a 56k line, IIRC. He gloated about it. The packet loss rate was absurd, but our customers had connectivity!

https://www.thaifoodnearmenyc.com/

There was a local food-truck operator named "Phở King" and eventually they established a storefront ... well, I see one closed, and another opened up. Formerly known as "Phở King Kitchen" and now there's the "Phở King Eggroll" place.

Fred Armisen did an SNL bit about this, too.

Not far from me, there is a ghost kitchen cluster. It's tucked away in a commercially-zoned neigborhood, and it serves all the food delivery services. Apparently, you can walk in too. I only accidentally patronized them once, when they had some great larb on offer. I think the report says there's 15 different menus and "virtual kitchens" in the building, just turning out food-to-go.

Randall's license text is really chill; normally to give attribution to an image from Commons there would be more to do, but currently the article does hotlink to the page on Xkcd.com, and that is clearly "stated in the LICENSE file".

Shoe repair is hit-or-miss. I contacted one who said it would be a 2 month turnaround time.

I purchased an item from a church supply and noticed that it included a molded plastic insert that I'd be removing to clean once in a while. So I contacted the vendor and asked whether I could purchase some spare inserts. "well, our supply chains are challenged right now, and this is made in Italy..."

I advise my friends, if they're purchasing any electronics, like a notebook, you may as well bundle some accessories and spare parts right away, like an extra battery or power supply or the component that's most likely to go bad, because in 5 years when you need it, they'll be sold out.

In fact, in all of those markets I've listed above, I've purchased something, unbox it at home, only to find out that it is lacking accessories, isn't a complete set, or part of it is unfit for purpose, and in fact the manufacturer just gets things onto store shelves while incomplete, so they can sell you more things out of their catalog [iPhones without chargers; shipping beta software...]

I just finished carefully cleaning the sponge filter on my vacuum cleaner. One day I'll visit their website to see if there are any spare accessories still available for it. Good luck!

But in those days, there were the trade magazines on the newsstand, the electronics shops and clubs where guys hung out to talk about calculators and radios and jukeboxes and pinball machines.

It looks like MITS was already into calculators and model rocketry. And getting featured on the cover of Popular Electronics gave them a boost. Undoubtedly, plenty of ads in the back for mail-order kits, and then you'd be signed up for ever-more specialized company catalogs.

It was the same when I collected vinyl records and built computers. Find the right trade magazines and the crusty old guys tending storefronts, and you could learn about the next big thing.

Of course there were also comic books sold to gullible children with catalogs and ads in the back pages. Snapping gum, whoopee cushions, spy cameras, and X-ray Specs. You could count on being disappointed by purchasing something on that list, but it was often a matter of clever misrepresentation by marketing blurbs and a sketch.

One night 8-year-old me phoned in an order for a "remote control hovercraft". It came "collect-on-delivery" which Mom didn't like. The hovercraft was not radio-controlled as I had imagined. It had a flashlight-like handle that held 2x "D" cells and a motor that rotated a thin cable. The cable stretched several feet to a "hovercraft" with a light plastic hull and fan blades. So you could walk it around the room like a marionette as the downdraft held it suspended a little bit.

Only a few years later, I began receiving mail from AARP. The hovercraft sellers had sold them my address and pseudonym. We could tell, because the hovercraft-selling lady had misspelled my first name. Good times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAWK_beacon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Build_a_better_mousetrap,_and_...

And boomers know that the grand-master of designing better mousetraps was Rube Goldberg:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg_machine

The long list of titles is interesting and almost leads us to a self-referential thought. These series were often known as "boiler-room novels" because they were basic and formulaic, and it was possible to command a team of entry-level writers to churn them out.

You wanted to "ace the class", which is an "A" on your final report card? But your crush's exam tanked your grade? You passed the class anyway, right?

Did you swap Scantrons, then, and your crush sat next to you, writing answers on the dgfitz forms?

She wouldn't pass without an "A" on the exams, so her running point total was circling the drain, and your effort gave her a "C-" or something?

In what ways did your teacher make the exams "fair"? What percentage of the grade did they comprise?

Were the 3 tests administered on 3 separate occasions, so nobody caught you repeatedly cheating the same way?

Internet Society / Internet Engineering Task Force

The Electronic Frontier Foundation

The Free Software Foundation

The Linux Kernel Organization

Southern Poverty Law Center

NAACP - 501(c)(4)

Planned Parenthood Federation of America

Corporation for Public Broadcasting

MacArthur Foundation

Gates Foundation

Wikimedia Foundation

You get the "Foundation" idea - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&li...

PFLAG

Human Rights Campaign

RAINN

Elton John AIDS Foundation

You get the "LGBTQ" idea - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:LGBTQ_political_advoc...

Amnesty International

Freedom From Religion Foundation

NORML / NORML Foundation

National Cannabis Industry Association

Sandy Hook Promise

March for Our Lives

Rock the Vote

By rights, you should be bludgeoned in your bed.

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=u-JDl5IeDIY&si=9ibHizB9IqD...

Last week I asked my PCP about a middle-ear blockage, and he said the F.P. should do the trick, and perhaps also relieve the dry, itchy eyes I've been suffering.

I suspect that I have been dealing with OSA for several years now, so... the nighttime dosing seems like a good idea. We'll see how it goes!

> When you take the test in a proctored testing center location they lock all of your stuff in a locker, check your hands, pockets, etc. They give you earplugs. You use their computer. They record you the whole time. They check your drivers license and take a fingerprint.

While attending there, I also took a virtual Calculus class. The instructor was based in the satellite campus, several miles away. The virtual class required a TI graphing calculator, used Pearson textbook & video lectures, and all the tests and quizzes were in Canvas. I worked from home or the main campus, where there was a tutoring center, full of students and tutors making the rounds to explain everything. I received tutoring every other week.

But then our instructor posted the details on our final exams. We were expected to arrive in-person, for the first time of the semester, on that satellite campus at specified times.

I protested, because everything I'd ever done was on the main campus, and I rode public transit, and the distance and unfamiliarity would be a hardship. So the disability services center accommodated me.

They shut me into in a dimly lit one-person room with a desk, paper, and pencil, and I believe there was a camera, and no calculator required. The instructor had granted an extended period to complete the exam, and I finished at the last possible moment. I was so thankful to be done and have good results, because I had really struggled to understand Calculus.

https://www.strausfamilycreamery.com/sustainable-manufacturi...

https://computer.rip/2020-06-14-manifest-telephone.html

I said that religion does not thrive under capitalism, and of course this was the fate met by the Bell system. The breakup of the Bell system in 1982 occurred primarily in response to their very high rates, which were (accurately) seen as symptomatic of the monopoly they enjoyed.

CNBC Reporting Live from Jack Welch's funeral, March 5, 2020: https://youtu.be/6opKFgvRzjE?si=ynbAEYEZBCzfuTqE

Nobody is wearing masks, but there is a lot of name-dropping by the field reporter, Robert Frank, and a full obituary in the dooblydoo; don't miss them

During the mid-90s, the Unix Wars were raging and Unix System Labs was suing U.C. Berkeley over the intellectual property of Unix source code. Unix had been written at AT&T Bell Labs, but Berkeley had licensed and forked their own, based on improved networking code, and by this time it was ready to run on i386 systems. In fact, USL had borrowed back some BSD code, allegedly without crediting them. Berkeley had been busy removing AT&T code and replacing it, so they could relicense BSD Unix.

USL, part of AT&T (but later purchased by Novell), contended that Berkeley could not easily make a "clean room implementation" of any kernel code or device drivers, if those programmers had read or worked with original AT&T source code. They told the courts (and journalists) that the programmers might be tempted to reproduce proprietary Unix code, consciously or subconsciously, and therefore, these programmers were permanently "Mentally Contaminated" and Berkeley should not be allowed to continue distributing BSD [BSDi] Unix.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc.....

So when I attended Usenix LISA in 1994, this 3-year lawsuit was at a fever pitch, and someone on the convention floor had manufactured large buttons for attendees to wear, proudly proclaiming "MENTALLY CONTAMINATED", and all the admins and systems programmers had a good laugh about the absurdity of trying to keep a lid on proprietary source code by policing everyone who's ever seen one of its files.

https://m.xkcd.com/1019/

https://m.xkcd.com/2159/

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/habakkuk/2?18

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/daniel/14?23

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/YubikeyMos...

You may be thinking of "passkeys" and while a security key can be a form of passkeys, the ones generated for your mum will be on her device, yes.

A passkey is a shortcut, for now. Relying on a passkey being in place is another good way to forget your password. ;-)

"builtins" are primitives that Bash can use internally without calling fork()/exec(). In fact, builtins originated in the Bourne shell to operate on the current shell process, because they would have no effect in a subprocess or subshell.

In addition to builtins and commands, Bash also defines "reserved words", which are keywords to make loops and control the flow of the script.

https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html#Reserved-...

Many distros will ship a default or skeleton .bashrc which includes some useful aliases and functions. This is sort of like a "standard library", if you like having 14 different standards.

https://gist.github.com/marioBonales/1637696

'[' is an external binary in order to catch any shell or script that does not interpret it as a builtin operator. There may be a couple more. Under normal circumstances, it won't actually be invoked, as a Bash script would interpret '[' as the 'test' builtin.