Gordonjcp

You mean your computer's PSU doesn't need a 120°C rated plug? Bro do you even CUDA?

You should see his old site.

> those wooden rod things

Dowels.

I guess these are engineers who somehow don't need to draw a wage then?

I think it may just be because it looks less weird than only pushing up the characters with descenders, like in HD44780 LCDs.

> Fact: When the Macintosh came out in 1984 it came with no programming environment

The programming environment for the Mac was a total shitshow in 1984, and continued to be so for a couple of versions after. You needed a 128k Mac, a Lisa, *and* an Apple II to make it work *at all*.

Never thought of it that way, but you might very well be right. Something like "my ear isn't shaking, the camera isn't shaking, must be real" ;-)

I wonder if maybe their implementation "fills in the blanks" in the 3D space in the same way our brain does, so it looks "properly 3D" because it's what we're expecting it to look like already?

When I've got my glasses on, the "Forest" sequences look *wildly* 3D to me.

Without my glasses it looks less so but that might be a function of not really being able to focus on stuff closer than about ten metres ;-)

I have this book.

You don't have to use the ORM, but if you do you get a lot of cool stuff "for free".

Also it's one of the better ORMs, a lot of people were put off by the fairly broken implementation in early RoR.

It's bonkers that the US named them but don't require them. They're called Mansfield Bars in the UK too, presumably because there isn't really a better or more descriptive name you can give them.

There's probably an "official" name in some dusty Ministry of Transport document like "side protection collision bar" or some such, and TÜV probably calls it something like "Seitenaufprallschutzgerätüberlaufschutzausrüstung" or some damn thing.

You just have a multimodal container, that you lift off a train car and onto an artic trailer.

This is a solved problem.

Find some existing project similar to yours that has a PCB and a circuit diagram. I tend to recommend that synth DIY folks look at something like yusynth.net, and Yves Usson's designs. It doesn't have to be done in Kicad and indeed it might be better if it's not.

Redraw the circuit in Kicad, then redraw the PCB. See how close you can get to the original.

That way you're climbing the "learn how to use Kicad" learning curve, without having to climb the "learn how to lay out a PCB and circuit diagram" learning curve :-)

I flip between Flask and Django depending on what I'm doing.

If I want to make something "from scratch" I do it with Flask, if I've got an existing database (or something that can be wrangled into a database) I do it in Django.

Others have mentioned the "plain text files" thing, so let me just mention the "plain text files" thing.

Everything is stored as a plain text file. It's just text. Hell, it's practically human-readable, if you're a fairly nerdy human.

You can store them in git, or any other source code repository. You can email them or stick them up on a server, without them getting mangled, because they're just text.

You can run scripts on them, or just plain open them in a text editor and do search-and-replace on them.

You can even write code to write files for you - take a bunch of stuff and programmatically design footprints and components, any way you like, because it's just plain text files, describing lines and co-ordinates and stuff.

Can't get any less locked-in than that!

Take a look at FlaskBB, it's kind of like those but modern and written in Python.

Also it needs devs.

https://github.com/flaskbb/flaskbb

Yeah, no, it has not.

It's not possible, because there's no way to distinguish what the previous value was.

Ah, you sound like the vendor we've just fired.

I wish I was joking.

I always imagine them as being a lot like Ron from GTA5.

Okay, but how can you determine what the old value was, given that it's now a random value multiplied by a random value with yet another random value added on top?

Hard disks don't record zeros and ones...

The lowest band my amateur radio licence allows me to use is 136kHz, which would require a dipole about 1km long and at least 50m off the ground.

You wind a loading coil on a plastic dustbin.

This is about the only valid objection in all the replies to my post.

You're bang on - you might not know it's been wiped.

99.9999% of people will never need to care about it that much.

How could they possibly be detectably different?

If you're saving stuff on old MFM drives today, you're probably not in the demographic that cares about wiping drives for disposal.

> there's a lab that can detect the difference between a zero that used to be a one and a zero that was always a zero

No, there isn't, and hard disks haven't worked that way since before Windows existed.

In the olden days hard disks wrote data on spinning platters the size of dinner plates with heads the size of Sharpie markers, and the controllers were a Z80 microprocessor on a card with a few kB of ROM and maybe as much as 16kB of RAM.

Everything past those days though, the data is very thoroughly scrambled for spectral whitening before being written to disk so there's no practical difference between /dev/urandom and /dev/zero.

They won't be readable either, if they're that bad.

No, there isn't.

The data is *gone*.

There is no way to recover it. If you know anything about how hard disks work, you'll see why.

There's this theoretical idea that you can get a kind of "latent image" of a mark or a space on the platter even if it's been overwritten, but hard disks haven't written things as literal north-to-south or south-to-north flips for 30 years or so. The data is written as changes of level and phase in a signal, and it's thoroughly scrambled to reduce the chances of a long run of patterns of all zeroes or all ones making the signal hard to recover.

Essentially, you'd be taking a list of floating point numbers, multiplying them all by another much smaller floating point number, adding on another floating point number, and trying to imagine what the original was.

It's not possible.

No, the NSA does not have a big magic machine that does it.

Why do you think it doesn't work as well as you'd think?

Okay, but a single pass of /dev/zero will destroy all the data beyond hope of recovery.

They don't need to develop an alternative to 100LL. Oil companies make it in such small quantities it's a total pain in the arse to cope with.

If you adapt a car engine (like a VW Beetle or Subaru engine, both flat-fours and common lightweight GA power plants) then it just runs on ordinary 95 octane unleaded, the exact same stuff you put in your car.