don-code

My grandmother speaks fluent English, but also fluent Italian. Problem is, it's what I'll call "pre-radio Italian" - where there was no single Italian language, but rather a great many dialects that sort-of sounded the same, until radio and (later) television came and unified them all into one language.

I bring this up because she often references words that only loosely resemble the modern forms. A good example is a number of her childhood figures who she affectionately calls "azi" - this is actually a version of the modern Italian "zio" (uncle). It gets much worse with foods, which really no amount of Googling can ever resolve a recipe, or even a description.

I have a number of 1980s-vintage Technics AM/FM radios around the house. All of these use an RCA-style plug labeled "REMOTE", and I believe are intended to be used for hooking a Technics radio up to a Technics stereo amplifier. Sadly, the manuals for the tuners I do have are mostly mum on what it does - they're like bad API documentation saying `remote: the remote input` or such.

I have a passing interest in doing something with this on all of the tuners, but all I've really managed to reliably do is get them to tune to exactly 1000kHz AM if I short the center to ground.

Sad to say, there seems to be little going on with CB these days. Even living inside a major metro area, I got one (and exactly one) call on a radio left tuned to channel 9 for close to six months: sadly, the man was elderly and senile, and did not actually have an emergency. I'd be willing to bet that's par for the course.

The last I heard any substantive CB chatter was around 2014, while driving to Kentucky. Two things I recall from that trip:

1. I was able to get on the radio and ask what the source of bumper-to-bumper traffic was - it was "a chopper in the road". I figured it was CB slang for a motorcycle, but, no, this actually was a medflight helicopter in the middle of the road. So, be prepared to learn not just a language, but also context - or just use Waze, Google Maps, or your other live traffic tool of choice.

2. There is spam on the trucker channels, 17 and 19 - actual, legit spam for 10% off your next meal at Burger King at the truck stop. This accounted for a solid 20% of what I did hear, which is probably on par with the signal-to-noise ratio of e-mail.

It's a neat idea that, thanks to the applications-not-protocols approach taken by many platforms today, probably isn't viable any longer.

When the article was written, my workplace communicated over e-mail (IMAP-enabled), our calendars supported CalDAV, and we did have an instant messaging system that ran over extensions to SIP, which _was_ compatible with libpurple. We also all had voice phones on our desks for very-impromptu calls. The ironic part of all this: it was Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Lync. I at the time was using Linux with Pidgin and Evolution, there being no Microsoft clients for any of the stack.

Nowadays, our stack is GApps with Slack, and a heathy dose of Zoom. To get Slack out of the way: good luck; the XMPP and IRC gateways were retired ages ago, and interactive API clients even today appear to be second-class citizens. GApps is interesting in that they do support standards like IMAP and CalDAV, but only if your organization allows for "insecure authentication" options, which mine does not. Otherwise, you're glued to a browser app that sometimes breaks in browsers that aren't Chrome. And let's not even start with Zoom.

My point in saying this is: in 2014, this would have been seen as a cool project, and I'd bet some coworkers would've even encouraged me to try and get it working. In 2021, this is how I'd get fired.

It was maintained by the fine folks at https://theworld.com/ up until a few years ago, though I can't speak as to why.

Back in 2007 I had a "laptop crisis" in which I went from having a laptop on me at all times, to not having a laptop at all, for about a month. My home situation was pretty good, but my school situation... not so much.

I ended up doing enough of a restore of my dad's old (1989, I think?) 386 laptop and parallel Ethernet adapter. The details were something like:

1. The rechargeable battery was dead, but it was a 4.8-volt NiCad. It ran beautifully off three alkaline D batteries, strapped to the back. I just had to disconnect the batteries out whenever I had it plugged into the wall, to prevent them from charging.

2. The hard drive wouldn't spin up, so I ended up making a DOS boot disk with an SSH client (SSHDOS) and ODI drivers for the NIC, as well as the bog standard MS-DOS editor.

3. When I had Internet connectivity (read: wall proximity to Ethernet), I used SSHDOS to connect to a remote IRIX host, and used Lynx from there. Lynx was painfully slow on the 386, and SSL was right out. Not that much used it in 2007.

4. I used the MS-DOS editor as my daily-driver text editor. My workflows then, as now, are mostly text-based, so this was a pretty easy change.

Of course, I couldn't help but add a sticker to the lid: "up to 10x faster than your malware".

This made my day. I always love finding out about super-useful features I wasn't aware of in software I use every day. Thank you!

When I last tried, it, AWS RDS still required EBS-backed disks. It may be acceptable for 99% of use cases, but that means there's a ceiling around 60k IOPS, even with PIOPS disks.

Outside of RDS, you're afforded a bit more creativity in your performance profile: multiple disks in RAID 0, tiered storage (burstable AND, rather than OR, provisioned IOPS storage), and instance store, to name a few. I actually once witnessed one of our databases riding out a 400K IOPS storm for a few minutes.

Before I get downvoted: yes, these introduce risk into your data architecture. It's crucial to understand what these choices will do to your failure profile, and plan accordingly. In our case, fast-failover to a hot spare database, combined with total recovery within two hours, was enough of a compensating factor to manage that risk.

I'm waiting for someone to get our corporate VPN on a blacklist just by clicking the button and hitting a honeypot. Granted, it's what I get for hitting the button without reading the code, so, shame on me?

You can get pretty close to an HDTV with nothing but a dumb VGA monitor.

Context: as late as 2012, I had nothing but two Sun Microsystems (rebranded Sony) 19" Trinitron CRTs. The picture quality on these monitors was _phenominal_, and I kept it as long as I could, before the siren song of more desk space got me to give them up.

To get from component video to VGA, I had a color space converter. Then I hooked up a 3x component switcher to give me a few more inputs - for the game consoles, of course.

To get television, I had an old DirecTV tuner with a VGA output. I didn't actually have DirecTV service, but it had an NTSC/ATSC tuner, to which I had a pair of rabbit ears hooked up.

To get composite and S-video input, I had an RF modulator. The DirecTV tuner tuned to channel 3 would show whatever was on that.

The weak link, of course, was HDMI - an HDMI to analog converter was, at the time, more expensive than real televisions (this article appears to show that this is no longer the case).

This happened to me once at an old job. I discovered a race condition between the process that sanitized data out of the staging environment as it was (continuously) refreshed in from a production fork, and the process that sent notification e-mails during mass events.

Our customers were all rather large corporate types, so a great many "Was this sent to my stores?" type messages from VPs and C-staff ensued.

I luckily wasn't involved in the communications fallout from this, but it did initiate a sweeping change inside of engineering to go proactively find and correct for these sorts of issues. We had the same pattern in use throughout our platform, and really all that stood in the way of this race condition being triggered had been QA not testing at the exact same time a critical part of that refresh process was running.

There doesn't seem to be any context on whether this was an intentional feature, intended to be used by userspace programs, or something entirely undocumented that wasn't intended to see widespread use. What's more, it doesn't dive into why it matters - if the microarchitecture's the same, isn't the only benefit a shorter pipeline; maybe you can skip some of the complex CISC->RISC decoding?

Itanium seems to have, in any case, shown us that exposing the microarchitecture for the sake of performance is an antipattern.

This seems on point. The conversation at the dawn of personal computing would have been:

> Where's file X for project A?

> On the floppy disk for project A.

And that more or less continued for most users through the 90s, but then it got confusing to the entry-level user:

> Where's file X for project A?

> In My Documents, under the folder "Project X".

Which, I'd bet, is one of the reasons why cloud-based editors have taken off - the file is "in Google Docs", rather than in a directory hierarchy on the filesystem. GDocs presents me with a more or less flat view of all of my documents. I hate this - I have to go over to Google Drive to organize them - but I can understand how it'd be much more approachable to the average user.

I'd love to give this a try as a replacement for FreeDOS. I've used FreeDOS for a couple of silly embedded projects (the clock in my living room, for one), and the biggest limiting factors are:

1) Network support - it's glitchy at best; ODI drivers + Watcom TCP never seem to work for very long. If I toss out coreutils, that gives me close to 500k for a network stack.

2) Boot time. I suspect this will be _worse_ on Linux than on FreeDOS, but bootstrapping bare essentials like APM and an ANSI terminal driver do add overhead that's "just there" on Linux, so they may be neck-and-neck for all I know.

Not counting a home: my favorite purchase has been a good stereo for my home office. Nothing that broke the bank, either - I picked up an older Technics receiver and a pair of Advent Legacy floor-standing speakers for under $200.

Now that I stay in the same room 12-16 hours per day, they've been extremely helpful in making things feel less boring and monotonous.

> yeah, eventually you just cut off those friends still working at McDonald's

That's profound. As "the friend in tech", I've never had this said to my face, but have definitely felt it. There's an us-versus-them mentality when it comes to dealing with those who aren't also in tech; that, somehow, there's no reason to be friends with those who aren't also white-collar professionals. What's more, my own tendency to be friends with non-professionals has in some cases alienated me - who wants to go to a housewarming where half of the people bring Bud Light and tell inappropriate jokes?

This split is something I've personally had a lot of trouble rationalizing.

Best: be open to the proposed solutions of those under you. They aren't tainted by your own preconceived notions of how things should be.

Worst: be open to integrating the solutions of other teams, that may conflict with your own. Purity of your solution is irrelevant if others have gone in different directions already.

Kicker: these lessons were learned from the same person.

I don't see the TI-series graphing calculators as a general purpose computing device. If I need more horsepower than an old Z80 for some specific use case, TI actually has me covered, in the 68k-powered TI-89 and the ARM-powered TI nSpire.

What _is_ inexcusable to me is that the calculator still costs as much as it does. I'd bet the bill of materials for a TI-84 is cheaper than that of a Raspberry Pi at this point. A few years ago I had to take apart my -83 and discovered from references online that there were revisions A through at least K of the hardware, with many cost cutting measures made along the way. And while there's something to be said for the supply chain for a 20+ year old device probably having dried up several times over, none of those cost savings seem to have been passed onto the consumer.

The author here has a good point. Social media may encourage us to write in summary. My tweet can go viral if it's funny and captures an emotion - here, that product requirements suffer as soon as making progress becomes difficult. It's something that everyone here can likely empathize with.

I don't even disagree with the author's conclusion, that he needed to stop encouraging this sort of behavior in his daily life.

However, I do disagree that it's the only conclusion to be made here. There was definitely a missed opportunity to take this further. Now that you're being watched because of the witty thing, you have some more influence and eyes on you than you might have yesterday. What better time to capitalize on the moment, and write a short piece about the problem of requirements drift itself? Some may learn something from it; others may get a feel for someone else's viewpoint.

I could write that piece myself now, but without a hook and followers, it's just a diatribe on a blog that nobody reads.

Yes and no - something that TI-BASIC on the TI-83 series has going for it is that it's tokenized, so directives like `While` or `ClrHome` are actually options, rather than full words. So I don't have to type "While" on the TI-83's cumbersome keyboard, but rather just hit Prgm+5.

I'm making a big assumption that the Python implementation is similar. I don't know this, but where this is a big feature of TI-BASIC, I'd hope it carried forward.

The thing I appreciate the most about a device like this is that it's largely self-contained. I can program my phone in Python, sure, but I largely can't program my phone in Python on the phone. There are tools which do this, but the device isn't optimized for it, and the usage metaphor isn't really compatible - coding UI applications with a soft keyboard doesn't sound fun or useful.

On the other hand, getting a text-based REPL that I can quickly enter some commands on is great - that was why I really loved TI-BASIC on my TI-83. In college it made it easy to write a small program, roughly when I needed that program. In one extreme example, my girlfriend and I took ours to the grocery store every week, and used a BASIC app I wrote for meal planning for the week (this was pre-smartphone era).

I'd hope that this is _something_ of an answer to the concern that computing is getting too complicated and detached. Just thinking about the near-ubiquity of the TI-83 when I was in high school, giving kids the ability to code out of their pockets without having to worry about UI mechanics, publishing to an app store, or _threads_ even (AFAIK Android throws exceptions if you do certain things on the main thread), sounds pretty powerful.

There was a time that some Microsoft software was free for evaluation for college students, but in fact, anyone with a .edu domain name was able to sign up.

While I took advantage of this as a high school student, I assume faculty and non-teaching staff, as well as alumni, could have done likewise.

At this point, TLDs matter about as much as your area code. They ceased being useful in the mid-2000s.

I'd love if someone broke down _reasons_ for vaccine hesitancy. It seems like the strategies we should develop for addressing them would be different, and that there shouldn't be a one-size-fits-all strategy, as we're trying to do today.

So far, I personally have encountered the following viewpoints in my family and peer group (none of which I share) - in decreasing order of how much credence I'll give them:

1. I'm pregnant and don't know what it does to my baby.

2. I do not think the vaccine is safe, because we developed it too fast. Corollary: blood clots in two of them are my proof.

3. I agree the vaccine is safe and effective, but it was made with "aborted babies" [actually: stem cell lines, as are many vaccines that I'm sure they _have_ taken], and I will not take it on religious grounds.

4. I will not take the vaccine on principle, as it constitutes government overreach into our lives. It is irrelevant whether it is safe or effective.

That's not to speak of some of the other egregious ones I've heard that people believe, like the vaccine having an ICE tracker embedded in it to enable roundups (https://www.boston25news.com/news/health/local-leaders-vacci...).

Given that all of the communication I've seen has centered around safety and effectiveness, it seems like two out of these four cases are not being addressed.

I ended up doing something very similar, if for different reasons. There was an elongated period of time when I had no home Internet service. It was more or less a nonissue, since I had 5GB of LTE-speed tethering, and most of my devices spoke Wi-Fi.

Note that I said most, not all. I had a few Raspberry Pi's, and an old Xbox and 486 PC that I used for old games.

I ended up using DD-WRT in access point mode, and rather than having it run in station mode, it would connect to my phone as a Wi-Fi client, and forward Wi-Fi packets out the Ethernet switch.

It was quite handy, and made the summer much more bearable. As an added bonus, I now keep that router config as a backup. If my actual ISP is ever having an outage, I can reupload that config, and get all of the devices on my network back online, without having to switch them over to Wi-Fi.

I bet you just answered my question - we aren't talking about a 5mbps video uploaded after the fact on home Wi-Fi, but a 384kbps video shoved down a 512kbps, TCP-unfriendly pipe as it's being shot. Thank you for that!

It seems like Facebook does a thing that doesn't scale, in the interest of time: feed a minimally processed video until other streams are available. That makes sense, but I wonder if it also means that video quality on Facebook generally suffers when high-profile events are taking place.

Context on that wonder: I've always noticed that news outlets seem to carry downright horrible quality user-generated video clips of rallies, protests, and the like. Where everybody's carrying around stellar-quality video gear in their pockets these days, I've never figured out why that is.

I won't disagree that the physical security of the last mile is quite fragile, but I'm not sure the same holds true for the global Internet.

There's no single topology of the Internet, but if I had to try and sum it up: it approaches a mesh at the core, and approaches a star at the edge. Backbones peer with thousands of providers; businesses may have a primary and backup ISP; home users are lucky to even have a second ISP offering service in their area.

You'd need some really great moderators for this kind of conversation. No conversation is perfectly linear - new ideas lead to forks, and a large group needs to somehow choose whether or not to take one. But if there's a queue of five folks waiting to speak, that's four opportunities for the tangent to either be taken or not taken, and exponentially many opportunities for the wrong tangent to be replied to.

We sort of know what to expect with powertrain longevity on used vehicles, but I'm not sure we know the same for electric vehicles just yet.

Consider: I had my last car purchase (which I knew would be used) between a BMW 4 Series, a VW Golf R, and a Subaru STI. I went with the 4 Series. The Golf R and STI are often used as track cars, and 40k miles on a Golf R may very well be the equivalent of 100k miles on a regular Golf.

I admit this is a very specific use case, but there are other specific use cases (e.g. police car - probably spent 80% of its engine's life idling and not racking up miles) that we know to look for, that we simply don't know to look for in the EV market, because they haven't presented themselves yet.

Something that this article doesn't address is that "uprootedness" is not new. Some cultures have been conquered, then conquered again, to the point where "whose god are we worshiping this particular century?" might have even been a valid question. Other cultures have relocated entirely, enough so that there is a Wikipedia article called "List of diasporas".

These cultures have been uprooted, but still have a common, shared identity, which seems to qualify rootedness. Otherwise we'd not have Russians, Ukrainians, Kazakhs, and Uzbeks, but some single, post-USSR identity, those demonyms having failed to have any official meaning for 3+ generations.

I _do_ think, on the other hand, that modernity has led others to question more about what's around them. Others have latched onto the resulting uncertainty and fed those questioning half-truths and outright lies, definitely, but this to me doesn't qualify as uprootedness.