flyinghamster

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-8

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.

At the rate things are going, LLMs are going to kill the entire web. I'm starting to think that's by design.

Um, why was someone's perfectly reasonable take downvoted to oblivion? Too much of a newcomer? Too many Welch devotees here?

As far as I'm concerned, Welch turned GE from an industrial behemoth that more than lived up to its name, to a pale shadow of itself that has sold off almost everything. "Outsource Everything" has been an absolute disaster for our economy that will take decades to dig out of, if we even have the will to try.

All of the purple lights I've seen have been of the same design, and they seem to be in towns that are (at least to some degree) cash-strapped. The manufacturer better be replacing these under warranty.

There aren't any of them in my town, though I've seen one LED streetlight so far that went out. The main streets have lights with a slight yellow tint, and the side streets are neutral white, which I find much more pleasing than the purplish mercury arcs they replaced.

Oh great, I get to learn how to use my phone all over again. We need a "leave this the $EXPLETIVE alone" setting for our user interfaces.

Unfortunately, data transfer requirements for video are through the roof compared even to audio, let alone text. Self-hosting is great if your audience is in the tens, but if your video goes viral, you'll get slammed with terabytes of egress.

I recall icheck, dcheck, and clri, and never had to use fsdb.

Also, mknod for populating entries in /dev, creating fifos, etc.

If I have more than 8 threads, I'll use the composite CPU chart instead. Also, I have to tell it to ignore veth, vnet, and virbr network interfaces, since I run virt-manager on the box as well.

> Fry's Electronics closed here in the west part of Phoenix, several years ago. Their shelves were starting to get bare and were selling things from consignment. It took a while for them to die, and I finally found out why: they were having trouble getting credit to buy inventory.

I was going to do some of my 2019 Christmas shopping at the one and only Fry's in the Chicago area, but I walked inside and it looked like a bomb had gone off. Nothing was organized, lots of empty shelves, the cafe was closed, and I got a serious case of the heebie-jeebies and hightailed it out of there.

Google Street View shows it as it was in August 2019. As far as I know, the building is empty now.

And then there was TigerDirect, but that's a separate rant. I used to have three major computer shops within driving distance, but it's down to one now with MicroCenter.