flyinghamster

I'd say they started getting into their swing in the 1950s, if my father's Yashica-A twin-lens reflex is any indication. That camera produced absolutely gorgeous shots in square format on 120 roll film.

A good way to demonstrate the problem is by trying to use a music-making app through a Bluetooth headphone or speaker. That delay completely kills the ability to stay on the beat.

For me, captcha hell is very random, and when it happens, it's things like "pick all squares with stairs" where I have to decide if that little corner of a stairway counts (and it never seems to) or "pick all squares with motorcycles" where the camera seemed to have a vision problem.

What usually works for me is to close the browser, reload, and try again.

Indeed, 40 years ago, if we weren't getting our news from the TV, we quite often got it via weekly news magazines and Sunday newspapers.

As always, don't count on it lasting. Nevertheless, it's a welcome move from WB, even if I've already fallen out of movie watching. I'm quite surprised they did it region-free.

I always thought it was crazy that Xerox had all this ahead-of-the-time technology in its labs, yet when it released a commercial PC, what we got was the 820, a me-too CP/M system that came out just in time for the IBM PC to steamroll it.

I never really got into that, since by that time I really couldn't get into TV shows anymore - or indeed, for pretty well all of my adult life. And yet, your note reminds me that the landline phone network is pretty well dead as the dodo at this point, and the flip phones that once evoked Star Trek communicators to my generation are now, for the most part, firmly in the past. For me (over 60 now), it's quite a bit of future shock, even as I saw it happen around me. First the pay phones disappeared, then the value proposition of a landline steadily degraded until VoIP (or just porting out to a cell carrier) was a better option.

It just reminds me once again that high tech has short horizons. If you found a functional example of a 1980s or 90s cell phone, there are no networks for it to use. That nifty, futuristic StarTAC is a guaranteed brick today unless it was a GSM model (and you'd better hope someone still supports 2G on its supported bands, and that you can find a battery for it).

One thing I started doing a few years ago is that, any time I check out a git repo, whether it's on github or anywhere else, is clone it to my NAS and then clone from there to whatever I'm building it on. Aside from guarding against losing dependencies to outages (or from being yanked), it can be handy for guarding against my own fat fingers, and for making sure that the same version is running on multiple systems.

In Chicago, the "L" network also has stretches that run down expressway medians, along with the elevated lines and the subway sections downtown.

The main use I see for smart bulbs is to put wall-switch lamps on timers. Then again, that could be done with a smart dimmer instead.

Too bad so many of these "smart" devices insist you talk with a server in China (or anywhere other than your own LAN!) to turn on the lights.

Decades ago, my junior college's parking lot was lit by low-pressure sodium lighting. I recall the light being an absolute monochrome yellow, to the point that you had to be careful to remember exactly where you parked your car, because you weren't going to find it by color.

I can't vouch for Germany, but there used to be long, high-output fluorescent tubes and fixtures for street lighting in the US. They seem to have largely disappeared by the 1980s. They weren't very common, but some cities used them. They tended to be used on main streets when I saw them.

In my town, when they replaced the old mercury arc and high pressure sodium lights, they picked a pleasing neutral white for the side streets that's far better than the bluish-white mercury arcs they replaced, while using 40 watts each instead of 175. Win-win in my book.

The main streets have a different LED with a slight yellow cast, but not the ugly orange of high pressure sodium. Yes, we can have nice LED street lighting.

I started using Ansible a few years back to set up VMs (or Raspberry Pis) with a consistent environment. Once I wrapped my head around it, I've found it very nice for any situation where I need to treat systems as livestock rather than pets.

One thing you might find helpful is to prototype things with GNU Radio and a GRC flowgraph. I'm not sure that would be useful for running on the ESP32, but you could at least tinker around with signal processing tactics that you could implement on it.

My condolences. Between QModem, Telix, ProComm, and all the rest, I'd put QModem at the top (but all were good). I didn't get online until I was away from home, but wasted no time getting there once I had the opportunity. At that time, Champaign-Urbana had a hopping BBS scene, aside from all that was going on in school.

I've considered revisiting old-school BBS systems (or at least, BBS-via-SSH, it is the 21st Century after all) but there just never seems to be enough time.

I think it was a bit too far ahead of its time. By the mid-1980s when I encountered it, it felt dated; the communications increasingly felt slow. Attempts at commercializing it, and on running it on newer hardware didn't really go very far.

There were implementations of TUTOR for MS-DOS as well, with TenCORE being one that I saw. Early in my programming career, I came across it when we were rewriting a financial planner that was originally written in it into C. I was flabbergasted when my Lotus 1-2-3 importer was twenty times faster then the original. On reflection, I realized that TenCORE so completely imitated its CDC Cyber heritage that it used Cyber floating-point format for its math, and had to emulate every math operation.

Not only that, but JET (the database engine) also integrated into Visual Basic and C++. I was using MDBs in applications long before SQLite3 became a thing.

And it's been going on for years. Years ago, when I had a landline, I started to notice that a lot of spam calls came from the same area codes and prefixes. A quick trip over to telcodata.us showed that all of these prefixes/thousands blocks were assigned to the same company, which had a web storefront as a wireless provider but didn't really provide cellular service. Apparently, nothing has changed.

ETA: Whew, my SIP provider isn't on the list.

As an age-old Linode customer from the UML days, I'd say that Akamai has done a good job with it. I've had nothing to complain about.

One problem I've noticed with status=progress is that systems can sometimes have gigabytes of buffer space waiting to be filled, so the transfer spends most of its time in a "nearly done" state while (for instance) the SD card gets slowly filled at its real speed.

The very first name that came to my mind was Jasper Maskelyne. He led British camouflage efforts during WWII, and sure enough, while they don't come right out and say it, the mention of him studying British work makes me think that Ohmer must have worked with him.

I'd wonder if that is stale data? There is a small building that looks an awful lot like a central office at that location [0], but I'd find it a bit farfetched that a 355A would still be active in the PSTN at this late date, given that Nantes, QC was supposed to be the last step in Zone 1. Also, while things may be different in the Wyoming desert, landlines are rapidly disappearing in general. If it's still in use, I'd guess it's either a DMS-10 (those are fast disappearing too), or a modern packet switch or cellular node.

I wonder how much old equipment is still abandoned in place? A fair number of museum finds have come more-or-less intact from old COs, and newer equipment often occupied but a corner of older buildings.

[0] https://www.google.com/maps/@42.812278,-107.6168592,463m/dat...

In the US, I don't think there was any commercial LW broadcasting (but I could easily be wrong). US-market radios rarely had SW bands and almost never had LW unless they were general coverage receivers. For the most part, the few times I looked through the band it was largely navigation beacons.

I was rather surprised to see an LW band on a regular clock-radio when I visited the UK, though that was 25 years ago.

Even better, there were hooks that allowed a machine-code routine triggered by & to further interpret the rest of the statement, so you could have a special-purpose "&print" statement, for instance.

I'd say there were both advantages and drawbacks to the BBS scene. The biggest single advantage was that it tended to be local - of necessity, since long-distance phone calls to reach distant systems could cost a fortune, even at night rates.

There were attempts to address this. Networked forums became available, and there was PC Pursuit, an effort by Telenet to sell off-peak capacity on their X.25 network to people wanting to call faraway BBSes. A user could dial in to a local access number, then use their network to dial out to a remote system, provided their network could dial it from a nearby modem pool.

Even when you had a networked forum like FidoNet's Echomail (or Usenet, for that matter), it would take time for messages to propagate through the network - and they could sometimes fail to be delivered.

You, too? Fortunately, disabling those doesn't disable the severe weather alerts, and those have worked well for me, most recently in that July tornado.

I was gifted an old Sparcstation, but it didn't have a hard drive, and while I had a suitable drive, I didn't have the cable - and then I looked up its performance, and never bothered to get it running. It would have been about the equivalent of a 486, when we already had Athlon 64x2 readily available.

And, the future marches on, such as the DECstation 3000 emulator that runs on an RP2040. [0] Seeing a cheap microcontroller doing something like that makes me laugh out loud.

[0] https://github.com/rscott2049/DECstation2040

Teletype Model 38 (essentially a wide version of the 33 with a two-color ribbon) could print 132 columns as well.

Hugged to death? All I get is a spinning circle, on Chrome or Firefox.