ja27

I swear my 16" i9 could eat the battery in an hour of a Zoom call. Even doing just CPU-heavy golang code, I could out-run the stock power brick and drain the battery.

Some percentage of our trash stream gets incinerated to generate electricity (then metals etc. are recovered and the remains go into a landfill). I can never find solid stats on what percentage but the claims sound like it's the majority of the trash stream.

But we also live so close to the coast that straws and any other litter in the wrong places can easily wash into storm sewers then eventually the Gulf of Mexico.

I was on-site at a power company. One of their older COBOL programmers was retiring that week. The person taking over his COBOL job? His son.

Redundancy?

I have a .tar.gz of my university account that's 25 years old at this point and a .ZIP of my old DOS, Turbo Pascal, etc. stuff that's a few years older. They've been copied so many times over the years and I'm not even sure the path my current copies took. They lived on floppies, on a CD-R for a long time, different PC hard drives, external backup hard drives, flash thumb drives, Dropbox / Google Drive / iCloud, and most recently a microSD card that lives in my MacBook's port. I'm sure it's been on a couple tapes and Zip disks but those media likely long outlived any installed drives I had. Can't remember ever getting a bit error or corruption on a copy. Even the CD-Rs that were well past their alleged lifespan read fine for me.

We had one van-dweller (who was otherwise homeless) that tried to live at our space. We tried to let it work for a while and added rules to deal with issues he created but he'd find a new way to antagonize other members every couple of days. Finally crossed some line and he took us up on an offer to refund his membership dues and go away. Bonus: he was working on a perpetual motion machine the whole time.

I did this. I had a folder with a few printed sheets of code hiding some slightly tricky C/C++ bugs from our codebase. I would ask the candidate to see if they could identify the issue. I don't think anyone ever actually got them but at least I got an idea of their thought process and experience. So mixed results.

App / coupons are a decent way to have a little elasticity on price and maximize revenue from people that will pay more and still appeal to a bargain-hunter. At least here there is always a 20% off the total order deal available in the app so that's an immediate discount for a relatively small effort.

Locally they did recently drop their long-time $1 any-size soft drink but it seems to be back now after a few weeks.

> In the field, devices are far away from each other. So they will only be able to hear the devices that are next to it.

And I'm out. Mesh networkers really should spend a bit of time re-learning all the lessons from decades of ham radio packet networks.

Bro

At my longest company, maybe 2/3rds of my group had left and come back at some point, including me. One was even was on his third time. After an acquisition, I was laid off with half my team and 2/3rds of them were back there within a year.

I've usually volunteered somewhere or another most of my life: university clubs, Red Cross, ham radio club, makerspace, etc. Right now serving on the board of a makerspace I founded and that can fill any desire I have for meetings and battles. Also means I have a place I can go cowork.

By 2011 it was AMD(ATI) not Nvidia. I had one that failed but Apple did the replacement for free.

I was permanently banned last year, for no reason I could find. I do somewhat rarely run a PIA VPN at times so maybe that flagged me.

I appealed the suspension, which sounded hopeless, but about 10 days later my account was restored.

It wasn't one of their annoying ass tv commercials?

I never owned a TRS-80, but my high school had a Model 16 running Microsoft Xenix with maybe 10 serial terminals attached to it. (This replaced a small Burroughs machine and card punch.) The business department ran COBOL classes on it. The COBOL was forgettable for me but it was my first *nix and got me started using vi (and writing stuff to other users' ttys). Pretty amazing that it could handle that.

For most of my life, I've volunteered at one organization or another. It's been a great way to meet people and find some purpose. It doesn't even have to be some epic world-changing nonprofit. Even a one-shot like a fundraiser walk can be good. Or take classes (cultural center, library, community colleges, Meetup, etc.), even if you're not super interested in the topic.

I co-founded a makerspace. Maybe 70% of our membership are 30-50 y/o men that work in some form of IT (and other desk jobs).

The opportunity to make something physical brings them life. It's a real bonus if it's something they can carry around and show others. 1-2-3 blocks, welded cubes, wood lathed pen bodies, 3d printed gadgets, etc.

For me, closing my exercise ring on my Apple Watch has been the best motivator. Maintaining a streak or collecting badges works well for me.

I used to cycle a good bit but some injuries have held me back. I got a cheap stationary trainer for my bike but that never worked well for me (again, injuries and just the uncomfortable position). I got a cheap recumbent stationary bike and have put a lot of miles on that thing. My biggest issues with it are that it's very easy to stop when you don't have to ride back to the start and that it's easy to get distracted by shit on my phone (now I start music / podcast and set it out of reach).

Just walking outside has helped a lot. I worked up to jogging and even some interval sprints but foot pain shut that all down. Just walking and trying to work my pace upward (again, Apple Watch helps there).

If you have the money, an online personal trainer may be great motivation. Or partner with a friend and do it together via Zoom.

freeCodeCamp has a new course: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/free-react-course-2022/

(All the books I learned from are out of date)

Weird, here Aldi and Walmart have seemed pretty unaffected but Publix has had a lot of empty shelves.

Yeah I had an IBM 5150 PC with DESQview and it was kind of amazing to be able to keep a vt-100 emulator dialed into school or a BBS while being able to run a local editor and even compiler. Sounds trivial today but it was a big deal on that old hardware.

Nekteck sells a car charger with 45W USB-C PD. I've seen others claiming 65W.

https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-usb-car-char...

Wow, that's a funnel-killer. I clicked away as soon as I found a US price.

There are a couple aisles of rotating seasonal stuff. Mine's obviously full of Halloween decor and candy but there's still leftover summer stuff even back to 4th of July supplies and excess back-to-school stuff.

They do bring in new regular items like they've added a good bit of craft / paint stuff in the past year.

Maybe the most impact day-to-day is splurging ($10/mo) on the 2TB iCloud storage plan for the family. It's pretty much replaced Dropbox, One Drive, scp-ing files around, etc. I even use it on Windows.

Cheap Panasonic Ergofit earbuds. They fit my ears well and isolate me from a good bit of noise. With a Lightning adapter and some sleep sounds / music, they usually get me through any night noises. My Airpods Pro are much better for this but the battery can't get through the night.

I got a 45-watt Nekteck USB-C car charger which helps top off my laptops or iPad when I'm out roaming and working from different places. Had previously used an inverter and the normal charger but this is small and easy.

Little nondo USB-C to USB-A adapters. I'm up to either 6 or 8 of these now. It's just handy to keep them on USB-A devices and no noticeable 2.4GHz interference like other brands.

I got lucky on a $99 black friday deal on a Dell color laser a couple years ago. It's been almost perfect. No more dried out ink. We just finished the last original toner cartridge and can probably get 2+ years out of a $24 knockoff set and that's with a teacher and high schooler in the house.

I carry a Nite Ize Doohickey but it's 90% box tape cutter and 10% bottle opener. Not sharp at all but I haven't tried flying with it.

https://www.niteize.com/product/DoohicKey-Multi-Tool.asp

Same, but Anker cables with lifetime warranty. One dies and without much more than an email and I get a replacement.

I have some with Apple 30-pin, micro-USB, and mini-USB.

SpaceX only "beat" them to a landing if you're disregarding suborbital flights.

Blue Origin landed their booster 23 Nov 2015. SpaceX landed their first booster 21 Dec 2015.

It really is apples and oranges until BO or VG gets to orbit. Rocket Lab is likely much closer to orbital booster re-use than BO or VG are.

In the mid-1980s my dad (PhD EE) talked me out of majoring in Computer Science initially because "you'd be a glorified typist". Glad I eventually switched to CS.

In the early 1990s, it sure felt like there was a limited market for robotics, machine learning, AI, etc. It was mostly industrial robotics and assembly line inspection cameras.