loph

I disagree with the whole typeface (font) selection discussion in the article.

You want people to read your slides? Don't use a hard-to-read typeface.

Before building a "deck" for a presentation I suggest reading Tufte's "The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint" (https://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/courses/pi/2016_2017/phil/...)

It would be useful to list IP ranges that the scans come from -- a lot of my web stuff has "hosting providers" firewall dropped because so much malicious traffic emanates from the hosting providers (Do you hear me, Digital Ocean and AWS?)

I'm not an EE, but I play one in my home lab.

I don't understand why this circuit needs an artificial ground at all, since the power source is two 9-volt batteries in series. AFAIK that could make a dead-simple bipolar power source +/- 9 volts and get rid of about half the parts.

The 10:1 voltage divider is also an interesting concept. It seems to me that what this thing does is attenuate the input signal and then provide a low impedance output to drive the 'phones. I wonder if the writer ever considered something as simple as shunt resistors.

Perhaps a "real EE" can enlighten me.

FWIW, I use a AudioEngine D1 USB DAC to drive headphones from a computer. It was not cheap, but neither is my time. For portable use I am rocking (with RockBox) a old iPod "video" with aftermarket SD card mod.

Do not confuse this "Cantenna" with the Heathkit "HN-31 Cantenna", which (despite having a RF connector) serves a somewhat different purpose...

https://www.orcadxcc.org/content/cantenna_va7jw.pdf

Here is how this was done... in 1965:

https://ia600609.us.archive.org/9/items/TNM_Digital_Equipmen...

A second's income shot to hell.

Seriously, $650K? That's not going to stop this kind of behavior.

Maybe 2 orders of magnitude more might make them sit up and take notice.

I hold in my hand a "Unix Reference Card," second edition, March 1979.

There are 10 options listed for "ls":

l, f, a, s, d, r, u, c, i, f, g

My recollection is that this card was for Unix V7.

My contempt is so great I will not even type their name.

Simply put, I'm not using anything with 0racle's name on it.

Free software from 0racle? There are gonna be strings attached... to lawyers.

I once set up a job on a co-workers VAXstation 3100 that would run XCrab every 10 minutes. What is XCrab? It is an annoying little program, when it runs a crab scurries across the screen, grabs the mouse pointer, and runs off the screen with it. I renamed the job PRT$SYMBIOINT so it looked like part of the print spooler, he never figured it out.

Truth.

Years ago a wise man told me "The compiler is not your customer. The next person who maintains this code is your customer. It might be you."

I use arborist throw bags for portable operations, but I cannot get them up 60-70 feet high, only 20-30 feet. For semi-permanent installations of wire antennas in tall trees I use a pneumatic tennis ball launcher. I can put a piece of 50 pound test fishing line over the top of 80-foot trees.

I love my metcal. It was so expensive I had to buy it from a surplus store. there is no substitute. Also use a lot of Weller, but I have had them for a very long time.

is that a bad thing?

WSJT-X is a cross-platform QT app. It is multi-threaded, processes audio in close to real time, talks to devices over serial interfaces, interoperates with other apps over UDP and TCP connections. It starts fast, and has a pretty small memory footprint (around 80 MB) and was literally written (largely) by amateurs.

OTOH, it is not a beautiful, lovely app. The UI does look like 1999. But it works fabulously.

(ref https://sourceforge.net/projects/wsjt/)

On my work computer:

Teams, an electron app, uses 600+ MB of RAM. Slack, another electron app, uses 250+ MB of RAM. Outlook (not electron) 180 MB of RAM. (Still a pig) PowerPoint (not electron) 70 MB. Excel (not electron) 25 MB. Gnu Emacs: 3 MB. Adobe Photoshop: 50 +/- MB. A simple windows SDK program (all C) 1.4 MB. A tiny windows SDK program, all C: 0.5 MB of RAM

This is just RAM usage. For CPU load and overall performance the native apps win. Emacs startup time blows away VS code.

The question is valid. Why do we create modern desktop apps using HTML/CSS/JS?

Electron apps are only good if you sell hardware.

Candlepins for Cash! I remember.

It was a damned shame when they took away the switch register, my first recollection of that was the 11/34, it had 7-segment LED displays and calculator style buttons. You could still load programs, but you did not have to convert octal to binary in your head to do that.

example: http://www.technology.niagarac.on.ca/people/mcsele/wp-conten...

Some later models simply had a boot button. No more blinkenlights. So sad.

I suggest the ARRL Handbook for Radio Amateurs.

The same site has a complete archive of "Ham Radio" magazine.

Wayne Green was the publisher of Byte magazine, which he started when he recognized hobby computing that the hams that read his "73" magazine were doing.

I thought it was interesting that the first edition of Byte had an article about hobby computing with a LSI-11, which is a PDP-11 variant.

Around 1978, my dad brought me a blue book: 'introduction to BASIC' from Digital Equipment Corporation. He then _typed my programs_ for me into a DEC-20 at his office, and brought me the output to debug. Batch style programming with an interactive language! The other book that was instrumental in my downfall was 101 Basic Games, also published by DEC.

Later, in high school, we had a PDP-8 with DEC EDUsystem BASIC on it, later replaced with a small PDP-11. This was right around the time that Apple ][ and TRS-80 were just appearing on the scene. Until then, programs were entered on printing terminals like Teletypes, GE Terminet, and DECwriter II.

This is not that long ago, in a relative sense.

This guy invented the MOSFET, which is the underpinnings of pretty much every modern microprocessor.

Nobody knows his name. He is "Not as Famous as He Should Be."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamed_M._Atalla

After the eastern bloc copied this chip, DEC engineers had a special message for the Russians:

https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/russians.html

18-21 years of child-rearing seems like a long time looking from the front of it.

It does not seem long in retrospect.

Diapers seem to last forever, that time is but a blink.

Find time to spend with your child, because time is fleeting. Take pictures, keep artwork, have adventures. There is no re-do.

"Crypto" to me is about cryptography, not cryptocurrencies.

re: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_naming_controversy

and (of course) this: https://www.iacr.org/meetings/crypto/

I wish that lazy people did not overload this term.

TOPS-20, we hardly knew ye.

I first saw the Digital Press version of this book around 1975 or 1976. I was in detention in my math teacher's classroom, seventh grade. To say that it was influential would be an understatement, this book set me on the path.

I did not have access to a computer at the time, but my dad would type my hand-written programs in on a DEC-20 at his work and show me the results.

I attended a meeting on the future of computing in 1992. The speaker discussed the end of the corporate data center, and the rise of "utility computing."

Also discussed was remote storage, globally available file shares.

It looks like this is happening with what we now call "Cloud Computing."

Please don't call me Shirley!

Do you not think Apple looked at the prior art before writing that translator? Of course they did.

"Great artists steal" -- indeed they do.