Or SSTV! I recall a demo years ago where someone had SSTV running between a speaker at the focus of a small dish, across to the room to another small dish with a microphone...
11,678 karma · joined September 11, 2013
> We’re going away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam … The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas.
Also, Lind is the brand you're likely to find sold alongside an ex-public-safety Toughbook. Since these were my first serious car computers, that's just how the majority of my mobile computing looked for a decade or more.
However, Toughbooks encased their HDD's in gel, and had been doing so since long before the advent of MEMS accelerometers, so they didn't jump on the HDAPS innovation along with IBM.
Machines precisely like this, but manually piloted, are used in automotive plants themselves to move vehicles that fail end-of-line test, had an assembly mishap affecting the powertrain, or otherwise need to be shuffled around when they're not able to move under their own power. As long as it has tires, it can be moved this way.
Stringo™ and DJ CarCaddy™ are some popular brands, if you want to see more of how this type of lift works.
If this thing could pick up my car from curbside at arrivals dropoff like a valet, but handle it robotically so there's no valet downside, it would be amazing.
Does the process have a check for forgotten windows?
Old thin clients are typically in the same hardware class, and probably cheaper by the time you add the exploding MSRP of a Pi, and a PSU, and a case and heatsink, and maybe some storage that doesn't suck ass. But if you already own the Pi, yeah, go for it.
Crucially, we set aside the common 10.1 and 10.10 ranges as nonroutable, so any devices that default into those have to be dealt with before they can live on the wider network.
Newcomers get handed a block and have to renumber, or NAT into it, or whatever, but they cannot emit bogons. At a small scale (first-name basis), this works.
I wrote to Privacy, and this was their reply:
> Jun 1, 2022, 5:21 PM EDT
> I've been reviewing your dispute and wanted to touch base with you to explain what happened.
> It appears that the disputed charge is a "force post" by the merchant. This happens when a merchant cannot collect funds for a transaction after repeated attempts and completes the transaction without an authorization — it's literally an unauthorized transaction that's against payment card network rules. It's a pretty sneaky move used by some merchants, and unfortunately, it's not something Privacy can block.
> We are refunding the transaction to the original funding source used for this purchase. You should see this refund reflected in your bank statement in the next 5 business days. However, please note that since this merchant uses force posts, they will continue to do this monthly until the subscription is cancelled. Please contact them to have the subscription cancelled.
> Let me know if you have any questions or concerns!
None of this can happen unless you first cede control.
Maybe, I guess? I still listen to some of the stuff from that era, but I've gotten wonderfully addicted to a music trivia game called Whatsamusic, which introduces me to a ton of music played by whoever's in the round. But only 30 seconds at a time (it's fairly fast-paced), so when I hear something that's intriguing enough to want to hear the rest of the track, I go add it to a "check this out later" playlist elsewhere. (I could also bookmark it in the game.)
My tastes have exploded in the 2 years since I found the game. There's so much good stuff out there! And playing with hosts that pick good themes ("Songs that're a good source of protein" was a recent favorite. The first play was "Maneater" and it went downhill from there.), you can't help but find more.
Yeeeeears ago, I was in the middle of some late-night hacking session, hanging with friends on IRC, and I had shared my screen via VNC so they could watch/help. (ISTR I had found the UART port on some piece of embedded hardware and we were muddling our way through U-boot incantations or something.)
At some point, I tabbed over to Winamp to change the music, which everyone saw, and one of the crew was like "oh hey you have artist X on your playlist, do you like artist Y?", and I admitted that I had not heard of artist Y. Seconds later there was a DCC file transfer.
Artist Y fit the mood perfectly. This was great.
This evolved into spawning Winamp on a second box that could be separately VNC'd into, where anyone could upload and play music they thought was appropriate for the session, without interrupting the main console. And someone installed a Shoutcast server on it too, so everyone could listen.
After a little while this was our little Friday-night routine, regardless of whatever other hacking was happening. The collaborative deejay stage -- we popped a Notepad on the Winamp box to track who was playing and who was up next, though ephemeral chat remained on IRC -- defined a brief era of my internet experience.
Many years later, I ran across a Spotify plugin called Jqbx that did basically the same thing. It was short-lived, but there seem to be several work-alikes. Sadly the community disbanded, but now it's got me thinking...
Technically it's easy. Mentally it's nearly impossible. This comment posted on Ars yesterday blew my mind:
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/we-cannot-choose-to-becom...
tl;dr: When given the easy option, people always take it, even when they know the hard route would be better in the long term. But the full story is interesting and not that long, it's worth reading.
I only used one for a few years, and never thought to laminate the pages because they didn't need it -- dye-sub wax-printed pages were already suitable for outdoor maps because the wax repelled water, and they held up where inkjet pages became a smeary mess immediately.
We definitely did wash our hands before and after loading ink blocks, I remember being cautioned about that.
Oh well. I guess my memories are better than the tech deserved. Won't be the last time.
You can also run NNCP over networks if you want to.
I wonder why. Were the consumables too cheap and the printers too reliable to be commercially viable? Did color laser printers catch up in terms of print quality? Did it have some other fatal flaw?