somat

Would they be different? They launched 16 days apart. I always assumed they were mostly the same core hardware. hm... rereading the wikipedia pages now...

Remember the Mike Rowe Software incident

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MikeRoweSoft.com

It is the other way around, When people want something they are willing to pay more for it. The manufacturer wants to sell to the person that will pay the most. While the person wants to buy from the manufacturer that charges the least. As such when the manufacturing capacity is below demand the price goes up until the item is worth what people will pay for it(at large, statistically, it works like an auction). The promise of capitalism is that as the price goes up it should incentivize manufacturing capacity to go up and as the capacity meets demand and the manufactures start to fight each other to be the one to sell the item the price goes down.

Sometimes this works and sometimes it does not.

I like to think that doom: the dark age is the quake 1 sequel we never got, I mean it has the doom name, probably for marketability reasons, but thematically it fits quake the first better, and it really fits if you include what quake was supposed to be before it was released as just another shooter, the only remnants of this planned quake are the excessive castles and eldritch horrors. Nether of which were present in supposed sequel. I think of it as three separate franchises bearing the name quake Q1, Q3/champions, Q2/4/wars

See also: operation plowshare.

The idea was you could use nuclear bombs to dig canals. Or make harbors. Or really any large scale earth moving project. The U.S. did one test shot, a shallow buried bomb intended as a cratering charge. https://www.google.com/maps/@37.176944,-116.046111,4654m This ended up contaminating more people than any other test which put the breaks on that. The soviets had an equivalent study but tried a little harder and are now the proud owners of several new irradiated lakes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedan_(nuclear_test)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Explosions_for_the_Nat...

On mowing actual grass, I love thinking about the algorithm while mowing. Turning(the reduction thereof)is often the most important part. removing awkward corners for later passes is critical.

The other is, if you are like me and don't really have a "lawn" so much as a large yard and a weed season, so just discharge where it lands, is optimizing the discharge path, you don't want to discharge into unmowed grass(it builds up and makes things hard) so the optimal path turns into a spiral, fences also interfere with the discharge, so the optimal spiral is inside out, but you never quite know where the center is so to avoid an awkward edge you go outside in with a reverse path around the fence. and what appear to be inefficient passes(not cutting to full width or doubling a pass) to reduce extra turns into straight lines.

There may be a fun idle game in all of this.

That is my plan, I have (had, you have to let it go) an old account from when it was a just username, never bothered "updating" it to the email account, I tried to convert when Microsoft said they were dumping all the old accounts, but the process was not working and I quickly decided I don't actually want a Microsoft account. At which point I decided that if I ever wanted to play again I would just do so sans account.

Which raises an interesting question, If I legally have a license for the game but they shut off the license servers, is it actually copyright infringement? (or piracy as people like to call it because copyright infringement sounds lame)

crude oil is also just organic solids. err... liquids.

Salutes, I had just redone the firewall and forgot to check external access, Works for me herp derp. I guess everything is fine. sigh Should be up now.

Mine is hard to get to(ip6 only) but was started around the idea of a shared postgres database.

ssh applicant@register.public.outband.net

The web page https://www.public.outband.net hosted on the same box, if you can see it you have the needed ip6.

No users yet but feel free to try it out.

Running X open as a sort of shared network attached monitor is pretty fun, granted it is only really useful as a sort of large control room style display as all window operation have to run via cli tools.

But it is neat for anyone to just be able to throw a application up on the big master display.

That was pretty great, Many times when someone does not like something they are unable to unable to articulate why. That video is a master class in how to critique a thing.

I couldn't compose my way out of a wet bag, but I wonder if at some level of complexity the job would be better served by a markup language? https://lilypond.org I know for complex documents, I start to really despise the word processor, Much better for my sanity to just write in the markup language in the first place, But that may just be me.

As a child I made several crypto disks out of cardboard, draw a 3 inch circle, give it enough segments to fit your alphabet, 32 is easy and gives you room for the capitals and some punctuation, draw the letters twice on each segment inside and outside of the circle, then cut out the circle, glue the outer part to a backing sheet and glue a tab/handle to the inner part to make it easy to spin.

Used statically it works as a simple ceaser cipher, but the real advanced ciphers became available if you rotated it by a specific amount after each letter.

Many plans and conspiracies about what we were going to do with our new "unbreakable" encryption system, but in retrospect, never used and more fun to build and think about than operate.

On desktop,I use a NFS home dir to a freebsd(zfs) fileserver. But I have to admit, that is not so much concern about the filesystem quality as I want a good(backed up, raid) storage system, and rather than trying to build good storage on all my system I just did it once (the fileserver) and use that as a home dir for almost everything. For instance. I have a laptop that only syncs intermittently to the main file server, but i have never had it fail due to unexpected shutdown.

As for actual usage, it largely depends on how hard the filesystem is used at the time of the sudden unexpected outage, A router will fsck, find a few superficial problems(mostly log file) and be done. A desktop with 50 tabs and applications open has a scary amount of fsck problems found(most of them in the web cache). Not saying it does not happen but I personally have not had a sudden unexpected power outage kill a filesystem.

And this is incidental(because it was removed) but obsd used to have a facility for it's filesystem called soft dependencies, which was supposed to work sort of like a reverse journal, where a journal writes twice(write what you intend to do, the journal, than make the changes to the filesystem, softdeps delayed writes until the changes could be written in order with every intermediate stage valid. It sounds like a good idea, but my understanding is, it was a very complicated system spanning several logical layers making it harder(scary) to work on filesystem code, too easy to mess something up far from where you are working. So it was removed. Also: softdep had some nasty fail states with a full busy filesystem.

Stamped steel has most of the properties cast iron has with regard to seasoning, the main difference is reduced heat retention.

I prefer stamped steel, lighter, stronger, won't break. But it does turn cooking in it more like cooking in a wok, faster to heat up faster to cool down. Where as cast iron is better for staying the course with a steady temp.

But the thing I like best about both is the maintainability of the pan, When I commit a sin against cooking and burn the living hell out of the poor thing, I can sit down for an hour of penance with the wire wheel and steel wool to strip the mistake out and then resurface the pan to it's nearly non-stick surface. I love having a surface I can repair with just the tools found in my kitchen.

Pyrex was one of the great customer betrayals. Corning built the brand to promote a specific blend of glass with it's specific properties. Successfully enough that that blend, borosilcate glass became synonymous with the brand, Pyrex. Breaking this link to ride on the coattails of trust the brand had while selling a different blend with different properties was a dirty move.

An interesting subject is how to differentiate borosilicate glass from tempered glass, It turns out to be surprisingly tricky, at least in a home kitchen setting. You could break it, easy but now you are can't use the dish. Color(blueish vs more clear) turns out to be a unfaithful test. There are ways to check the index of refraction(IOR) with oil, but it turns out the IOR of borosilicate and soda-lime overlap. I suspect the polarized light test to identify tempered glass stress would work, but that requires getting the polorizing filters and knowing what to look for. I sort of wish there was a requirement to stamp the formula right into the glass.

I use obsd as a desktop system, I would not necessarily recommend this to anyone, you give up a lot, but obsd is my ultimate comfort system, it is small but full featured. I feel I understand the system far more than I ever did linux, which is one of the good guys. Compare to windows where despite using it my whole life I always feel I understand barely at all. But openbsd is so well put together I love using it, So I put up with the downsides and am quite happy with it as a desktop system.

Naturally I also use obsd as my firewall, a role I would recommend it in. at least if you don't mind a bit of old-school unix administration.

I have a freebsd fileserver and never got around to trying netbsd, But between fbsd and obsd I found I prefer obsd as the desktop system, it is a subtle thing hard to describe, but it feels better focused for desktop use than freebsd, not as performant and the filesystem sucks in comparison(thus the fileserver) but somehow feels better. I don't know.

Yes, but the audio plugin ecosystem also insists on using rotating potentiometer like controls everywhere, these are fine when there is actually something physical to grab, but always feel awkward when trying to map it to a virtual control.

I never really "got" sim tower growing up, I liked sim city but bounced off tower. It only clicked years later when I read that it was an elevator simulator that got fleshed out a bit, Knowing this I enjoy it quite a bit more today than younger me who I guess was expecting a vertical simcity.

I vaguely remember some sort of stunt where they had got hold of two 3 meter dishes paired them with off the shelf wifi radios, mounted one on a pickup truck and drove out across a dry lake bed. 53 miles before signal loss is what I remember.

I will probably never be able to find the source, and my poor memory probably inflated the range like any good fish story.

Fair enough but they don't get hot, nearly any glue would work, Being plastic, I would use CA(superglue).

After failure I like to do a postmortem teardown, it has never been the LED proper, usually it is the capacitor in a capacitance power supply, otherwise the controller IC.

A page like this, with minimal styling, the whole point is the author does not care, the author expects the user's agent to style the document optimally for it's dimensions., the optimal in responsive design. this was the original vision for the web, the agent supplies most of the style.

Except it does not, for some weird reason unstyled pages like this which should look great on mobile look like ass. Why are mobile browsers defaults so wrong?

This hits hard because this is how I build my pages (you can probably tell I am not a front end designer) I just want to put well structured content out and let the users agent display it in the manner that suits the user best. And it mostly works, it will not win any awards but it looks fine. Until someone asks why it looks like the dog's breakfast on mobile.

REST is an inherently human technology, almost superfluous for API(emphasis on Programming Interface) usage. I guess it does not strictly have to be, especially with our modern LLM's But REST can best be summed up as "ship the human interface required to handle a state with every state". For a strictly programming interface, this interface coupled with the state is inefficient and mostly pointless(the application already knows how to handle the state, it does not have to figure it out) and is better served by a more focused mechanical transfer.

With how narrow this scope ends up being I can understand how most of the tech industry collectively had what appears to be a collective brain fart when Fielding said "hey this web thing is doing something really novel in the field of application design, lets talk about it" and went "herp derp, REST == HTTP, sounds good to me". I mean I understand it, but still find it funny.

The Samuel Vimes Boot theory of economic unfairness comes to mind.

Oh wow, it has it's own wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory

Oh man, list comprehensions, that's me. I get inspired, caught up in the flow, write some eldritch horror of a LC. 30 seconds later "What in the name of saint Lovecraft does this even do?" (sighs) Rewrite as a loop. I mean, I guess they are fine in small doses, very small doses, But boy do they read poorly compared to the rest of Python.

I also need something to save me from my regexps, the verbose flag helps a lot. but what would be really nice is some sort of python subset that could compile to the state machine. I would also like composable expressions, that is, composable at the graph level not the string composition we are forced to use. And a pony, I would also like a pony.

As you can tell I am not a fan of APL, not because of what it can do but because of the super compressed syntax it adopts. see also: perl

Euphemisms are weird, what was originally intended as a way of saying a thing without actually saying that thing, becomes the unspeakable thing in the first place. and the original meaning fades.

The one I like is why do we use birds to refer to female anatomy? I also heard something the other day and had an epiphany, but the sort you can't really tell anyone. "Oh... it means pouch that makes so much more sense, it's not a cat."

The first steam engines were vacuum engines, fill a cylinder full of steam and as it condenses it sucks the piston down, Watt's improvement and patent was on a separated condenser unit so you did not have to reheat the whole cylinder each time. This doubled the efficiency, that is, reduced the amount of coal you had to burn by half. But Watt would not sell manufacturing rights to his patent he sold operating licenses, If you had an engine that utilized Watts patent idea you owed him half the price of the coal you did not have to burn by using it. Consequently there were a lot of "pirate" engines, the most common method of working around Watts patent was to claim that your condenser was integrated into(as opposed to separated from) the cylinder some how.

Reading the constitutions of both states in order to pin down exactly where the problem is, the Wikipedia article is sort of vague. The Nevada document specifically references "thence in a North Westerly direction along the Eastern boundary line of the State of California to the forty-third degree of Longitude West from Washington" So that is not the problem, the border is whatever California says it is. It must be a north-south strip in the difference between "the forty-third degree of Longitude West from Washington" and "Running south on the line of said 120th degree of West Longitude"

The latest California constitution just says to reference the original 1849 for the boundaries https://archives.cdn.sos.ca.gov/pdf/1849-california-constitu...

Nevada https://www.leg.state.nv.us/Const/NVConst.html#Art14 amended in 1982, but the original 1864 document has the same geographic description with a different starting point for some reason.

The funny thing I found in the Nevada constitution was

"All territory lying West of and adjoining the boundary line herein prescribed, which the State of California may relinquish to the Territory or State of Nevada, shall thereupon be embraced within and constitute a part of this State."

We reluctantly agree to your existing borders, but we really wanted the Sierra Nevada ridgeline to be the border and if you want to give it to us we are going to put it right in the constitution to accept it. The passive aggressive tone in such a formal document just kills me.

It is close, and if you consider Washington as a district there is a meridian exactly 77 degrees west somewhere in there. But I am here eyeballing maps and if the "Washington meridian" is considered the point of the capital it is ~ 1000 feet west of -77.0, should have chosen Stanton park. Seeing as Washington was a planned city I wonder if the capitol point was supposed to be -77.0 west but limitations in surveying accuracy put it where it is. A thousand foot error is not bad for 1800. In fact the very public line at Greenwich is off by ~ 50 feet.

On the subject of eyeballing maps are there any online openstreetmap derivatives that have better cartography tools? (crosshair, lat long at specific point, distance and bearing lines, etc) I probably could install qgis for it, and osmand has a bunch of these tools. but the default osm page sort of sucks here.

My current favorite boundary dispute is between California and Nevada.

California entered the union in 1850 and it's north-eastern boundary was defined a specific way(120 degrees west of Greenwich), Nevada entered 14 years later and it's western boundary was defined with a different method(43 degrees west of Washington), at the time it was thought these two methods were equivalent, but this was later proved otherwise. It appears the main strip got resolved but there is still a weird triangular strip of land on the diagonal claimed by both sides. There were also a number of surveying mistakes, but the root of the problem appears to be the accepted but incompatible definitions. It turns out that congress has no authority to change state borders once they are set(Somehow this both surprised me and made total sense at the same time), so the states themselves have to resolve it. There is currently an "agreement" on how to interpret the border, but neither state has changed it's constitution so the dispute is still technically ongoing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Tahoe#Interstate_boundary...