alnwlsn

You actually can still call NIST and hear the signal broadcast from WWV[0], though that's probably different from the telephone time of day you're thinking of, which might have come from one of these machines [1] in a local telephone exchange.

[0] https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/time-di...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audichron

If you want to see how an actual application of this works, I've yet to see a description better than in CuriousMarc's HP 5061A series:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOti3kKWX-c

You mean everyone else would have the "wrong" time whereas your clock is still bang-on correct for you. So you have become a time traveler.

I've done this to myself too. I once had a thermal receipt printer I wasn't using, so I decided to point a webcam at it and put it on a webpage so anyone could print random crap to it (it's actually still up - alnwlsn.com/printer). Of course I went in knowing full well what I was getting into, and the types of messages posted to it are about what you expect and get here. Some highlights:

- It was once found by one of those worse-than-4chan places, who spent about 4 hours spamming the worst things you could imagine until it ran out of paper. I added some filtering after that to stop tons of duplicate messages from wasting so much paper and some regex, which reduced the volume of some particularly vile things. Some people do post nice messages too.

- The setup breaks often. Eventually, I'll notice and fix it, but it might have been broken for months. Inevitibly, there will be people using it again within days, with no announcement made. How enough people find it on this tiny corner of the internet is a mystery to me, but they do. I am convinced most of them are real people, because why even bother to point a bot at it?

The whole point was that I thought it would be more interesting than letting the thing sit around on a shelf, and to use up the box of rolls that came with it instead of throwing the whole thing in the trash. Intersting it is; I don't think I would describe it as plesant, but it is interesting.

I think it would have been more likely to be some kind of mechanical analog computer full of gears and cams (which some planes and missiles did use for guidance). Probably needing more support from the ground.

Apollo did carry tubes also, in the radio transmitters.

I do some retro-computing every now and then and of these old drives that still work (about a 50% chance), when I format them assuming all sectors are good, they will inevitably report the same bad sectors as is on the label.

I don't really know why "bad sectors are still bad after 40 years" is so surprising to me, but there you go.

In many ways this project is more difficult than building a professional train simulator (I've worked on one).

1. Professional customers are willing to pay for (and usually have an in) on getting genuine parts. You usually don't have to worry about scouring ebay for a authentic throttle control lever and hoping one turns up. There is some challenge in interfacing the controls to your system, but you probably don't have to start from scratch. Even if you do, you might be able to access drawings. You might get protocols documented and not have to reverse engineer anything. In our case, we didn't have to make those custom panels, we could just get real ones. Sometimes, you do get nothing though, so you have to have those skills.

2. You aren't building a sim necessarily for how accurate it is to the real vehicle, they are ordering it because they have operators they want to train. So if a LCD screen behind a bezel provides the same training value as interfacing a real gauge, you might well go for a screen. This one varies by customer, but generally they care more about having the correct buttons, switches, anything you touch more than something you look at.

I wonder if they aren't sticking the die to the end of their finger, then using the bamboo stick to poke it off and get it into final position. That's probably how I would attempt it given those materials.

I occasionally do some microsoldering, and I'll reach for a wood toothpick when I need something that's absolutely non-magnetic, soft enough to not scratch things, does not conduct much heat, or is not wetted by solder. At those scales, stainless steel tweezers are quite strong magnets. Sometimes you just need a tiny stick to poke a component off the end of the tweezers.

If you need a stick that's sticky instead, you can wet the end with something - water, flux, hopefully not your own saliva. Then expose it to some heat from the hot air gun, and the liquid will evaporate and unstick the thing you picked up.

My cousin has one. But he also lives on 5 acres, which is also not average either.

Apparently prices on them have gone way up. The one he has now would cost something like $6K today.

Here's a real world* example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAbyUaLN2QA

*youtuber

For an anecdote in a different direction, my father bought a Ford model T a few years ago. Now, "classic" cars of the 60's and 70's are still very popular among those who lived through that time. Maybe your family had one or there was a particular car you wished you could have had. I don't think the model T works like that. Next year, all model T's will be 100 years old, so even if you are 95 today, when you started driving, the newest model T would have been a 20 year old car.

I've been with him to a couple of the local model T club meetings. The demographics are interesting. I was the youngest person there. My dad (late 60's) was the second youngest. But you have to remember that nobody alive, even the real geezers, has experienced a time when a Ford model T wasn't an old car. So by all means, it seems like this hobby should have died out decades ago, even as it continues to die out today. Very strange.

As it stands, it looks like a decent condition Model T can be bought these days for 10-20K, only a bit more than the inflation-adjusted original price. But, I don't really know what the collectors market was like at peak nostalgia.

The shortwave WWV, not so much, except to check if your shortwave radio is working. Canada's shortwave CHU was shut down last month.

The 60 kHz WWVB, yes. Plenty of cheap wall clocks have "atomic time" as it is marketed over here, meaning it has a radio receiver. You can pick one up at the grocery store. It depends on where you live if it actually works though. Where I live it works pretty well, but I've heard it does not work so well if you live on the east coast. That's quite a ways from Colorado.

I think the idea is that you can make a machine that goes on the rails and installs them automatically. So you don't need to haul a bunch of equipment on site, you just drive one special train down the track once.

I have a small CNC mill and can carve out a board if I don't have time to wait for ordered boards. It's a pain to set up to get it to cut properly, the boards are either one sided or with no vias, and the lack of solder mask makes it harder to solder, especially for SMD components that rely on the solder blob being a certain shape. Additionally, I find that the traces tend to peel off a little too easily, though that may be down to the Ea-Nasir quality copper clad boards I'm using.

It is pretty fast though, and worth learning if you need to do prototyping quickly. You can have a finished board in just hours instead of a week.

One thing that annoys me about am/pm is that the clocks have a 12 at the top and not a 0. So it goes 11:59 am to 12:00 pm and not 11:59 am to 00:00 pm. Even as a kid I was confused as to why 12 belonged to PM but 11 was still AM, but I never thought about it much until recently, decades after I had learned and was using the system. Which I guess is why it is still like this.

Like a burned out brick building, a burned down planet is still there, but still also burned down. Of course it doesn't 'disappear'

The other home security camera companies already make cameras in a doorbell form factor.

Point is to do what you want with the hardware you supposedly "own".

Look up Carnot efficiency. The maximum amount of work you can theoretically extract depends only on a temperature difference. For a datacenter running chips at 100C into ambient air at 60F, it's about 25%. So even with perfect capture, you are guaranteed to lose 3/4 of your input energy to the datacenter as heat anyway.

For comparison, an IC engine has a Carnot efficiency of something like 80% on paper, but the reality you get is only 20-30%

The Aliexpress of 10 years ago was just ridiculous. One time I ordered something (a USB adapter) for literally a total price of 40¢, and it was delivered. It cost about 35¢ to send a regular US postcard domestically at the time, not counting the price of the postcard.

Now all the 40 cent items cost $2, and have $3 shipping. Or you can buy the same thing on Amazon for $6. Their search also used to be a lot better, today it's worse than Youtube search.

Mentioned elsewhere in this thread, but the print heads are a very specialized silicon chip with internal microfluidic passages, microscopic heaters, etc. Who else would even make them? The kind of thing you would need millions of dollars to reverse engineer and replicate just to enter the lucrative market of... making inkjet cartridges.

I would be shocked to discover that there are counterfeit print heads out there the same way there are counterfeit STM32 microcontrollers.

Unless the patents have something to do with the shape of the cartridge or they somehow have a patent on "technique to fill printer cartridge with ink" which would not be so surprising.

I mean, in 1978 Tandy used standard drives and a disk controller IC, and still managed to sell a whole 16K TRS-80 system with disk drive for the same price (TRS-80 Level II 16K + Expansion Interface + disk drive = $1786 [0]) as Apple (Apple II + Disk II + drive = $1790 [1]). Plus, the TRS-80 came with a video monitor wheras Apple did not. But the Disk II could hold more data per disk, and I'm sure Apple's margins were better.

0 - https://ia803203.us.archive.org/9/items/Radio_Shack_TRS-80_S...

1 - http://www.apple-iigs.info/doc/fichiers/Apple%20Price%20List...

I remember visiting a science museum as a kid which had a couple of CRTs like that set up where you could pull a rope to smash a hammer into it and try to break it. With the same result; never leaving a mark.

CRTs are built like that because otherwise they would implode from the slightest bump and send thousands of tiny glass fragments flying in all directions.

Panel displays of today have their glass pieces glued together into one solid lump, and there is no pressure, so when they break the broken pieces stay where they are for the most part.

If you like things like this I can recommend you check out the Chris Staecker youtube channel. He covers all sorts of tools people used to use to do math before computers and calculators, and there are a lot of them. Some of the things people came up with to do what today would be considered relatively simple math are pretty clever, pretty complex, or both.

https://www.youtube.com/@ChrisStaecker

Archeologists discover 2000 year old cultural link between badgers and mushrooms

Buried the lede by calling this a "usb wifi adapter" and not "magic Ethernet adapter that you don't have to plug a cable into". This will come in handy for my systems that are normally air gapped or currently connected to something else, but sometimes I need to get another network connection on there for a few minutes. I don't always have a USB ethernet adapter on hand or enough cable, but I almost always have a Pico around.

Also I posted this comment using one. Speedtest says about 4 Mbps. Surprisingly usable for web browsing though. Very nice tool! I'll be keeping the .uf2 file around for sure.

And they were quick about it too [0]. I mean, not that quick, much slower than today's printers, but much faster than nearly all of the 3D printer conversions or pen plotter kits you can get now.

My HP-7470A is from 1982 and does not have stepper motors, but DC motors and rotary encoders doing closed loop servo control. They move the lightweight paper itself instead of a heavy gantry.

Worth noting that this HP sold printers and atomic clocks, unlike today's HP which sells cheaper printers and subscriptions to them.

0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXQKj4WJQIc

> much better dexterity than any human

Do they? A human can both chuck kilograms of stuff across a room or kick in a door, but then pick up a single hair off the ground, or feel and manipulate (things even lighter than) a literal feather.

Robots can certainly do things more repeatably, if not more precisely.

Me too, and also I've never used one and it was discontinued before I was born

I thought that's what the little breakaway tabs on the bottom of the cassette are for

Though I'll admit, when I used to use cassettes, I never write protected them