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I'd probably put the typical smart switch hardware/software stack at around 0.25 seconds. Maybe you can but I don't think I'd try to rely on anything much faster than that.

If you did, I would go in the custom firmware for the smart switch direction. A lot of them are just an ESP32 inside, and you could probably get to 0.001 seconds that way (but you are switching AC which cycles on the order of 0.02 seconds, so whatever)

Was speaking more generally there; I don't think you need to know everything but I don't recommend being clueless. For the doctor example, if you are prescribed medicine, I think you should know what it is, how much and how often you are supposed to take of it, and at least at a high level what it is supposed to do for you. I've known people who don't know any of the above, and while their health outcomes weren't necessarily bad they were more complicated than they could have been.

I'm not saying you need to be paranoid and scrutinize every decision down to the molecule, but you are the greatest person who cares about the things you care about, and you deserve to know about those things.

Finding someone who will take your money is easy. Finding that they can actually be trusted to do the work correctly, on budget and on a compatible schedule may or may not take more time than actually doing the thing itself.

Also, if you do not bother to learn at all, you have no way to verify that the work is actually done correctly. People will absolutely take advantage of your ignorance.

My home internet is on a CGNAT, so I experience a lot of the same. Ironically, sometimes a VPN will get through.

If you're a hobbyist, pick up some used thin clients from Ebay. I lost a couple of pis recently, and instead of replacing them, I bought a batch of Wyse 3040 thin clients for about $23 each, power supply (which is 12V) included. 2Gb RAM and a 4-core intel Atom - roughly equal to a Pi 4, but at (what is now) 1/3 the price.

There's a link to that same youtube channel on the webpage.

It still does, but it is cool you can make a radio for one with some wire and a razor blade.

You can on the desktop website, I do it all the time. Although in general I've stopped buying a lot of stuff on there since it seems like everything now costs 5x as much as it used to, you seem to pay for shipping on everything, and the ability to search for things is way, way down (it's actually better than it used to be, but still terrible compared with 6-7 years ago).

As you do to view completed listings on Ebay

Construction stands out - this is made from a bunch of (thick) cut plastic sheets glued together. But within just over 10 years, almost nobody attempting this would do anything other than 3D print the whole case in one shot.

Depending on what sort of important you're talking, those ICs don't have the usual "something important" environmental specs, like an extended temperature range, or certification for automotive use or safety critical applications, for one thing.

Seems as though it's been filed under a different page:

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

You must not hang out on there. Those are some pretty standard grade Hackaday comments. I love the site, read every day, but the comments section can be... rough.

Not who you're replying to, but I did this just the other day.

First thing to know is what there is even to look at. If you don't know anything, look here:

https://www.heavens-above.com/skychart2.aspx

You'll get a better result if you put in your actual location, but whatever. Looks like Saturn is visible this time of year, and will be in the east around midnight. You can check this right now and it'll be about right for the next few weeks. You can step the time forward and see what how the planets move over time.

If you don't do the above steps, you could probably make a guess, as the planets are the brightest objects in the sky, easily seen by eye.

Then you point your telescope at it. I found mine in the trash and it didn't come with the spotting scope, so I kind of just have to guess where to point it. Use your widest angle lens, and move the scope around until you see something bright go by. You're close! Then you center the bright thing in the center of the view, and after the scope stops shaking because it's on a cheap tripod, you can see a very tiny Saturn, including the rings. Then you swap the lens for a more zoomed in one to see it better. The rotation of the earth means it will quickly drift out of view, so you have to constantly adjust your scope every minute or so to keep it in frame, until I fix the motor that came with my equatorial mount which is supposed to do this part for you.

I have a couple of these. Of the ones in a working device, they are in capacitor ("condenser") checkers. You rotate a dial until the eye tube goes from closed to open, then read off the capacitance on the dial.

I don't remember the exact design off hand, but I seem to remember that about all that's inside one of these is the eye tube, a rectifier tube, and a handful of resistors and capacitors. Can also test leakage and shorts. They really knew how to get a bunch of things done with about 10 components back then.

This is not insignificant. The period of Pluto's planethood represents just about 0.76% of recorded human history, but that does cover around 7% of the total number of people who have ever lived, about 10x the 'average'. Of course a lot of culture comes out of that. I think the 20th century will be important to historians for a very very long time.

Luckily telephone lines are very current limited. You'd be hard pressed to draw more than 100mA even with a dead short at ring voltages. One zener diode might be all you need.

Also not the most unusual thing I've seen over a RJ11, which includes keyboards, RS-232, other random digital IO and full USB with data. But these are normally on items that are not phones.

In contrast, I've been messing around with some old analog phones and VOIP stuff recently, and I've been blown away with how good the quality is over what I was expecting. The audio bandwidth is low yes (it's G.711u, so 8 KHz), but the actual quality is great, with no hyper-compression artifacts or over-applied background noise filters. And yes this is on the original 60's carbon microphones.

The regular phone calls I normally make on my cell still all sound like they are underwater for some reason, except for those rare times when the better connection is actually working.

There is always some young person or new to the field learning for the first time. Post like this are exactly how I learned.

For those that have this, how is your auditory imagination? I would not describe my thinking as especially visual, but I can hear things. It's much easier for me to imagine the crunch of someone biting an apple than the image of an apple itself. The effect is quite strong - I can hear music almost as well inside my head as actually listening to it; the sound of instruments, pitches (I don't think it's perfect pitch but it's close), the inflection of someone's voice, etc. I had a lot of trouble learning to read music, because it was a lot easier for me to remember what things were supposed to sound like and just play that than to actually read it.

Old Roombas used to come with a serial port so you could use drive the motors and use it as a robot base. Then, you stick a wireless router and a webcam on top - no raspberry pi in those days.

That's a shame, I'm quite a bit younger than both of you and this is exactly how I learned to program. When I was a kid, computers were icons and a mouse, with no indication of how they worked or how you would go about making them do whatever you want. But I found a bunch of old BASIC books in my school library; the kind of computer in there had no icons, but very much encouraged you to program it. It took me a while to find one of those computers (but not as hard as it is now, they were literal trash back then), but I was hooked once I did.

Modern tech has a huge barrier to entry if you know nothing about it. I didn't even know what "install a program" was at the time, before soon learning it means "get in trouble" for messing up the (one) family computer.

There are indeed!

Vacuum tube computer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAlnJnYt5do

Making vacuum tubes in a garage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UEfqAWb3fE

To be fair, I've bought things for more that promised zero support, but at least you know what you're getting into with that. Bad support is just plain bad.

I like my framework, but I do wonder if the repairability angle is overstated if you're already used to fixing normal laptops. Yes, Framework's parts are easier to find, and the laptops are easier to open, but it's not like doing any of the typical repairs - keyboard, screen, touchpad, battery - are impossibly difficult on those other guys.

Used thinkpads and the glut of EBay parts for them reach about 85% of what Framework does for me, and at half the price. But it's a different experience.

Framework does seem like better build quality than most laptops I've had, but I'm used to cheap crappy ones.

On the other hand, you do seem to find more cases of multiple people doing things like the linked bios update procedure on framework.

Both myself and my boss took off work to see the last one. Though unplanned it was not, as eclipses can be predicted centuries in advance. I intended to see it before even working there. Looking forward to the next local one in 2045.

This is correct. I have bought some disks from him before (also he is tomdotstar on EBay) and they come as ordinary used disks with a new label stuck on top. Supposedly each one is tested; all the ones I got worked and looked to be in good condition, so I guess so. It is interesting to see some of the old labels underneath the new one - most of mine were driver disks or "setup disk 5 of 19" or similar.

They do sell, I've bought from them before.

In the US, those are radio stations WWVB for clocks and watches, and WWV/WWVH for shortwave.

One thing I think is interesting is that not only are the digital formats these carry synced to an atomic clock, but the radio carrier wave is too. So if you need a very precise 10 MHz signal in the lab, you can hook up a shortwave antenna and a filter, and receive the precisely-on-frequency signal broadcast from WWV.

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