Supervisor chips are not complicated. In some ways simpler than a homebrew analog watchdog, and the good ones will handle failure modes a simple watchdog won't, like those that result in an oscillating output.
The fact that the Apple II met the new FCC requirements was a major competitive advantage for Apple, and there have been rumors over the years about how that happened. The higher emissions allowance was why you saw the big shift from monsters like the Atari 800 (heavy cast metal frame, aluminum or pot metal) and Commodore PET to lighter chassis like the Atari XL series and the Commodore VIC-20 and C64.
One of the books I first tried to learn from was _Miniature Projects for Electronic Hobbyists_ by one Ken W. Sessions. It was really a unijunction transistor project book. You know how some people will say you'll learn maybe not the best mental models for electronics from Forrest Mims' books? (I don't get it, they seem OK to me) Well, Forrest has nothing on Ken W. Sessions. The circuits worked, though.
The TL081 family of op amps is definitely in the "old parts you should (sometimes) use" category (for price/performance) but there have been much better op amps for not much more money for a long time now. Both the now-ancient 2nd edition and the aging 3rd edition of Horowitz and Hill recommend the LF411 for a JFET-input general purpose jellybean, for example.
For learning you some analog, I would recommend the LM358 op amp and the LM393 comparator and all the old National material on them. The LM358 has its quirks so you won't think op amps are ideal but you still see them in a ton of stuff, because they're dirt cheap and adequate for a lot of things, and the LM393 comparator is still so good you really should know why you're choosing anything else - micropower or exotically high speeds or whatever.
Sure, it's kind of cringe. I've shipped stuff with 555 timers in it. I'm not proud, but I'm not telling what either.
You can do almost all of the 555 tricks with comparators and then some, and you'll learn more doing them. Check out the old National Semiconductor application notes for the LM393. You're more likely to see comparators used for little bits of analog/analogish-digital glue in professional designs.
And there's another reason not to recommend them - no one sane has used the bipolar version since the Carter administration but they're still out there and it's another pitfall for beginners.
That's the only use for one that isn't (always) a design smell - it makes a really nice missing pulse detector, better than you can easily do with comparators. But if you have the budget, a purpose-made watchdog chip or a tiny microcontroller really can make a better watchdog.
Yeah, in the typical value ranges (nanofarads) of a 555-timer-class analog design, you'll need film caps. Ceramic C0Gs are too small and class 2 dielectrics are dismal for anything but bypass. They don't just have temperature coefficients, they have voltage coefficients and are wildly nonlinear. And electrolytics are almost as dreadful as batteries. Worse in some ways. It's a tough bridge for beginners to cross - once you figure out capacitors are not all equivalent you have to do a deep dive on dielectrics and it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem - you don't know what you're doing so you don't when you'll need what.
I don't know how powerful. It will fit a half sheet. The door is a little less than a foot high and the interior obviously is smaller. I wasn't being "I made timing measurements" exact by saying "almost as fast" - think "almost as fast for my purposes". It takes about five-ten minutes to preheat and my old toaster oven took minutes, not tens of seconds. I don't remember how many. It's just a big enough improvement over a full height oven that we use it a lot more, and don't bother with a toaster oven.
You also can toast just about anything in it under the broiler.
Working on your knife skills will pay off more than any small organizational optimizations and it's fun.
The top oven of a 30" double oven heats up almost as fast as a toaster oven, you don't have to bend over far to use it, and it takes up no counter space. I thought these were just for people who frequently cook huge meals for large gatherings but we moved into a house with one, used the top oven constantly, and it became a must-have when it was time to replace the range.
I got a gigantic weston vacuum sealer for Christmas one year. Fortunately we have the counter space for it, and drawer space beneath it for the bags, in our pantry. In the amounts we cook it's taken a long time to break even on any cost savings but it's a quality of life game changer. Plus sous vide. In a world where less-than-super-premium American butchery has gone from mediocre to downright sloppy in my lifetime, it's very, very nice being able to break down big roasts and subprimals into chops and steaks and smaller roasts etc and trim them up nicely and freeze whatever we're not going to use immediately. I tie roasts before freezing them.
Just buy the big box of sharpies for the kitchen. They walk off and dry out and get that weird thing that happens when they touch something oily. I mark things like super-duper-pasteurized dairy products with the date opened. I'm not michelin-star disciplined about using painter's tape for other containers. If I have a subprimal's worth of meat to go in the freezer, I use a label maker.
It's one thing if you make a youtube video starting from already knowing how to make modern fish sauces, and what they're supposed to taste like, and quite another level of horror if you don't. My recollection of the letter or paper or whatever it was was that the person who wrote it was not at all pleased with the result.
There are folks that will insist that we don't know at all what Roman garum really tasted like or everything involved in its preparation, and they're not exactly wrong since Colatura di Alici can only be traced back to the middle ages, but it's also oddly obtuse. I think it was probably like modern fish sauces but Roman garum could have been as different from Colatura and Asian fish sauce as those are from Worcestershire.
That's the roman dodecahedrons that are a bit more mysterious than that - the "this is for knitting gloves" explanation is a real stretch, and not only because the Romans didn't have knitting.
There's speculation that Asian fish sauce came from Greece through the same cultural diffusion processes that brought Greco-Buddhist sculpture as far as Japan.
I think the best explanation is that classicists are not makeup artists. I am reminded of reading some classicists' attempt to create garum in the kitchen by making some unpleasant horror of mashed fish or something back in the eighties or nineties. No one ever mentioned in those kinds of write-ups back then that they still make fish sauce in Italy. (I looked for the source I'm thinking of and it's drowned out by more credible modern attempts). There's a tendency the further north you go to think of the classical world as completely lost, discontinuous, and opaque to us, too, which adds to it.
The folks who urge haste occasionally need to be reminded that there is nothing faster than doing it right the first time.
That said, finishing (not just working) quickly is very important. You will never get good if you do not finish a lot of things. If you need to iterate to a solution, you will never finish if you do not iterate quickly.
My corollary to "good, fast, cheap: pick two" is that there's no such thing as good, slow, and cheap, and if there were, it's booked for the next 30 years anyway.
They're looking for the level of answer you might get instantly from an llm. I think figuring out the right balance of "ask chatgpt", critical thought, and ownership in these situations is going to be tricky.
"Yes, Socrates, he said, and if you were providing for a city of pigs, how else would you feed the beasts?
But what would you have, Glaucon? I replied.
Why, he said, you should give them the ordinary conveniences of life. People who are to be comfortable are accustomed to lie on sofas, and dine off tables, and they should have sauces and sweets in the modern style."
Catadioptric telescopes are in fact sometimes configured and sold as long (working) distance microscopes:
http://www.company7.com/questar/microscope.html
Not made out of a single piece of glass, though, which is one of the things that's so elegant about Rik ter Horst's design.
If you just want a serviceable telescope, you haven't been able to really save any money by grinding a mirror for decades, unless you're a madman like Dobson who scrounged blanks in the form of things like porthole windows. But that's not why people do it. I haven't built a non-trivial telescope but it is not too unusual for amateur telescope makers to figure mirrors to precision that you can't easily buy, i.e. not for amateur prices. Where he talks about Ali mirrors being l/6 or better? That's really good for randomly buying something unspecified cheap on Ali. l/6 is lambda/6 which means the surface error of the mirror is less than 1/6 a wavelength of light. Utility optics are typically l/4. Really fine stuff is l/10 or l/20.
I never really warmed to perl in its era but perl dbi was kind of perfect in its way. If you needed what it could do, it got very intuitive very fast, and was pretty terse. Both of which were supposedly the appeal of perl.
No. The RF equivalent of that would be an antenna pattern. The smith chart is a particular mapping of complex impedance that allows for fairly straightforward calculation and visualization of things like conjugate matches. It's related to the impedance plots for speakers, but audio engineers generally don't use it. RF engineers will plot impedance vs frequency on it though. If you come across curlicue plots on it, those are typically frequency sweeps i.e. they plot impedance vs frequency. You might have to look for the frequency legend or endpoints.
And technically (the best way, right?) there's a whole thing to suss out between AppleTalk, 422, and LocalTalk, hahahahahah, but it's effectively as proprietary as PS/2 ports were, until they weren't. And ADB was 100% proprietary iirc, but I'm not going to look it up for you.
Thirty years ago was 1995. TUI programming environments were closer to obsolete than obsolescent. We had 32-bit versions of Visual C++. We had Delphi and the Borland C++ stuff for Windows. We had Codewarrior. On the lighter end of RAD, Visual Basic was four years old, HyperCard was eight years old, and LabView was nine years old. The future was very unevenly distributed back then.
I see now the article is from 2023, well, adjust appropriately.