drewzero1

Try buying a decent toaster, I've found exactly the same. $20, $30, and $50 options all using the same internal mechanism with a different style of shell and minor changes to the control circuit, or $200-$1k models that are mostly marketed for commercial kitchens/hospitality use. Not a whole lot in between.

I've also been saving up for a self birthday gift from AliExpress, parts to build a custom watch. Looks like I missed my chance on that one too. Though if this trade war continues escalating I have a feeling a watch will be the least of my worries.

This thought experiment reminds me of Mark Twain's novel "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court", in which the main character is a 19th-century American man transported back to 6th-century Britain. He used his experience in firearms manufacture to introduce modern weapons and had bicycles constructed for the knights to ride around on. I always thought it was pretty farfetched that he'd be able to recreate such complex technology without the aid of modern tools, much less set up factories to manufacture it in pre-industrial times. But it is a bit fun to imagine someone using knowledge of modern technology to pose as a wizard. As Arthur C Clarke famously said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

My DCP-7020 is going on 20 pretty soon here. Don't want to jinx it but it's been the reliable workhorse of the home office.

The funny thing is that the laser printer is much better for people who print once a week or less, because toner doesn't dry up and clog the printer. But for the price/quality it's hard to justify buying a new one.

Not sure how it is in Ottawa but here in the US Midwest distances are frequently measured in units of time. I might say I'm an hour from Green Bay or two hours from Madison, though I don't remember the actual mileage. That said, it usually only applies to distances over 20 minutes (between 7 and 25 miles, depending on speed limits).

Some time in the mid-2000s my dad showed me a website he'd found called Screams of Wheat which purported to show a pitched-down video of ultrasonic wheat screaming while being harvested. I always thought it was just a joke to troll vegans, but maybe there's a grain of truth to it?

> Can't help but see some parallels between this and current Scarlett Johansson vs. OpenAI debacle.

I think that's why this was posted... I saw it referenced in a comment on that thread.

Interesting, in cars the terms "generator" and "alternator" are used to refer to a DC device (dynamo?) and an AC device, respectively. Cars used DC generators for their electricity until the 60s/early 70s (depending on make/model) when they started using an AC alternator with a rectifier to make a constant 14VDC.

Right, I feel like between that and seeing it a lot over remote desktop I've never really appreciated the quality of the original. I always liked the wallpaper set from the windows 9x era because they were designed to look good in low quality 256-color modes.

For a moment I confused it with the one from W11 and wondered how they got all the folds so smooth and uniformly spaced.

A large percentage of people in my area eat venison regularly for at least part of the year. We already have controls on place for CWD so I have to hope that would catch any similar cases before someone eats the meat.

I took it to mean they're not worried about themselves catching it, but more about the implications if this disease were to spread more. How bad could it be if it started infecting more than just the eyes? How fast could it spread between people before we have a vaccine ready?

I've seen it often on Hackaday over the years, and while they probably could do it all with a 555, I certainly couldn't... My specialties are software and mechanical stuff, for everything in-between I shove in an Arduino and hope it works!

There's a bit of a meme among electronics hobbyists that for so many projects with an Arduino, somebody in the comments says "I could've done that with a 555”. It's a very common chip with a wide range of uses from arcade sound generation to the timer on a toaster to light/motion activated alarms.

Yes, and haven't had issues with it recently... Was there some bad news I missed?

What's wrong with Ting?

The only person I ever heard call them "hard disks" was as a joke in a cartoon[1]. Non-computer people I knew called them stuff like "little floppies" to distinguish them from the big 5 1/4" ones. Windows used "floppy" for both in the file manager.

1: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wKnLBNS9jDw&t=1m8s

"Who is General Failure and why is he reading my disk?"

I found one of those in a folder at work a few months ago and was surprised how extra-floppy it was. I grew up with mostly 3 1/2” diskettes and some 5 1/4” disks, so the "floppy" name always seemed like a bit of a stretch. Seeing an 8" disk really made more sense why they called it that.

(Eight inches was a really clever size for storage in a paper-based office environment... It fits just right in a spot meant for a sheet of letter or A4!)

I have them, love them, and have kept them outside before. I've found their mouths are too small to eat fully-grown mosquito larvae, but as long as they get there before the mosquitoes do they will gladly eat the eggs and young larvae... they are top/middle feeders and will viciously nibble anything in the water column while completely ignoring anything on the bottom.

This year I'm hoping to try the variable platyfish, Xiphophorus variatus (though most just call them 'variatus'). They tolerate a similar temperature range to white clouds but they're slightly bigger and more likely to eat things off the bottom. They're livebearers, so they make more, but in fairness white clouds are among the easiest egg-scatterers to breed and will likely also make more in a pond.

Occasionally I allow my (toddler/preschool) kids to play 'Kindercomp' in DOSbox on my computer. It's got a mode that prints the letters you type across the screen in different colors, which seems to be the fan favorite because it rewards indiscriminate keyboard mashing.

When they get a little older I plan to introduce QBASIC programs that do the same kind of thing, then we can start looking at the code that makes it do that.

This is timely for me, and something that's been on my mind, as my grandmother passed away about a month ago. (Tomorrow would have been her 83rd birthday.) I find myself thinking a lot about funerary traditions and the ways they can bring healing and closure to surviving loved ones, and help us remember the good times we've had with the deceased before recent illness or strife. The preparation for the funeral (compiling stories, pictures, etc) was very therapeutic for me as it helped me remember who she was beyond the decline of her last few years.

Or give them away, or leave them in a little free library for someone else to enjoy. In my old neighborhood somebody else had similar taste in scifi and (as far as I could tell) we traded Asimov books back and forth through the book box in the park!

I'd love to keep them all forever but (a) I think my house is about maxed out on shelves and (b) a book's potential is wasted on the shelf.

My personal favorite is the articulated locomotives, especially the Klein-Lindner system: http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/LOCOLOCO/klienlindner/kli...

It probably took me about a week to get a full idea of how it works, and I'm hoping to create a model to help myself really understand.

I don't know how many nights I've lost track of time reading through this site, mostly in the 'unusual locomotives' section.[1] (I'm in a rail modeling group where some of us are really into the oddballs, so it comes up pretty often there!)

1: http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/LOCOLOCO/locoloco.htm

Unless you're talking about the PHP function[1], the generally-accepted spelling is 'Israel'.

1: https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.is-real.php

I really like the palmtop form factor. When I was using a Palm Pilot the one thing I missed most was a built-in keyboard. Several years ago I was looking for a pocket-sized retro PC and ended up choosing the HP OmniGo 100[1] over the 200LX because of the convertible form factor (palmtop/PDA) and the handwriting recognition. It's possible to run DOS programs on the OmniGo but the square display means the whole screen can't be shown at once.

1: https://www.palmtoppaper.com/ptphtml/24/pt240017.htm

Resource limit reached; archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20240413001045/http://ascii.text...

The hopelessly optimistic side of me thinks this might be just the thing we need to spur massive improvements in mass transit, when big employers discover that it's cheaper to chip in for some commuter light rail than it is to pay everyone to sit in traffic. Realistically I don't think it'll happen, but I can dream.