evilbob93

I went to a PC expo of some sort in NYC in 1999 because I was in town for an interview. LCDs had just come out, but every exhibit in the hall had them because they were new but also because you could ship a whole bunch of flat screens in the same weight as a decent CRT.

In 1992 VAX/VMS from Digital Equipment Corporation was beginning to feel the hurt from various Unix systems that were becoming popular. In 1993, I worked at a US Army contract that still had MS-DOS and we had to do some creative accounting things to get them some systems that could run Windows 3.11.

There were still a bunch of proprietary systems like Apollo that had were used in a lot of engineering places. Unix came in two flavors, BSD System V and Berkeley. Linux hadn't happened yet but open source had made its presence known by all the utilities that ran under Unix with familiar names prefixed by a g- like gawk, gcc, gtar, etc. Before the GNU project, each vendor had their own C compiler that came with their version of Unix. The GNU utilities slowly made those obsolete as gcc became the standard C compiler.

Brian Eno started his [ambient] career doing essentially that, creating and tweaking programming systems to do various musical things, and then letting them to go do their thing. Does this make his ambient pieces, many of which started as a programmatic system, not art? If not, where does the line fall?

I tried to use a CPAP 15 years ago but it didn't work for me because of the noise and the fact that I had long hair and it felt like i was trapped in it and it was difficult to get it all right so i felt comfortable going to sleep.

a few years ago I got another one, and didn't like it at first. Turned out that I needed the mask that covers my nose and mouth because I am a mouth breather. Getting a different mask made a big difference.

> I don’t believe most people are willing to uproot their lives simply because they can get cheaper housing elsewhere. I’m sure it factors in but it’s rarely the driving motivator.

Retirees and other fixed income people may have a different opinion. Where I am in Colorado, a bunch of boomer-aged people seem to be disappearing to places that have a lower cost of living, with or without bubble payouts.

Problem is that the entry-level stuff is going to be done by the AI and fewer people are going to have the chance to go through the steps of becoming a master artist.

Depends what your benchmark is. As the AI stuff is getting better, things like MIDI and Autotune lower the bar to where it's understandable some might see the convergence coming sooner than later.

Perl is getting to be like COBOL - lots of lines out there still doing useful things but they aren't cranking out new Perl programmers like they used to. Lucrative if you can find the gig.

That said, I met a millennial COBOL programmer a couple years ago.

Approaching 61. Got two offers this year. The current hot market seems to (temporarily) make ageism slightly less of a thing than it used to be. Probably losing the white pony tail a couple years ago helped too. Dying my hair is out of the question, the only thing that isn't gray on my head are my eyebrows.

I did take my ID badge for my current job with blue hair, however.

Everything2 is one of those things that inspired near obsession for me when it was a going thing. I am glad you can still look at it, but it's a little like going to the World's Fair site in New York City. You get the impression this was pretty cool once, but that its time came and went.

You could make the argument that it's further a reference back to "Day of the Dolphin"

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069946

Original Furbies can be remote controlled by infrared. The codes are available for Flipper.

I ordered a second one when I found out that there was already some code written for some a SubGhz radio intercom. Currently only available at the command line interface (yes, you can ssh to it while connected via usb) but shouldn't be too difficult to build some kind of interface for it.

As I was writing this, it occurs to me that you could might be able to capture a bluetooth signal with one, sent it via radio to another that might not be in line of sight, then retransmit from another.

The limit on what you're thinking is that the devices inside this are NOT the latest and greatest.

It depends on the fob. I didn't get it to read mine.

That said, there was a post on Reddit of a EMT driver who used theirs to clone dozens of remotes that the ambulances need to open the gate to bring in a patient.

Sorry, I answered the wrong question.

Garage Door openers aren't as easy as they sound. Try the infrared remotes first, you'll have better likelihood of doing something useful in a few minutes.

If you want to start writing code, https://flipper.atmanos.com/docs/overview/intro worked really well for me. If this was the free sample on the kindle store, I'd buy the rest of the book.

I encourage you go to this young man's main page and buy him a coffee (not me nor anyone I know, apparently I was the first person to actually use that button)

The source is written in C. The provide a docker container that lets you simply download the repo, make changes, compile and then load to your flipper.

I hadn't actually written an original line of C code since the 1980s. After a couple evenings of following one of the tutorials, I was able to create some new functionality to a button that currently doesn't do anything.

At least one person on the Discord (Flipper Devices, I think) watches when someone mentions how they think it would be cool to make changes to the firmware, When that happens, they upload a PDF of the K&R book "The C Programming Language" to the chat.

the quickest hit of functionality is duplicating buttons from your remotes.

Next it's fun to mess with the screens at the pub.

Somewhere along the way, realizing that someone out there has the remote you lost long ago and all you really want is an on/off button and now you can get one.

For me so far it's a universal remote with a kind of weird interface.

so far a relatively unexplored avenue. The Discord doesn't have a GPIO specialty last I looked but I've seen a few people wishing that there was one.

Don't know if this helps you, but the about screen has this: FCC ID: 2A2V6-FZ IC:27625-FZ for all compliance certificates, please visit www.flipp.dev/compliance

Other comments mention how this was a Kickstarter that took two years to come to fruition and the supply chain is listed as the culprit. No one else has mentioned that while us backers were waiting, they sent out newsletters that detailed some of the complexities they were dealing with. Getting the case right took several iterations, and when you feel it in your hand you can tell that they took time to get it right.

You're right that one could put most of the functionality together, but not in a package that you're gonna toss in your pocket for EDC.

When I tried to go to the link on this post today, my browser gave me a "NET::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID" warning.

I have used it successfully in the past to place and receive three different orders of flippers and accessories.

I was on the 2 year kickstarter wait. Got my order in mid -May (USA).

Later on, they had some sporadic availability, got my second one ordered and it has arrived in the last week or two.

So far it's mostly a clunky universal remote but I've started relearning C so that I can write firmware customizations.

Somewhat off the subject of this post, but I believe we lost something when calling for help stopped being as simple as grabbing at the wall and punching a couple buttons. What are children supposed to do these days to call 911 or 999?

for me that Altair or IMSAI would have taken a lot time of to earn with a paper route.

I graduated high school 1980. Started taking mainframe computer classes in 1981, family got an original IBM PC when they came out. What repeatedly blows my mind is the expansion of storage. A 300 Megabyte removable CDC hard drive was the size of a washing machine. Nothing was a gigabyte anything, the largest drive in the whole place was a 900 Meg beast.

I used to have a keychain with a collection of <8G drives and i'd estimate how much more storage on my keychain compared to my data center. With the large flash drives I'm getting, I estimate that the flash drive collection with higher capacity drives (the smallest they stock in the supply cabinet at work is 32G) has more storage than my entire backup tape vault in 1987 and there is probably as much duplicated data in both.

could they at least open source the Graffiti interpretation library? stupid device made me change how I write for what, three or four years of use?

I got the Handera with the add on cards and for a glorious afternoon I had my phone's sim card installed. Why it had to use AAA batteries for that.. oh yeah, batteries still sucked back then.

After waiting about 2 years, I got my Flipper Zero in the mail a week ago. Yesterday I bought a second one and I am getting excited about tinkering with C because the firmware is open source.

... and?

I agree that years aren't necessarily a good metric for experience, although I have decades in IT - started when I was 19 and retirement is a real thing I have to consider.

Years do give you some experience that isn't translatable to the resume: after a while, you've seen through most of the tricks that management likes to try but which the younger colleagues haven't learned. Having older folks around can spoil the surprise.

My personal theory of the roots of ageism has this as a pillar.

My mom was a technical recruiter for a big Catholic hospital system in the Detroit area in the late 90's. She decided that she needed a copy of Doctor Seuss's _Yertle the Turtle_ for her cubicle because she thought it described her office situation (management creating new layers below them to lord over).

Tech people often don't make the transition to management well.