jbuzbee

Do these balloons transmit any weather data along with their telemetry? Or at the altitude they fly, maybe there's not much weather to report?

Same here. I run temperature monitors on mine. Every five minutes a cron-job copies data to a /boot subdirectory which is still r/w. On power loss, the most I can lose is those five minutes.

http://jpbuzbee.asuscomm.com/

Our fiber ISP, Ting, used those in our neighborhood to lay new lines. It was interesting to watch. For the most part, the only place where you could see any disturbance was when they had to pop up for a junction box.

Vey interesting analysis of Starlink coverage and latency:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m05abdGSOxY

Very interesting Starlink analysis here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m05abdGSOxY

My guess is that the restriction is already on the existing deed, originating with the first sale from the builder of the community. So it transfers with the property.

As part of the purchase, you are given the deed restrictions and you contractually agree in the closing process to follow them. We once backed out of a purchase when we read the overly strict restrictions.

You also contractually agree that the association has the ability to fine you for violations and put a lien on your property if you don't pay. There are plusses and minuses. The minuses are obvious - PITA, picky busybodies, limited paint colors, landscaping restrictions, etc. The plusses are that in general, the whole neighborhood is typically better maintained - paint, lawn, general upkeep, etc. which affects your property value.

Yeah - I recall that the number of characters printed would tell you where it failed.

Yeah - And I bet you also remember those warnings about configuring your monitor wrong could physically destroy it. Fun times! :-)

This time of year is ripe for nostalgia. I recall that it was just about this time in 1993 during Christmas break that I loaded Linux version 0.96(?) onto this 386SX machine. This involved taking a stack of 1.44MB floppies and driving to a place where I had access to the internet. I'd choose SLS packages and copy each to an individual floppy. Then I'd drive home and load them one by one until I had a bootable system. And of course with floppies, it was inevitable that you'd get a error now and then. So, back to the car, download, copy and repeat. All to get away from the limitations of Windows 3.0...

You were living large! My first Linux computer was a 20Mhz 80386SX with a 40MB hard drive partitioned half for Windows 3.0 and half for Linux (SLS) and swap. It had a whopping 4MB of RAM and I also compiled my own kernel making sure to trim down features as much as possible. It was magic seeing X11 come up for the first time just like the big-bucks Sun boxes!

I have symmetric gigabit fiber with no caps in Colorado. https://ting.com/internet/town/centennial

Here's another magical experience. No one will believe it, but it's true, so here goes.

We too would read, sing and hum to my son in-womb. While doing so, we'd occasionally hear a loud click, the source of which we couldn't determine. But after he was born, we found out. He would press his tongue hard against the roof of his mouth then release it with a suction "pop". Was he trying to communicate back to us from the womb? We like to think so!

We've got it here in Centennial Colorado. Symmetric Gigabit

https://coloradosun.com/2018/09/13/municipal-broadband-citie...

If you missed it, this is from Keith Packard, big-time X Window System developer.

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

The shrimp is so small, it would be hard to get a photo, but it looks pretty much like the "Small Sphere" from the link above.

Yep. Just the one, and he's still tending his garden of algae every day.

I bought one of those small "EchoSphere" water globes[1] back in 2002. It originally had 3-4 little shrimp and algae. within a few months, all but one of the shrimps were gone. But now, nearly 17 years later, the one remaining shrimp is still going strong. Amazing!

https://eco-sphere.com/

>>I've said many times that raspi-config should allow an option for mounting the filesystems read-only, with an overlay ram based filesystem.

I've had success with this:

http://wiki.psuter.ch/doku.php?id=solve_raspbian_sd_card_cor...

My brother and sister-in-law (Westerners) lived in Cairo for a few years and tell a similar humorous story. They too would just set their trash and unwanted items out in the hall where it would quickly disappear.

Once my sister-in-law put out some clothes that included an old T-Shirt that had been printed for a family get-together celebrating her parents 50th anniversary. It had a large photo of her parents on it along with wording like "John and Mary's 50th anniversary" etc. etc. She thought nothing of it. But several days later while walking near their apartment, she was taken aback to see an Egyptian man coming toward them proudly wearing the T-shirt with her parents smiling photo on it.

And it seemed this was his favorite or only shirt. For months afterword, she'd see her parent's photo as the man went about his business in the neighborhood. She took it all in stride!

I have a bunch of headless Zero Ws spread around the house, each monitoring temperature and reporting themselves over multicast DNS

http://jpbuzbee.asuscomm.com/

Everybody has a story. Everybody. Greg Lopez was a great newspaper columnist for The Rock Mountain News in Denver who wrote about everyday people. It was like he could just walk up to anyone on the street and get a fascinating story out of them.

Unfortunately, he was killed by a drunk driver - Rich, listless kid driving an exotic sports car. Tragic loss. It's been a long time, but I still remember him. I could only find one of his columns online since his paper shut down but here it is:

https://www.syracuse.com/kirst/2009/03/greg_lopez_and_the_ro...

They are denying it. Time will tell..

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/05/the-worlds-largest-a...

I'm in Centennial Colorado - Several years ago we voted to allow commercial companies to lease the city's fiber. As a result, I now have symmetric gigabit fiber from a company named Ting running into the house for around $89 a month.

Still have mine. And what I learned from it hasn't become obsolete yet. Those were the days of writing everything in assembly language, trying to cram your program into what now seems like a tiny amount of memory. I recall that memory was so tight that I'd use one byte to hold two different variables. Multi-tasking? Yep. We had vertical and horizontal blank interrupts that you could use. Magic times making that machine "sing"!

I did't see a video if them in action in the article, but there's more than on on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jvKaM7R5iY

A couple of things that I recall. Any commercial activity was severely frowned upon. No adds, promotion, etc. Anyone remember the "Green Card Lawyer"?[1] Raised quite a stink with his spamming usenet for business. And I recall there being rumors of anonymous ftp sites containing pornography. But word was such a site couldn't exist as it would immediately swamped with so much traffic that it would be shut down. Times have changed...

[1] https://www.wired.com/1999/04/the-spam-that-started-it-all/

With acoustic modems on both sides. Can you hear the old-style modem connect screech now?

I recall there is a known "tomb" of a ceremonial ship next to the great pyramids. They started displaying its twin back in '82 (amazing exhibit [1]), but have left the other in place.

I also suspect that the Egyptians have a stash of known tombs that they periodically "discover" in order to keep their tourism market in the news

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