teel

I bought my first sound card SB Pro 2.0 in the early 90s and it came with Dr Sbaitso. We had lots of fun making it say different things, especually in our language (not English).

I think it was the first time I heard synthesized text to speech, really cool at the time.

My finnish phone number did not work either with web login, although I dont think I ever saved it anywhere back then. But succeeded to login with UID and password that I have luckily been keeping in safe (post-its first in the 90s, keepass nowadays)

2558361. Uh-oh. It feels weird how my ICQ UID has stuck to my head although so well. Just tested the online version and it was funny to see the contact names. Too bad the messages were not there. I think I have the db from old old pc somewhere, perhaps it is time to try installing it one more time.

Funny to see this link here, just after I saw this site yesterday. I was forced to google how to disable custom scrollbars when I was reading the "A simple hash table in C" link from 2 days ago [1]. The site set the scrollbar width to 4 pixels which was so narrow I could just see it but couldn't grab it with mouse anymore. Totally unusable.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36302552

First I thought I had clicked something that showed really old postings. I had no idea MythTV would still be around. I never used MythTV though; I used Freevo in the 2000s. Worked quite well once I had it configured. Every once in a while I looked over the fence to see if the DVRs were greener on the other side, but never got around trying MythTV. I still have many shows and episodes I saved with Freevo, on old hard drives somewhere.

Good memories! Not a small number of hours was spent reading TUTnn.txt files in the 90s. Learned a lot. Another great series at the time was the pcgpe (pc game programmers encyclopedia) which was mentioned in the VGA trainer docs (or was it the other way around?).

For such case, if I were to use this service I would hope the owner's own dead man's switch has been set up properly.

The title reminds me of an interesting article about old Soviet and eastern block computers in a Finnish computer magazine Skrolli a few years ago. They have done couple of international editions in English, and this article happens to be included in 2016.1E [1]

[1] https://skrolli.fi/en/international/

The specs are there, under Wiki / Hardware specifications [0]

- CPU/Soc: LPC11U6x (NXP ARM Cortex-M0+ processor, running at 48 MHz)

- 256kB program memory – 36kB RAM – 4kB EEPROM

- 2.0″ Color TFT, max res. 220×176

- 8-bit DAC and 8-Bit PWM sound

- 600 mAh lipo battery with built-in charger

0: https://talk.pokitto.com/t/wiki-2-pokitto-technical-specific...

It is nice to see how replies have persons real name and organization in the header, something you rarely see in internet discussions today (FB being one big exception). Brings back memories of using usenet in the 90s.

While this seems to be a neat thing, I am just wondering how common nowadays are door locks that actually have a hole through them? Where I come from, those locks could be seen in doors of old cabinets and other furniture. Or perhaps at the summer cottage, but even there, it is usually just an old shed or something; any doors that are supposed to keep anything valuable safe, have solid lock housing, i.e. no through keyholes.

Heh, thanks for correcting the typo, that saved my Friday afternoon :)

I had not heard car videos are so popular nowadays that their download speed can be used as a measure of modernity. But actually, that did not surprise me any more, more like the opposite. I feel that the older I get (I was born in 76), the more I see and hear things related to computers, music, media that apparently are very popular now I have never heard of. Sometimes it feels like I'm forever stuck in the 90's in a way. I mean, music was best in 90s-early 2000s, All you bases belonged to us as far as the best memes go and so on. But then again, with the technology in my hands today, I wouldn't change it to 90's junk in a million years.

Reminds me of Finnish "Frankenhornet"; they attached the forward-section of Canadian F-18 to their own damaged F-18. Unfortunately the thing crashed during test flight after the modification.

Heh, I had forgotten that already. I had so much fun with Dr. Sbaitso in the early 90s when I bought my first sound card, SB Pro 2.0. After all these years I can still remember the introduction lines word-by-word. Scary..

...but only in Soviet Russia, you insensitive clod!

This (monitor being removed from the system if I turn it off) must be the most braindead idea I've seen in a while. This is why don't turn off my monitor after work day any more, but leave it on and let it go to power saving sleep when it wants so.

Until I figured out what the hell was going I was pulling my hair every morning when I turned on my work monitor (40-something inch 4k display) and found all program windows in the top-left corner of the monitor, stacked on top of each other and resized to some svga-resolution.

Thanks! That (simulated device loss followed by all the steps you mentioned) is something I plan to do every now and then but so far I've never gotten around to actually doing it. Encouraged by your post think I'll finally do it (some day, hopefully sooner rather than later).

May I ask what software you use mostly?

I just checked couple of programs I have open on my computer right now and the floppy as save icon is very used still; tortoise svn client, adobe reader, excel, winscp, notepad++, eclipse, all more or less up to date and showing floppy icon.

Hell, if someone put me sitting in front of a program I never used before, and said do this and that and save it, and all I was only seeing was picture of usb stick, or ssd drive, or a cloud, without "Save" written anywhere, I am not sure how long I would be looking for the "save" command :)

> and Megadeth.)

Laughed at that one.

Having never heard of OpenShot before, I needed a video video editor, saw OpenShot and downloaded it, managed to cut a short clip, add extra music track, do other small adjustments and export it suitable format rather quickly. Very nice!

Most problems were related to (accidentally) clicking something and not knowing what it does, trying to revert the changes but messing up things even more instead. Once I figured out what to do and what _not_ to do, the process felt very polished and easy.

I think the problem is the same as with other software that are still being developed: you google the program name, download latest version and there are new features that haven't been added to documentation and tutorials yet. So you have bunch of settings and buttons that do something but to find out what they are and how they work, googling gets you to development mailing lists and where you get lost very quickly without answers.

Will definitely keep this installed and follow the development.

Yes, I like it too. I tried to resize the browser window horizontally and the page neatly splits the content in multiple columns. Very nice.

I've used the snapshot versions as my primary browser at work and home at least since... (referring again to KeePass, checking creation date of credentials for some vivaldi related thing) ...beginning on April 2016, and for me it has worked great.

I might not be the heaviest of the heavy users (figuratively speaking :), for example I have total of 3 Chrome extensions installed (uBlock origin, some exif viewer and Google translate), so I am not aware of things that may not have worked correctly.

I used to use Opera (first 12, then the Chrome version of Opera which I didn't like), and then switched to Vivaldi when I found out about it.

It's been there at least 6 months already. I think I started using it around the time it was added. According to my password safe, I put the sync name/password in there on 1st of December last year.

EDIT: I want to add that I run the Snapshot versions of Vivaldi (currently 1.16.1211.3), and it could be that the Sync was introduced only in a Snapshot in December. So I have no idea if the sync can be found in the Stable releases as well. Anyways, it's under Tools/Settings/Sync tab if it's there, otherwise it isn't :)

Vivaldi does have a sync feature! But I don't know if you're aware of that already, and FF/Chrome sync have something special in their Sync that Vivaldi doesn't.

Off topic, but I am trying to get my head around the photo #14, it's almost like an optical illusion but not quite! Looks almost like a photo that has been mirrored vertically but since the men are in different position, the halves must be different photos (one mirrored). How did you get the hoses line up at the middle position? I'd like to hear how this photo was created!

The Okinawa missiles of October was a story that looked like a close call (to me at least!). It was on HN couple of years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10452983

That is something I've been googling an answer for. In "alarms only" mode the media volume is still not muted, as one would expect from the name. It seems they forgot to make it so, or forgot to describe that mode as "alarms + media only"...