tesseract

Because, specifically for onions, it's infamously illegal in the US (as the site alludes to).

Yeah, they are used in space. I don't work directly in this field, but have discussed wax motors with some newspace/smallsat folks, and get the impression they are popular for the same reason nitinol wire actuators are: few moving parts, no rotary bearings, resettable/multi-use unlike pyrotechnic actuators.

You're going to make me quote the "Dive Manual" scene from _Cryptonomicon_ again, aren't you.

(It features a software engineer introspecting about the fact that his line of work has caused him to dramatically overvalue recency when evaluating books about... pretty much any other technical field.)

And are often _encouraged_ to be wasteful by "use it or lose it" type provisions.

> there is that CO2 on the air that we actually want to get rid of

For this reason I have long been slightly baffled that development of compostable/biodegradable bio-based plastics is such a priority in materials research. Sure, it's interesting in the very long run, but for the foreseeable future, converting atmospheric CO2 (via plants as an initial step) into a long lived, inert material that can just be buried after an initial use seems like a benefit.

What with so many fans, it shouldn't be too surprising that jokes are just blowing every which way.

"Side hassles"... hahaha. Love it.

That's pretty much what a food co-op is supposed to be.

American food contains maize, obviously. This works for multiple understandings of the word "American" :)

That is true but it's also an infamously unusual aspect of the Bay Area.

Many of those big bells in other cultures are on fixed mountings (in a carillon, for instance). The idea of mounting the bell on a rotating wheel - which imposes limits on what music can be played due to the rotational inertia of the wheel, therefore leading to a unique style of composition - is distinctively English.

More likely a hall effect sensor, which is solid state and a lot smaller. And yes, older MacBooks had something like that, as evidenced by the fact you could put them to sleep by holding a magnet in the right place (just to the left of the trackpad IIRC in the models I'm familiar with)

CPC is in this market too https://www.cpcworldwide.com/Liquid-Cooling/Products/Blind-M...

Non-spill fluid quick disconnects are established tech in industries like medical, chemical processing, beverage dispensing, and hydraulic power, so there are plenty of design concepts to draw on.

A fairly intellectual audience, in the 50s and 60s when the space race was big news and von Braun's Nazi past was recent history? I'd guess a majority.

> My family had a small B&W CRT that fascinated me with its image quality, in that it always reminded me more of a b&w photo than color CRTs reminded me of color photos.

The problem of a finite dot pitch interfering with image quality, especially on small displays where the dots were necessarily larger relative to the image size, is what motivated Tektronix to develop field-sequential color CRTs which they used in their digital oscilloscopes in the 80s and 90s. JVC also used the technology in some professional broadcast video monitors. Basically it was a B&W CRT with a changeable (liquid crystal) color filter in front of it. The R, G, and B channels would be shown one after another with the corresponding filter activated, in a similar manner to a color wheel DLP projector.

(1) SSL

(2) 37. I've been an Internet user since ~1995 and been working in tech since 2004.

The real project is the sense of accomplishment we gained along the way, or something like that.

But anyway, there are institutions like the Craftsmanship Museum <https://craftsmanshipmuseum.com/> that exist to present this kind of passion project to the interested public. That one in particular came out of and is still very centered on the hobby machinist and model steam engine community... if there's not already something similar for electronics and computing type projects, it definitely seems like maybe there could/should be.

In my opinion it's not always the most readable codebase, due to some idiosyncratic style choices, but it definitely has the advantages of being small and focused.

Telemetry was included in what was open sourced, e.g. <https://github.com/google/pebble/blob/3b927684809fba173ee540...>

My read of that caveat from Google is that the code that was removed was third party code that Pebble had a proprietary license to use, thus it was not Google's to release.

It was based on FreeRTOS, but FreeRTOS at the time was extremely bare bones and only provided a preemptive scheduler, task management, and synchronization primitives. Everything else (memory management, I/O, ...) had to come either from whatever libc implementation was in use, or be built from scratch.

I have been happy with my pepper mill with a Crushgrind mechanism.

(The mill happens to be from Normann Copenhagen but Crushgrind supplies mechanisms to a number of pepper mill manufacturers as well as selling their own.)

Flash as an animation tool and applet platform was already on the downswing when the iPhone happened, though.

The consumer demand for Flash on mobile seemed to be mostly about video streaming, because at the time Flash was experiencing sort of a second life as the least-bad way to do streaming video on the web. In that context Apple's point of view of "as an industry let's finally fix browser-native video streaming, rather than being stuck with Flash forever" seems pretty reasonable.

Ben Rich, and yes: he was the 2nd director of the Lockheed Skunk Works.

I think the book may have been out of print for a while but it's easily available now.

If you apply a constant current to a capacitor, the voltage across the capacitor will increase linearly as the capacitor stores energy in the electric field.

If you apply a constant voltage to an inductor, the current through the inductor will increase linearly as the inductor stores energy in the magnetic field.

Perhaps part of why the intuition can break down is that in real life, inductors tend to be much "leakier" energy storage devices than capacitors. If you store some energy in an inductor and then change the voltage across it to zero (practically: short its terminals together), in theory a perfect inductor will maintain a constant current forever and the energy stored does not change. In practice inductors (with an exception for things like superconducting magnets) are made from wire that has a resistance, and so the current in a real shorted inductor will eventually decay to zero. This means that in practical terms inductors are mostly only useful for short term energy storage. On the other hand, real-life insulating materials (like air, vacuum, or Teflon) can can be pretty close to perfect insulators allowing real capacitors to store energy more or less indefinitely... certainly on timescales of years.

> Honestly, eating cereal just isn't appealing anymore.

All cereal grains or are you just referring to breakfast cereal here?

The meme started as eating paste, back when that meant wheatpaste (made from flour and water). In that context it's less surprising that kids might try to eat it!

I wonder if there's been a bit of a conflation with the other meme, about sniffing glue, which has also lost much of its context considering that rubber cement and other similar types of glue which contain volatile solvents are also less widely used than they once were.

Yes, it does. There's also audio of Don LaFontaine reading the ad in his signature movie trailer style [1] - I'm a little unclear on whether the YTMNDer requested it from him or if he came up with the idea himself, but it also predates the actual movie by a fair number of years.

[1] https://lafontainesafety.ytmnd.com/

In the days before cheap, low-power radio networks a "central system" would have meant dedicated wiring to each door lock. So it would have been much more expensive to install than a standalone battery powered unit mounted directly on the door.

Yeah it seems like basically a hybrid of a roundabout and a Michigan left, with unclear advantages over either of those alone?