alnwlsn

5 ms·

31.
by alnwlsn 3mo ago
For an anecdote in a different direction, my father bought a Ford model T a few years ago. Now, "classic" cars of the 60's and 70's are still very popular among those who lived through that time. Maybe your family had on
32.
by alnwlsn 3mo ago
The shortwave WWV, not so much, except to check if your shortwave radio is working. Canada's shortwave CHU was shut down last month. The 60 kHz WWVB, yes. Plenty of cheap wall clocks have "atomic time" as it is marketed over
33.
An Illustrated History of the Calculator(lcamtuf.substack.com)
7 points by alnwlsn 3mo ago|0 comments
34.
by alnwlsn 3mo ago
I think the idea is that you can make a machine that goes on the rails and installs them automatically. So you don't need to haul a bunch of equipment on site, you just drive one special train down the track once.
35.
by alnwlsn 3mo ago
I have a small CNC mill and can carve out a board if I don't have time to wait for ordered boards. It's a pain to set up to get it to cut properly, the boards are either one sided or with no vias, and the lack of solder mask makes
36.
by alnwlsn 3mo ago
One thing that annoys me about am/pm is that the clocks have a 12 at the top and not a 0. So it goes 11:59 am to 12:00 pm and not 11:59 am to 00:00 pm. Even as a kid I was confused as to why 12 belonged to PM but 11 was still AM, but I
37.
by alnwlsn 3mo ago
Like a burned out brick building, a burned down planet is still there, but still also burned down. Of course it doesn't 'disappear'
38.
by alnwlsn 3mo ago
The other home security camera companies already make cameras in a doorbell form factor. Point is to do what you want with the hardware you supposedly "own".
39.
by alnwlsn 3mo ago
Look up Carnot efficiency. The maximum amount of work you can theoretically extract depends only on a temperature difference. For a datacenter running chips at 100C into ambient air at 60F, it's about 25%. So even with perfect capture
40.
by alnwlsn 3mo ago
The Aliexpress of 10 years ago was just ridiculous. One time I ordered something (a USB adapter) for literally a total price of 40¢, and it was delivered. It cost about 35¢ to send a regular US postcard domestically at the time, not countin
41.
by alnwlsn 3mo ago
Mentioned elsewhere in this thread, but the print heads are a very specialized silicon chip with internal microfluidic passages, microscopic heaters, etc. Who else would even make them? The kind of thing you would need millions of dollars t
42.
by alnwlsn 4mo ago
I mean, in 1978 Tandy used standard drives and a disk controller IC, and still managed to sell a whole 16K TRS-80 system with disk drive for the same price (TRS-80 Level II 16K + Expansion Interface + disk drive = $1786 [0]) as Apple (Apple
43.
by alnwlsn 4mo ago
I remember visiting a science museum as a kid which had a couple of CRTs like that set up where you could pull a rope to smash a hammer into it and try to break it. With the same result; never leaving a mark. CRTs are built like that becaus
44.
by alnwlsn 4mo ago
If you like things like this I can recommend you check out the Chris Staecker youtube channel. He covers all sorts of tools people used to use to do math before computers and calculators, and there are a lot of them. Some of the things peop
45.
by alnwlsn 4mo ago
Archeologists discover 2000 year old cultural link between badgers and mushrooms
46.
by alnwlsn 4mo ago
Buried the lede by calling this a "usb wifi adapter" and not "magic Ethernet adapter that you don't have to plug a cable into". This will come in handy for my systems that are normally air gapped or currently connec
47.
by alnwlsn 4mo ago
And they were quick about it too [0]. I mean, not that quick, much slower than today's printers, but much faster than nearly all of the 3D printer conversions or pen plotter kits you can get now. My HP-7470A is from 1982 and does not h
48.
by alnwlsn 4mo ago
> much better dexterity than any human Do they? A human can both chuck kilograms of stuff across a room or kick in a door, but then pick up a single hair off the ground, or feel and manipulate (things even lighter than) a literal feather
49.
by alnwlsn 4mo ago
Me too, and also I've never used one and it was discontinued before I was born
50.
by alnwlsn 4mo ago
I thought that's what the little breakaway tabs on the bottom of the cassette are for Though I'll admit, when I used to use cassettes, I never write protected them
51.
by alnwlsn 4mo ago
I've had a phone with a swollen battery that I swear was not swollen when I chucked it in the drawer a year or two earlier. Apparently it's the battery itself breaking down that causes this, so I don't think any electrical pr
52.
by alnwlsn 4mo ago
The most difficult thing about these projects is for me to consider why anyone would want to use words to describe a 3D object. How do you reference objects? Saying "Make the hole at the end of the bracket 3 mm and move it up" isn
53.
by alnwlsn 4mo ago
The stuff I 3D print at home uses machining CAD. Making video game assets on the other hand I could see.
54.
by alnwlsn 4mo ago
There are some grades of electrolytic capacitors for which this is probably the only thing they should be used for.
55.
by alnwlsn 4mo ago
The defaults it gives me are 180 lines, so if this were a real single turn spiral nipkow disk, then for the image to appear at the 3 inches wide it does on my screen (no magnification), the disk would have to be about 14 feet (4.3 meters) i
56.
by alnwlsn 4mo ago
Since my laptop has a screen and keyboard, I probably would claim that.
57.
by alnwlsn 4mo ago
Serif font?
58.
by alnwlsn 4mo ago
Plenty has already been lost due to being buried in search, removed for lack of interest, or simplified so far as to be too generalized.
59.
by alnwlsn 4mo ago
Audio file to gcode is not difficult. Here's a record laser cut into a tortilla [0]. I once tried to mill one out of MDF on a CNC machine [1]. It didn't sound very good, but better than I expected. 3D printing one seems very diffi
60.
by alnwlsn 4mo ago
Do you need to, or only if you care about fitting the longest possible recording on the disk? How much shorter would an LP be if you used a fixed pitch?

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