dhosek

26 ms·

601.
by dhosek 1y ago
Yes, it is quite thoroughly defunct. Back issues show up at high prices at specialty bookshops occasionally. I offered what I had in the basement a few years back at a discount and what was left at the end of the summer went into the recycl
602.
by dhosek 1y ago
Serif . Publishing it was a great way for me to lose a lot of money I didn’t have.
603.
by dhosek 1y ago
The existence of exoplanets was an open question still in the 80s. They were pretty sure that they existed, but no one had any evidence of it. It fell kind of in the same category of whether the Riemann conjecture is true. Mathematicians ar
604.
by dhosek 1y ago
It’s worth noting that we went from wondering if other stars had planets to hitting 6000 detected so far in about four decades with just 33 years since the first discovery of an exoplanet (and 30 years since one was found orbiting a main-se
605.
by dhosek 1y ago
I remember buying books at a shop in Denver in the late 80s and watching the proprietor look to see if my card was in the big book of stolen credit cards numbers before he ran my card through the kachunka machine.
606.
by dhosek 1y ago
When I got my first account to accept credit cards in the 90s, they sent me a kachunka machine along with a bunch of window stickers, all of which were kind of silly since it was for a magazine and I almost never took payments in person (it
607.
by dhosek 1y ago
In my experience the opposite is true.
608.
by dhosek 1y ago
Not quite. The original sans font on the Mac was Geneva. It was only with the advent of the Laserwriter that Helvetica became a standard font on the Mac.
609.
by dhosek 1y ago
Icon fonts are bad for accessibility. Better to use SVG graphics and provide alt text for screen readers.
610.
by dhosek 1y ago
Have you ever been inside a tall building? How are you thinking a drone would deliver to the upper floors of vertical buildings? The windows don’t open. There are occasional balconies or terraces, but these are more the exception than the r
611.
by dhosek 1y ago
Worth noting is that @ was not the universal separator for host and username. BITNET (and its sister networks) based on IBM’s networking protocols used with word “AT” (separated by spaces) so, back in the olden days I was U12921 AT UICVM. U
612.
by dhosek 1y ago
When I got solar panels for my (former) house 15 years ago, as I recall, the best practice was to have panels in parallel (each with its own microinverter) and not in serial as serial would cause loss of efficiency when there was partial bl
613.
by dhosek 1y ago
I almost always use spotlight to launch apps. The rare occasions when I’ve used launchpad are when I momentarily forget an app’s name.
614.
by dhosek 1y ago
Man, they were so close to naming the trio Unitanic, Bitanic and Tritanic.
615.
by dhosek 1y ago
Red zones are “instruments” which isn’t defined, but is apparently surface-based observatories.
616.
by dhosek 1y ago
Proper scale makes the visualization impractical. I wrote about this with respect to a US map showing mountains on my mailing list: https://dahosek.substack.com/p/one-million-stories “any accurate depiction of elevatio
617.
by dhosek 1y ago
It’s based at least in part on delivery routes. There’s a less-known 11-digit zip code which is unique for every delivery point (so down to the individual residence). I’m not sure if multiple apartments in the same building have distinct 11
618.
by dhosek 1y ago
Which the OP acknowledges, but it’s an extra step (and one that a lot of people don’t realize is possible) that shouldn’t be necessary.
619.
by dhosek 1y ago
As noted elsewhere in the discussion, not all zip codes are polygons. Some are lines or points.
620.
by dhosek 1y ago
A lot of P. O. Boxes have their own zip+4 address. You can spot these because the P.O. Box number and the +4 are usually the same (or occasionally the P.O. Box number is the last two digits of the five-digit zip code combined with the +4 so
621.
by dhosek 1y ago
A lot of this is on the people doing the platting in the first place. I would note, for example, that where I live in Oak Park, when they replatted the suburb after splitting from Austin Township with a different grid than is used in Chicag
622.
by dhosek 1y ago
My first Apple laptop, a Titanium PowerBook, you could sleep the machine and swap the battery and not have to reboot.
623.
by dhosek 1y ago
He knew that i was the square root of 1 and he had learned some really basic skills like the distributive law, so he managed to work out that (a+bi)(a+bi) = a²-b²+2abi, but it was entirely self-directed on his part. I had taught him some
624.
by dhosek 1y ago
I don’t. My 11-year-old son managed, without knowing algebra, to find the square root of i without guidance. His technique was not dissimilar to what Newton described. And while he’s bright, I don’t know that I would put him in a class with
625.
by dhosek 1y ago
I’m doing a nerdy Catholic project that calls for attending Mass at churches all over Chicago ( https://www.dahosek.com/category/catholic-nerd-pilgrimage/ ) and one recent church had an east-facing wall that was ent
626.
by dhosek 1y ago
It was the prolog to a 70s sitcom as I recall, about the dad going to the corner for cigarettes and only coming back years later. I can’t remember what the show was now though.
627.
by dhosek 1y ago
I’ve been puzzled by a number of houses near me with panels on the north-facing roof. Are panels really that cheap that it makes sense or are people that stupid?
628.
by dhosek 1y ago
I think if you walk around in one of those, your friends and spouse will abandon you pretty quickly.
629.
by dhosek 1y ago
This is proper softball, none of that 12-inch nonsense. The original game was played using a wrapped up fielder’s mitt as a ball. Although the rules are similar to baseball, it’s a very different game, one much more about fielding and bas
630.
by dhosek 1y ago
I had a coding challenge where if you didn’t implement what was essentially a Set in the exact way that they expected, you couldn’t proceed since the evaluation assumed you’d match their ordering (which was arbitrary). One of those automa

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