You can/could also find Coffee HOWTO in your distro’s HOWTO package. (I found a reference back to v0.5 of the document in 1998.)

Has simple schematics.to get you started for the hardware, using the parallel port to toggle relays.

It’s a very neat little document, and inspired me to write a simple kernel module so I could echo 1 | sudo tee /sys/whatever/coffee0 to turn pin 0 high on the parallel port. (This is silly, and it’s much easier to just do things in user space!)

…and regular old murder for ReiserFS.

Not sure what it is about filesystem maintainers…

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

I have heard, but have trouble finding references to it, that you can build a simple arbitrary waveform generator circuit by using an analog scope, a photodiode, and a cardboard cutout.

You make a photodiode circuit that rails high with no light, but light on the photodiode pushes the signal low. Then you aim this at the phosphor screen with a cardboard cutout of the desired waveform: signal goes up until the phosphor trace is above the screen, and then it gets pushed low (i.e., feedback keeps the trace right on the edge of the cardboard).

Never seen it in action, but I choose to believe it works beautifully :)

After reading a few of these I feel like I was either a very boring grad student, or my professors were all very chill. (Or maybe just subject to male privilege.)

A few run-ins with IT, but I don’t think I ever got nasty letters from professors…

…or is it about an hour from damn time? I can never remember.

In much of California, it’s not the electric energy costs that are high, it’s the delivery/grid fees. Not that it matters as far as the electricity bill goes, but it’s worth noting.

On my recent bill I paid 16¢/kWh for on-peak electric generation and 49¢/kWh for electric delivery. (There’s a small baseline credit for delivery so it’s a little more complicated, but you get the idea.)

So if someone tries to tell you electricity is expensive because CA is a hippie state with lots of solar, I would be a little skeptical.

Never tried it, but hot peppers can be added to birdseed to prevent this — birds aren’t sensitive to capsaicin, so it only affects the mammals.

Gnarly PDEs aren’t exactly the same beast as differentiating single variable polynomials.

Sounds like this was basically the plot of the first Nolan Batman.

I don’t think it does—I think OOP is doing the math and then inputting the sum.

The thing that fascinates me is that every single digital microwave I’ve ever used behaves the same way, and allows the “seconds-place” to be 0-99.

My best guesses are

• There’s some ASIC that’s been around forever and everyone uses it (a cockroach chip like the 555)
• The first digital microwave did this and all subsequent ones followed
• There’s actually some implementation reasons why this is way more sensible.

Writing it in software, there are different ways that folks would probably implement it, for example, “subtract one, calculate minutes and seconds, display” seems reasonable. But nope, every one I’ve ever used is just the Wild West in the seconds department.

Not a historian, but folks on The Internet have characterized the Soviet program as a series of milestones, with the US program a series of stepping stones in support of a single goal.

This makes sense with the cartoon, where the Soviets were first in basically everything except walking on the moon.

Not sure how much merit it has, but it’s kinda interesting.

I bought a Rockchip SBC (Orange Pi 5+), and when it worked it was awesome…but man, the software support (mainly kernel space) is just not there. Exercise in frustration to get everything working at the same time.

Currently running armbian. I don’t think HW acceleration is working, and I don’t think HDMI out is even working, but for my use case it’s a stable config…for now.

Boring conversation anyway.

Resistors.

nc is useful. For example: if you have a disk image downloaded on computer A but want to write it to an SD card on computer B, you can run something like

user@B: nc -l 1234 | pv > /dev/$sdcard

And

user@A: nc B.local 1234 < /path/to/image.img

(I may have syntax messed up–also don’t transfer sensitive information this way!)

Similarly, no need to store a compressed file if you’re going to uncompress it as soon as you download it—just pipe wget or curl to tar or xz or whatever.

I once burnt a CD of a Linux ISO by wgeting directly to cdrecord. It was actually kinda useful because it was on a laptop that was running out of HD space. Luckily the University Internet was fast and the CD was successfully burnt :)

IIRC UT2K4 shipped with a Linux port on the install media.

In college around the time this came out, there were beefy Linux machines in one of the libraries. You could ssh into them for homework, but you could also physically access them. Xenon, with Nvidia Quadro gfx is my recollection.

So, I would rsync the game to /tmp (no root access of course, and home quota was too small), walk over and enjoy it on high end hardware. Fun stuff!

Same — rsync to a pi 3 with a (single) ZFS drive at family’s house. Retain some daily/weekly/monthly snapshots.

I have a (free) VPS with static IPv4 which is how I connect everything.

Both the VPS and the remote site have limited network speed (I think 50Mbps for VPS), so the initial sync was done sneakernet (well…“airplane net”). Nightly rsync is no problem bandwidth-wise, and is mostly just any new videos I’ve uploaded to my local Immich instance.

When they talk about being the party of Lincoln this isn’t what I had in mind…