It can be power - see Reddit and Wikipedia mods - but it's usually money. And once VC fundraising is involved, it's pretty much always money.

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

It'd transfer phone numbers and calendar entries to the watch by blinking the screen of your computer. Kinda a 1 pixel version of this.

(I wonder where that ended up? From memory I threw it in a drawer when I finished the Windows 95 project I'd been working on, and switched to Mac. There was no Mac software to talk to it.)

(We still catch up for coffee every 6 or 12 months.)

I've seen a few projects that use SDR to detect doppler shifts of reflections of broadcast FM radio station off planes as "passive radar". But that doesn't get much in the way of direction info, just approach velocity. I've pondered building something that uses that and correlates it with an ADS-B receiver, to see it it can detect aircraft that are not transmitting ADS-B. But that'd get me on another "list" if I published it I suspect...

This is not the project I remember, but it's the same idea and technique: https://github.com/Max-Manning/passiveRadar

I've only ever once been at a place where there was a policy saying "all you are allowed to say during reference checks is "yes, they worked here as [job title], from {month/year} to {month/year}". And even with that policy/restriction I still found ways to be much much more positive about the people who were genuinely great.

One great way around that kind of policy - at least if you far enough into your career for it - is to provided references for people who are also no longer at the company they're being a referee for. There are 3 or 4 people from that job I mentioned that didn't allow me to elaborate, where I've subsequently provided reference including something like "Ratica? Yeah - she is great! She lead my QA team and worked magic! You might want to warn the company she's applying to that as soon as I get a role and budget that suits her QA skills, I'll 100% be trying to headhunt her away from them."

(But is is a cool project)

Something similar to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscillating_cylinder_steam_eng...

And you can still get them reasonably inexpensively: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007964198565.html

I bought one for a friend's 5 year old a while back and became BEST UNCLE EVER!

The run well on compressed air (like an electric car tyre inflator or small air compressor), or for a bit more high temperature danger they run great attached to the steam wand of an espresso machine. When I was a kid dad built me a steam boiler out of a steal aerosol can and some copper tubing with a folded brass sheetmetal alcohol burner. That's not a 5 year old friendly thing though, from memory I'd have been maybe 10 or 12 when he started letting my light alcohol on fire in that garage or backyard. (Modern parenting may disapprove...)

I'm feeling this right now. I have a working prototype of a project that has mirrors mounted on pan/tilt mechanisms driven by servos and controlled by an Arduino. I modeled the mirror mechanisms myself in OpenSCAD and 3D printed them, I laid out the wiring from my head, I assembled everything by hand. But I got Codex to write the Arduino code that uses a GPS module to get the location and time, calculates the sun position, and (with some manual calibration) aims the mirrors to beam sunlight 'pixels' in an x/z grid on the wall.

It works. But for some reason it's profoundly unsatisfying. I'm very unlikely to go from this 4 mirror prototype to the original dream of a James Web Space Telescope model in my courtyard with 18 steerable mirrors drawing low res 1 bit pixel art on my dining room wall.

So not quite a 50% markup on the bard phone, not quite as bad as 4x.

And while I'd feel like a jerk if I asked for money helping someone at risk of DV setting this up, if I was doing it as a business with the mandatory warranty and support this'd need to include in Australia, I think that's expensive but probably fair?

"Australian research shows that 99% of domestic violence cases now involve some form of technology-facilitated abuse."

Where the "Australian research" is linked to a page where the first Key Finding states:

"Over one quarter (27%) of domestic violence cases involve technology-facilitated abuse of children."

Doesn't fill me with confidence in anything they say (even if I do believe the advice is right).

Cynical-me assumes every single AI company is vibe-coding everything, and _all_ their scrapers are as badly written as the typical publicly available scraper code and tutorial - mostly written by self promoting spammers and SEO "experts" in the late 2010s.

Any they all DGAF about wasting website owners server/network resources, of the CPU and network resources of the "dumb schmucks" who have a free vpn installed or a factory-hacked cheapo media box or mobile game the developer has surreptitiously monetised with a residential proxy sdk.

It also wouldn't surprise me at all to find there are dozens of competing training data acquisition teams at every frontier and wannabe frontier AI company - scraping the entire web in parallel to meet internal KPIs. Half of which have lost entire datasets due to vibe coded storage and archive setups.

I'd kinda like something like this that could do 2.4GHz, 850-950MHz and even down as low as 400MHz.

Would by uneducated guess that 2.4GHz antennas would be twice the size, 900MHz about 6 times the size, and 400MHz about 10 times the size?

These days, can "ordinary people" afford 24GB of ram and half a TB of NVME ssd?

sigh