A bog standard Sony radio would run for a long, long time on a few AA batteries. Back then, you could also pick up the audio portion of UHF and VHF analog TV too. It was the main lifeline for news and local updates.

Radio is a fantastic technology that is being wasted. Cheap to transmit, cheap to receive, and covers a wide area. It would be great to see a radio renaissance. Maybe the Zoomers reconnecting to older technologies will revive it.

I laughed at a lot of this, but this was a gem. This definitely happened to whoever wrote it. I also like how the TITLE changes when the tab is backgrounded. Great work folks!

Best part of SCSI was the required sorcery. "No no, young padawan, you must put the terminator on the scanner, not on the hard drive, lest your device chain causes the computer to no longer boot."

I had a film scanner that would not work on any other SCSI ID that was not 4. Why? Because. Alacazam!

Yes it does. However, I have sent messages to more than a few people who tell me that my message is completely empty. I have my client set to send text-only, no HTML, and apparently the system on the other side drops the HTML version altogether. Something on the other end only processes the HTML part. No HTML, no message.

(I believe these are Outlook/MS based systems, but I don't know for sure. It's certainly not ALL Outlook/MS systems that do this.)

For these people I have to set my client to send HTML. It's all well and good to blame them, but I can't make them do something. They may not even be in a position to do anything. And I don't have an option to tell them "too bad, so sad".

The email situation is really quite bad if you don't conform to the Big Three. I've run my own email infrastructure for a very long time, and it's quite irritating that when we get something good (like DMARC, SPF, etc) it gets forced by the Big Three because along with that we also get things like Google toying with the requirement that you have to have AAAA MX records too.

She was using what is broadly comparable to a WebTV browser to access a government site, and it worked because the guidelines for gov.uk are so very, very good.

(The UK gov sometimes gets a bit of stick for being needlessly useless, but their web guidelines are extremely good. Absolutely a fantastic starting point for anybody interested in web development.)

The NES was a radical departure in how games were played and how good they were. You'd never spend all day in front of the Atari, but you could with the NES.

Add to that the steady increase in the availability and affordability of cable tv, then VCRs and video rentals, and now the TV is even more central to the ordinary person's life. Then came computers, the Internet, etc.

I think there is definitely something to kids just not being as interested in going outside. Why would they be? All their friends are in the magic box in their pocket. Outside is where you get sunburn and ticks that make you allergic to meat.

It sounds harsh and maybe a bit gauche, but it's true. A literate and numerate citizenry helps the nation advance. That's the selling point for widespread public education. Airy ideals sound great, but that's also how ideology slides into the public school.

You fool! The WF-1000XM5 is the worst model of the line! You should buy the WF-1010XN5, it is far superior!

Apple tends to name things in an odd way, e.g. sometimes you need to remember whether your laptop came out in "early" 2014 or "late" 2014, but they have a remarkably flat, but consistent, product line.

I mean, honestly, if somebody just tossed you a random Macbook from the Apple store, it may not be the exact model you want but you wouldn't complain. All of them are pretty good, even down to the bargain basement Neo.

Models are such a great tool, artistically, culturally, and scientifically. Joe's NYC model really helps put the scale of the city into perspective.

"We trained the dang-AI on thousands of dang posts, and now it's a Zen master and wants to sit under a tree and contemplate bees."

I used nothing but emacs for several years (well, xemacs, but close enough), because I was using an old Thinkpad, and long-term use of the trackpoint gave me RSI in my finger. Being able to use nothing but the keyboard was nice.

Eventually I went back to BBEdit and have remained there. You can make it mostly keyboard oriented if you want, but sometimes using the mouse is easier/faster, and I have a lot of reps inside of BBEdit. It just seems more like home to me. A nice balance between GUI and keyboard-focussed IMO.

Every construction admin, supervisor, field inspection guy, etc. has a top of the line iPad Pro, in an Otterbox, with a kind of sling that helps you hold it with one hand, and an Apple Pencil, and they spend all day in Plangrid.

This setup has completely eaten the entire market.

But as a guy that teaches kids about computing and system administration, having another option to demonstrate is excellent. For many things something like nano is fine, but for something a bit more robust? And is available for many platforms? And is small and self-contained? It's a great option. The Lua extensibility is also a bonus.

Teaching teenagers how to use vim or emacs is, not surprisingly, a bit of a chore.