You goto the article for "Orbit" and under "Laws of Motion", click "Orbit Interactivity" and then click the large graphic that appears to launch the interactive applet.

As a young person I sat and went through every article looking for these little interactive applets. This was my favorite for some reason.

Another fun tidbit is, in the '95 version, if you send the moon into the Earth, it just bounces off. In, I believe, the 1996 version, they updated it- to I think a generic red colored planet and gray moon (if my memory after 30 years is correct) and if you send the moon into the planet, it would explode!

Yeah. I spent a lot of time with these CD-rom's.

but it looks like the LCD has to be bit banged by the CPU data bus directly? I see the 8 bit data bus is going straight to the LCD thru a buffer IC.

I don't see where in the memory map there would even be enough space for a screen buffer that large to be located, so I take it you have to write you own graphics handling yourself and pick a spot in memory for it all?

In my case I was trying to find a 'D1-15531-9' when the actual part number is 'HD1-15531-9'

Someone in their marketing thought they were being cool back then, but it's just confusing.

But I can't help but wonder if it isn't some socially apparent phenomenon stemming from Simpson's Reversal [1] as applied to group sentiment analysis / polling of opinions.

[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-goomba-fallacy [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson's_paradox

The failure of SSD's you warn of and the way the HDD's fail due to a dead controller aren't that different.

This won't happen with a physically written media like a CD, DVD, or Blu Ray disc. With physical media, you're separating out the media from the reader (the drive). If your disc reader dies or you cant find it, etc, you can go find any another one on ebay even decades from now, very likely.

Doing surgery on an HDD controller PCB to replace a dead controller, while possible, sucks, and may be incredibly difficult if not impossible to source parts for in the future.

That phrase. I think these people and how they are using tech and memes are part of the current problem of this world. A large part of the problem, in my opinion. It's may be just coping, dark humor for most but it is deep psychosis for others and it's giving them ideas and power over the rest of us. I'd strive to be better than falling into such meme sharing sociopathy.

I'll keep the rest of my words to myself.

You can try to say no, but I don't think you can anymore. I go through this a dozen times a year on my travels there.

This is Spain.

Live at the Brixton Academy, 2004.

I have it on a DVD. I think it's all on youtube, but split into parts.

One of my favorite live performance recordings out of many, many, many...

  Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?

It's prescient.

Happens on lakes in Wisconsin. See [0] for a very interesting example of what happens when one gets real big and floats away.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2AG6LAOBYo

I recently had some old hardware manuals I wanted to digitize, which were pages in 3-ring binders. I started thinking about scanning them but did not have an auto-loading, xerox style scanner at home. I looked around for free software that could do this 'google books style' as they did here in this article - take a photo of each page and automatically find the corners, dewarp, white balance, etc. and export to PDF.

I actually didn't find a premade solution that looked like what I wanted. So I wrote my own, with Python an a simple tk GUI.

I tried a lot Open CV messing about to do automatic page corner detection and whatnot, but found everything I tried unreliable. Sure, the corners may autodetect about 95% of the time, but if 5% of the pages fail and get cropped wrong or dewarped weird, I noted the time it took to go back and fix those errors eclipsed the time saved by the entire rest of the automatic process.

The fastest method I found was a human in the loop semi-auto program: it loaded in all the images from SD card, and had the user manually click the 4-corners of the page as shown in the image. Upon the 4th point being clicked, the page would auto-de-perspective and apply the last saved default white balance curve, thresholding, and posterizing (color binning) / grayscaling / scaling to fixed width. For subsequent images in the camera roll this meant settings didn't have to usually be changed on a per-image basis. Then just a spacebar to add the image to the saved temp queue and at the end an export to PDF.

This approach had me digitizing about 600 pages in an hour I estimate. Yes, it was a lot of clicking for the manual part.... but it allowed me to proof every page as it flew by and this caught a few photographic errors that I wouldn't have caught if it was fully automated, and not a single page was left mis-shapen or unreadable.

The problem is... now for anyone looking to pickup a slightly older used/surplus server rack - you have the go and buy the (now marked up) RAM separate.

So... did they list the "0GB" racks with removed ram cheaper you ask? Nope. Many of them seem to be basically the same price as they were or even higher than they were, except now you're paying for RAM separate.

I bought a surplus Gigabyte server about 2 years ago off ebay for a home project, and I just went and the same seller still has some for sale, even older now than they were when I grabbed one, but they are 2x the price, and they don't come with any RAM, whereas I got one already populated as they were from the factory. Once you add that back in literally looking at 150-200% markup in the last 2 years on what was just surplus computer equipment that is 5+ years old.

After the crypto miners dumped them (that was, what, 2 years ago?), I saw one of the entire rack systems on eBay- I think they held 12 of these in one rack on a common backplane - for $800. (or maybe less?)

That's $66 per BC-250.

The real takeaway is that power is power and energy is energy and regardless of how it gets to do the 'pushing' of the air, if you want to use solar energy (power, at any given moment, not integrating over time) those are the numbers you are comparing. It's all just unit conversions, at least when you're attempting such napkin math. Anything more - taking into account the actual systems, losses, efficiencies, etc.. just makes it all worse, not better.

A cool exercise is - given the 777 wingspan I esitmate and the power output from solar of said size... what kind of current aircraft use piston-driven engines with similar horsepower? Assuming we had motor inverter electronics and an electric motor that was 100% efficient, you could imagine trying to build a similar weight aircraft of that size that has such a wingspan.

This is why you wind up with the only solar powered aircraft out there being superlight, high altitude craft with super high aspect wing surfaces- maximizing wing area to weight / lift capability such as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AeroVironment_Helios_Prototype (note the largest of those prototypes and the tiny amount of power output they were making. All that wing area and it would have barely been able to carry a single passenger as payload and cruise a day without battery power)

Take a Boeing 777, it has a wingspan of about 60 meters, and I'll ballpark an average upper wing chord of about 7 meters, for a total upper flat area of about 420 square meters.

High quality modern but standard single sided solar panels can do about 220 watts per square meter is full sunlight (around 22% efficiency tested at a 1000w/m^2 irradiance).

So that is 92,400 watts at full power.

92kW is less than the peak power of a Nissan Leaf. 92kW is 123 horsepower.

The two GE turbofans of a 777 are generating something like 40-50 MW of shaft power during cruise. MW.... megawatts. 50-60,000 horsepower.

Plastering the wing surface of a commercial plane with solar panels would make up less than a quarter of a percent of the total power it uses to produce thrust at cruise, at best case with them fully-lit.

Fully solar sailplanes do exist (NASA's Helios prototypes are an example) but that isn't anything close to a 'normal' aircraft with any appreciable payload/passengers.

So, no need to wonder.

Which means I just built a demo of a tiny 16 bit windows GUI applet, using emulated VB in Win 3.1 in a browser and got it to run on modern Windows in a shorter amount of time than it would have likely taken me to get the same type of demo up and running natively in Windows 10 today.

There are entire sects of people on the internet that share this incredibly frustrating memory from their childhood. [1]

[0] https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/1995-packard-bell-sof...

[1] https://steamcommunity.com/app/359420/discussions/0/13550947...

I then saved this .exe to a disk image, and then saved that disk image back to my modern mac that I'm doing this on via downloading that in the browser.

I then took that .exe and the only dependency - vbrun100.dll - and put it on a floppy (a real one) and then took that floppy over to a vintage computer I have that has Windows 3.1 on it still (an old 25 MHz Intel486 DX industrial computer I have sitting in a closet with no real use for). Popped in the floppy, copied the .exe and .dll.

And ran the program, no problem! A real GUI windows program, made in VB running in Windows 3.1, inside an entire emulated machine in Javascript in a browser window running on an Apple Silicon macbook in 2026....

Exported and saved to disk and then ran without issue on a piece of hardware made in *1992*!

Now I need to do the reverse... make some software with a copy of VB installed on this old machine of mine and run it on my mac inside the browser.

I'm looking at you, 1993's Journeyman Project....