I think part of the problem is all our laptops have smart card slots on them, and that limits the available options.

When I started in 1990, most of engineering at Autodesk was in 2320 and 2330 Marinship Way in Sausalito. Later I moved down the street across from Mollie Stone in 3 Harbor. The infamous every-Friday "Beer Bust" was in 1 Harbor during those years.

Ted Nelson had a house boat not far way, too. Wild times.

A few years later we moved up to the new HQ on McInnis Parkway in San Rafael. We also had several buildings on Civic Center Drive and several floors of 4000 on top of the hill. I think I had an office in all of those at one time or another except the HQ building -- I managed to escape that and the new fangled "open office space" they put in that one.

Back in the 90's the Autodesk tech office was next door to the Bay Model and we'd occasionally pop over for lunch and tour the place.

Great to see it still around and open to the public.

Probably helps the IT center folks are actually employees of Dell and this service is part of the deal Boeing has with Dell. Lots of big companies have similar deals with their hardware vendors.

But just tonight, while getting gas just outside St. Louis, a young woman was having an absolute meltdown outside her car about the price of gas being $3.65 a gallon. Wild.

So, yeah, perhaps the price of gas is high enough that the public would tolerate some heavy collateral damage at this point.

This thread is interesting to me 'cause I'm also a software guy and recently took a job dealing with building fighter jets and the amount of engineering going into the wiring and computers on those things is insane. It's been a very interesting learning experience.

I still use email drafts for a lot of notes. Looking at my email draft folder the oldest one I have is from 2002 and I can still access it just fine, even on mobile.

In 1990 I went to work at Autodesk and got to work on all kinds of stuff over the next decade -- AutoLISP was the bridge that got me into tech as a profession over the geology field work I was doing. It's been a wild ride.

It remains to be seen if AI will end up being about as useful as crypto in the long run.

I remember the local press going on about the crypto mining operation and how folks were going get high-tech jobs in this rural area of Texas. Of course it didn't go that way.

Aluminum smelting is an incredibly energy intensive operation. A lot of places in the US that used to host aluminum smelters now host large datacenters, include the Google data center in The Dalles, Oregon on the Columbia river near a hydro dam. It's a shame that Rockdale didn't get something useful like these other places.

As far as Al smelting in the US; I don't know. I'd imagine it produces a lot of air pollution by itself and uses huge amounts of power that is usually generated by cheap methods like burning rocks (coal) or large hydro operations nearby to minimize transmission costs. Then you gotta get ore to the site. The only Al smelter I recall being left in the US is up near Puget Sound in Bellingham, WA and I think it's currently shutdown.

Folks should be happy since the crypto operation is using far less power and dumping less heat into the environment that the industrial operation that was previously there, but datacenters seem to be a trendy thing complain about at the moment so here we are.

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These inert reentry vehicles are impacting at hypersonic speeds; I wouldn't want to be anywhere near there.

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I don't do much scanning anymore, but I do have an ancient Nikon CoolScan 35mm scanner that's probably at least 20 years old now. I get it out every few years to scan something I found and, with Vuescan, it still works remarkably well.

Although the last time I fetched it out from a storage container by our barn (I really should store it in the house) I found the negative strip scanner wasn't working anymore, but the slide adapter did and that was good enough for the task at hand.

The panels seem the same but everything on the Apple one is better, as you would expect.

But lately my LG is starting to have issues with ghosting and color shifts around the edges. It's still ok to use (I'm typing this on it) but I guess it's nearing the end of it's useful life.

If I get the warning the mouse is getting low on charge I just plug it in, go grab a drink or use the bathroom, and by the time I get back it's good for the rest of the day.

Then all I have to do is remember to plug it in overnight and it'll be good for months. YMMV.