High wire to Half Moon Bay (2021)
2 points • 0 comments
@Stratoscope | Hacker News
From 12/12/2010, 8:06:42 PM till now, @Stratoscope has achieved 16079 Karma Points with the contribution count of 3380.
Recent @Stratoscope Activity
Bill Gates Shares His Old Resume Online
4 points • 1 comments
Peter Higgs: the man behind the God particle
1 points • 0 comments
Tangentially related, this showed up in my news feed today:
It's RAID. With Floppy Drives.
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/30/its-raid-with-floppy-drives/
Be there with the bears eating berries.
We have all wondered about hidden meanings.
The bears wonder too!
After all, they are just beginning to discover fire.
What is this thing? We know how to make it happen, but we don't understand it.
Nothing is as obvious as we might hope.
Don't let this trouble you. Just bear with it.
Rare clouds that glow in the dark are the most vibrant in 15 years
3 points • 0 comments
It's fun to see that old article again. (I wrote the FixDS program Raymond mentions at the end.)
One pain point in 16-bit Windows programming was that you had to do two special things for any callback function in your application: EXPORT the function in your .DEF file, and call MakeProcInstance() on your callback function to get an "instance thunk".
FixDS made a simple patch to the compiled function prologs that rendered all of this unnecessary. You could just use your callback function directly, like we expect today.
You would be surprised.
I have a neighbor who only uses the touchscreen on their ThinkPad, except when they have to type something.
The other day I stopped by to help them troubleshoot a problem, and they had to do a password reset.
They touched the Old Password field on the screen and typed in their old password on the keyboard. They touched New Password on the screen and typed in the new one. Of course then they had to touch the second New Password field on the screen and enter it again on the keyboard. Finally they reached up to touch the OK button on the screen.
I mentioned that they could avoid going back and forth between screen and keyboard by using the Tab and Enter keys. They asked, "What are those?" I pointed them out on the keyboard and explained what they do.
We will see if the message got through. Hopefully with some gentle encouragement over time, it will.
My real point is that yes, some people do use touchscreen laptops.
Ah, now that makes sense! I was picturing actually watching a full TV show, but what you describe is very practical.
That's a good point. When I used to wear an old Casio digital watch, I would often take it off my wrist if I was going to do any serious timing with the stopwatch.
Of course if you're going to take it off your wrist for any serious viewing, they could have just put a bigger LCD on the tuner device itself, since you have to carry that anyway.
But that wouldn't have the "wow" factor of a TV watch!
Try this exercise:
Hold your arm so a watch strapped on top of your wrist would be facing toward your eyes for easy viewing of its display.
If you have a smartwatch, or any kind of watch, you do this many times a day.
Now hold your arm in that position for 30 or 60 minutes to watch an entire TV show. You can take a break during the commercials.
Enjoying that? Probably not.
With a [smart]watch, you only glance at it a bit here and there. You don't try to view it continuously.
It is interesting to see a very clever product idea that completely ignores human anatomy.
When I was a kid in Eugene, Oregon in the late 1950s, before I started school we had the Rough Country and the Bomb Shelter.
The Bomb Shelter really was a bomb shelter. We had one of the first houses on the street, and just down the hill was a house under construction. All they had built so far was the basement and the bomb shelter. The kids in the neighborhood made that our clubhouse and brought snacks so we could hang out and keep safe from any nuclear attack.
The Rough Country was just up the hill from our house. They were clearing out some trees to begin construction, so when we needed a break from the Bomb Shelter, we made tunnels under the fallen trees to have another place to hang out.
I had been playing with electricity all this time. When the TV "went on the fritz", as they always did back then, my dad let me pull out all the tubes, put them in a cigar box (I loved that aroma!) and take them to the corner grocery where they had a tube tester. I would test each tube one by one, adjusting the settings for the tube type, until I found the bad one. Dad would buy a new tube, and when we got back home I plugged each tube back in along with the new one. And the TV worked!
In kindergarten I pranked the class. I had a one farad electrolytic capacitor with the terminals on top. That is a big scary capacitor! I charged it up at home all the way to 1.5 volts. Then I brought it to class and demonstrated how dangerous it was. While I was setting up the demo, I accidentally touched both terminals, one with each hand. I started shaking and writhing around like I was being electrocuted!
Somehow I managed to free myself from the electric charge. And then, conveniently, I'd brought along a screwdriver and used it to short out the two terminals, with a most satisfying bang and a spark.
Then I told one of the girls in class, "It's OK. I discharged it. It's safe now. You can touch the terminals and it won't hurt you."
In first grade, that same girl handed me an astronomy book that she thought I might like. I said, "Oh, I read that last year."
It was not one of my finest moments. I wonder what opportunities I may have missed?
Halfway through the year, the school got tired of my troublemaking and moved me to second grade. It was scary being with the big kids.
In third grade, I was still making trouble, so they had me spend the afternoons in a special ed class called Mrs. Spencer's Workshop, where we could invent projects of our own. My first one was drawing maps of all the freeway interchanges on the new I-5 route between Eugene and Portland. We had family in Portland and used to drive up 99 East to get there, and this new "freeway" idea fascinated me. I'd made rough sketches in the car, so I turned them into more polished and colorful maps.
One odd thing was that I could not draw curved lines! I had to construct them with a series of short straight lines drawn with a ruler.
For my next project I wanted to make a printed circuit board. I'd designed a simple circuit I called the Current Changer Switch that I wanted to demo in the Science Fair. You could flip a switch and make a light go bright or dim.
Of course I knew how to hand wire the circuit and had tested it that way, but I'd heard about something new called a "printed circuit board".
I didn't know about phenolic boards with copper on them, but I did understand the basic concept of etching a board with resist to protect the traces. So I got my own idea: I would take a sheet of copper, stick electrical tape on both sides to map out the traces, and dunk it in a tank of nitric acid.
I asked Mrs. Spencer if she could get me the materials: a sheet of copper, some electrical tape, and the tank of nitric acid. And she did!
So I taped out the board and and dunked in the tank of acid while Mrs. Spencer and I watched the copper dissolve.
And my printed circuit worked!
I realize that the HN guidelines recommend submitting original sources instead of secondary sources. In this case I chose to submit the bleepingcomputer article because it gives a nice overview of the topic and is much easier to read on a mobile device than the original NSA/CISA/NCSC PDF file.
The article links to the original PDF, which can be found here for anyone who prefers to go directly to it:
https://media.defense.gov/2022/Jun/22/2003021689/-1/-1/1/CSI...
NSA shares tips on securing Windows devices with PowerShell
4 points • 1 comments
The Magnet That Made the Modern World
2 points • 0 comments
Anecdata: I have a lovely old Canon Cat in working condition that I want to sell to someone who is interested in this piece of computing history. But I have somehow misplaced the box of floppy disks that came with it!
I know they are here somewhere. Looks like I have some housekeeping to do.
When I find them, that number will become nonzero...
If this troubles you, wait until you learn how many bytes are on a 1.44MB floppy disk.
It holds 1,474,560 bytes.
That is 1.44 * 1000 * 1024.
In Russia, Western Planes Are Falling Apart
15 points • 2 comments
People do that too!
Here's a comment I posted a year ago about the sacrificial plastic gear in a Baratza coffee grinder:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27018629
One of the replies is a truly frightening story about people who broke the sacrificial gear in the tailgate window mechanism of their Toyota Landcruiser and machined a new one out of brass!
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