HeyLaughingBoy

> network of CoCo 2s that used a CoCo 3 as a "file server" via a rotary dial to download courseware through the cassette interface

Are you serious? That's fkn brilliant!

Amazon didn't exist at that time (or was probably still only selling books). Digi-Key still had a $25 minimum order. RS was pretty much the only game in town if you were a high schooler with a small allowance.

OTOH, some items were surprisingly cheap. A couple years after college, I had a small business running out of a spare bedroom making temperature monitors and there was a shielded audio cable with connector that I used for the sensor. Radio Shack's price was about $1.50 each but all the "real" parts houses were at least 5x that.

> DE-9 to RJ-45

Few things impress me more than someone using shell sizes correctly :-)

I did controller software for blood (plasma) analysis instruments for over a decade. Vitamin D was actually one of the harder analytes to process. Now that I'm writing this, I don't even remember what was so hard about it. I vaguely remember issues with the reagents clumping together and being harder to separate before they could be properly mixed with the sample.

There's been some talk (I haven't followed it) that autism spectrum disorders are linked to insufficient Vitamin D.

Here in MN, we have a very large population of Somali immigrants. Their children, born in MN, have a higher prevalence of autism than the ones born in Somalia. To the extent that the community has begun to call it "the Minnesota disease."

I was responding to the comment that there wasn't a sensor available that would work.

I worked on a system that sat in the railroad right-of-way and by necessity had to detect an oncoming train from at least half a mile away due to our response time. We were aware that the railroad already had the data on where the trains were, but for RR safety, there was no way that we could get access to that, so we had to place our own sensor next to the track.

You raise an interesting point that if you're near a switching point, you need to know the point's position to determine if there's a potential collision. For my system, it was placed far enough away so that was not an issue: if we detected a train, we knew it was coming our way.

So you detect them miles away. It's a real-time analysis problem: assign a latency equal to the longest time required to react and that's the time you have to detect an oncoming train.

When did he change his name from Tim Apple?

I generally don't start a fire in the fireplace unless the temperature is below 10F. I'm not hanging out around the firepit at that temperature.

This deserves far, far more upvotes than it got ;-)

The horses will probably go to a rescue. We run one and take in and rehome lots of horses that have been seized for mistreatment via court order.

I remember getting a mortgage and the loan officer saying that there was a 100% possibility that the loan would be sold within 60 days of closing.

That's not just happening on Amazon, tho. Hang out on /r/smallbusiness and you'll find tons of tiny retailers asking for help on how to deal with the same problem.

Yep, and I live in a rural area about 10 miles outside town. Amazon Prime was reliably within 2 days until a couple years ago when they opened a fulfillment center about 20 miles away. Now I often see an item I'm buying as available within hours. I basically use Amazon Prime as a way to avoid having to drive everywhere. Ease of returns, Prime Video, etc., are just icing on the cake.

Highlight the fact that it's a 501(c)(3) on the website. Being a non-profit opens up opportunities for donations from large corporations and applying for government grants. I notice that you have a PayPal Donate button. IIRC, PayPal has a specific payment structure for nonprofits.

You could say that about a lot of crimes, but that's not how it works.

Most software is purchased or built by businesses for their internal needs. Are you a business?

You sound like you don't like other people very much.

> how many orchestras will be needed?

Many more. There isn't a fixed amount of software needed in the world: the amount will expand to fit the capacity. There's a reason it's been consistently difficult to find good programmers: there's more work than the existing population can handle. By expanding to use AI, I expect that the amount of programming work will grow, not shrink. However, the amount of programmers may decline.

It's funny you say that because just this morning I was thinking about my first job and remembering how amazing it was that I was actually getting paid to do the thing that I did for fun in my spare time.

yes.

Yeah, well, that's one huge difference between you and me.

> lot of first time mothers are rather mediocre

I had a hen who was sitting on a clutch of eggs this summer. Did everything right: kept them warm, turned them regularly, etc.

Then one hatched and she promptly lost interest in the rest, leaving them to die.

Not for the person who's making it and accruing the benefit!

Memories. A long time ago I used to sell a little board that plugged into a printer port and added a power driver to the outputs and some buffering to the inputs so they were 12V-tolerant.

Forgot about that until you mentioned it.

[sigh] I've lost track of the number of times that I've suggested that instead of an ESP32 with small TFT screen for some web or BLE enabled project that doesn't require any I/O, you could just use a cheap phone or tablet and make life much easier. I'm downvoted every single time. I guess some people take pride in doing things the hard way.

I live on a small farm a few miles from the closest town. It's not totally pitch dark, but on a clear night you can see the Milky Way and sometimes on my way back inside after doing evening chores, I'll just stand there staring up at the sky. It never gets old.

Does feel a bit eerie on moonless nights when the coyotes start howling though.

Part of the difficulty in understanding the problem for others is that they simply don't drive very far, very often. Our pickup has a range of over 750 miles with a full tank. It's not unusual for the tank to have to be filled two days back to back: my wife drives a lot. When you're driving that much, the last thing you want to do is stop if you don't have to.

Even in peacetime, training accidents kill an expected number of military personnel each year.

Or, you know, just use a different license?