atomicstack

I got lucky and picked up a second hand HP-7475A for $50 about five years ago. It's the GPIB version, not native RS-232, so I also had to find a way to connect it to a modern PC. Ended up going with a GPIB<->USB adapter from AliExpress (about 10x cheaper than one from Prologix) to plug it into an RPi, which I can use to send HPGL files to get plotted.

Also got a friend to hack away a chunk of the plastic casing with a circular saw so I could use pen adapters for modern Sharpie and Stabilo markers, which are much easier and cheaper to acquire than old format plotter pens.

Quantising the oscillator pitch into discrete steps like this is pretty common when it comes to synthesisers. Generally there is also a fine-tuning control that allows the user to offset the output by up to an octave. Makes it easier to not be out-of-tune with other instruments.

About a year ago I stayed in a hotel and the door lock started misbehaving one morning while I was at breakfast. Went to the front desk, got a new card, went back to the room and discovered it still didn't work. After doing that two more times, someone was sent up to the room with a mysterious, palm-sized device with a USB cable hanging off it, which they plugged into a well hidden USB port on the bottom of the lock. The device performed some black magic, and after about 30 seconds a light on the lock changed colour from orange to red and it started functioning correctly again.

I use `ts` quite often in adhoc logging/monitoring contexts. Because it uses strftime() under the hood, it has automatic support for '%F' and '%T', which are much easier to type than '%Y-%m-%d' and '%H:%M:%S'. Plus, it also has support for high-resolution times via '%.T', '%.s', and '%.S':

  echo 'hello world' | ts '[%F %.T]'
  [2023-12-30 16:25:40.463640] hello world

This is a very impressive integration of fzf's speedy fuzzy-match CLI, with zsh's completion menus for command line parameters:

https://github.com/Aloxaf/fzf-tab

https://asciinema.org/a/293849

I like this one, it has more options and also features a JS-based offline version: http://donjon.bin.sh/5e/dungeon/index.cgi

Not quite... the first 30% of your salary is tax-free:

https://www.belastingdienst.nl/wps/wcm/connect/bldcontenten/...

I started running some games of Paranoia last winter, and found this tool to be quite useful for generating layouts: http://donjon.bin.sh/fantasy/dungeon/

There is also a pure-JS version which works offline, downloadable from here: http://donjon.bin.sh/apps/

It's also now illegal to sell kebabs past midnight:

http://stoneyroads.com/2016/01/there-is-now-a-lockout-law-fo...

Native Sydney-sider, lived there for 25 years, not sure I'd enjoy living there any more.

Slight errata: This part of the pipeline: `bind -l | sed 's/.*/bind -q \0/' | /bin/bash 2>&1 | grep -v warning:`

...can be replaced with `bind -P`.

Also, \e represents ESC; tab is represented by \t.

"Perl (and I mean Perl5) is antiquated, and no modern shop I'm aware of uses it."

30 seconds of Googling puts this fallacy entirely to bed:

http://perl.la/ http://www.perl.com/pub/2014/02/perl-today-february-2014.htm... http://moose.iinteractive.com/about.html

Yes, another of his inventions (or something he was at least involved in implementing) is Gearman (http://gearman.org/), a queue/worker system which I used in my last job at a domain registrar/web host to hack up parallelised domain name look-ups. Similar to memcached, it was ridiculously quick and easy to set up and use, and bought me massive efficiency gains with very little implementation cost.

The other thing that nobody seems to have brought up is the forks, descendants and similar pieces of software it inspired in one way or another: e.g. memcachedb, Tokyo Cabinet, Redis, etc. Memcached's release was very much a watershed moment.