uint8_t

I was a gradeschool student in the nineties, and I just want to close the loop for you.

All of us young people knew those bendy, half-plastic, scratchy-lead pencils were trash. (The graphite would even break inside the barrel). They were barely fit to play the role of tinkertoys.

I hope the PE firm did something magnanimous with the money it saved.

You didn't have a router with dialup, or early DSL, where the modem was a separate device. You'd often get publicly routable IPv4s in your university dorm, too. See also napster. :-)

Just amazing. I had a need for something like this but wound up building it out in Mathesar. That, too, is an amazing project, but my business logic has to remain separate. Jeepers, you're even getting into labor accounting - well done!

Newton's Rings. Anti-newton glass is frosted, loses resolution.

Professional drum scanners would immerse the film in mineral oil. Epson used to ship a kit for their flatbeds. Popular with 8x10 photographers.

There is a scene near the end where their dealer/friend/squatter rolls an enormous, conical joint, which he calls a "Camberwell Carrot."

I'm not from the UK and have been dying to know if there's more cultural nuance to that slang than name dropping a neighborhood.

See also these internet-historical gems from everything2:

Uberman's sleep schedule - every 4 hours, sleep 20 minutes.

https://everything2.com/title/Uberman%2527s+Sleep+Schedule

Everyman sleep schedule - per above, with an additional 3-hour nap each 24 hours.

https://everything2.com/title/Everyman+Sleep+Schedule

Of course, the surest way to experiment with an alternative sleep schedule is to simply take care of a newborn, something humans have gotten pretty good at over the millennia.

Diku and most (all?) other MUDs were "BSD" socket-based. Windows did not even ship with a sockets layer (winsock) until 1994, with Windows NT 3.5, and it made its way to consumers with Windows 95.

Merc did allow for compiling on Mac and MS-DOS, but in this mode reads and writes to the console, without a socket implementation. No multiplayer.

See: https://github.com/alexmchale/merc-mud/blob/master/src/comm....

Hee hee. But it is Farnsworthed, the default 40 WPM is quite spaced out!

Worth noting that the movement to drop morse code, "No-code International," was spearheaded by none other than K6BP. Bruce Perens, one of our own!

In absolute terms, probably, but some are declaring a renaissance associated with the increasing popularity in portable operation. Summits On The Air (SOTA) in particular favors lightweight transmitters. CW is such an efficient mode, in terms of speed, reach and circuit design that it is worth learning Morse for that single use case.

Personally, once I gained some proficiency with CW I realized that it is an enjoyable pursuit in and of itself, so now while not climbing mountains I stay on the low parts of the band and exchange postcards with octogenarians and I couldn't be happier.

"Just prior to welding the plutonium surfaces are cleaned in the inert atmosphere of the welding box to remove oxide and foreign material. If the oxide film is light, it can be removed by wire brushing. If this is not satisfactory, sanding or an abrasive wheel can be used."

In case you are wondering what you'd do with tools, consumables, entire workspaces and ductwork contaminated by that kind of dust, well, these folks buried it in a trench on a mesa overlooking the Rio Grande [1]. The dump is large enough to contain the Empire State Building and, by one account, whole machines like forklifts were just pushed right in [2]. No "highly esteemed deed" was commemorated there, indeed.

1: https://n3b-la.com/area-g-tru/

2: Los Alamos, Hidden Colony, Secret Truths by Chuck Montaño (2015)

If you like this, you are sure to love Jacob Tonski's "Balance from Within," a 170-year-old couch outfitted with reaction wheels so that it stands up improbably on one leg.

Eventually, the reaction wheels max out and the couch falls over, exploding like... well, an interpersonal relationship if you ask the artist; but lately, it's hard not to see politics.

It was recognized by Prix Ars Electronica, a very high honor for this genre of art.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQRP-b68fnE Article: https://ars.electronica.art/aeblog/en/2014/07/02/auf-der-suc...