vertnerd

Colds, yes.

I think respiratory flu is far less common now than it was. I have had a legit case of the flu only once in my adult life. After spending 15 years teaching in a public school, I had countless colds but never caught the flu. Of course, annual flu vaccines might have helped. Those weren't available in the 70s.

Strep throat was also a very common complaint in the letters. Throat cultures, home visits from the pediatrician, etc., were frequent, especially for my brother. I haven't seen a single case of strep in my extended family since. Maybe just lucky.

Many things have improved over the decades, but we do have an array of exciting tick-borne illnesses to make up for it!

This is a good point.

I am retired now and lucky to have my (now adult) children living nearby. Every Friday I cook a large pizza dinner for everyone, their spouses, and their children, and any friends they want to invite. I will always be an introvert, but this weekly meal is the highlight of my week.

The difference between this and what my parents did is that I host for my own pleasure and for what it does to bind the family together. I don't expect reciprocal invitations, and no obligation is ever implied (I hope).

As others have mentioned, the decline started long before social media and the Internet. When I was a child, in the 70s, my parents often had other families and couples over for dinner, and we often attended small dinner parties, too.

As an introvert, I absolutely loathed these gatherings and was frustrated by how powerless I was in avoiding them.

Recently, I have been reading over my mother's old letters she wrote to her parents at that time, in which she described the effort and social anxiety that went with this tradition. It was not something my parents enjoyed, but rather an obligation they felt they had to uphold. Someone invites you over, then that goes into an unspoken balance sheet, and you are required to reciprocate. She often spoke of "owing" dinner to people. I don't think she enjoyed it at all, though there were a few couples I can remember who were good friends of theirs, and those meetups were always a pleasure to listen in on. The rest were simply a drag.

I should note that their life in the 70s (in a middle-class college town) was not some idyllic paradise without the Internet, either. Everyone was constantly falling ill with colds or flu, and days were spent running dreary errands to shop for boring things that we now can get with a click. The rotary-dial telephone that hung in the kitchen was the heartbeat of the house, since replaced by Facebook and smartphones. My parents were always busy and exhausted.

My first exposure to this was reading Lost in Shangri-La (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_in_Shangri-La), which concerns the search for an airplane that crashed in PNG in 1945, the recovery of survivors, and the ensuing media sensation (heightened because one of the survivors was a woman).

"After trying Kagi/Duck Duck Go, I have gone back to Google for search and I freely grant that I find the “AI Overview” to be useful."

I feel compelled to point out that Kagi does offer AI-backed answers if you want it to. Just pose your query with a question mark to trigger the AI response in addition to the usual search results. It is not ever the default or only answer, and I pray Kagi keeps it that way!

I use the AI option more often than I thought I would, usually for things that I don't consider controversial or complicated.

It's not a matter of "letting" her do anything. She can choose to use whatever service and hardware vendors she wants, as long as she can take care of her own tech support.

We (wife and I) de-googled ourselves about a year and a half ago, moving half a TB of photos to Ente and canceling our paid Google subscription (while still keeping our gmail addresses). We set up our (Android) phones to back up photos to Ente and everything was lovely.

Then I started noticing my wife's Google Photos storage use growing again. Somehow her phone had been switched to backing up on Google again. I turned it off. Then it happened again. And again. She couldn't explain how it happened, but I suspected she was the victim of a scary prompt warning that her photos weren't getting backed up.

This wasn't happening to me because I had switched my phone to LineageOS, but hers was still a stock Pixel with Android.

Lately, I have run across a different example of Google locking in its services. As part of our process of leaving Google, we moved our email, contacts and calendars to mailbox.org. I set up her phone's calendar app to use the new server but to my dismay every new appointment was defaulting to use the Google calendar service! I switched her to the Etar calendar app (which is the default app on LineageOS), disabled the default calendar, and asked her to use Etar instead. Everything was great until I began to notice that her new appointments were showing up on Google again! I look at her phone and see that Etar is completely gone and the only calendar app available is the default Android one.

This calendar fiasco only just revealed itself the other day, so I haven't had enough time to figure out how or when it happened but it feels like it might be the same Google Photos tactic of sucking people back into Google.

As a high school teacher, I first noticed this effect when I started using a CO2 monitor in my classroom as a proxy for air freshness during COVID. The CO2 levels in our supposedly "no problem with the air" classrooms shot up to 2000 ppm within minutes of the start of school and stayed there all day. Kids weren't checked out ONLY because I teach mathematics. They were breathing bad air, too.

Worse, when I brought the monitor home, I found the levels there were elevated even with no one home and surpassed 2000 with just two or three of us in a room.

The good news is that I stopped worrying about making my house "tight" for the sake of energy efficiency. I keep some windows cracked all year and don't worry about how tight the door seals are.

If this article intrigues, see the chapter on Egyptian mathematics in The Crest of the Peacock: https://www.ms.uky.edu/~sohum/ma330/files/Crest_of_the_peaco...

I didn't realize how much I had come to rely on Unicode until I created my own VT-100 emulator as part of the Forth language engine (https://github.com/Eccentric-Anomalies/AMC-Forth) in the spacecraft simulator game I'm building. The display is implemented as a shader with the original VT-100 display character set embedded in code, and there is absolutely no support for anything else. Things were going along swimmingly until I realized I just shot myself in the foot when it comes to translating the game to other languages. Sometimes the old ways really did suck. At least that part of the period "feel" is guaranteed to be correct!

As far as I can tell, the video itself is 100% fake. A bad fake. I particularly love the part where the worker levitates a large coil of steel with his hands. The narration sounds OK, so just turn off your monitor.

Used Chromebooks are plentiful and cheap on eBay and many of them are easy to convert to Linux using the tools and instructions at https://docs.mrchromebox.tech/. I used to have a house full of Chromebooks, but now all but one of them are Linux laptops. My favorite is the Acer CP713 because it comes in flavors with lots of RAM and drive space. I also prefer the convertible touchscreen models because they can go on a shelf and make cheap and attractive Home Assistant dashboards.

If you are using a password manager, start by searching for every record with your gmail address. Make a list. Every day, go to the next entry on the list and change your email with that app or service.

Of course, set up gmail to forward messages to your new address and filter them into a folder. Once you have changed all the services you know about, watch for emails coming to the gmail folder, looking for more services that need to be updated. Eventually the only thing arriving in the folder is spam and you can just route it all into the garbage.

I am not an MS Office user, but I have seen the effect of format lock-in with Google Sheets. A few months back I began a project to de-Google my life, which went pretty smoothly until I tried to download my spouse's accounting spreadsheet from Google Sheets to Excel format. Both LibreOffice and Excel could open it, but nothing worked correctly. So for several months, I kept that one Google Sheet live until I could come up with an alternative. When I created the original file in Sheets, I was blindly using all sorts of features and capabilities (including Google Forms) that simply have no direct analog in other products.

A couple of days ago I bit the bullet and dug into the Excel file and figured out how to redesign everything and get it going again. Yay me. I'll admit I don't like the UI in LibreOffice, but I didn't like it very much when I first tried using it (as Star Office) back in the 90s either. Yet I keep coming back to it.

If I'm going to be locked into a format or app, I'd rather it be something like LibreOffice.

I was a 14 year old digital electronics hobbyist at that time. At $666 it could just as well have been $1 million. The most I could possibly afford at the time was about $50. For me, personal computing didn't become truly affordable until the Commodore 64 came along in the 80s, and by that point the Apple II was about 4x more expensive. The Apple computers were revolutionary, but to me they have never been affordable.

Yes, most likely. Steam is dominant, and it's not hard to make a Windows release that works under Proton.

Though in my case, I currently offer demo/beta releases for both Windows and Linux directly from Github. If I ultimately elect to release my game under a GPL license, then supporting both Linux and Windows directly would make sense.

As someone who grew up with only vinyl in the 60s and 70s, I would never choose it over a CD for audio quality.

BUT I would enjoy recreating the rituals that go with playing vinyl: obsessive cleaning of the disks, the gentle manipulation of a delicate tone arm, and the soft thud when the turntable cover drops. Playing a record was a minor event to be savored. I doubt the younger generations are getting all of that right.

I'm solo developing a spaceflight simulator on Linux (using the Godot engine), exporting binaries in both Linux and Windows. It turns out that I really didn't need to bother with the Linux export anyway because Steam runs the Windows version on Linux without any problems.

The ONLY thing I'm still having trouble with under Linux is Steam VR on the HTC Vive. It works. Barely.

I used to be an educator, and many of my students had an autism diagnosis. I would get to know them and often eventually decide that they were "just like" me, except that whatever their problems were, I had it worse.

So then I would look at these autism checklists and say, "yep, that's me," but when I actually looked at the strict diagnostic criteria, it wasn't that clear.

Looking at this article, I get it. There are other, more focused criteria that can be more appropriate. But those diagnoses don't trigger the special services, so they don't get used often enough.

What is my takeaway? People often don't conform to a model of average human behavior. Being unusual isn't necessarily a grave character flaw (which is what my mother had me believe) but merely an expression of the great variety of human intellect and behavior. It gives me license, without official diagnosis, to enjoy being who I am without shame or embarrassment.

I've also been working on half a dozen crates of old family letters. ChatGPT does well with them and is especially good at summarizing the letters. Unfortunately, all the output still has to be verified because it hallucinates words and phrases and drops lines here and there. So at this point, I still transcribe them by hand, because the verification process is actually more tiresome than just typing them up in the first place. Maybe I should just have ChatGPT verify MY transcriptions instead.

Just the other evening, as my family argued about whether some fact was or was not fake, I detached from the conversation and began fantasizing about whether it was still possible to buy a paper encyclopedia.

I admit I didn't even know I was using RCS on Android until I switched to a cheap flip-phone and I could no longer post to a Wordle group chat that I had been in for years. What is the possible advantage to the user for a messaging platform that ONLY works on an Android or iOS device with an active number? Don't want.

My Camroc produced exactly one usable photograph. It was hell to load it with a single disk of unexposed film.

I was captivated by the August 1980 issue of Byte magazine, which had a cover dedicated to Forth. It was supposed to be easy to implement, and I imagined I might do that with my new KIM-1 6502 board. Alas, the KIM-1 was lost when I went to college, and life forced me down different pathways for the next 45 years.

About a year ago I finally began to work on my dream of a Forth implementation by building a Forth-based flight management computer into a spaceflight simulation game that I am working on. Now, instead of writing mostly C# or GDscript code in Godot, I am trying to figure out ways to create a useful device using this awkwardly elegant language. I'm having fun with it.

One of the interesting bits is that I have been able to make the Forth code an entirely separate project on Github (https://github.com/Eccentric-Anomalies/Sky-Dart-FMS), with a permissive open-source license. If anyone actually built a real spacecraft like the one in my game, they could use the FMS code in a real computer to run it.

There is one part of the linked article that really speaks to me: "Implement a Forth to understand how it works" and "But be aware of what this will not teach you". Figuring out the implementation just from reading books was a fascinating puzzle. Once I got it running, I realized I had zero experience actually writing Forth code. I am enjoying it, but it is a lot like writing in some weird, abstract assembly language.

I am convinced that someday, device manufacturers will realize that complicated, small touchscreen UIs are a horrible idea. They're even worse for seniors, because our fingers are losing dexterity, may be slightly swollen and stiff, and are prone to tremors. So, at a point in our lives when merely holding the phone can be a challenge, navigating some ambiguous UI while our fingers are obscuring the very thing we're trying to use is insanity.

But Apple is the worst because of its Apple ID requirement. I tried to resurrect an old iPhone of mine only to get stuck in a week-long perpetual ID recovery loop with Apple. Enter the new password wrong too many times, and you have to wait another week to try again. Want to create a new Apple ID? Nope. No duplicate IDs attached to the same phone number. I finally just recycled the phone. I'm old. I don't have time to waste on an iPhone.

Fun link. I never wrote GPU drivers, but it does remind me of writing my first Ethernet card driver back in the day. I felt like I had decoded the Rosetta Stone, and there was absolutely no one to talk to who understood how that felt.

This is a familiar concept from reading about WW2 spy stuff (Between Silk and Cyanide, for example, which I highly recommend). But what REALLY intrigues me is the typeface of the letter with its upper-case 'E' used in place of 'e'. What's up with that?

I've found nowhere that any price is mentioned, so I have to assume that it's one of those "if you have to ask..." sort of things.

Edit: https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/p...

Slightly less than $5 a mile with a minimum of $2296. The rate to park your car is around $4000 a month. Fun thing to do if you have the money.

The canonical Bell Biker helmet that I remember was an ugly and expensive white bowl-thing for serious road cyclists that started becoming popular in the late 70s as ten-speed bicycles became more popular with adults.

https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_11831...

I think I bought my Bell Biker helmet around 1980. The stylish kid-sized helmets that became widely available during the 80s did not exist in the 70s.

This statement in the article is a real head-scratcher:

> Until now, the Southern Ocean region was virtually inaccessible to satellites due to its low temperatures and the complex, ever-changing dynamics of sea ice.

I hate to cast doubt on the veracity of such an interesting story, but this really makes me wonder whether the entire article is just AI garbage.