• 1 Post
  • 58 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 14th, 2023


  • If you’re thinking amplifier, just grab your favourite Japanese '70s hi-fi range and go from there. Can hardly go wrong.

    A half-scale Harman/Kardon 330c but with an OLED info display in the panel that held a tuning scale might kill it.

    The key is to use the right materials. They sold a modern CD-based stereo a few years ago that apes the look of a small Marantz 22xx, but being plastic garbage, sort of fails the mission. Conversely, Yamaha did some new silver-face amps that don’t look like dollar-store tat.




  • XFCE’s old panel was a distinct mimic of CDE’s. I liked it…

    But now CDE is open source and NsCDE gives you the same look with a highly customised fvwm config if you don’t want to stick to the Motif universe.


  • The UK issued silver dollars once. They were dated 1804 and considered “bank tokens” as they had less silver than their denomination required at the time. They basically stamped a new design on Spanish colonial 8-real coins and passed them as five shillings.

    The UK had a hard time with coin supply for most of the 1700s until 1816 when they finally downdized many coins.



  • Air-conditioned dhed with high volume air cleaning for toxic actibities like soldering, plastic models, spray painiting, 3-D printing…

    And a 3-d printer with a cross section of a metre on a side. I am sick of having to cut up designs, I want to print an entire extended-ATX case in a single run.



  • Oil burning was common in some regions. The Southern Pacific had a lot of oil-fired engines. Their famous “cab-forward” steam engines could only make sense as oil burners without fundamental redesign.

    Part of it might be that the last holdouts for steam, who made the most technically advanced engines, were predominantly coal-carriers. They didn’t have the oil infrastructure, and didn’t want to burn relations eith their customers.







  • I’m hoping for MacroSD. About the size of a 3.5" floppy so you won’t lose it easily.

    Seriously, it’s interesting that now that we have the tech to make a useful-capacity storage device the size of a credit card, we don’t. Not like those crappy giveaway flash drives printed with a card design, where they had a captive USB head and were 4x as thick as a card, but something with just contacts like a chip card, so you might need to use an external reader but it really preserves the wallet-size concept.

    I’d love to have a cheap 16GB card in my wallet with all my health records and a cryptographically signed copy of my will as a one-stop, no cloud required, emergency kit.



  • Yeah, he was one of a long string of lunatic leaders, which evidently “democracy” has done little to temper. The thing I recall about him was a bit in a reference book to coins and currency: at one point in the 1950s, the central bank issued a 500-hwan note that had a large central portrait of him (the overall design looked like a cheap riff on US currency of the time), and rapidly replaced it because he concluded people folding it in half across his face (as people do with banknotes) was some symbol of defiance to him personally.

    They don’t teach that style of crazy in dictator school.

    As for the “Korea is a puppet and exists only as long as the US props it up”, duh, but I figure there’s perhaps some chance to exploit some “we’ve been under the yoke so long we no longer notice it” and “we’re a big strong country that thinks it can actually engage internationally” mentalities to loosen the fixation with copyright and chasing those imagined license revenues that will never materialize.