IMO, the real use case for PayPal was really on the seller side.
When it was 2002 and you weren’t a major business but just wanted to sell three old CDs on eBay or offer dog haberdashery online, it was by far the simplest way to accept a credit-card funded transaction.
We’re still not a lot better there in 2025. Even with more modern platforms, you can’t really get from zero to accepting cards directly in 15 minutes.
What problem does CSD solve? I’d think “some apps look and work differently” is a pretty bad tradeoff for “I want to cram custom stuff in the title bar which was more or less universally treated as owned-by-the-system for the first 35 years of GUIs at least?”
GTK/GNOME seem to be making themselves actively hostile towards customization, which seems a great way to lose enthusiasts.
Now I want to see a fully Hexbearified LLM.
Instead of racist conspiracy theories it will divert every topic to beans. And the saucy images will be mostly of cuties from Soviet posters.
Is it pronounced like the blood thinner/rat poison (warfarin)?
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.
In 2006, it was the least hot garbage choice though.
If your software supports authorize.net, you can often use some other gateways with a drop-in compatible API by changing the endpoint.
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.
Try RiscOS for a glimpse of a world most of us missed.
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.
Keep an eye out at thrift shops-- I’ve seen huge tranches of Star Trek novels.
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.
Fre:ac seems to run in a wine package.
I wonder what impact a truly high end CPU being open would have on the fab industry.
Right now, there’s a lot of manufacturing secret sauce; if you took an Intel design, it would require significant rework to perform well on Samsung or TSMC process.
Fab owners would have a vested competitive interest to customize the design to perform better on their tooling.
Conversely, buyers might develop a renewed interest in second-sourcing-- if you can take your chip to any fab, you have more control over your supply chain.
I’ve seen a lot of cheap little “appliance” machines-- fanless devices meant to be network routers, NAS devices, signage controllers advertised as running on like 4th and 5th generation laptop CPUs.
ATSC 3.0 is usable. I have a HDHomerun sitting on my LAN with a couple 3.0 tuners.
The big problem is:
the 3.0 broadcasts are still mostly tests, so you get mostly a respin of a 1.0 channel
the audio is AC-4 and a lot of software doesn’t support it. There was stuff for Windows but when I looked, the usual suspects (VLC, mpv) on Linux didn’t support it
Why not an aerial for Jeopardy? It’s usually on local broadcast, so you could plumb together a DVR setup if you want it within a unified experience.
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.
Make something unmarketsble.
My big hobby project was software for 30-year-old computers, not a big market.