No longer a theory lol

No.

It should be from -3 to 10. (Probably more than 10 actually.)

We did.

Then we decided not to use them.

Cheap, fast to build, doesn’t appear obvious from the air, hard to destroy with conventional weapons. The drawback of damaging the container when you use it wasn’t considered as big an issue back when we knew what the words “strategic” and “emergency” meant. When the administration creates a new crisis every week to distract from the Epstein Files, it suddenly seems insufficient.

Interesting thanks for the explanation!

They’re really simple electronics, but there are likely a lot of little trade secrets that made them better. At the end of the day, it’s a cathode ray tube with a couple of electromagnets to divert a pulsing electron beam to hit different parts of the phosphor-coated end of the tube. The signal fed to the magnets is analog, and the beam sweeps the screen line-by-line every frame. (Or every other line for interpolated signals.)

It’s really not that dangerous. There’s a big capacitor called the flyback capacitor which can store a deadly amount of energy. You disconnect the power (obviously) and then discharge that cap and everything else is relatively safe. To discharge a capacitor, bridge the leads with an electricians screwdriver. If you don’t like sparks, hold a resistor with pliers between the two leads. (It will go slower but also get hot AF.)

Retro games look better on them and there’s no emulator that has ever pulled off a sufficiently convincing simulation for me. They also render dark colors better than most high end TVs. If you play a lot of old games, it would be neat to have a small one. The big ones, however, weigh a metric ton and are at least as deep as they are wide, and they’re extremely front-heavy. Those aren’t worth it unless you plan to build an entire arcade cabinet around it.

Yeah Gauss a unit of measurement for magnetic flux density. It’s not just there to make a BOING noise and briefly mess up the picture.

I’m fine with people having them; I just think the vetting/training should be more thorough. Charlie got popped by the kind of gun that most would agree should be easy to buy, though. You used to be able to order that sort of thing to your house from the Sears Catalog.

Some podcaster. He became kind of irrelevant in 2025.

And furthermore, he’s on record having stated that he truly believes gun deaths are an acceptable trade off to have a society with virtually unfettered access to guns. It’s one thing to say that on a podcast, but he really stuck his neck out to support the idea.

I don’t know if any phones have this, but on a PC you can set up multiple partitions and have the password you entered determine which is logged into on boot. Then if the ICE brownshirts demand to see your sick memes, you can show them a boring install with some basic apps, instead of the install where you’re informing the denizens of the interwebs that Trump raped kids and the entire GOP is covering it up.

There are 4 pairs of 2 wires, for 8 overall. They are all used, but the pairs are redundant. From what I understand, when you send a positive pulse on, say, the solid blue wire, you also send a negative pulse on the stripy blue and white wire. The twisted pairs should counteract any interference, but if it doesn’t, the arrival of the bumps with opposite polarity should foolproof things a little.

Oh yeah it’s called differential signalling.

OK so I just learned, like, last week that there are two standards. Why are there two standards? WTF?

(The context is I was turning an Ethernet cable into an EtherCAT cable, which is a stupid industrial standard where you only wire up pins 1, 2, 3, and 6, and then charge the end user 200 times more for the cable.)

It feels like we’re losing ground. Why does 8GB of RAM feel totally insufficient to browse the same websites I used 12 years ago with 4? I’m so happy I maxed out my motherboard’s RAM (32) when I built a PC in 2021.

PROTIP:

Ebooks are trivially easy to find online, or you can check them out from your local library.

There’s a free and open source program called Calibre that can manage your ebook library, change file formats, edit visual formatting, and even remove proprietary DRM.

Don’t let Amazon being a bad company prevent you from using your old Kindle.

I don’t make it often, but if you marinate it in something like half soy, one quarter rice wine vinegar, and one quarter mirin, then bread with corn starch, egg wash, and panko, you can make awesome deep fried tofu bites. This works well with the less dense stuff most stores carry.

Yeah mostly joking. I actually do like some of the veggie substitutes. I also like tofu. My grocer carries a brand of ultra dense stuff that’s great breaded and fried.

Yep. And be careful which ebike or motorcycle.

I know I can completely disable–deenergize from the fuse box–my car’s “SOS” modem, but that isn’t possible on all cars. Mine is also like 10 years old and I imagine it’s getting harder and harder. (It being 10 years old also means there aren’t many 3G towers left around for it to talk to, but I’m not taking any chances.)