My college ThinkPad laptop had a trackpoint in the keyboard that I never used. The paradigm of "pushing" the cursor around by applying an acceleration vector just never clicked with me. I found the touchpad faster and more accurate/predictable, and learned to be quite proficient with it, so I never used the trackpoint.
It also didn't help that (at least for the T-series of the era) the trackpoint nib had a reputation for causing a bright spot on the LCD within a year or two, from the contact pressure when the lid was closed. I removed the rubber cover to avoid the screen damage, which guaranteed I would never use it.
I get that some people like it, but those are my two reasons for not :)
I've been using this AutoHotKey script long enough that Ctrl+Shift+V has become a muscle memory for "paste without formatting". In case it's useful to anyone else, put this in a file (clipboard.ahk) and run it at startup:
^+v::
Clipboard:=Clipboard
Send ^v
That way, it works globally, it's not dependent on any particular application implementing it.
In case anyone else is curious, since this is something I was always confused about until I looked it up just now:
"Baud rate" refers to the symbol rate, that is the number of pulses of the analog signal per second. A signal that has two voltage states can convey two bits of information per symbol.
"Bit rate" refers to the amount of digital data conveyed. If there are two states per symbol, then the baud rate and bit rate are equivalent. 56K modems used 7 bits per symbol, so the bit rate was 7x the baud rate.
I was under the impression that a floppy disk is referring to the substrate that holds the data, not the cartridge that contains it. So a 3.5" floppy disk would be "floppy" in contrast to a 3.5" hard disk drive that has rigid metal or glass platters.
This nomenclature could be a regional thing though (I'm from the US).
> how you used an oscilloscope to diagnose the ~1ghz bandwidth DOCSIS signals on broadband cable
I should clarify that I didn't really do any _true_ diagnostic with the scope. Simply as an attempt to gather as much data as possible, I connected the oscilloscope to see what the signals looked like. And, because, why not. I had driven 2+ hours to get there, might as well try everything! I didn't expect it to actually be able to decode the signals. I was surprised to find a correlation between the modem losing sync and a visually-distinct pattern appearing on the scope though.
I had a similar problem with a different ISP, Optimum, in Northern NJ. It wasn't as regular as the author's problem -- my cable modem would desync intermittently throughout the day despite the signal strength numbers being in spec.
I replaced everything downstream of the drop from the street, all new wiring inside, a new modem/router/etc. All signs pointed to the problem being outside the house. I went so far as to connect an oscilloscope to the coax line to look for patterns. I discovered that if I physically manipulated a particular section of the line from the pole, a huge interference pattern appeared and the modem's connection dropped. Eventually I could reproduce the connection loss fairly easily.
Convincing the ISP to actually do anything about it was much harder. Despite first-hand evidence that the coax from the pole needed to be replaced, their tech support insisted that someone had to come into the house to inspect the interior wiring. No amount of insistence on my part would convince them that it was not necessary. The building was a vacation home, and this was during peak COVID time, so there was basically no chance of that happening. The appointment came with threats of service charges if they sent a tech and could not enter the building or reproduce the problem, so I cancelled it.
Coincidentally, I happened to discover that the mayor of the town had started a hotline specifically for reporting home Internet problems in the town. So I sent in a message to that service, not really expecting anything to come of it. But shortly after I get a phone call from some higher-up department of the ISP. They had a truck out within a few days to replace the drop -- with no one home -- and the connection was rock solid ever since.
This experience taught me that ISPs often have distinct support channels that governmental departments use to contact them. I think they called it the "executive support team" or something along those lines. Basically, if you can get a message in that way, it's possible to circumvent the useless consumer-level support. Long story short, I think escalating this through the local or state level government may be the author's best shot at getting this resolved.
I'm curious what you mean by this. I've never had trouble syncing files with the Nextcloud client, inside or outside of my LAN. I didn't do anything special to make it work internally. It's definitely not the fastest thing ever, but it works pretty seamlessly in my experience.
According to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZ8ehplVFp4&t=636 the handrail is driven by a friction wheel that wears out over time, so its diameter gradually decreases and the handrail speed slows down (until it gets too out of sync, and the friction wheel is replaced).
My (admittedly very, very limited) personal experience owning cars actually suggests cars are getting cheaper over the past couple decades. Specifically, my data looks like this:
- A new Honda Accord LX in 2003 was ~$19k
- A new Honda Accord LX in 2020 was ~$23k
In today's dollars, that's roughly $33k and $29k, respectively. These numbers are very approximate, but it means the same car model in 2020 was about 12% less expensive than the one in 2003. And the new version has a whole lot of improvements and features the old one didn't. (They cheaped out and removed the lock from the glove compartment though!)
Stepping back and thinking about the complexities that go into manufacturing a modern automobile, it's wild to me that they can cost so little compared to what you get. It's a machine that can travel 200+ thousand miles and last for decades with barely any maintenance.
Commercial-scale vehicles (semi trucks, busses) cost an order of magnitude more than personal vehicles, yet share many of the same complexities. Like, how are cars so cheap for what they are? Manufacturing volume, I guess.
Yep. Although I only have experience with the classic console (the one with physical buttons), I haven't used the touch screen model that superseded it.
Some of my personal anecdata on this. I had an Ambient weather station that lasted only a couple years. First the wind speed sensor failed, and they replaced it under warranty. Then it failed again outside the warranty period. Next I believe the temperature sensor failed, and then finally the indoor console completely stopped working (the display no longer showed anything). Even when it worked, it had intermittent connectivity outages despite being <100 ft from the sensor array (and more-or-less line of sight through a window).
After that experience, I replaced it with a Davis Instruments Vantage Vue, which has been running for 10 years without a single issue. Just needs periodic cleaning and battery replacements. Someone also made a device that goes inside the console to provide local access to the weather station (for Home Assistant integration, for example). It's called WifiLogger2. Pricy, but recommended if you want to pull the data from the console easily. I've also set up two more of these weather stations for family, and they've been similarly stable. So my experience with Ambient Weather left a bad taste. I'd rather pay the higher cost for Davis Instruments hardware that I know will work for a long time, than roll the dice with Ambient Weather ever again.
It's also telling that a search for "davis instruments weather station" on Amazon suggests the WS-2902, followed by actual Davis Instruments products. I imagine Ambient Weather is spending a lot of money for that search placement.
I have been using a Core One at home for the past six months or so, and have not had this experience at all. For me, it just works. I can send prints to it and it completes them, hands-off.
It sounds like there may be a hardware problem with your printer. Did you buy it assembled or do it yourself? You may want to contact Prusa about this, because I can confirm this is not normal behavior for this printer.
These commercial microwaves have a ceramic tray (transparent to microwaves) that the food sits on. It fills the entire bottom of the microwave. Underneath the tray is a small piece of metal bent into a particular shape attached to a spindle that rotates. The idea being that it spins around the reflected microwaves rather than the food itself.
In the past I remember that Excel not properly handling UTF-8 encoded text in a CSV. It would treat it as raw ASCII (or possibly code page 1252). So if you opened and saved a CSV, it would corrupt any Unicode text in the file. It's possible this has been fixed in newer versions, I haven't tried in a while.
A similar thing happened to my Brother laser printer. It has a tiny rubber piece inside that serves as a bumper to quiet down a component that clicks while the paper travels through the printer. Over time, it gets sticky and winds up holding the component too long, which confuses the printer into thinking it has a paper jam, causing it to suddenly abort the print job partway through. The fix was to simply remove the rubber pad and it was back to normal -- albeit a little "clickier" than when it started!
I am also perplexed by this. As someone who obsessively tracks and categorizes all my spending, I have not observed a significant upward trend in my grocery spending. And I have data in a spreadsheet which confirms this. I'm honestly not sure what I'm doing so differently than the general population which perceives prices as skyrocketing.
While most goods are slightly more expensive, egg prices have been a notable outlier, which I believe was more an effect of culling due to bird flu rather than inflationary. If anything, the most notable cost increases I've observed are in restaurants and takeout places, not grocery stores.
It's entirely possible these costs are highly region-specific, so it's interesting to hear different takes on it.
Nope, not that I found. The set of fonts installed was _very_ limited. I can't remember the exact count, but I think it was less than 20. Nothing specialized like an OCR font.
> the source site seems to be hosted on an 30-year-old laptop
You're not too far off :)
It's actually hosted on super cheap shared VPS with only 768MB of RAM and a single CPU core. This is the first time it's seen any real heavy traffic, and all considered I think it did pretty well with such limited resources.
I did a little postmortem investigation and, surprisingly, it wasn't CPU-bound. A low memory condition killed the database service a couple times. It looks like PHP-FPM was set to scale too aggressively. For the future I've reduced the number of workers it can spawn. Server administration is not my specialty, so this was a fun learning experience!
I simplified the story a bit for brevity. I actually tried a bunch of different font styles, including a 47 page fax using a pretty large size Courier (with only 72 characters per line). The screenshots from the blog post were after the point I decided OCR wasn't working, so I was using a heavily reduced font size to optimize the transfer time. Hence the characters looked like barely-legible blobs.
The Fax-to-Binary converter isn't doing anything particularly complicated with the image, just breaking it up into an accurately-aligned grid and hashing the pixel data of each tile.
Replacing the characters in the document hadn't occurred to me at the time! It's a good idea, but for my programmer brain, writing this software was the easier (and more fun) solution :)
Should we discover any more files to recover from the laptop, I may explore this avenue a bit further. If the ZTerm software is present, the trickiest part might be physically connecting the serial port to something else. Not an insurmountable problem.
It also didn't help that (at least for the T-series of the era) the trackpoint nib had a reputation for causing a bright spot on the LCD within a year or two, from the contact pressure when the lid was closed. I removed the rubber cover to avoid the screen damage, which guaranteed I would never use it.
I get that some people like it, but those are my two reasons for not :)