I had the same problem when my previous Brother printer was nearly ten years old, I did the same trick, and it worked. Most components might last almost forever, but things like rubber or glue, not so much.
My brother passed a few years ago. I was able to "memorialize" his Facebook account, or whatever they call that term. Found a link on their web site, uploaded a scanned copy of the death certificate, and within a day or so the title to his page was changed to something like "Remembering Joe Blow..." People could still post on his page, but nobody could log in under his name (just in case his account got hacked or something). It was pretty easy to do.
I had a job in 1982 or so that involved programming in Forth. It kinda made sense at the time to my young impressionable self, and one of the old timers thought it was ideal for what we were working on at the time. It all ran on a single thread; I don't even recall it having interrupts. I can't imagine using it for anything practical today.
Holy cow. I also worked at MDH Industries, for a few years starting in 1981 or so. That was also the first and only time I ever programming in Forth, doing embedded code for a new radiation calibration machine they were coming out with. Howard Marshall was the most brilliant analog circuit designer I have ever met; it was only decades later that I realized his connection with J. Howard Marshall the oil tycoon, Anna Nichole Smith, and all that.
Doesn't seem likely. All data received from the craft is recorded, so it doesn't need to be decoded in real time, and if the spacecraft has the hardware to encode it at some rate then it's quite likely that we would have hardware here on earth that could decode it at that same rate.
I was diagnosed with prostate cancer when I was about 57. I had had somewhat regular "finger up the butt" exams prior to that, since I was about 45, which were all negative. Then a PSA blood test test came back positive and I then had a biopsy done (no fun, trust me). Because I was still in my 50's I needed to do something beyond just continuing to monitor it. Between radiation treatment and a prostatectomy I chose the latter. Eight years or so later my PSA tests are still negative, knock on wood. Lesson learned, I think, is to get a simple PSA blood test done regularly once you've reached a certain age.
I used Forth for a while in the early 80's, but I don't miss it.
It took a while to get used to it, but since everything I had done before that had been assembly language or interpreted Basic, it wasn't a steep curve.
I remember doing things like writing code to take a string that was to be printed on a small dot matrix printer, like what you would find in a cash register, and flipping it upside down because the printer was physically mounted upside down in the final product but they wanted the print to be right side up when the tape exited the machine.
My father was a physicist, working for Westinghouse for many years when they did R&D in phosphors & other lighting. When I was a kid in the 60's he had a combination darkroom and chemistry lab in our basement. Every Sunday afternoon was dedicated to a chemistry demonstration. We kids were mostly interested in the experiments that went boom, of course. He had a shelf of chemicals of all sorts; liquid mercury, various acids, you name it. I guess he just "borrowed" them from his lab at the office. We would make hydrogen balloons by mixing zinc with hydrochloric acid in an empty coke bottle. We would grew walnut sized crystals of copper sulphate and other molecules. He bought a giant Fresnel lens from Edmund Scientific that we would use to melt lead using just the sun.
When I became a father I would do things like the ammonium dichromate volcano for my kids; now you can't even buy that stuff anymore without being suspected of terrorism.
I'm in my sixties. I haven't been in a Howard Johnson's since I was a kid, but I distinctly remember the smell when walking into one, the smell of fried clams. It told me that we were on a vacation trip.
Circa 1975-976, as best as I can remember, a magazine (Popular Electronics maybe, or that other one?), had an article about building a Pong game, complete with extensive schematics. There was zero code involved. It was comprised of pretty much nothing but TTL chips in DIP packages and maybe an oscillator or two. I imagined I could build it in my basement. Of course I never did.
Back in my scout leader days we would buy Swiss Army knives by the bucketful at TSA auctions and give them to scouts as goodies after jamborees & what not. I swear the TSA must confiscate a thousand a day.