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Do you ever do strange things because you're a computer nerd?
For those of us here who may consider ourselves to be
computer nerds, what unusual things do you do?
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Israel's H2OLL unveils first full-scale water-from-air system in Negev
Water traps. And in a Fremen sietch!
(The Bedouin consider themselves the only free people, because they aren't tied to the land. Frank Herbert based his Fremen on them)
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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I went to visit my sister and her fam today. I arrived as usual, bearing gifts, among them a 7" ESP32 based display+MCU combo for use as a CPU/GPU monitor.
Thing worked great on my desktop last time I tried it.
Got it hooked up to my laptop and it just hangs.
So now I have to take it back home with me to bang on it more.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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I can't understand it; it works on my system. 
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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That hasn't happened to me in a number of years, to be fair, but it's never a convenient time when it happens. 
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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Murphy's law.
Anything that can go wrong will go wrong at the worst possible moment. (usually important demos, version 1.0 releases, "no sweat system updates"... etc.)
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exactly
"A little time, a little trouble, your better day"
Badfinger
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Now to find that particular dll or registry entry which is hiding deep inside your system. And perhaps that holds the magic wand 🪄 to make it work on the other system.
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I'm about to install QEMU KVM... in WSL... in Windows 11. It'll be Windows 11 > WSL > Debian 12 > Debian 12, so I can reset the inner Debian VM while testing some install scripts. 
Imagine having this chat with devs in the 1960s.
Yeah, I could just install VMWare... but we're going for cool points. And what's life without cool points?
Jeremy Falcon
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Jeremy Falcon wrote: devs in the 1960s.
Wrote my first program in LEO III* machine code in 1966.
*The LEO III was a great machine, 16K of core memory, no rotating storage (other than magnetic tape), filled a huge air-conditioned room, and played music through a speaker on the main CPU control panel.
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Richard MacCutchan wrote: Wrote my first program in LEO III* machine code in 1966.
You da man.  Or should I say?
01011001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01100100 01100001 00100000 01101101 01100001 01101110 00101110
Real talk, there is something magical about the early days of computing. Back when it was the wild west and being a part of something new.
Jeremy Falcon
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Richard MacCutchan wrote: *The LEO III was a great machine, 16K of core memory, no rotating storage (other than magnetic tape), filled a huge air-conditioned room, and played music through a speaker on the main CPU control panel.
Sorry, I blazed over this part. Us youngins and our attention spans. 
That's really cool actually. Back when you didn't waste memory or disk space either. Nowadays we got Blu-rays that hold a 100GB and we think that's chump change. All so we can store stuff that's probably 90% useless.
Jeremy Falcon
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From wikipedia:
CPU @ 500 kHz
Memory 2K (2048) 35-bit words (i.e., 83⁄4 kilobytes) (ultrasonic delay-line memory based on tanks of mercury)
Good lord! And that was probably state of the art at the time.
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It was. If the mercury tanks were open, working in that room must have been more dangerous than being a hatter in the Good Old Days. 
(The mad hatter of Alice in Wonderland fame was mad because of the mercury used in those days to make hats. Mercury is known today as a neurological poison.)
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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I think "tanks" is a very misleading term. It should rather be called a "tube" - you can see a photo of one at Mercury delay tube[^]. The tube is is capped in one end by an electric transducer (actuator) producing pressure waves in the mercury, in the other end by a sensor converting the waves back to an electric signal. If the tube wasn't closed, the device wouldn't work, or would work poorly.
The tube in the photo is referred to as a 'short mercury delay tube'. I've got other photos of such tubes, and they are indeed longer. The length of the tube sets its storage capacity. There was an obvious tradeoff: Once you put some data value into the actuator end of the tube, it is unavailable until it comes out of the other end. So a long tube gives you more storage capacity, but slower operation. Other photos of such tubes show 'fans' of rows of tubes: If you could afford it, you would rather use many short tubes in parallel than fewer long ones.
Long tubes would slow down your computer to the speed of wave propagation through mercury The device was directly based on the low wave propagation speed. The actuator can transmit several hundred or thousand bits (waves) before the first one reaches the sensor in the other end. When it comes out, it it is immediately cycled back to the actuator - but you may steal a copy for copying into a register, or you may replace it with bits from a register rather than the value that comes from a sensor. One article from 1951 says that each tube holds '16 45-digit numbers', which I assume means is decimal digits. This article has a photo of the short tube in the link, as well as two longer tubes but otherwise identically looking. It doesn't indicate which length holds 16 numbers.
(This 1951 article also has a photo of a magnetic storage device from the Manchester computer: Along the rim, the cylinder has "20 rows of digits, each row of 2560 digits in the binary system. To realize how compact the unit is, note that the height of the cylinder is no more than 5 cm.")
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
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I started out in front of an Altair 8800 entering machine instructions with switches and staring at the lights.
A home without books is a body without soul. Marcus Tullius Cicero
PartsBin an Electronics Part Organizer - Release Version 1.4.0 (Many new features) JaxCoder.com
Latest Article: EventAggregator
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Respect, my brother in arms... I mean bytes. 
Jeremy Falcon
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I have 3 small furry laptops, and a home free of bugs as a consequence - despite the windows being open all summer.
In exchange I feed them and change their litterboxes.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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They also provide entertainment and stress relief (sometimes).
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I've got two of those laptops, and one large floor model. The laptops provide rodent control, the latter wet kisses and ball retrieval services.
There are no solutions, only trade-offs. - Thomas Sowell
A day can really slip by when you're deliberately avoiding what you're supposed to do.
- Calvin (Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes)
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This looks a lot like a site driving attempt.
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Yeah, his profile says US. Not sure if he noticed or not, but most people speak English in the US.
Jeremy Falcon
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Default profile of a new registrant is likely US, and most new users don't prefer to change it to their country of citizenry, because this is an opportunity to attend least virtually become a US resident.
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