DAK catalogs were wild. Each item had a magazine article length description that was clearly bullshit. But by the end you’re certain that the constant emptiness you feel is from not owning the World’s Best 16 Channel Stereo Graphic Equalizer.

You’re gonna carry that weight

Then they trip balls, see their life flash before their eyes, and become a space baby. Could be worse.

Up until a few years ago there was a local urologist named Richard Chop, and Dr. Peter Ruff is still seeing clients. Nominative determinism is a thing.

You’re welcome.

20 years ago the pocketable digital cameras that took over the consumer market didn’t have hot shoes. 30 years ago the compact point and shoot viewfinders that were the weapon of choice for vacationing didn’t have hot shoes. Today neither are relevant and are all outclassed by smartphones, and there is hardly a consumer camera market.

You don’t have to spend five figures for that exposure, but it’s going to be an intentional hobby.

The intersection of people who aren’t five figures into photography and know what a hot shoe is, and people who recognize a wall mount phone trend old.

Correct. We’ve replaced all our incandescent bulbs except for two 60w contractor bulbs in the a hallway that were installed when the house was built 18 years ago. All of the original higher wattage incandescents died within the first couple of years.

The C64 had a notoriously garbage power supply that would eventually cook the machine regardless of how clean your line power is.

A large green pushbutton with a Molly guard labeled “OK” I found in a scrap pile behind the physics building.

Oh man. Huge company I used to work for had:

• two separate Okta instances. It was a coin toss as to which one you’d need for any given service

• oh, and a third internally developed federated login service for other stuff

• 90 day expiry for all of the above passwords

• two different corporate IM systems, again coin toss depending on what team you’re working with

• nannyware everywhere. Open Performance Monitor and watch network activity spike anytime you move your mouse or hit a key

• an internally developed secure document system used by an international division that we were instructed to never ever use. We were told by IT that it “does something to the PC at a hardware level if you install the reader and open a document” which would cause a PC to be banned from the network until we get it replaced. Sounds hyperbolic, but plausible given the rest of the mess.

• required a mobile authenticator app for some of the above services, yet the company expected that us grunts use our personal devices for this purpose.

• all of the above and more, yet we were encouraged to use any cloud hosted password manager of our choosing.

Nonfiction oldies that still hold up: The Cuckoo’s Egg by Clifford Stoll and The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder.

Oh, like back in the Before Times when everything was statically linked?

Have some compassion.

Fraud is highly addictive. He needs to be in a fraud rehab center where trained professionals can step him down from treason to committing misdemeanors in a safe, controlled environment.

Guy wouldn’t know majesty if it bit him in the face.

…with slides.

Apple historically can’t or won’t bring mixed signal design in-house. It could be related to patents, standards compliance, or the much more complicated silicon design, DV, and test for analog vs digital. It’s not just the modem either. The bulk of Cirrus Logic’s business nowadays is making audio, haptics, and focus servo chips for Apple, and if Apple ever went vertical with those components Cirrus would collapse overnight. Yet Apple has been buying custom audio chips from them for over 30 years, so obviously this isn’t a new trend.

Thinkpad intensifies

Clbuttic.

Wrote a TSR to beep the speaker gradually longer every time a key is pressed. The programming teacher assumed excessive beeping meant you were playing some sort of game. I’d run it on the PC I was using before class was over to get the next kid to sit there in trouble.