Modern tech, retro tech, 80s/90s music & nostalgia. I live in northern England so most things I post about have a UK slant.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • It’s a little more than 100€

    It’s half as much again! If your budget is that flexible you really should have mentioned it in the original post so that people could give you a wider range of options.

    Translate it up by a couple of orders of magnitude and you get “I want to buy a car, I have €10,000 to spend” … “I found one for €15,000, it’s a little bit more but …”



  • You don’t need a desktop for CAD anymore.

    Not for the raw processing power, but anyone doing serious CAD work is going to want at least a 21" monitor, relying on just the laptop screen is going to be difficult especially (and I speak as someone aged over 50 myself) as your eyes become less able to focus on fine details as you get older.

    So OP needs to decide if they’re going to want to use the machine for other things as well, in which case a laptop + external monitor might be fine, or if it’s a dedicated work/hobby CAD machine in which case why not get the desktop + monitor.


  • With flying cars we’d have the opportunity to take the human factor out of the equation, which is the cause of the vast majority of car crashes.

    Imagine we had never invented cars and trucks and highways and were just doing it now. Do you think we’d take these two ton death machines and say “let’s put them under control of an individual person, with all the distractions and fallibility and other problems we know we suffer from”? Or would be instead design a system where every single vehicle has a computer that is constantly in communication with all the other vehicles around it, and can react far quicker to any issue than a person could.

    The problem with self-driving cars is that they have to operate in a world where there are also human-driven cars, and cyclists, and pedestrians, etc. If the only things on the road were computer-controlled, it’s a completely different scenario. And that’s what we’d have with flying cars. At least I hope so!











  • Slackware. Version 3.1 if I remember rightly, with Linux kernel 2.19.x.

    It was installed from floppy disks, you needed about 10 of them to do a full install including X Windows.

    At the time (1997 or 1998) I only had dial up internet at home, so over the period of several days I brought blank floppies in to work, downloaded the relevant images and copied them on to the disks.

    I then spent most of a weekend trying to persuade an (even then elderly) PS/2 with 4 MB of RAM to become a Linux box. Got there in the end, though!