I remember my grandad and uncles purchasing dynamite and blasting caps over the counter at the local hardware store, no ID required or even asked for. Usually they just bought enough to set off their own mix of ANFO, though ... made a better bang for rolling Redwood stumps out of the ground.
Posts by jake
26713 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007
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Fixing an upside-down USB plug: A case of supporting the insupportable
Block this: Using satellites to plaster ads over our skies could work, say boffins
Re: Nothing new...
Skywriting still exists. I know a couple dudes who do it here in Northern California. My much modified A152 has smoke capability, but I've never seen a need for it. I should probably pull it to save a couple pounds.
The "dot matrix" version is called "sky typing", and also still available.
Towing banners goes back to the dawn of flight.
I've never seen an airplane towing a blimp, and is still available.
Have a beer for that last one ...
Re: what's old is new again
About fifteen years ago (or thereabouts) a company called "Moon Publicity" was going to sell advertising on the Moon itself, using a technology they called "Shadow Sculpting". These forever visible adverts were supposedly going to be sold for as little as $46,000 each.
I have no idea what happened to the company, I assume they folded after "suddenly" discovering that it would cost far more than $46,000 just to survey the regolith to be sculpted ... But not before the owners trousered a couple million from credulous investors, of course.
Make your neighbor think their house is haunted by blinking their Ikea smart bulbs
No, working in IT does not mean you can fix anything with a soldering iron
Re: Phone Cabling
Many moons ago, I dated a gal who had been married to a gynecologist. At some point the obvious subject came up. She seemingly changed the subject, and asked if I would look at her new computer, she couldn't get Procomm to cooperate with BIX. I asked something brilliant, like "What, now? I thought we were going out!" ... then the ball dropped.
There is a reason that jokes about the mechanic's car not running, the plumber's pipes leaking and the electrician's fuses blowing exist ...
Not just American, but proper English, too.
I believe it was Henry Watson Fowler (the great English lexicographical genius) who wrote "solder without the "L" was the only pronunciation I have ever heard, except from the half-educated to whom spelling is a final court of appeal ... " and was baffled by the OED's statement that it was the American usage.
As the OED puts it (paraphrasing to avoid copyright hissy-fits): The modern form in English is a re-Latinization from the early 15c. The loss of the Latin L in that position in Old French is regular, as poudre from pulverem, cou from collum, chaud from calidus.
Charge a future EV in less than five minutes – using literally cool NASA tech
"Not ideal for long-distance travel."
Depends entirely on what you are hauling and what you mean by long distance.
Mom, dad, 2.7 kids+dawg(s), towing a boat, with kit for a three day weekend ... I see this combination by the hundreds on Hwy 121 and 128, heading for Lake Barryessa on warm summer weekends (9 or 10 months of the year here in Northern California). Even more on Hwy 80 heading for Tahoe, or on 50 heading for Comanche, and more heading to all the other lakes in the Sierra. Sadly, the station wagon is long gone.
And of course, EVs are shit at towing ... Well, to be more accurate, they are GOOD at towing (gobs of low end torque, and they are heavy with a low center of gravity), but their range goes to shit in a hurry, making them all but useless as tow vehicles.
Linux 6.1: Rust to hit mainline kernel
To be clear ...
This isn't "Rust is officially a Mainline Linux Kernel Language!", per se. Rather, it's "Rust might show up in some drivers, eventually. Maybe. If anybody (the vast majority of whom are very well versed in C) can be arsed."
Rust will not get into the kernel until it has full GCC support. And we all know how the Rust community feels about working with GCC, which is written in the much hated and vilified C (BOO! HISS!). Last I heard, there were only two developers actively working on this, with an experimental partial Rust GCC front-end expected by mid-summer next year. Maybe.
No, Mainline kernel development is not moving to llvm/clang anytime soon. Not enough hardware support.
SUSE wheels out first public prototype of its server Linux distro, asks for feedback
Re: Pardon?
But feoll was a part of Old English right from the git-go. If that's not English, I don't know what is.
Remember, Modern English is mostly an amalgam of Celtic, Latin, Greek, Ænglisc ("Old English"), Saxon, Frisian, (old)Norse, (old(high)) German, (old)Dutch, and French. Not necessarily in that order.
Yes, there are other languages involved. I said "mostly" for a reason.
Re: Pardon?
"Autumn" is from the Latin, via French, and is not English at all.
"Fall" is from the Old English "feoll", and is very English indeed, although the time of year was more often referred to as "harvest", or hærfest, back then.
Pardon while I get back to work ... we're in the middle of crush at the moment. Cheers!
Boffins hunt and kill cockroaches with machine vision laser
Re: Dinner?
Not dinner, rather a snack. Crickets, anyway ... the dried ones taste & crunch almost exactly like popcorn with a hint of dried shrimp[0]. I toss 'em with a little salt and some chili powder[1], and sometimes throw in a little lime zest. Tasty, cheap, and nutritious. What's not to like? You can easily find them online as "Chapulines", if you have the mind to do so.
Yes, they go well with beer.
I've never tried cockroaches, nor is it high on my list of things to do. Somehow I suspect that laser braising isn't going to change this anytime soon.
[0] The ones a friend sends me from Mexico, anyway.
[1] Often jalapino, but sometimes I'll go hotter. Depends on who I'm sharing with.
"more effective and environmental friendly approaches are needed"
I know of a much more effective and environmentally friendly approach. Far, far cheaper, too. And doesn't require electricity. Non-toxic to humans and other animals (keep it away from your bees, pet tranatula, friendly neighborhood scorpions, and ant farm).
Simply dust the affected area with DE.
About $20/10lbs at your local farm store.
Ohno, flatso
California to phase out gas furnaces, water heaters by 2030
"requiring them to hook up or their property will be condemned."
Shouldn't be happening in California anymore. Changes to Title 24 should have put a stop to that. Mind you, you still have to pass the inspection, which can be quite draconian. Especially local laws that only exist to fill the coffers. Suggestion: Do homework BEFORE purchasing that "perfect" off-grid retirement property.
This rumor needs to Die Hard: Bruce Willis denies selling face to deepfake biz
Removing an obsolete AMD fix makes Linux kernel 6 quicker
Re: The older the OS...
"Forms of "old" with final -e are given in the OED from about 1200 to 1530."
Yeah, but ... "English" wasn't really standardized until relatively recently ... some say as late as the 18th century, some say it still hasn't been. People often wrote phonetically, according to their local accent. The widespread use of the printing press helped everybody get on the same page (as it were), improving basic literacy world-wide over the decades. (Only to have Web Forums come along and completely fuck that trend up ... but that's a rant for another day.)
But I digress ... The (few) examples of "olde" prior to the mid-1880s were not Ecclesiastical, nor collegiate in nature. Most likely they were missplelings by under-educated scribes, but they could have been regional (perhaps phonetic) differences. Unfortunately, there aren't enough examples out there to say whether or not it was "normal, and thus a part of English as she was writ, or not.
Most linguists say the jury is still out, but lean heavily towards "no, "olde" was just a misspelling on a few surviving documents from that era".
Re: The older the OS...
The 16-bit PC/GEOS[0] operating system (later just GEOS, then Geoworks Ensemble) ain't nerdcore. Early AOL floppies came with a runtime version of PC/GEOS that could be modified to become HDD bootable. I know a couple of folks who used this as a primary GUI to get computer illiterate folks online.
You want nerdcore? Try DesqView. Ran Win3.x in a window.
[0] Note that the 8-bit software also called GEOS, and from the same company, for the C-64 and Apple ][, is a completely separate code base and mostly incompatible with the later 16-bit code.
Whatever happened to???
Girls Who Code books 'banned' in some US classrooms
Those screws on the Apple Watch Ultra are a red herring
The last time I put on a suit and tie was when I got married (MeDearOldMum insisted on "nice" family photos. If tied down and forced to talk, I'll admit that I'm glad she did. Made the family happy.)
The next time I put on a suit and tie will be when they put me in a box. Somebody will have to donate the suit and tie. I don't own any.
The last 9-5 I interviewed for (in 1989), I was wearing my racing leathers. When the interviewer queried my choice of "uniform", I pointed out that he had asked me to drive up from Palo Alto to South San Francisco by 10AM ... and had called at 9AM. I knew I could make it on the bike, but there was no way I was driving the Bayshore without armor ... I got the job.
The 9-5 prior to that, I wore the same outfit, for similar reasons. When queried, I responded along the lines of "are you hiring an engineer or a fashion plate?" ... They made me an offer. I counter offered, they hired me at my price point ...
Around these here parts, dangly bits on socks would be attacked & killed by the cats.
Scientists, why not simply invent a working fusion plant using $50m from Uncle Sam
Re: At least it's only $50m ...
It's the Royal "my". Consider:
I pay my share of US taxes, according to current tax law (and my CPA), same as everybody else ought to.
Once the Government gets their greedy mitts on it, "we, the people" STILL own it, all, by definition. Including this little 50 mil subset.
So yes, it's MINE. It also belongs to every other citizen who pays their taxes.
Beer?
My deductions as a farmer/rancher are codified into Law. I am law abiding.
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