tfvlrue

6 ms·

1.
by tfvlrue 3mo ago
My college ThinkPad laptop had a trackpoint in the keyboard that I never used. The paradigm of "pushing" the cursor around by applying an acceleration vector just never clicked with me. I found the touchpad faster and more accurat
2.
by tfvlrue 7mo ago
I've been using this AutoHotKey script long enough that Ctrl+Shift+V has become a muscle memory for "paste without formatting". In case it's useful to anyone else, put this in a file (clipboard.ahk) and run it at startup
3.
by tfvlrue 8mo ago
In case anyone else is curious, since this is something I was always confused about until I looked it up just now: "Baud rate" refers to the symbol rate, that is the number of pulses of the analog signal per second. A signal that
4.
by tfvlrue 8mo ago
I was under the impression that a floppy disk is referring to the substrate that holds the data, not the cartridge that contains it. So a 3.5" floppy disk would be "floppy" in contrast to a 3.5" hard disk drive that has
5.
by tfvlrue 10mo ago
> how you used an oscilloscope to diagnose the ~1ghz bandwidth DOCSIS signals on broadband cable I should clarify that I didn't really do any _true_ diagnostic with the scope. Simply as an attempt to gather as much data as possible,
6.
by tfvlrue 10mo ago
I had a similar problem with a different ISP, Optimum, in Northern NJ. It wasn't as regular as the author's problem -- my cable modem would desync intermittently throughout the day despite the signal strength numbers being in spec
7.
by tfvlrue 11mo ago
> it's not able to do sync over LAN I'm curious what you mean by this. I've never had trouble syncing files with the Nextcloud client, inside or outside of my LAN. I didn't do anything special to make it work internal
8.
by tfvlrue 11mo ago
According to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZ8ehplVFp4&t=636 the handrail is driven by a friction wheel that wears out over time, so its diameter gradually decreases and the handrail speed slows down (until it gets to
9.
by tfvlrue 11mo ago
My (admittedly very, very limited) personal experience owning cars actually suggests cars are getting cheaper over the past couple decades. Specifically, my data looks like this: - A new Honda Accord LX in 2003 was ~$19k - A new Honda Accor
10.
by tfvlrue 11mo ago
Yep. Although I only have experience with the classic console (the one with physical buttons), I haven't used the touch screen model that superseded it.
11.
by tfvlrue 11mo ago
Some of my personal anecdata on this. I had an Ambient weather station that lasted only a couple years. First the wind speed sensor failed, and they replaced it under warranty. Then it failed again outside the warranty period. Next I believ
12.
by tfvlrue 1y ago
I have been using a Core One at home for the past six months or so, and have not had this experience at all. For me, it just works. I can send prints to it and it completes them, hands-off. It sounds like there may be a hardware problem wit
13.
by tfvlrue 1y ago
These commercial microwaves have a ceramic tray (transparent to microwaves) that the food sits on. It fills the entire bottom of the microwave. Underneath the tray is a small piece of metal bent into a particular shape attached to a spindle
14.
by tfvlrue 1y ago
In the past I remember that Excel not properly handling UTF-8 encoded text in a CSV. It would treat it as raw ASCII (or possibly code page 1252). So if you opened and saved a CSV, it would corrupt any Unicode text in the file. It's pos
15.
by tfvlrue 2y ago
A similar thing happened to my Brother laser printer. It has a tiny rubber piece inside that serves as a bumper to quiet down a component that clicks while the paper travels through the printer. Over time, it gets sticky and winds up holdin
16.
by tfvlrue 2y ago
> I don't understand what people are buying. I am also perplexed by this. As someone who obsessively tracks and categorizes all my spending, I have not observed a significant upward trend in my grocery spending. And I have data in a
17.
by tfvlrue 2y ago
Nope, not that I found. The set of fonts installed was _very_ limited. I can't remember the exact count, but I think it was less than 20. Nothing specialized like an OCR font.
18.
by tfvlrue 2y ago
> the source site seems to be hosted on an 30-year-old laptop You're not too far off :) It's actually hosted on super cheap shared VPS with only 768MB of RAM and a single CPU core. This is the first time it's seen any real
19.
by tfvlrue 2y ago
Author here. I was also surprised by this. I simplified the story a bit for brevity. I actually tried a bunch of different font styles, including a 47 page fax using a pretty large size Courier (with only 72 characters per line). The screen
20.
by tfvlrue 2y ago
Awesome sleuthing! Should we discover any more files to recover from the laptop, I may explore this avenue a bit further. If the ZTerm software is present, the trickiest part might be physically connecting the serial port to something else.
21.
by tfvlrue 2y ago
Nope! That's a good idea though. The transcription errors I was getting were not consistent. Like, D would be O or 0 or D, with no apparent rhyme or reason to it. And the turnaround time on each fax attempt was long enough that I focus
22.
by tfvlrue 2y ago
This is great! I'm amazed that someone else has solved the same problem in a different context. Good stuff.
23.
by tfvlrue 2y ago
Author here. It's a good question. It probably does, but I admit I'm not familiar with Zmodem. I don't recall finding a terminal application installed on the laptop, but maybe I just wasn't looking hard enough.
24.
by tfvlrue 2y ago
Author here. Admittedly I didn't explore this avenue very deeply. I was more focused on accomplishing this with parts I had on hand. A quick search yielded this result, which does confirm it's absolutely possible to adapt the driv
25.
by tfvlrue 2y ago
Author here. Seeing how difficult it was to get a reliable OCR transcription with commercial software from a pristine, computer-generated representation of the text, I suspect trying to OCR photos would be even less reliable :) I simplified
26.
How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop(unterminated.com)
607 points by tfvlrue 2y ago|261 comments
27.
by tfvlrue 3y ago
Treat this study with a grain of salt. The Environmental Working Group is essentially a lobbying group for the organic food industry. They tend to stigmatize "conventional" farming in pseudo-scientific ways to make organic food se
28.
by tfvlrue 3y ago
This is impressive. Very cool. Poking around a bit, I noticed that some of the geotagged articles are from other planets. For example, north of Alaska are a bunch of craters from Mercury. Makes me think that an interesting feature could be
29.
by tfvlrue 3y ago
https://www.unterminated.com Showcases a few projects I've made, and some food adventures. I have plans to write more, but it's slow going :)
30.
by tfvlrue 3y ago
I'm curious if you mean the 15 cents per kwh estimate is too high or too low? It's a conservative average for me in upstate NY over the past ~15 years. If you're using electric resistance heat, then I suppose a running comput

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