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They used to not be considered strange, but I now work 8+ hours per day, own a home, and don't do social media.
"One man's wage rise is another man's price increase." - Harold Wilson
"Fireproof doesn't mean the fire will never come. It means when the fire comes that you will be able to withstand it." - Michael Simmons
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him." - James D. Miles
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Why does this feel like a survey coming straight from 1997?
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Nothing I do is strange - I'm a computer nerd...
"It never ceases to amaze me that a spacecraft launched in 1977 can be fixed remotely from Earth." ― Brian Cox
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Never! It's all other people that are starnge! 
Ok, I have had my coffee, so you can all come out now!
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Back in the day, I wrote my own versions of some C string functions (which didn't blow up on NULL)...
# define strlen safe_strlen
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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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What best place to build moisture vaporators than one that looks like Tatooine?
GCS/GE d--(d) s-/+ a C+++ U+++ P-- L+@ E-- W+++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- r+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
The shortest horror story: On Error Resume Next
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I find myself ambivalent about this. On the one hand, water is a basic need, so finding ways to provide it seems like it should be a no-brainer. On the other hand, if you're taking water out of the system here, then it's not available there, when it always was before, possibly creating an unintended consequence. I'm guessing if its only used for small populations, then the net effect will not be substantial. But at some point, surely someone will be wondering "Where's my water gone?".
"A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants"
Chuckles the clown
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If we assume that the relative humidity in desert air is 10%, that would mean that 22.4 liters of air at 25 degrees centigrade would contain 2.24 liters of water vapour, or about 0.040 liters of liquid water. We therefore need to process 560 liters of air to get 1 liter of water, or 560 cubic meters of air to get 1,000 liters.
The average domestic water usage in Israel (pop. 10,000,000) is about 100 liters a day, so supplying the entire country with water (assuming that the entire country were a desert, which it isn't) would require 560,000,000 cubic meters of air a day, spread out over the entire country. This is a cube 825 meters on a side, daily. Given that the area of Israel is about 25,000 square kilometers, and that a lot of the water will evaporate after use, I'm not worried about any climate effects.
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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Did you try plugging it in and out ?
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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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