cronix

Joined 8 years ago

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Comment · 2 years ago

It took about 3 seconds to check. Pop open the case the tapes came in and look at the plastic window and you can easily see both reels. If the tape was all on the left reel, it was rewound. Just about all rental places did this when you returned the tape. Audio cassette tapes were the same way. The VHS cassette was basically just a larger version of an audio cassette with wider and longer tape.

Pic of rewound VHS: https://www.becomingminimalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/0...

Comment · 2 years ago

I fell in love with 3D Studio in the 90's. It was so intuitive to use compared to Lightwave3D for someone who didn't know what they were doing, but very curious and wanting to learn. A big challenge was getting it to run in windows 3.1 when that was released, but it did. Ah, and having to create a RAM drive to put the video into so you could actually watch it in real time without buffering at 320x200 (i386 days).

Comment · 2 years ago

And now US Steel is owned by Japan!

Comment · 2 years ago

One of the biggest "steps" I experienced was when SSD'd first came around. Suddenly "slow db queries" ran at light speed instead of taking 5+ seconds. It was quite physically noticeable and now it's not. You have to run EXPLAIN on everything to be sure.

Going back a bit further, I fondly remember my dad yelling "did you PARK the hard disk?" whenever he heard me power down the old TRS80 with "state of the art" 5 meg HD physically bigger than my first PC (which had a 40meg HD - dad was jealous). If you didn't manually issue a park command, the read/write head could flop around and cause damage if you bumped or moved the HD.

Comment · 2 years ago

You can track them with sites like FlightAware or FlightRadar24. Just zoom in to where your house is. Click on a plane. If it's not on the map, it likely isn't broadcasting ADSB

https://www.flightaware.com/

https://www.flightradar24.com

Comment · 2 years ago

> China permitted more coal power plants last year than any time in the last seven years, according to a new report released this week. It's the equivalent of about two new coal power plants per week. The report by energy data organizations Global Energy Monitor and the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air finds the country quadrupled the amount of new coal power approvals in 2022 compared to 2021.

> That's despite the fact that much of the world is getting off coal, says Flora Champenois, coal research analyst at Global Energy Monitor and one of the co-authors of the report.

> "Everybody else is moving away from coal and China seems to be stepping on the gas," she says. "We saw that China has six times as much plants starting construction as the rest of the world combined."