farhaven

> The gap between WW2 rocket development and now is so long that German history with rockets may as well not exist.

And yet, all currently existing rocket designs capable of reaching (and staying in) orbit can trace their design back to the Aggregat 4 and the engineers (and slave labour) that built it.

My setup was a Compaq Armada M300 laptop with a keyboard that was missing a few key caps, a battery that was shot to all hell and held only 5 minutes of charge, and a HDD that was completely broken.

I used a 128 MB USB stick for settings and my home directory, and had a Knoppix disc in the CD drive at all times.

It did indeed run pretty well, at least well enough for me to play around with it as a 14-15 year old kid and until I had finally saved up enough money to get me a new (used) 20GB HDD on eBay.

Good times. I kinda miss it.

> doctors/hospital strongly prefer it.

Seems to depend a lot on the hospital. We (partner is pregnant with a high risk pregnancy) were at a level 1 prenatal care center in Germany a few weeks ago where they very much insisted that in her and the child's condition, a c-section is pretty much her only option.

We're now in a different, also level 1, prenatal care center, also in Germany (though a different state), where the prevailing medical opinion is "natural birth should work perfectly fine for you. We're not ruling out a c-section in case things go sideways, but natural birth is very much our preferred option in your case."

The first center seems to be quite keen on using as many cases as possible for training their staff in c-sections, even where it's not strictly necessary/beneficial. At least that's what we've heard from other parents in similar situations.

> Congress has become a radical leftist politics playground.

I don't know which past Chaos Communication Congresses you have attended, but it always was. If that's not for you, then that's too bad.

> The one thing you cannot ever do is go to CCC and express any idea that isn't very far left. That is a very certain way to get thrown out.

Opinions that people get thrown out for are not "I love my country" or "hey, maybe immigration should be handled differently". They're things like "Hitler was ok, actually". And IMO if a conference doesn't throw you out for _that_, it's not one worth attending.

OpenBSD is a lot faster in some specialized areas though. Random number generation from `/dev/urandom`, for example. When I was at university (in 2010 or so), it was faster to read `/dev/urandom` on my OpenBSD laptop and pipe it over ethernet to a friend's Linux laptop than running `cat /dev/urandom > /dev/sda` directly on his.

Not by just a bit, but it was a difference between 10MB/s and 100MB/s.

> Two cells was probably selected for one of: Voltage to avoid boost converters, capacity to avoid having to do extensive power optimization to make it run the whole event, balance to make it hang even off your neck.

It's likely not voltage because they're connected in parallel.

Well they can still be a conductor, even if they're not a resistor. Actually they'd be a pretty good conductor. A super-conductor, if you will.

Others have already told you that talking to a lawyer is still a good idea. If I may offer a personal story that illustrates that that is _really_ a good idea:

While I did my Bachelor's in CS, I was employed by a university (not the one I attended, but one that the project I worked on moved to after the Prof in charge switched universities) as a "student worker" type deal. My job was essentially a Jr. SWE.

A friend of mine also worked on that project, but he was ahead a bit further in his studies, so he already had a BSc degree, while I hadn't. Universities being universities, this meant that his hourly pay was a tiny smidge more than mine (think 50 cents/hour or something like that). Neither of us was paid very well, we both came out to about 10-12 €/hour.

After 6 months my contract was up for renewal. Along with the renewal, they included a modest pay raise to my friend's level. I naively thought that that meant they appreciated my work or something like that. All went well until the _next_ renewal was up.

The HR person responsible for student workers noticed that my "raise" had been in error because they assumed I had gotten my degree as well. None of their paperwork that I signed originally mentioned that. As "proof" that I "should have known" that the raise was in error, they sent along a scanned copy of a copy of a copy of an internal "wage schedule" that I somehow should've been aware of.

Their solution was to hand me a "new" backdated contract with lower hourly wages and told me to sign that to "just quickly fix this error" and told me to just pay back what I had "erroneously" received (signed contract stating the contrary nonwithstanding).

I politely declined because that's not how I think employment works. As a response they said "ah well, don't worry, we'll just take it out of your next pay check", which they did (without me signing anything).

At that point I called my mom and told her the full story. She immediately went "Alright, how do you want to play this? Should we talk to them or do you want to pull out the big guns?". I was sufficiently pissed off that I told her I want the big guns, she told me the info for my families' "lawsuit insurance" (The German term is "Rechtsschutzversicherung", basically cheap-ish insurance to help you pay for a lawyer in cases like this) and called them after we talked.

I called up a lawyer in town that specialized in employment law, had an appointment with him to tell him the story, he went "I can see roughly 4 or 5 reasons that they can't take that money from you, let me write a letter to them and we'll see how it goes".

The end result was that the university in my next paycheck included the amount they had initially reduced my previous check by, my higher-wage contract was renewed, and we never spoke of any of that again. I didn't get an apology or anything from the HR admin who had clearly messed up my contract and was probably trying to cover her ass, but that's fine with me.

Point being: talk to a lawyer, even just to get some advice or to have them write out a nice letter as to why what they're doing is not OK.

"Alright ma'am, you claim this here device contains encrypted data? If you don't mind, we'll keep you here until you provide us with the password."

and meanwhile in an alternate universe

"So you say that this device just happens to contain a bunch of random data? That sounds mighty suspicious. We'll keep you here until our technicians have taken a look at it. Get comfy, it'll be a while."

This is very cool!

Can you share the technical background you've used for creating the 3D reconstruction? Like software packages, or algorithms used.

Are we looking at the result of packages like OpenSfM here, or COLMAP?

I have a CF-33 that I got used for about 600€ (plus something like 120€ for a replacement battery).

I use it as my "outdoor/garden/workshop" laptop that I can display CAD drawings on and stuff like that without worrying about getting wood splinters in it, or as a juke box/internet lookup-thing/spreadsheet when I work on a semi truck I sometimes drive (not for work though, purely for fun).

It does also double as my backup laptop in case the XPS13 I use for freelancing ever falls off the table or something, but I don't really see that happening anytime soon.

Granted, most of this I could just as well do with an old T-series Thinkpad, but there's something to having a carrying handle on the thing and being able to pull it off its keyboard base. Also, COM ports.

So Microsoft gave the Wine project the software equivalent of a stained mattress?

The British are doing good stuff as well with EMF.

I mean, I'm pretty sure rats also have a theory of mind. My data point is exactly one of the little buggers who used to be my pet. Whenever he was running around my room, he'd peek around to see if I was looking at him before jumping on the couch. If he couldn't see me, he'd jump. If he could, he wouldn't.