mk_stjames

Yes! The interactive demo of simple orbital mechanics is there and works, just like I remember it. The last time I saw this... was actually 1995.

You goto the article for "Orbit" and under "Laws of Motion", click "Orbit Interactivity" and then click the large graphic that appears to launch the interactive applet.

As a young person I sat and went through every article looking for these little interactive applets. This was my favorite for some reason.

Another fun tidbit is, in the '95 version, if you send the moon into the Earth, it just bounces off. In, I believe, the 1996 version, they updated it- to I think a generic red colored planet and gray moon (if my memory after 30 years is correct) and if you send the moon into the planet, it would explode!

Yeah. I spent a lot of time with these CD-rom's.

I'm trying to figure out the video part, there is a demo screen that is showing pretty high res in color, and this says 1024x600 and 256 colours- that is mighty impressive for a 6502, that is driving way more pixels that I ever saw in that era, so I was expecting there was some other chip being used as a screen buffer and graphics chip...

but it looks like the LCD has to be bit banged by the CPU data bus directly? I see the 8 bit data bus is going straight to the LCD thru a buffer IC.

I don't see where in the memory map there would even be enough space for a screen buffer that large to be located, so I take it you have to write you own graphics handling yourself and pick a spot in memory for it all?

Hah, I just went thru this identification problem with another Harris IC. They use their 'H' logo like it's part of the chip name.

In my case I was trying to find a 'D1-15531-9' when the actual part number is 'HD1-15531-9'

Someone in their marketing thought they were being cool back then, but it's just confusing.

Theres a scene there that's one of my favorite comedy bits in any film, the breakfast scene where you see a buzzer and light going off repeatedly, like they have some sort of computer system to indicate it is breakfast time... but then it cuts to Wallace in bed and he is just repeatedly pressing a button next the the bed, with the same specific cadence, to make the buzzer sound. I don't know why I find that so hilarious.

Even if perfectly held still in a sealed box with perfect conditions, hard disk drives need controllers; they need the chipset to drive them, which has ROM and other stored microcode that is susceptible to bit flips due to cosmic ray impingement. I've traced faults in a few 20+ year old HDD's due to failed controllers likely due to such loss (either in the main controller fail, a ROM/BIOS chip fail, or less likely but still possible the cache IC, or motor controller). The data is there on the spinning rust, you just won't have a way to access it.

The failure of SSD's you warn of and the way the HDD's fail due to a dead controller aren't that different.

This won't happen with a physically written media like a CD, DVD, or Blu Ray disc. With physical media, you're separating out the media from the reader (the drive). If your disc reader dies or you cant find it, etc, you can go find any another one on ebay even decades from now, very likely.

Doing surgery on an HDD controller PCB to replace a dead controller, while possible, sucks, and may be incredibly difficult if not impossible to source parts for in the future.

"sarcastic meme posting channels on russian Telegram"

That phrase. I think these people and how they are using tech and memes are part of the current problem of this world. A large part of the problem, in my opinion. It's may be just coping, dark humor for most but it is deep psychosis for others and it's giving them ideas and power over the rest of us. I'd strive to be better than falling into such meme sharing sociopathy.

I'll keep the rest of my words to myself.

Travel to Spain and they will not give you a room key until they can take your passport and make a scan of it, often times on an old flatbed print/scanner combo, that they print out a copy on paper to staple to their copy of the invoice and put god knows where. It's been like that for about 6-8 years. No more showing up and paying cash for a hotel room.

You can try to say no, but I don't think you can anymore. I go through this a dozen times a year on my travels there.

This is Spain.

OP is Undoubtedly referring to "In Tune And On Time"

Live at the Brixton Academy, 2004.

I have it on a DVD. I think it's all on youtube, but split into parts.

One of my favorite live performance recordings out of many, many, many...

For the interested; the saying I believe you are referencing in regards to writing code / debugging is from Brian Kernighan, specifically:

  Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?

(from, 'The Elements of Programming Style')

It's prescient.

The approach noted in this article is similar to an experience I just had.

I recently had some old hardware manuals I wanted to digitize, which were pages in 3-ring binders. I started thinking about scanning them but did not have an auto-loading, xerox style scanner at home. I looked around for free software that could do this 'google books style' as they did here in this article - take a photo of each page and automatically find the corners, dewarp, white balance, etc. and export to PDF.

I actually didn't find a premade solution that looked like what I wanted. So I wrote my own, with Python an a simple tk GUI.

I tried a lot Open CV messing about to do automatic page corner detection and whatnot, but found everything I tried unreliable. Sure, the corners may autodetect about 95% of the time, but if 5% of the pages fail and get cropped wrong or dewarped weird, I noted the time it took to go back and fix those errors eclipsed the time saved by the entire rest of the automatic process.

The fastest method I found was a human in the loop semi-auto program: it loaded in all the images from SD card, and had the user manually click the 4-corners of the page as shown in the image. Upon the 4th point being clicked, the page would auto-de-perspective and apply the last saved default white balance curve, thresholding, and posterizing (color binning) / grayscaling / scaling to fixed width. For subsequent images in the camera roll this meant settings didn't have to usually be changed on a per-image basis. Then just a spacebar to add the image to the saved temp queue and at the end an export to PDF.

This approach had me digitizing about 600 pages in an hour I estimate. Yes, it was a lot of clicking for the manual part.... but it allowed me to proof every page as it flew by and this caught a few photographic errors that I wouldn't have caught if it was fully automated, and not a single page was left mis-shapen or unreadable.