This is fairly close to my revelation as well. I don't run "heavier duty programming" as OP says local anyhow. VSCode runs wonderfully, battery lasts forever and I run anything beyond trivial in some cloud instance. They are so light, the battery lasts so long and they are so cheap mine just bounces around in my backpack and is always with me.
Would a local nodejs webserver be easily doable for web dev? It's sorta ok on the cloud as long as you can SSH tunnel and run the browser locally, but you'd have to either sync code changes or use Vim over SSH (not always nice due to latency).
Gentoo was the "gateway drug" that got me moved over from FreeBSD. I loved FreeBSD ports and Portage scratched that itch with a Linux kernel. Eventually the need for less excitement and a little more predictability caused me to move on. I also miss it at times.
I cut my Linux teeth on Gentoo around when Sabayon Linux was released. Ubuntu didn't make me feel like enough of a hacker, so I had to bash my head against configuring grub through xserver until I felt like I got it. I learned a ton, but it likely wasn't the best use of my time.
The pinball community as a whole has been doing really cool things like this for years. Custom soundtracks for older games and now more recently we're seeing total rewrites of the rules/coding flashed onto chips or new PCBs like this. Super cool stuff.
I have a "reset board" for WPC games that is many years old at this point. It piggybacks on the power connector from the power board to the system board and steps down the unregulated 12v supply to power the 5v rail, bypassing the power board's 5v which can become unreliable as voltage regulators age and fail, triggering a watchdog on the system board that causes a reset. It is a plug-in mod that is reversible (I actually do not currently use it).
Also you can buy new boardsets for System 11 machines in both kit and complete form. They are electrically identical to the Williams parts but use modern components. They even come on red PCBs like the Williams development boards.
Yep, friends with the guy from Pinball Basement who makes the System 11 boards. It was actually done by licensing the designs from Williams, so that's cool. They're still quite expensive, but it's great from a preservation perspective.
Not that I know of. https://pinballbasement.com/ Looks like the 11 stuff is not finished or sold out atm. I believe he was running into supply chain issues last year.
No benefit to replacing working Williams boards. The benefit is if you have a bad board and can't find replacements. The DumbAss boards are electronically identical to Williams boards so you can install them in any combination in a System 11 pin without any other modification. They're simply modern replacement parts.
The software is whatever you flash on to the ROM and could be modified on a Williams or DumbAss board equally.
Also what System 11 machines do you have? I have a High Speed (with Williams boards).
I have a Terminator 2 - a lot of similarities to High Speed because both were designed by Steve Richie and i think T2 came right after High Speed for him (could be wrong about that last bit). Also have a Cyclone. Both have lots of mods and addons. I used to be really into the hobby but not so much anymore.
The t2 back glass is signed by Steve Richie when I met him at Texas Pinball Fest in 2019.
There’s a podcast interview with Richie somewhere that he talks about designing HighSpeed. As I recall, he had a Porsche in the 80s. He was speeding home one night - very fast like 120 mph or something crazy. He was pulled over by a cop. Or maybe he dodged the cop. I don’t remember the rest of the story but it was interesting, and it became the inspiration for your pin.
Yes I have heard that story. I think he actually got a ticket for 146mph. That’s the speed on the radar on my backglass. I have a T3 as well, the first pin Ritchie made for Stern. T2 is a classic but I think T3 is underrated, many similarities. Much like High Speed vs Getaway.
I got into ownership during the pandemic, was the only way to get my fix. I’m up to five now!
Would love to meet Steve and his brother Mark who designed Fish Tales, which I also own. TPF seems to be the place for that.
Another bit of Steve Ritchie trivia is that he shared a cube with another Steve at Atari. This one was named Steve Jobs!
I started off as an EE in college ~20 yrs ago before switching to CS. I did some circuit board design work (never fab) as part of my coursework, but haven't touched it since. I have some baseline familiarity. I think we used pSpice and Cadence, which (at the time) still had a lot of Win 3.1 era MFC UI elements. I'd like to jump back into it for hobby reasons. Any recommendations on modern low-budget software-tooling?
I'm a tinkerer and software dev, so my use is very basic.
https://www.kicad.org/ is free and open-source It is mature and useful, has a vibrant active community, and is progressing at a healthy pace. It competes with the paid options, but might have rough edges comparatively speaking. I recommend starting here. I've only ever used this.
There is also Eagle PCB which is now an Autodesk product. It requires a Fusion360 subscription but I don't know if the free version qualifies. It's a professional tool.
Those are the only two I really hear about from the communities I lurk. But I know there are about a dozen or so currently that range from simple to professional.
> Cadence, which (at the time) still had a lot of Win 3.1 era MFC UI elements
I'm not sure how it appeared on windows, but cadence is the kind of software with an extremely long history. I'm pretty sure even recent releases have code that date back to the 70s.
As far as I know, it has always targeted UNIX, then X11, using raw XLIB for drawing? X11 forwarding still seems to be the preferred option for using it.
Anyway, try kicad, which is free and open, it has made great strides recently. You can also look at the gEDA suite, though it may be a bit rough. Commercially, I've also used Eagle and Proteus. LTSpice still is a pretty good no-$ option for simulations (though kicad integrates some barebones SPICE simulator now).
X11 forwarding for Cadence's chip layout tooling is practically unusable nowadays! Sub-1 FPS, even on a reasonable 1 Gbps pipe with only 3-4 ms ping. I had to use NoMachine when I was doing that work -- proprietary tooling that does the "simpler" image/video streaming.
This is my situation as well. If you travel a lot, having something light Flightaware giving you more detailed information about what is really happening with your flight or airport is wonderful and starting a feed was a fun way to get more features.
I have a basic (free) Flightaware account. I can't imagine anything relevant to commercial airliner travel that I'd need that I don't get from that free account. Is there something I'm missing?
(I totally get the fun aspect and it's fairly cheap to put a receiver up.)
the only value for me is having no ads. which is, in fact, something i value, but not at the $80/month it would take to subscribe for. But it's worth sending my feed.
If the trash was sorted so we buried "caches" of plastic separate from chemicals, cardboard, electronics, etc I think there is some short term sense here. My issue with landfills is that mixing all that stuff into a big pile in the ground just makes more useless for the future. I believe that future us might find a way to make use of some of these types of waste if they were separated and easy to get back. To put it another way, at least make it as easy as possible for the future to try to fix this if we must be so wasteful.
The only movie to give me nightmares and sleepless nights. The Day After had little impact on me but Threads was on a whole different level.
For some reason I also still remember a scene from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Bulletin - the news crew trying to understand why the NEST bomb squad was running away just before cutting out...
Interesting. I watched both about ten years ago (around the birth of my first child incidentally) Andi remember The Day After a lot while Threads had little impact on me. I think I should rewatch Threads.
I thought the scene in The Day After where the silos open and the missiles go up was the most chilling thing to experience. At that point you've got a couple of minutes until the end of the world ...
Way back when Adams also posted occasionally on his own Usenet group. When he did the answers were often very similar. I got the distinct impression of someone who had found something he was very good at but not particularly interested in doing.
Or, someone who was creative and enjoyed creating things, but when one or two of them get a fanbase, it becomes a burden, because fanbases by their obsessive nature want more of the same.
I was one of these. However I now understand that the pricing nuances reflected a reality that I appreciate. We used DDB in a way that was not the best fit and the cost was a reflection of this.
Accepted pull requests to open source projects run by someone else. If PRs look even decent that will almost guarantee an interview with me for a young dev. It will guarantee me a look at just about anyone.
This is probably the only thing a young, self-taught dev could do to impress me.
If you put some projects on your Github profile, I am going to assume that they are either crap or copy-pasted from somewhere else.
If you are self-taught and have no experience, I am going to assume you will struggle with even the most basic things.
But if you write on your resume "I've had two pull requests accepted to Syncthing" I'm definitely going to have a look!
Of course, making a contribution that is meaningful and will be accepted in an open source project is pretty difficult, but at least you'll learn a lot in the process.
I agree. The majority of the reactions here to Foundation seem exactly the way I felt so many years ago to the Starship Troopers movie. I hated seeing it in the theater with a passion and it was because I was one of the people that read and enjoyed the book. Even today when the ST movie is talked about as a cult classic I bristle a little bit - but I can see now it is good as a movie unrelated to the book and a disappointment to a fan.
