u/Fear_The_Creeper

Background: I have arthritis, and cubing helps loosen things up. I solve in about a minute and realistically will never get much faster than that.

My nine-year-old niece is under 30 seconds and rapidly improving. She gave me a challenge: make a single move. Put the cube down and read a sentence from a book out loud. Repeat until solved.

I couldn't do it! Turns out that I had some sequences of moves in muscle memory and couldn't reliably see the pattern if interrupted part way through.

Challenge accepted. I started practicing and now can solve the 3x3 either way.

I am going to try to get a Linux desktop running on an Ambernic (I haven't bought it yet). Cost isn't an issue. I assume that I need to do some Linux hacking to make it work, unless someone else has done the hard work already.

So I am looking for:

• Already runs some variety of Linux
• Lots of RAM
• Big screen
• Fast processor
• Ability to connect a mouse and keyboard, either through bluetooth or USB

I kind of like the clamshell form factor, but that's not important -- just a preference.

So, which Ambernic should I buy?

Background: I have arthritis, and cubing helps loosen things up. I solve in about a minute and realistically will never get much faster than that.

My nine-year-old niece is under 30 seconds and rapidly improving. She gave me a challenge: make a single move. Put the cube down and read a sentence from a book out loud. Repeat until solved.

I couldn't do it! Turns out that I had some sequences of moves in muscle memory and couldn't reliably see the pattern if interrupted part way through.

Challenge accepted. I started practicing and now can solve the 3x3 either way.

I was noticed that a local construction site was using what looked like rigid foam panels with one side being reflective like a mirror or like some sort of foil. Kind of like an auto sunshade.

What if someone positioned a few of these to reflect more sun onto an Aptera? Would that add range, or are the panels only good for the amount of light the sun puts out, not double that amount?

Worse case would be the extra light and heat damaging the vehicle. If that's the case, there are buildings with reflective windows that might be able to cause damage.

You could just buy some solar panels and (with the right adapter/converter) charge the batteries that way, right?

I have a cheap and fast but unreliable SIM in my Puli. When it works it works great and the data is cheap but a couple of times a day is drops the signal and gives me no internet for a minute or two.

I have a SIM in my Mudi V2 (configured to look like it's a smart phone) that is slower and more expensive per GB but is rock solid. It has the TTL set to 25 so the carrier sees a TTL of 24 when I tell my laptop to connect to the Mudi.

So if I tether the Mudi to the Puli and set up either load balancing or failover, will the carrier on the Mudi still see a TTL of 24? I haven't changed any of the settings on the Puli because that SIM doesn't care if it is in a router. Should I set it to TTL=25 as well?

Is there an easy way to tell what TTL a carrier is seeing?

Finally, should I try to figure out how to disable the WiFi on the Mudi? I won't be using it. Is there a problem with having two firewalls in series or should I try to figure out how to disable the Mudi firewall?

An awkward situation: asking for your job back after quitting because the rapture is going to happen this weekend. Will he get his job back?

From the January 3, 1982 New York Times:

Technology's Martyrs: The Slide Rule

Kirk Johnson

In 1967, Keuffel & Esser, a scientific instrument manufacturer then located in Hoboken, N.J., was commissioned to make a study of the future.

The company's report, "Life in the Year 2067," which was compiled on the basis of interviews with scientists, said people would live in domed cities and watch three-dimensional television. It predicted computerized traffic lanes and electric autos. It did not, however, predict that within five years the company's most famous product would be all but obsolete. Keuffel & Esser was America's largest producer of slide rules.

"Nobody really foresaw the cheap calculator," said John J. Montesi, customer service supervisor at K.& E. When the unforeseen became reality in the early 1970's, recalled John J. Heath, customer service manager at Sterling Plastics, one of K.& E.'s competitors, "it was a downhill sleigh ride."

Mr. Heath's company, based in Mountainside, N.J., was probably America's last producer of the basic trigonometric slide calculator, ceasing production in December 1980, a year in which the company sold "maybe a couple thousand dozen."

"Those last couple years we just carried on as a nice gesture," Mr. Heath said. Sterling's leading product then was an $1.79 plastic slide rule. It was the kind that came in its own little leatherette scabbard that you could wear on your belt. In 1964-65, Sterling's biggest year, more than a million of them were sold; it made up almost 20 percent of the company's business. Fortunately, Mr. Heath said, Sterling was able to develop a desk accessory line during the slide rule's decline that, he said, "more than compensated" for the subsequent fall in income.

"We were into the college and high school market," Mr. Heath said. "You got a K.& E. slide rule when you really became an architect."

Indeed, in slide rules, Keuffel & Esser was in another league altogether. It was the first importer, beginning in the late 1880's, and the first American producer as well, beginning in 1891. Its machined, mahogany, inlaid slide rule (consistently costing about $40 since the 1950's) was sold mostly to professionals and scientists.

According to Mr. Montesi, at K.&E., slide rule sales never contributed more than about 10 percent to 15 percent of income, even though they were what the company was best known for. Sales peaked in the late 1950's at about 20,000 a month. With the advent of the calculator, "the business we lost was just lost," Mr. Montesi said. "We were never fully compensated."

Nevertheless, the company earned $3.7 million on its surveying and architectural instrument sales last year, which was apparently enough to attract interest. Two weeks ago, two-thirds of K.& E.'s stock was purchased, at $31 a share, by Kratos Inc., a La Jolla, California-based maker of analytic devices, aircraft instruments and computer display equipment.

The company still has about 2,300 slide rules in stock, although it ceased production in the early 1970's. "Now we sell about 200 of them a year, tops." Mr. Montesi said.

There are four subreddits with basically the same focus.

• r/SPTV_Unvarnished/ -- 1.5k weekly visitors
• r/OT42/ -- 1.4K weekly visitors
• r/AaronSmithLevin/ -- 653 weekly visitors
• r/SPTV_Grifters/ -- 281 weekly visitors

Is there some way to merge subreddits and reduce the fragmentation and duplication of effort?. Yes, I know about multireddits, but that seems to be more of a per-subscriber thing.

In general, the mods of each know each other and get along fairly well. There is a lot of crossposting between them. I am the top mod of the first. I haven't discussed this with anyone; I want to know what can be done before discussing what should be done with anyone else.

The obvious way would be to make the subreddit I control read-only or permission-to-post with a big pinned notice pointing everyone to a new home. But is that the best way?

BTW, I also get along great with the mods of r/scientology/ (50K weekly visitors), which considers SPTV content to be off topic and sometimes sends people who want to talk about it our way.

Some recording studios have 120VAC wired with 60VAC on hot and 60VAC (180 degrees out of phase) on "neutral" with the green earth ground wire at at 0V relative to earth. And no, they don't always tell the inspectors that they are going to do this. They wire it normally, wait until everything is approved, and then go back and wire in a special transformer to power the studio and redo the breaker box to have dual ganged breakers that will interrupt both hot and "neutral" if either sees an overcurrent.

First put on your EE hat. What will be the effect on ground wire current caused by capacitive coupling? What will be different if someone grabs a water pipe in one hand and touches a live wire with the other? Can you think of anything that might be in a recording studio that will have a problem with this kind of AC power? Think power filters (MOVS and caps) in surge suppressors. Think about GFCI outlets. Tube guitar amps built in the 1950s. Modern switching power supplies.

Now put on your electrician / electrical inspector hat. How many code violations can you find? Can you think of any sort of short circuit, open circuit, or miswiring that would be more dangerous with such a scheme?

http://www.primrosebank.net/computers/mtx/projects/mtxplus/data/mtxplusdata_refs.htm