ja27

I've seen maybe five big Meetup groups here that were pretty active pre-COVID get abandoned and looking for a new organizer. It's sad.

We had a big thriving Microsoft focused community here with multiple Meetup groups and multiple events every month but that died down as they laid off developer evangelists and then closed the local Microsoft office about 2 years ago.

There is a big, broad tech Meetup group here that's kind of thriving but their biggest draw events are "anything mentioning AI" meh. It's hard for them to find places to meet that can accommodate 50-100 visitors.

We did a "restart party" at our hackerspace a few years ago. Definitely could have used a good stock of capacitors. Probably power cords. Not sure what to do with all the very specific USB-C etc. ports that break.

I remember talking about waiting for it to be ready in 1991.

Interesting. It's always been odd to me that FLL was all autonomous and no driver control then FTC and FRC focus heavily on driver controlled periods.

https://archive.is/SxxXj

I was just thinking today how I miss my DSL (Damn Small Linux) setup. A Pentium 2 Dell laptop, booted from mini-CD, usb drive for persistence. It ran a decent "dumb" terminal, X3270, and stripped down browser (dillo I believe). Was fine for a good chunk of my work day.

https://archive.is/YZIg0

Article is from 2020.

They're all but out of the launch business now but claim to be continuing research on it. There are a lot of skeptics that it would ever work (at actual orbital velocity).

https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/04/spinlaunch-yes-the-cen...

Exactly. There are thousands of other venues to share political news. Go there.

Addressable LEDs (strips, rings, panels) are really cool to play with too.

Yeah I fried a RAVPower USB-C PD supply with one of those.

My wife taught as a fine arts adjunct off and on at a large state university. Between gas, parking, and (relatively cheap) childcare we lost money every semester she taught.

One of my favorites.

Also the one where Wally insists his towel gets cleaner every time he uses it: https://br.omega.com/dilbert/311.html

There's one somewhere where they're eating lunch and I think Wally asks Dilbert if he has any extra napkins and Dilbert says he won't know until he's done eating.

and the discussion from five days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43687966

Adios then

A Trader Joe's moves in

WordPerfect for classic MacOS came out in 1988. It always felt like they bought someone else's product but apparently it was an in-house port.

The nice thing about picking up older laptops is that the upgraded models don't really hold as much extra value compared to what they cost new so if you keep looking you can get a pretty maxed out machine for not a lot more than the more common low-end ones.

My local one closed two months ago to move to a smaller location. Won't open again until at least spring. They still had an iOS 5 book on the shelves from 2011.

This wasn't super creative, but way back in time, I was on a local tinymud and a number of us starting writing bot NPCs for it. I built a bartender bot that eventually would remember drinks, tell jokes, and more. One day another bot came into the bar and got into an extended exchange of insults with the bartender bot. We were kind of dumbfounded watching these blocks of switch statements have a very real-looking conversation in front of us.

I was going to comment this but he actually mentions Michael Hickey in the article. He says he banked $60k towards building a tiny home in 146 days living in his car, doing Doordash etc., and posting/streaming a lot of social media. I believe there are many days where he says his income from views is higher than his delivery work but gotta have content to film.

Am I missing something? How did he get Ollama / phi to access the internet to evaluate that site's text?

I helped man one at a Brickworld. Lots of chasing down little plastic soccer balls all over the floor.

The whole thing just makes sense as a software dev. There's an input standard, output standard, and I guess a processing rate expectation (or not - that was probably the second biggest issue we faced was some slow contraptions that would back up). (The first biggest issue was a contraption that "pinged" the balls through the air to a landing container and would sometimes send them off randomly or kids would try to catch them.)

This is partly from LEGO fans previous work on railroad, town, space base, etc. modular builds where they have a spec for where each unit should connect and people bring in their own creations and link them all up.

I've always wanted to do something like the great ball contraption in general at makerfaires but open to all kinds of build materials, techniques, power, etc.

I saw someone on Twitter that left hers in a seatback on a flight. They'd show up on Find My every day for almost two months before they died. She talked to the airline multiple times about someone checking her seatback and several times they insisted they weren't there. Doubtful they ever checked at all but impressive battery life.

Heart attack from arguing with OM on 75m

The flight path looks like they were approaching for the east-west runway which is pretty rarely used at Tampa so that might have caused some confusion but that's what instruments and ATC are for.

If they had to divert, St. Pete Clearwater is right there and big. They probably flew right over it. Orlando and Sarasota are also much closer than Ft. Lauderdale. Maybe they didn't want St. Pete/Clearwater or Sarasota because of weather or Southwest doesn't use them, but Orlando gets plenty of Southwest traffic.

I've been almost exclusively laptop for 15+ years.

Currently main a 16" M1 Pro MacBook Pro. About half the time it's connected to a Thunderbolt dock, 27" monitor (and sometimes a second monitor), keyboard + mouse/trackpad, ethernet, external SSD(s) at least for Time Machine, webcam, good mic on a shock mount arm, speakers, etc. I very rarely push the thermal limits or ram. It's incredibly useful to me, at least psychologically, to be able to pick up my main machine, with everything already on it, and move somewhere else in the house or get out of the house.

I do own some desktops but mostly use an older small gaming rig that can double as a dev machine but except for the GPU and SSD space it's weaker than my MacBook. It's actually small enough to throw in a large laptop bag with kb+mouse and a travel monitor but I rarely do that.

Hey, welcome to the laid off by OpenText club. fistbump

Local makerspace

They did not manually pilot the docking. They demonstrated manual piloting outside the 200m keepout sphere. This was a planned test but they wound up counting manual testing the problematic thrusters as that test.

The previous Starliner flight that actually docked with the ISS had two thrusters out as well so this was not totally unexpected.