Viewing profile — ben1040

This is unchanged from the upgrade program terms before. The phone is unlocked, but when you take delivery of the phone you have to activate it on a Big 3 carrier's postpaid plan.

There are more consumables involved there beyond just reagents and a lot of it was/is proprietary. The machines all had their own consumable physical bits for sequencing as well an…

Back in 1999 I joked that the ABI 3700 looked like a $300K mini fridge. Now you could actually get one on eBay and convert one for cheap.

I worked in this space for over a decade. It's so weird to me to see the workhorse sequencing hardware like the ABI 37x/37xx series, 454, and Illumina machines now as literal museu…

I've been watching the Québécois version of Taskmaster with community-made subtitles and I love how the subtitle writers have included brief idiomatic explanations for the swearing…

It's me, I'm too lazy to modify a keyboard. I came upon a spare Touch ID keyboard. I just got Command strips and adhered the whole keyboard to the underside of my desk. USB cable i…

Much of the early part of the Human Genome Project was done using gel based DNA sequencing machines that were controlled by Classic Macs. The rest of our shop was Solaris on SPARC/…

I have a UniFi doorbell that I chose because it's self hosted and the video stays in my home. It also easily lets you get an RTSP stream of the camera feed. Earlier this spring we …

The 2 year contracts from the 2000s and early 2010s are back with a vengeance.

20+ years ago during undergrad my OO design class had us writing C++ on Solaris. We were told that unless it compiled and ran on Sun we'd get a zero. This was also before ewaste re…

When I graduated 20+ years ago I scoured trash rooms on campus before my card access got shut off. I paid probably six months of rent by taking what I found and selling it on ebay.…

I stuck just the tip of my tongue on there, and it was so bitter that it was more of a sensation than just a taste. Enough that I reflexively pulled away.

Raise your hand if you tasted a Nintendo Switch cartridge because you read the plastic was infused with a bitterant to mitigate choking hazards.

>I'll never be able to read about us digitally unrolling fragile scrolls without it seemingly like otherworldly sci-fi technology. I similarly had my mind blown reading an article …

I had a Makerbot 2X in 2014 and it required constant janitoring every time I wanted to print. I built a Prusa MK4 this spring; it calibrated itself and printed a great looking piec…

The links on the page all go to Amazon. This page looks like AI generated SEO spam that's set up with the intent to generate Amazon affiliate leads.

30 years ago I was a teenager a friend of mine had a giant plot of empty land in his family, and so we'd go out there and do stupid teenager things things like playing with firewor…

And they've been doing this for several years already, with Luminar hardware mounted on engineering vehicles with manufacturer plates. https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/tesla-mode…

I flew some overseas trips on Delta 767s in the late 1990s that still had the tube headphones. I was pretty intrigued by the concept, you could hold your hand up to the tube holes …

I own one of these disks and quit using it when the news came out, expecting I should hang onto it to get money back for a recall. Didn't even occur to me I could just have brought…

Just loved this quote from the Cooler Screen people: >When you think about it within the context of "I'm in front of an ice cream door and I want to buy," you have the ability to i…

> Also NACS locks the cable on the car side while CCS locks on both sides. That means with CCS, a malfunctioning cable can strand your car. I'm just surprised they didn't consider …

In the 1980s there was also LEGO/LOGO, a programmable interface to a line of Technic products, plus an expansion card and breakout box for the Apple II to wire it all up. There wer…

Mr. Munch.