Viewing profile — prosaic-hacker

The article talks about long forgotten reasons why things are as they are. I have heard of a, probably now apocryphal story, of field on a Multinational's paper report that was alw…

I am from a earlier generation. Owned a TI SR-51A last year of High school, Then a HP-29c first year of University. I vaguely remember the SR-51A had an limited equation programmin…

About 1/4 of a Security Now podcast or 1/2 of the Amp Hour or Embedded.

I will cast my vote for mobile websites over apps on phones. For personal choice reasons I have always had a "budget" phone with less memory and storage (and less cost) than a flag…

In another thread this statement was made. >>>>There are an amazing number of "business critical" applications that are running ancient libraries, protocols, etc. Does anyone know …

>>There are an amazing number of "business critical" applications that are running ancient libraries, protocols, etc. Do you know of any examples of these "walking wounded" applica…

I teach in a tech/trade vocational program where 1/2 the students are your generation. All kinds of reasons they are there. (Didn't do well in High School, College, University, Gra…

Early 80's VMS had a Keep/Purge system for history of files. Everytime you edited a file a version number was bumped up by 1. There was a command, "purge", I think that set the Kee…

There was this link on the page https://hackaday.io/project/202541-replica-of-the-pdp-1-pidp...

TL;DR Don't sweat the future, it will mess up eventually. Just Do something now that is productive for a while and don't be afraid to change you mind or your job. Doing the same th…

I have seen the effect of tools building in several contexts. The most successful were teams that respected the process in that they each, could and would build tools themselves an…

I may be a little more "temporally ludditish" than the author. I have bought the cheapest unlocked cellphone that Best Buy, Staples, or Costco had to offer. Most times on Black Fri…

Ageism is not death. Just a bump in the road. I am well past 60. For the first 30 odd years I was an individual contributor in both programming and system administration and manage…

I have been following ReactOS development for years. I have loaded and run it for various hobby projects. I am glad that the skills developed in working on ROS are transferable to …

This is not a topic that can be explained while standing on one foot. It is a multi layer cake of hand-offs of information similar to the ISO OSI model of networking (which of cour…

Breadboard implementation using the MC14500b Usagi Electric 1-Bit Breadboard Computer P.01 – The MC14500 and 555 Clock Circuit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPA8dHtf_6M&list=PLnw…

Your desire that everyone learns to swim is laudable but as with all useful skills it takes work. Our completely distracted society is loosing skills like map reading, making chang…

TLDR: 30% success rate for a $89 expense over 200 drives in 15 years is more than enough anecdotal evidence to say it was worth it. I bought it 15 years ago and have run it on abou…

What will the world look like after the "Great HW speedup Plateau". Will we have top level optimizers rewriting code to get software only speed ups.

I have be hesitating to buy a PROM programmer. Now I dusted off a couple of old Arduino Unos and a ZIF socket and I will get one of these. What could I build....?

Their could be a pre-Dinosaur version of this going back to HTML only websites with submit buttons (1995) because java-script came out only in 1997.

Being nerd sniped into thinking I could learn how to do the same thing for X64. Backing away from the assembler.

I have a storage room under the stairs which would be a vintage computer museum of its own. I am keeping it there until I downsize the house in the next 5 years. I have been delusi…

So all those people with FZs I met at Bsides were car thieves. Just how many thefts are linked to its use. Criminals will be add FZs to their gun and drug shipments to Canada