Viewing profile — tfvlrue

My college ThinkPad laptop had a trackpoint in the keyboard that I never used. The paradigm of "pushing" the cursor around by applying an acceleration vector just never clicked wit…

I've been using this AutoHotKey script long enough that Ctrl+Shift+V has become a muscle memory for "paste without formatting". In case it's useful to anyone else, put this in a fi…

In case anyone else is curious, since this is something I was always confused about until I looked it up just now: "Baud rate" refers to the symbol rate, that is the number of puls…

I was under the impression that a floppy disk is referring to the substrate that holds the data, not the cartridge that contains it. So a 3.5" floppy disk would be "floppy" in cont…

> how you used an oscilloscope to diagnose the ~1ghz bandwidth DOCSIS signals on broadband cable I should clarify that I didn't really do any _true_ diagnostic with the scope. Simp…

I had a similar problem with a different ISP, Optimum, in Northern NJ. It wasn't as regular as the author's problem -- my cable modem would desync intermittently throughout the day…

> it's not able to do sync over LAN I'm curious what you mean by this. I've never had trouble syncing files with the Nextcloud client, inside or outside of my LAN. I didn't do anyt…

According to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZ8ehplVFp4&t=636 the handrail is driven by a friction wheel that wears out over time, so its diameter gradually decreases and the hand…

My (admittedly very, very limited) personal experience owning cars actually suggests cars are getting cheaper over the past couple decades. Specifically, my data looks like this: -…

Yep. Although I only have experience with the classic console (the one with physical buttons), I haven't used the touch screen model that superseded it.

Some of my personal anecdata on this. I had an Ambient weather station that lasted only a couple years. First the wind speed sensor failed, and they replaced it under warranty. The…

I have been using a Core One at home for the past six months or so, and have not had this experience at all. For me, it just works. I can send prints to it and it completes them, h…

These commercial microwaves have a ceramic tray (transparent to microwaves) that the food sits on. It fills the entire bottom of the microwave. Underneath the tray is a small piece…

In the past I remember that Excel not properly handling UTF-8 encoded text in a CSV. It would treat it as raw ASCII (or possibly code page 1252). So if you opened and saved a CSV, …

A similar thing happened to my Brother laser printer. It has a tiny rubber piece inside that serves as a bumper to quiet down a component that clicks while the paper travels throug…

> I don't understand what people are buying. I am also perplexed by this. As someone who obsessively tracks and categorizes all my spending, I have not observed a significant upwar…

Nope, not that I found. The set of fonts installed was _very_ limited. I can't remember the exact count, but I think it was less than 20. Nothing specialized like an OCR font.

> the source site seems to be hosted on an 30-year-old laptop You're not too far off :) It's actually hosted on super cheap shared VPS with only 768MB of RAM and a single CPU core.…

Author here. I was also surprised by this. I simplified the story a bit for brevity. I actually tried a bunch of different font styles, including a 47 page fax using a pretty large…

Awesome sleuthing! Should we discover any more files to recover from the laptop, I may explore this avenue a bit further. If the ZTerm software is present, the trickiest part might…

Nope! That's a good idea though. The transcription errors I was getting were not consistent. Like, D would be O or 0 or D, with no apparent rhyme or reason to it. And the turnaroun…

This is great! I'm amazed that someone else has solved the same problem in a different context. Good stuff.

Author here. It's a good question. It probably does, but I admit I'm not familiar with Zmodem. I don't recall finding a terminal application installed on the laptop, but maybe I ju…

Author here. Admittedly I didn't explore this avenue very deeply. I was more focused on accomplishing this with parts I had on hand. A quick search yielded this result, which does …

Author here. Seeing how difficult it was to get a reliable OCR transcription with commercial software from a pristine, computer-generated representation of the text, I suspect tryi…