Viewing profile — vertnerd

As a high school teacher, I first noticed this effect when I started using a CO2 monitor in my classroom as a proxy for air freshness during COVID. The CO2 levels in our supposedly…

If this article intrigues, see the chapter on Egyptian mathematics in The Crest of the Peacock: https://www.ms.uky.edu/~sohum/ma330/files/Crest_of_the_peaco...

I didn't realize how much I had come to rely on Unicode until I created my own VT-100 emulator as part of the Forth language engine ( https://github.com/Eccentric-Anomalies/AMC-For…

As far as I can tell, the video itself is 100% fake. A bad fake. I particularly love the part where the worker levitates a large coil of steel with his hands. The narration sounds …

Used Chromebooks are plentiful and cheap on eBay and many of them are easy to convert to Linux using the tools and instructions at https://docs.mrchromebox.tech/ . I used to have a…

If you are using a password manager, start by searching for every record with your gmail address. Make a list. Every day, go to the next entry on the list and change your email wit…

I am not an MS Office user, but I have seen the effect of format lock-in with Google Sheets. A few months back I began a project to de-Google my life, which went pretty smoothly un…

I was a 14 year old digital electronics hobbyist at that time. At $666 it could just as well have been $1 million. The most I could possibly afford at the time was about $50. For m…

Yes, most likely. Steam is dominant, and it's not hard to make a Windows release that works under Proton. Though in my case, I currently offer demo/beta releases for both Windows a…

As someone who grew up with only vinyl in the 60s and 70s, I would never choose it over a CD for audio quality. BUT I would enjoy recreating the rituals that go with playing vinyl:…

I'm solo developing a spaceflight simulator on Linux (using the Godot engine), exporting binaries in both Linux and Windows. It turns out that I really didn't need to bother with t…

I used to be an educator, and many of my students had an autism diagnosis. I would get to know them and often eventually decide that they were "just like" me, except that whatever …

I've also been working on half a dozen crates of old family letters. ChatGPT does well with them and is especially good at summarizing the letters. Unfortunately, all the output st…

Just the other evening, as my family argued about whether some fact was or was not fake, I detached from the conversation and began fantasizing about whether it was still possible …

I admit I didn't even know I was using RCS on Android until I switched to a cheap flip-phone and I could no longer post to a Wordle group chat that I had been in for years. What is…

My Camroc produced exactly one usable photograph. It was hell to load it with a single disk of unexposed film.

I was captivated by the August 1980 issue of Byte magazine, which had a cover dedicated to Forth. It was supposed to be easy to implement, and I imagined I might do that with my ne…

I am convinced that someday, device manufacturers will realize that complicated, small touchscreen UIs are a horrible idea. They're even worse for seniors, because our fingers are …

Fun link. I never wrote GPU drivers, but it does remind me of writing my first Ethernet card driver back in the day. I felt like I had decoded the Rosetta Stone, and there was abso…

This is a familiar concept from reading about WW2 spy stuff (Between Silk and Cyanide, for example, which I highly recommend). But what REALLY intrigues me is the typeface of the l…

I've found nowhere that any price is mentioned, so I have to assume that it's one of those "if you have to ask..." sort of things. Edit: https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects…

The canonical Bell Biker helmet that I remember was an ugly and expensive white bowl-thing for serious road cyclists that started becoming popular in the late 70s as ten-speed bicy…

This statement in the article is a real head-scratcher: > Until now, the Southern Ocean region was virtually inaccessible to satellites due to its low temperatures and the complex,…

Where, exactly, is this deep-ocean vent south of Antarctica. I checked my map but couldn't find anything south of Antarctica at all.

I left the software engineering field about 17 years ago to become a high school teacher. One of the things I taught was computer science (to high schoolers) and I recall sitting i…