I’d think the bathroom would be anotherboption.
Yiu can take the ham radio license exam over Zoom now, but you need to be in a closed room to imply you’re not being coached. The evaluators said I was far from the first to do it in the loo.
You saw how the underlying reference sketch ends, right? So basically in weeks Ukraine will be going “More please” and they’ll be perplexed at the insatiable appetite for weaponry?
If you’re thinking amplifier, just grab your favourite Japanese '70s hi-fi range and go from there. Can hardly go wrong.
A half-scale Harman/Kardon 330c but with an OLED info display in the panel that held a tuning scale might kill it.
The key is to use the right materials. They sold a modern CD-based stereo a few years ago that apes the look of a small Marantz 22xx, but being plastic garbage, sort of fails the mission. Conversely, Yamaha did some new silver-face amps that don’t look like dollar-store tat.
Telling people to “give up hopes” is just a terrible word choice, even if the thing you’re asking them to give up is solidly distasteful.
So many more positively phrased options-- “commit to peaceful nuclear programs”, for example. We got a real wordsmith in here, boys. Better keep Smith AND Corona lubed up and ready.
The UK issued silver dollars once. They were dated 1804 and considered “bank tokens” as they had less silver than their denomination required at the time. They basically stamped a new design on Spanish colonial 8-real coins and passed them as five shillings.
The UK had a hard time with coin supply for most of the 1700s until 1816 when they finally downdized many coins.
Try RiscOS for a glimpse of a world most of us missed.
The Very Busy Tactical.
Could we use biomass and hydro to bootstrap without fossil fuels?
We might have to go smaller scale, but if we have a playbook to follow, we can skip some wasteful false starts
Air-conditioned dhed with high volume air cleaning for toxic actibities like soldering, plastic models, spray painiting, 3-D printing…
And a 3-d printer with a cross section of a metre on a side. I am sick of having to cut up designs, I want to print an entire extended-ATX case in a single run.
Keep an eye out at thrift shops-- I’ve seen huge tranches of Star Trek novels.
Oil burning was common in some regions. The Southern Pacific had a lot of oil-fired engines. Their famous “cab-forward” steam engines could only make sense as oil burners without fundamental redesign.
Part of it might be that the last holdouts for steam, who made the most technically advanced engines, were predominantly coal-carriers. They didn’t have the oil infrastructure, and didn’t want to burn relations eith their customers.
We’ve seen decentralized education and it tends to have problems with resourcing and economies of scale, and content policies get easily hijacked by loud people with personal vendettas.
That’s what baffles me with the DOGE fracas. How long will solidarity hold when there are some very clear winners and losers within their own class?
There are a lot of billionaires who have fat revenue streams coming out of the federal budget, and I don’t think they’re all eager to trigger some sort of Mad Max/Medieval social collapse just so they can be the Archduke of San Jose after America implodes. I doubt they all bought the Network State story.
A fair number of them, expecting to live for more than 10 years and wanting to remain rich, probably invested aggressively into “skate where the puck is going” businesses that are now being slaughtered in the name of doubling down on fossil fuels and uncompetitive domestic manufacturers. Will Elon eat their losses? Of course, he’s committing financial seppuku too.
Our new defacto president is the avatar of bubble economics.
Even the other oligarchs, thry made something at dramatic scale to justify their wealth. Microsoft did sell a lot of software. Facebook got 176 billion people on board to blast adverts at. They’re trillion dollar firms that do correspondingly large run rates.
Tesla is still a minor player in its space, and SpaceX is inherently a narrow business. Even PayPal, where the horrors all came from, isn’t a major value add, it’s a thin mask atop the clunkiness of American payment rails that should have been replaced by something like FedNow by 2003.
But he’s taken these tiny fundamentals and convinced Wall Street to puff more air into them than a fresh bag of Lay’s.
ATSC 3.0 is usable. I have a HDHomerun sitting on my LAN with a couple 3.0 tuners.
The big problem is:
the 3.0 broadcasts are still mostly tests, so you get mostly a respin of a 1.0 channel
the audio is AC-4 and a lot of software doesn’t support it. There was stuff for Windows but when I looked, the usual suspects (VLC, mpv) on Linux didn’t support it
Why not an aerial for Jeopardy? It’s usually on local broadcast, so you could plumb together a DVR setup if you want it within a unified experience.
I’ve been working on “retrofication” of a “somewhat” modern case and have some notes for that process more than a specific recomendation:
If you want a 3.5" floppy that works, you can either get a little USB adapter board, or a LS-120 on a PATA-SATA adapter. A Caleb UHD-144 might work, but many BIOSes and Windows still special-case LS-120s as “it can be drive A.” The USB adapters sort of suck, because the USB floppy spec sucks. 5.25, the best you can really do would be to rig up a Greaseweazle (specialised USB controller) which won’t really work like a regular floppy drive
Instead of a MHz display, you can get a small programmable OLED. Digole offers some that can be hooked to a $1 USB-UART adapter and programmed very easily-- I’ve got some crude code hacked up (C++ for Linux) on my Gitlab (https://gitlab.com/hakfoo1/graphic-oled-control-for-linux) that gives you MHz and a bunch of other stats, but you could probably also rig up something on Windows
Rustoleum Heirloom White is a very good “panel beige” for the metal side panels. You might also look at their “Satin Ivory” which gives a slightly yellowed tint good for the front panel.
Intentional colour mismatches can work very well, like if you use an optical drive, paint it a different beige than the rest of the case, to indicate either being different plastic than the main case, or an aftermarket add-on. Tell a story.
Some features feel like they “post-date” a case. Top-mounted ports seem pretty uncommon on vintage cases the first one I can recall having was well into the Windows Vista era)
Get a momentary paddle switch, preferrably red, and mount that and it buys you a mountain of street cred.
Grilles can be cut away and replaced with 3-D printed alternatives.
It’s San Marino. The entire country is mounted on a flip-top like a bathroom trash-can lid, covering an enormous number of missile silos. Why do you think they’ve been left alone for a thousand years.
The goal should be no hyperpowers at all. There’s probably a place for at least four superpowers: the US, an EU with more coherent military integration, Russia, and China. If there was more unification in Africa or South America then there might also be the formation of suitable powers there.
It’s a strength through diversity thing-- we want multiple different styles of government and economy to survive so each one can steal from the others’ playbook. We can’t guarantee that liberal democracy and free markets are the best solution for our next global crisis.
It was less about formal privacy and more “here’s a room that licks so people won’t barge in accidentally”