HakFoo
@HakFoo@lemmy.sdf.org
- Comment on I can't believe it 2 days ago:
I think it’s more the £50 notes. Much like using a USD100 note in the States, it’s a bit big for most daily purchases.
I ended up dumping most of mine on a couple expensive souvenirs in shops expensive enough that they’d deal with it or breaking them in banks.
- Comment on lab equipment 1 week ago:
I bought a '60s VTVM recently. It needs mains voltage, uses two vaccuum tubes, and does less than my $15 Aliexpress digital meter while taking 48 times the space, but golly it’s nifty.
- Comment on Friendly reminder 2 weeks ago:
Who are the skeletons fighting? Do we need to do well intentioned symbolic support gestures on social media?
- Comment on Re: Delete, Delete, Delete - FCC Initiates Broad Inquiry on Rules to Delete or Amend 2 weeks ago:
I’d wonder if the existing amateur presence would make the bands hard to sell for “pollution risk”. There’s a lot of kit in circulation, and getting it off the market, including secondhand, would be difficult.
Yeah, they could blow a lot of time and money on FCC enforcement, but it feels like trying to unring a bell. As a telecom, would you be willing to pay for (for example) 148MHz on just the promise the existing users were displaced on paper? That doesn’t mean much when some untrained/curious person finds kit at the Goodwill and tries it out in the middle of your service range.
Of course, obviously fight for every nanometre of spectrum, but that’s probably a legit argument against reclassification: all they’d get is damaged goods of low resale value.
- Comment on What Can We Do to Get Youth into Ham Radio? 3 weeks ago:
I wonder if the way to go is to start with the premise of “It’s a way to communicate” and work backwards. Better tooling could make it more amenable to new users, and also help make specific use cases more compelling. Once users have he reason you want to be in the ecosystem-- which I suspect, for many people, might look more like a community than a bag of one-off contacts-- then it justfies going deeper into better equipment and technique.
Discoverability is a huge thing. For example, a cheap SDR, even receive-only, is a magical thing, but you end up getting a waterfall full of “what’s this weird burst” and jumping around the dial trying to chase where the action is. I suspect better software could really help there-- a UI that decodes digital modes and CW in the right place, and archive received signals might make it easier to track the activity and reduce the problem of “I tuned elsewhere and missed something interesting”
If you start with one of the cheap 2m/70cm HTs, you might be able to find a local repeater, and once you work your way through the fidgety UI, even send a transmission. but are you just going to find empty air much of the time. Again, it’s hard to find the action, and make sure you’re actually being a positive contributor. I think this has been a problem for me; I got licensed, got my little HT, but now I have the choice of either listening to static, or waiting for a conversation and hoping I have everything configured right enough not to be an annoyance. Maybe better guide websites and scheduled events can help minimize “listening to static” disappointment times.
I could see a fun community project being an autoresponder bot-- in idle times, it would listen to an advertised frequency, detect speech and CW signals and respond with signal quality reports quickly and conveniently to make it easy for a new user to make sure they’ve got their equipment set up right without barging into a conversation. I know there are ways to test propagation, but a lot of it is “go find a second device and pull up a tracking website”
I admit some of this could be seen as “dumbing down” or steering towards specific narrow paradigms, but that doesn’t have to be the entire universe. It could be the equivalent of AOL or Compuserve to the open internet-- making sure that you can get value out of the experience early on, so people can transition to the broader open platform as their needs and skills grow.
- Comment on What's wrong with a technocracy? 5 weeks ago:
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.
- Comment on Hypothetically, if you were a billionaire that suddently had a change of heart and wanted to go against trump, how dangerous would it be to resist? 5 weeks ago:
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.
- Comment on How is the Stock Market keeping it's value after *points to everything*? 1 month ago:
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.
- Comment on Amateur Radio Emergency Preparedness Act Re-Introduced 2 months ago:
There’s some shared delusion that without a HOA to block it, everyone is just champing at the bit to leave a rusted out Pontiac on blocks in their front yard, which will totally cause their neighbour’s property value to fall.
Personally, the next model-home exhibit I visit, I’m asking up front if they mind my plans for a 1:3 scale reconstruction of the Westward Ho
- Comment on Romance scammers are now in the fediverse 2 months ago:
I never seem to get appropriately coded romance scams.
I guess the RFI from my computer is jamming the gaydar.
- Comment on Elon Reeve Musk 2 months ago:
Are you using a shell replacement for the XP style titlebars and taskbar?
Calmira was pretty impressive for a taskbar-based shell, but I don’t recall doing a titlebar swap.
- Comment on Perfectly clear instructions HP 2 months ago:
I read about this. They make the printer WITH a perfectly good USB port and then stick a “no USB” label over it and attempt to force you to use their wireless setup.
post.lurk.org/@yaxu/110833261398955782 for more.
- Comment on Wasn't the future of tech much more interesting in the 90s? LGR comments on '93 CES 2 months ago:
There’s also the Ploopy, which is modern-oriented but a competent DIY trackball.
- Comment on what was the last game you played in 2024? 3 months ago:
Vampire’s Dawn 3. I suspect I’m exhausting my opportunities to powerlevel through the content, being that my party reached level 86 and never having seen any zone tagged at a level over 85. I might have to use gasp strategy to finish it.
- Comment on Think twice before gifting someone an M dwarf this holiday season 3 months ago:
I though dwarf stars had far longer lifespans than solar-type stars, and conversely the largest giants last only tens of millions of years.
- Comment on I guess I'm just a cubicle monkey now 3 months ago:
Right there that’s where we went wrong. Back when Dracula was in charge the prices of groceries were reasonable, and he only needed a few virgins a year sacrificed.
- Comment on Upgraded my setup (for x86 asm of course) 3 months ago:
Why not nasm? Are you actually targeting DOS?
- Comment on Happy birthday, peon 3 months ago:
My company originally said you got two free days off per year, outside the accrued PTO: one for your birthday, and one for parity because office #2 got a state holiday that #1 didn’t.
Now they moved to the “unlimited PTO” gimmick which has no right answer for how much time you can take off, so I follow the old PTO accrual schedule for my seniority as a guide.
- Comment on Why virtual desktops always have same background? 4 months ago:
CDE supports it.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 months ago:
Just to be clear, the chicken sandwich itself holds no ill will to the homosexual community. Sandwiches are generally incapable of hate.
Sadly, the ghouls that own the company that makes the sandwiches are incapable of reaching the same level of human empathy that an inanimate foodstuff can.
Aside from that, you ain’t missing much. It tasted weird and sweet 20 years ago when they started selling them here, before the controversy.
- Comment on Hot take 4 months ago:
I wonder where “same language, different encoding” turns into “new language”
The morse-derived shorthand used by radio enthusiasts might be similar.
- Comment on When you die, what do you want to be done with you? 4 months ago:
Is vampirism or zombification an option?
- Comment on Scalper economy 4 months ago:
Would thry?
The ticket seller doesn’t care if there’s an empty hall, he got paid early on.
You’re hoping that the scalpers don’t get enough return to be able to justify continuing to play their role.
- Comment on Epic Games is officially cool with the Internet Archive preserving early Unreal games 4 months ago:
But GOG is alresdy the Steam with Principals.
- Comment on Mine was the fact that Anne Frank and Martin Luther King Jr were both born in 1929 😭 5 months ago:
The Apple II’s big selling point, compared to the other two big brands introduced in 1977 (the Radio Shack TRS-80 and Commodore PET) was colour.
But it was a weird and colour scheme that took advantage of clever Wozniak hacks to make it viable on a cheap machine. Good video hardware, and enough memory for the colour display, were spendy. That’s why even into the 1980s you’d have machines like the ZX Spectrum with limitations like “every 8x8 block can only have 2 colours” which used less memory, and 40-column screens that were readable on TVs instead of dedicated high-res monitors…
- Comment on Orac 5 months ago:
I was always disappointed that celebrity and character voice packs weren’t a thing for the voice-assistant platforms. I’d pay literal ones of dollars for a voice assistant with a Sebastian Michaelis intonation and theming.
Cortana for Windows Phone came closest, I think they did use the same voice actress as the game character.
- Comment on Random question for today: Considering people who are not amateurs, if you wanted to create increased visibility and participation in amateur radio, what would you do? 5 months ago:
It’s a bit late, but here’s my upvote. Ground the site for a few weeks, and took my Technician and General exams today, holed up in my bathroom.
- Comment on Ain't nothing a dollar anymore 6 months ago:
“Ten Bits” seems viable, although nobody cares much about the Spanish real anymore.
- Comment on Would it be weird if I took something my neighbor put out for trash? 6 months ago:
I put out one of those big plastic storage units with like 30 little drawers recently, figuring although 2 were missing, someone could still use it. I stood it next to the dustbin, on trash day where it would be optimally visible for anyone who wanted to scrounge it.
The bloody HOA took a picture and sent a nastygram.
- Comment on Python Sundae 6 months ago:
Cute!