Cobalt 60 has a half life of 5.27 years.

If the 7-1-63 is a date stamp of original manufacture, it’s gone through over 11 half-lives. There’s less than .05% of the original flavour.

I don’t know about the decay products, but I’d wonder how far we are from legitimately edible.

You see low voltage ones for things like memory backup on hi-fi gear. I have some 3F/5v capacitors in an old Technics tiner.

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.

I sort of wonder if the next generation will still romanticize Japan in quite the same way. We’re past the peak trendy-products era of Weird Sony and the Toyota MR2, anime is no longer a secret exotic thing, and it feels like if you want “15 years ahead of us optimistic techno future”, you could easily slide in Chongqing or Seoul instead of Tokyo.

Have you tried Johnson’s Spray Crab?

They’d need to change the law banning living people on coins.

Surprised they haven’t pushed to slap Reagan on the dime to displace FDR.

XFCE’s old panel was a distinct mimic of CDE’s. I liked it…

But now CDE is open source and NsCDE gives you the same look with a highly customised fvwm config if you don’t want to stick to the Motif universe.

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.

I expect the hype people to do hype, but I’m frustrated that the consumers are also being hypemen. So much of this stuff, especially at the corporate level, is FOMO rather than actually delivered value.

If it was any other expensive and likely vendor-lockin-inducing adventure, it would be behind years of careful study and down-to-the-dime estimates of cost and yield. But the same people who historically took 5 years to decide to replace an IBM Wheelwriter with a PC and a laser printer are rushing to throw AI at every problem up to and including the men’s toilet on the third floor being clogged.

It feels like we’re being delivered the sort of stuff we’d consider flim-flam if a human did it, but lapping it up bevause the machine did it.

“Sure, boss, let me write this code (wrong) or outline this article (in a way that loses key meaning)!” If you hired a human who acted like that, we’d have them on an improvement plan in days and sacked in weeks.

Stop selling it a loss.

When each ugly picture costs $1.75, and every needless summary or expansion costs 59 cents, nobody’s going to want it.

Try RiscOS for a glimpse of a world most of us missed.

Once an egg sac hatched at our communal postbox and it was magical, all these tiny yellow spot sprite things bumbling around and setting off. Put a good narrator on and people would have watched for hours.

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.

Some people like to use a stored balance as a financial discipline tool. Don’t put a “real” funding source on the account and then you can only spend the $100 you committed to, and not go whale-mad and drop $500 on premium currencies.

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.

Who are the skeletons fighting? Do we need to do well intentioned symbolic support gestures on social media?

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.