I have two color laser printers. The old one is a Dell branded printer from about 15 years ago and was about the cheapest color laser printer you could buy at the time. It has some issues now particularly with color printouts, and combined with poor Linux support meant I went ahead and bought its replacement, a much nicer Brother model. But as the old printer can still give acceptable results for some things I’m keeping it until it runs out of toner which could be a while.

On top of that I still have an HP LaserJet 4 but that’s been disconnected for a while. Still prints but desperately needs new rollers.

That’s tackling a different myth about light bulbs using a lot of energy to start up so it’s better to leave them on rather than pay the extra energy cost of starting them up again.

Here, the hypothesis is that stress of thermal cycling of the components in LED light bulb by cycling it on and off will shorten the life of the bulb and the cost of replacing the bulbs prematurely is greater than the energy costs of just leaving it on. While it’s certainly true that almost all LED light bulb failures I have seen are not the actual LEDs themselves but the other components, I’m still skeptical. Especially as LED bulbs have gotten really cheap now.

It’s the latter for all of the Bluetooth audio protocols that I’ve worked with.

The van itself doesn’t make sense. It’s a weird mashup of Ford and Chevy styling and details, with a bit of Dodge thrown in for good measure. It’s actually pretty plausible and very realistic looking but that’s not a Chevy van (nor is it a Ford or a Dodge with a badge transplant). Some thing with all the cars in the background. They are all very plausible but I can’t actually ID any of them.

Either someone has been busy with Photoshop, or the AI stuff is getting scary good.

Smells like AI slop to me…

It was probably a combination of using the motherboard RAID and AMD motherboards to boot.

Microsoft also updated their Windows XP install disk a few times over the years. If you were installing from an original launch disk from 2001 on a PC with 2006 hardware it was quite a different experience than with a disk that already had SP3 and a bunch of newer drivers.

30 years ago, Windows 95/98 (not sure about things like NT4) would just fall back to going through the BIOS to access the disk. It was slow, but it worked, and you could install Windows and then install your storage drivers later. Needing to push F6 and install your storage drivers during the install was a Windows 2000/XP thing.

The installing Windows 20 years ago panel is missing the bit where you have to push F6 and have a floppy disk handy with the drivers for your storage device. Yes, an actual floppy disk. Ditto for all the other drivers (video, sound, network, etc.) that you usually had to install once you were booted into the OS.

For clones of WinAmp for Linux, there’s qmmp (which I use) and I believe some distros still have an xmms package (xmms2 is a bit of a different beast). xmms hasn’t seen an update in a long time but like old versions of WinAmp it still works. Both of them have some support for classic WinAmp skins. Neither one supports the full feature sets of WinAmp such as the media library or video playback, so it depends on what parts of WinAmp you’re looking for.

WinAmp also runs under wine and basic stuff works, but last time I tried it I ran into issues with some of the plugins and the basic stuff is covered by qmmp so other than nostalgia reasons I didn’t really see much point in running WinAmp under Wine.

The problem is everyone expects Calc to be Excel, including full compatibility with reading and writing of Excel’s file formats. As Excel is a constantly moving target, following that path means you’ll forever be a second-rate Excel that’ll never quite be fully compatible.

I find Calc to be a fine spreadsheet program myself, though I’m hardly a power user. If you want to use Excel, then just go use Excel.

That’s really only needed at slow speeds. At higher speeds the tire noise is enough. Even for most modern ICE cars, at higher speeds the tire noise dominates over the engine/exhaust noise.

Earlier this year I needed a SSD for a PC I was going to use as a router. The smallest drive Microcenter had was 256 GB, which was massive overkill. It was also priced at $19, so I was like whatever and bought it.

With the massive increases in price for flash memory, maybe we’ll start seeing smaller drives again.

If I remember right the first couple of books were originally published as a series of short stories in a sci-fi magazine and sometime later were compiled into novels. That’s why the books seem a bit disjointed where they’ll suddenly just jump ahead in time to some new setting.

That’s exactly how it works, well other than me having the dates off as the Boomers weren’t even born when Social Security was enacted by FDR. When Social Security was enacted, retirees started receiving benefits even if they never paid into the system, which was paid for by the current workers who were paying into the system. It’s been like that ever since. Social Security is also not a pension.

You are correct that for most people would be better off investing their Social Security taxes into a hedge fund but workers don’t really have a choice in the matter.

That’s not how Social Security works. The money the Boomers paid into the system went to paying benefits for the previous generations. The benefits the Boomers (at least the ones that have retired) are getting now is being paid by the workers in the younger generations. While it’s true the program has run a surplus, if the young taxpayers stopped paying into the system that surplus wouldn’t last very long.

Not that I disagree, but 90 would be silent generation.

It’s the explanation for why the Allies could spot their planes in situations where they would otherwise not be easily visible. If it happens a few times you might write it off as luck, but if it keeps happening over and over you might get suspicious.

With that said, I don’t think they really bought the carrots thing. Both the Allied and Axis powers knew about radar and how it worked. It’s just the Allies figured out how to build and deploy their systems first.

Wesley Willis

If I really wanted something like that, I’d just buy a dumb fridge and rig up a camera inside of it.

You can always just use set compatible.

Actually, one of the reasons that vim “won” over many of the other vi-like editor clones back in the day is that it tried to behave like vi as closely as possible, whereas many of the others didn’t.