I bought a Tektronix 4014 in 1991 and had it until 2016. During that time it never required any repairs or calibration. Built like a tank. The guy I sold it to had to replace capacitors in the power supply, and still uses it today.
Readit Newsdn3500 commented on A vector graphics workstation from the 70s justanotherelectronicsblo... · Posted by u/ibobev
dn3500 commented on We're learning more about what Vitamin D does technologyreview.com/2025... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar
I live in the tropics and there is plenty of sunshine here. So my skin doctor told me to avoid the sun at all costs, always wear suncreen and a hat, don't go out in the daytime. A few years of that and now I have a vitamin D deficiency.
dn3500 commented on Oversight Committee Releases Additional Epstein Estate Documents oversight.house.gov/relea... · Posted by u/latexr
"The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released an additional 20,000 pages of documents received from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein."
It's in google drive?!?!
Not only that, it's all jpeg images. Of email messages. I wonder if they printed these out from Lotus Notes on a dot-matrix printer then screenshotted them on their camera phones.
There are various efforts (outside the government) to convert these to pdf and ocr them. I think Internet Archive has a torrent.
dn3500 commented on Inside an Isotemp OCXO107-10 Oven Controlled Crystal Oscillator tomverbeure.github.io/202... · Posted by u/thomasjb
I imagine that the accuracy requirements for those crystals are not quite as stringent as the one that I’m talking about here!
An entire 1000 foot reel of 35 mm film only has about 15,000 frames on it, so one part in 30,000 would be good enough. When I worked in TV none of the sound equipment had ovens for their crystals.
We did have a sync generator with a crystal oven. I forget who made it. The sync generator has multiple outputs, the most important one being the color subcarrier, which is 3.579545 MHz for US NTSC (I still remember that number). It also puts out vertical and horizontal sweep signals. The stable timebase allowed us to free run for a day in case we lost the network signal for some reason. The network (NBC in our case) had a cesium clock in New York that they calibrated against WWV for time of day. We locked our clock to their signal, and all our equipment to our clock.
dn3500 commented on Inside an Isotemp OCXO107-10 Oven Controlled Crystal Oscillator tomverbeure.github.io/202... · Posted by u/zdw
dn3500 commented on Putting a dumb weather station on the internet colincogle.name/blog/byo-... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
You might consider joining the Citizen Weather Observer Program. It's a great way to share your data with other station owners.
I had a station for a few years. The receiver had a usb interface so no software radio required. I used weewx to import the data. I even had a water temperature sensor off the end of my dock so I could see if the lake was warm enough to swim in.
This, this, this.
Just never, ever connect the TV to the internet. Connect up an Nvidia shield, or a mini-PC/raspberry pi configured with whatever apps you desire, hidden behind a pi-hole. Connect a steam deck if gaming/linux desktop usage is your thing. I only touch the TV remote to switch on the TV, and even that could be automatable with home assistant+CEC if that's of interest.
I had a TV once, can't remember the brand, that refused to stream from my dlna server unless it could contact its own corporate servers over the internet first.
dn3500 commented on Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something? · Posted by u/paulwilsonn
In 1981 I wrote a tool that is still in use today. You can install the package on most major linux distros. This was before we paid much attention to software copyright, and I simply published it with my name on it and no license.
About six months later someone took my code, removed my name from it, made some small changes that didn't change its behavior at all, and re-published it. By that time I had moved on and wasn't aware that it had started to take off.
The man page now has someone else's name on it as author. I don't really regret publishing it but I wish I had put a copyright notice and license on it.
dn3500 commented on Show HN: Header-only GIF decoder in pure C – no malloc, easy to use · Posted by u/FerkiHN
It's header-only in the sense that you cut everything that normally goes in the .c file and pasted it in the .h file.
Don't you get linker errors when a project includes this header twice in different translation units? If not, please explain how.
You're supposed to #define GIF_IMPLEMENTATION in only one of your .c files to prevent linker collisions. But yeah I don't get the point. How is this any better than the standard method of putting macros and data definitions in the .h and code in the .c? This is just going to confuse anyone who comes along later and wants to work on the code that uses this thing.
It's pretty entertaining!
And free to read for anyone interested: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/69404
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/jack-black/you-cant-win