BoxOfRain

The original Furby was interesting on this front, I have one controlled by a Pi Zero using a motor controller and LED driver board (you need an LED for the cam position sensor, and this way I could ba…

I'm not sure of the veracity of this, but apparently the Disney set the film Treasure Planet up to fail specifically so it could wash its hands of the very cool but expensive hybrid technology …

The UK used to get around this with very powerful medium-wave signals, the site at Orfordness could put out the BBC World Service at 2 MW towards the USSR and the Eastern Bloc. This site was built on …

I'd quite like to hook up a teletypewriter to a modern Linux box, sounds like a fun little project.

More heads should have rolled over this in my opinion, absolutely despicable that they cheerfully threw innocent people in prison rather than admit their software was a heap of crap. It makes me so an…

I was taught about it in university as a computer science undergrad, thought about it often since I ended up working in medtech.

I used a 2015 MacBook Pro up until 2021 when I replaced it with its M1 successor, the 2015 MacBook went to a sibling where it's still their main machine. Apparently it works fine, a little slow b…

To be fair in Antarctica territorial ownership is a bit strange, as I understand it a lot of countries don't recognise Antarctic claims in general and those that do tend to do so on a mutual basi…

>These all seem made for non-musicians to make a very cookie cutter song from a specific genre. This is my main problem with AI music at the moment, I'd love it if I had proper creative contro…

Yeah I've seen people refer to it as "Chat" too who've nothing to do with Twitch.

>From not needing to fix the house Someone unfamiliar with the 'landlord special' I see!

>The rebuild will likely end up easier, IMO, because the screens and the logic is all done. Most of it just has to be moved to strict backend and then have the APIs secured correctly. Atlas can fin…

Interestingly while it'd be daft to call them Christian Nationalist the Labour Party does owe a lot of its early philosophy to various religious groups descended from the English Dissenters. This…

I genuinely think that some 20% of the population are incurable moral busybodies, and the main function of liberal democracy is to protect the rest of society from these people. In this case liberal d…

The UK would need to have a well-funded and well-equipped police force to be a proper police state, and the rate of shoplifting, burglary etc that goes on suggests otherwise.

Yeah as a British person if anything I think the French had the right idea and we need to be moving away from dependence on American SLBMs in favour of a fully indigenous programme. I find the idea th…

It's definitely long lost its crown as the main way to watch video, but linear TV does still have a role. Apparently there's still the odd broadcast in the UK that means the national grid ha…

>My building replaced all the outdoor lights with them, and now it's just too bright to sit on my stoop at night like used to be so common here in Brooklyn. What I miss are the old low-pressur…

I've been using KDE for years now, I've recently put CachyOS with KDE on the new personal machine I just built and I've not been so impressed with a distro in ages. It's rock solid…

I've found propensity to swear quite a useful observation when determining whether or not a user is an LLM. I suspect it'll remain useful for quite a while, the corporate LLM providers at le…

It's Pascal's Wager with a sci-fi reskin, and all the objections that go along with that.

I think as well as the obvious connection to nuclear warfare, part of the public fear of nuclear technology comes directly from how highly radioactive objects mimic the idea of a "curse". In…

My A-level chemistry teacher liked to paint it onto door frames and in the hallways. Apparently one day he'd left some out in his lab in preparation for this prank, then the school had a surprise…

To me it's a totalitarian style, it tells people 'I'm unashamedly ugly and I couldn't care any less what you think about that'. It goes out of its way to be imposing and insti…

There's only so far you can economically maintain a building of bare concrete in a damp maritime climate like the UK I think, the porous material is just going to be a nightmare when it doesn…

Music is always something that comes to mind for me; in the UK there's a long history of excellent music with strong working class roots, but as the economy becomes more precarious in the UK (hou…