Print the photos that you like on the laser, if you really like 'em, order them to be printed from your local pharmacy/whatever that has good printers.

Brother makes a color laser with scanner for under $400 at Best Buy. It's on the heavy side, but it supports wireless. I set one up for a friend of mine a couple of months ago and haven't heard a word of complaint.

He's a frat boy who never grew up. Just look at the Tesla models spelling S3XY.

I've had mixed results with that. But the one thing that I have noticed is that different people swear by different various techniques, it appears that one size doesn't fit all.

If the droplets can't hit your eyes, it helps a lot! My mom had an excellent technique: she had a gas stove and ran a burner on high, cutting onions next to it. Alton Brown tested this and apparently the convection current caused by the flames will capture a lot of the aerosolized droplets and incinerate them!

with a laser light show. The photographer was shooting a high-end Canon DSLR and the laser scanned right across the axis of the focal plane of the camera, and that was it for the sensor. Burned a line right across it: you could remove the lens and lock the shutter open and it was quite visible to the naked eye.

I'm actually a little surprised this hasn't happened/been reported on before.

fortunately not in any state that we may be moving to. My sympathy to those states that are in AT&T's/Lumen's shadow.

I've been considering taking the micro- and macro- courses offered at our community college, but if this is the level of jargon that I'm expected to wade through, I think I'd rather start studying Perl and APL again.

It was a stupid move to drop the HBO in favor of Max only. I never stopped calling it HBO and no one had trouble knowing what I was talking about.

I worked there back in the early '80s. Aside from publishing Tunnels and Trolls and the Nuclear War card game, we did play-by-mail computer-moderated games. Our main computer was a Raytheon with magnetic core memory and punched-tape I/O. Those were the days. It was pretty cool in that when the Arizona summer monsoons came in, we'd just flip the power switch and turn it off. Storm passes: turn it back on and resume production. If the machine got wonky, there was a certain cross-beam in the memory cage that you'd strategically place a 2x4 and whap the end of it with a hammer for a couple of minutes to randomize the memory, then reload the OS and you were back to work. I never got to see this happen.

Fun times. But anyway....

The head programmer, Steve MacGregor, was an absolute nut for Pascal. Anything that was an in-house game that didn't run on Theo, the Raytheon, he wrote in Pascal on CP/M boxes. And since it was all UCSD p-code, it was easy to port to new computers as they came in over the years, long after I was gone. While I was learning programming at the time, sadly I wasn't into Pascal just then and didn't appreciate it. I wish I had been, I could've learned a lot from Steve as he was quite the wizard.

Even more sadly, Flying Buffalo is no more, Rick Loomis the founder passed away in 2019. The Tunnels and Trolls and other properties have been bought up and are still available on DriveThruRPG, and it appears the play-by-(e)mail games are still going, who knows how long that'll be up.

Borland will live with us in spirit always! I have/had a Turbo Pascal box set, but sadly lost the disks. LOVED their spreadsheet and word processor. I so wish they were still around, but we can't have everything.

Completely disagree. I've been voting the Hugos for several years, haven't attended a WorldCon in decades. You can vote the Hugos for the cost of a supporting membership, $50US. That will get you the download packet containing ebooks of most of the nominees and allow you to vote for the current year and nominate for the next year, IIRC. Lots of people do this.

While I'd love to attend, finances and other obligations preclude it. Haven't been to a proper sci-fi con in over 15 years.

Live long and prosper, my friend.

This is becoming my new favorite: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffoxtrot.com%2F2025%2F05%2F04...

This is exactly what I came to post. Clearly Eric doesn't understand some of the problems involved. I think he's suffering from the delusion that he's the smartest man in the room because he's so rich.

I looked at the iFixit for installing an SSD for my 2014 Mini and noped out of it. I'll stick with its internal HD and go to booting external if it ever dies.