0xEmmy @emmy@tech.lgbt

Here's our headmates introducing ourselves:

Zoey: im soft, pls give me lots of gentle snuggles and tight protective hugs.

Claire: don't do anything evil, I will get mad and you will hear about it. People need a stern talking to, I'm ya bitch.

Amy: You got stuff that needs doing, I like getting stuff done, 1+1=2.

Lynn: I'm just a goddamn intellectual, so either give me something interesting or leave me alone.

Veronica: wait y'all have a sense of identity? Where'd you get that, Amazon?

Question:

is MacOS decent for servers? Just asking because I have an old x86 one lying around.

IDEA:

a packet-switched large-scale network,

but for objects, not data.

We'd keep the existing postal service for edge cases (highly sensitive info, oversized or fragile parcels, rush delivery, certified delivery, that sorta thing),

but for "average-size" objects - anything from fast food to a medium-size Amazon package - trucks for the last mile (and hand delivery for the last meter) are a bit unnecessary.

Question:

what's the simplest way to put an internet-available server on a LAN?

Ban the server from using IPv4? Some kinda NAT dark magic? Get a dedicated IPv4 address for it?

Hypothesis:

The preference for cooked flavors over raw ones, and our fascination with exothermic processes such as fire,

is a result of the same evolutionary shift from natural, raw foods straight off the source organism to complex, intentional processing that gave us big brains and small stomachs

IDEA:

a fictional setting about a pressure system engineer...

on a rare-metals mining colony turned metropolis on the surface of Sol 2. Y'know, the one with the supercritical CO2 industrial oven for a surface atmosphere.

Once you figure out how to keep the atmosphere from wiping the colony out, it'd probably make a pretty useful industrial resource.

IDEA:

An Expanse-like universe,

except instead of reaction drives,

it's a gravitonics revolution. Starting with large-scale subluminal Alcubierre field spacecraft, then miniaturizing and advancing in a manner similar to today's semiconductors.

We'd have courier probes loaded with hard drives for interplanetary internet (instead of tight-beam electromagnetics). Fusion would be ubiquitous and miniaturized. Spacecraft would have interior gravity. FTL would be possible.

Question:

for RAID 0 on Windows (SATA spinning-disk hard drives),

the solution is Storage Spaces, right?

Ok, how exactly did I get from the Z80, to bose-einstein condensation?

Wikipedia is a dangerous site.

Anyone else see the irony in Nazis being the American standard "human but still free to represent without concern for dehumanization" despite our having waged an almost identical war on almost identical grounds for at least the preceding century?

I wonder if there's a simple way to do NVMe over Ethernet.

(I know there is over Fiber Channel, but I'm not exactly in the mood to add another link-level protocol to my LAN.)

Ok, so:

the two most powerful x86 interpreters I have (assuming <=8 threads) are a top-of-the-line AMD chip,

and Rosetta on an M2.

The performance is comparable (with the M2 having the advantage of native ARM code for better performance).

In terms of power:

The M2 recently lasted a full 2 days on battery,

and the AMD manages to gain a temeprature well into the 10's K above ambient at the BIOS.

The continued existence of hardware x86 is an environmental issue.

IDEA:

bring back interlaced scanning, with the number of fields per frame scaled so the GPU generates 1 field per refresh cycle.

Does anyone know if anything particularly interesting happens if you overclock a bunch of 65x chips (at minimum, 6502 and 6522) to 16 MHz?

Ok,

I used to be a flat-out non-believer in Apple. I considered their products to be absurdly marked up with nothing to show for the value.

But y'all, Apple's M2 chip is legit. My computer has lost 45% of its charge in 9 hours of mixed web browsing and idling.

Near-any x86 laptop would be just about dead by now.

Ok, bad news: my existing oscilloscope is on the noisy side, and has a pretty suboptimal resolution.

Good news: replacements on eBay are quite economical.

Bad news: apparently shipping a particle accelerator across 🇺🇸 is kinda slow.

Good news: I have a few different options to improvise one, if so required.

Ok, so doing some thinking:

A half-wave of the NTSC color signal is 70 nanoseconds, which is a respectable time for an AVR machine cycle.

This is the maximum delay between signal level changes (the "Nyquist frequency") to recreate that signal.

This might barely be doable with an AVR, assuming one memory write per frame. Emphasis on barely.

Conversely, I can ignore color altogether, and my critical signal rate improves to 1.5ish microseconds.

I just realized,

I can literally make a composite video signal with an Arduino and some resistors.

And by "can", I mean "hopefully will".