Mr. Tim

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• Commented on Do my Laundry
  ... nevertheless, the old-timers amongst the engineering staff at Manchester reckoned that you could get more life out of vacuum valves than most people realised. Post WWII it was figured out a major life limiter of vacuum tubes was...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  I am getting the impression that our difference of opinion is largely down to you wanting more social contact than me. .. snip .. You know, if somebody had told me that this was written by Wednesday Addams I...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  I have an iPhone Se 3, just bought this year. It is the same size as previous SEs and 7 & 8. The iPhone 13 mini is a smidgen smaller, although thicker (but it has a better camera) and is...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  There is one trope I don't think you have hit: The Cassandra syndrome. Sometimes shows up as the village idiot who speaks the truth but nobody pays attention. For a near(ish) future story, have a LLM AI model actually telling/warning...
• Commented on Summer webcomics
  Full Moon trigger: At the time of the full moon: The Earth is (almost) directly between the Moon and the Sun. If there were a deep pit on the Moon, in the middle of the side that faces us, during...
• Commented on Announcement: 2nd edition Laundry Files RPG is coming
  The Hagley museum is the old Dupont Gunpowder works. They have a machine shop that is completely powered by one water turbine (not a water wheel) through gears & belts. Other aspects of the operation (the grinding and mixing of...
• Commented on Announcement: 2nd edition Laundry Files RPG is coming
  Rain generators: I wonder if you could stack them? I mean, if you had a stack of them, with each one a bit less than 10 meters apart, each rain drop should reach terminal velocity before the next one (sorry...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  Does agriculture ever show up as part of school science fairs? Isn't that what 4H clubs and State Fairs are for?...
• Commented on Announcement: 2nd edition Laundry Files RPG is coming
  Do dragons obtain the power-to-weight ratio to make that heavy, under-winged reptilian body fly by supporting symbiotic microbial V8s? Or did the legends get it wrong about which end the flame comes out? They are not wings, just control surfaces...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  BUT This is NOT complicated - a simple mix of specified I've seen some comments on another blog hypothesizing that it requires the copper atoms to replace very specific lead atoms for the effect observed. (Like a semiconductor, only...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  Pigeon - I bet you would have loved the CDC 6000 operator console. Each character drawn by the electron beam (caligraphic display), full addressability was 512x512, but you could get a lot more text on the screen than that would...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  How about Interface Age, Jan 78? https://archive.org/details/197801InterfaceAgeV03I01 It is not a mouse......
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  Bo, my specific question was, would you have expected that assembly language tutorial in Computer Shopper? (As opposed to Byte, Doctor Dobbs, Circuit Cellar, etc.) (Forgot about Dr. Dobbs, another favorite :) ). I seem to remember the that...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  I mean, would you have read a multi-issue introduction to 6502 assembly language programming in the US version of the magazine? I had subscriptions to Byte, Kilobaud, and Circuit Cellar. I also had a preliminary manual of the 6809...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  I used to love the US Computer Shopper. I think it was impacted by the Internet because it relied on ads, which due to the publishing lead times were always months out of date. Once you could access the same...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  Clip from a Stargate episode. Strong parody here. Best episode, ever. (especially if you watched lots of sci-fi growing up :)...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  I don't go out to the movies much anymore. The one with the $2 matinees got torn down & I don't have anyone to go with me to see a movie in a REAL theater that makes it worth...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  I really despise it when people claim to be able to read my mind. I knew you were going to say that. (Sorry, couldn't resist)....
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  I'm not an engineer, of course, but I'd hazard a guess that if a warp drive is feasible, it would waste as little energy as possible in the form of non-functional gravitational waves. That in turn would mean it...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  I think I remember kids getting broken bones in the play ground (both after school and at the community park). I also seem to remember it was two boys that were ones always getting them. Neither was very bright... I...
• Commented on Finding true love in the cosmos
  and the hominins have speciated again You might find this of interest then: https://www.livescience.com/y-chromosome-dying.html...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  In the US, there's always MicroCenter Yes, I like that I have one nearby. Just before the pandemic, I got a 32" QHD (2560*1440) on an "open box" special for the home office ( (32" QHD has the same...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  And both Ellen and I wanted real desktops/towers. You know, with full-sized keyboards to type on, and my 24" monitor.... You can buy a gaming or business laptops these days for a reasonable amount of money (especially if you...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  Driving to a customer site in Kansas in the early morning. Everybody in the car is looking at the mountains low on the horizon, when we all suddenly realize they are clouds (the ground was flat enough that the curvature...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  I cut my teeth on the PDP-10, a mainframe that actually had a whole MB of RAM (shared among many users, of course). I cut my teeth (mostly) on a CDC 170 series 750 (one 40 Mhz CPU). A...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  It is sometimes difficult to remember how fast computers progressed from mid-70s to mid-2000s. I used to say that 1 computer year == 10 human years. IOW, a computer 0-2 years old might be the latest thing, but it would...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  BTW, one of DT's daughters recently married the son of a Nigerian billionaire so he might feel right at home with their politics. I think I just got an e-mail from him.......
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  And no, I do not want to see President Marjorie Taylor Greene in the White House. You may not have to worry about that: https://news.yahoo.com/people-sure-think-marjorie-taylor-053253337.html...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  Seriously, EVs generally have two gears: forward and reverse. I don't think there is even a gear for that, they just run the motor in reverse....
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  And it's easy to get the legislators in on the racket, because so many of them think the unnecessary extra production and activity is actually desirable.... Read "The Midas Plague" by Frederik Pohl. One collection I read it in...