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"Infant school" is a class of school in the UK.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_infant_schools_in_G...


Yes, by "infant" I didn't mean baby, rather "in infant school" so 5-11, I was 8ish IIRC? Apologies for the Briticism. No apologies for despising that evil bitch.

This is a thing for a child. The aim of such projects is to get it built before they grow out of it. I think given the duration and duty cycle of usage it will be fine.

I lost all my files to Time Machine in 2008. I don't remember exactly what happened. But since then I'll take a slightly slower, observable command-line copy over sparkly magic.

Yes, I do not trust TM. That's why I have both a backup with TM for convenience and also to have all the files (including system files), and a mirror of the important files (basically my home directory) with `rsync`.

I’ve just set up a forum for up and coming bagpipe makers (not the loud Scottish kind).

It’s been a real breath of fresh air seeing a community coalesce without the feeling of predators on the horizon (eg a hosting provider with misaligned incentives or astroturfers).

I don’t do social media (beyond HN) much at all these days but I’m enjoying seeing it slowly take off.

Using hosted Discourse. I’m glad there’s still a market for it.


Curious why you went with a matrix over WS2812 or similar. That PCB looks like it was painful to route!


We switched to a matrix partly for price, partly for improved reliability.

Regular RGB LEDs are a lot cheaper than the WS2812, around 6x cheaper when we made the decision to switch, which adds up when you have 768 of them.

WS2812 LEDs are much easier to route, but if one dies then every LED routed after that one stops lighting up.


They have visible pickups, which presumably have a permanent magnet core.

But how are the resonators getting 'plucked'? Is it the same electromagnet as the pickup or a separate one? I can't imagine those two modes would work well. (i.e. dumping current across the coil would make the magnet want to escape)

Perhaps there's a field coil instead of a permanent magnet?


My guess is that it uses magnetic fields to resonate the bars (kinda like an ebow). Any plucking types sounds are probably done with filter/envelopes within the electronics.


The visible coils provide the stimulus, I think. The pickups are mounted near the top (middle?) of the resonators and not directly visible.


And yet was an absolute marvel of engineering. I often used to wonder at the accuracy and reliability they got out of those stepper motors, trying to imagine the size of the tracks.

Fun thought experiment. The 128 GB SD card on my desk could store a 1-bit bitmap of 1,000,000 x 1,000,000 pixels. Imagine shrinking that down to the size of the die, and how small each (logical) cell is.


Maybe that's the charm of mechanical watches? Precise metal parts moving in harmony. You can entertain yourself with analyzing its workings by simply watching it (no pun intended).

Precise, but featureless digital clocks lack "soul" which you can actually see.


For sure. And early specimens are worth a close look if you ever get an opportunity!

Humans can do amazing things! One of those things happens to be really precise, tiny parts literally willed into existing.


There was a hacked driver you could get that would tighten up the tolerances of the stepper motor and get from 1.5 to 1.9 MB of data onto a single floppy, but sliding the tracks closer together.

There was I believe at some point a game that shipped 1.5MB disks as a copy protection mechanism. But if you had this tool you could copy them anyway.


Are you referring to 2M/2MGUI? That didn't change the track spacing (which is fixed) but used bigger sector sizes (similar to how HDDs went from 512B to 4K physical sectors):

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/27412/how...

(Big fuckings to Wikipedia for erasing history, and kudos to archive.org for preserving it: https://web.archive.org/web/20241203124243/https://en.wikipe... )


No they definitely did more tracks, but it seems to be a smaller multiplier than I recalled.

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/12768/wha...

2-5% more tracks, 12.5% more sectors.


The track spacing didn't change, but yes, many if not all floppy drives could step the head slightly past the officially supported number of tracks.


Stepper motors were last used for HDDs with the capacity in megabytes.


I was thinking 5¼ floppies actually. But the same applies to the voice coils in newer hdds.


Youtube has tonnes of cookies! Why give youtube a free pass but not some independent hobbyist's site?


It doesn't get a free pass from me but it seems to work fine with only first party cookies, ublock origin and built in tracking protection active, and most (but not all) third party content blocked by umatrix.

Alternatively you can use the link in GP to grab the video via yt-dlp. Can even do that via tor if you want. (Weirdly at least historically youtube was friendlier to tor exit nodes than it was to a lot of mainstream VPNs. Not sure what was up with that, haven't tested it in a while.)


What does custom domain mean? Just an email provider other than the mainstream ones?


You purchase your own domain name and use that domain name as your email address. For instance, if I had an email address that was me@afandian.com; the afandian.com would be a custom domain. It's not routed to @gmail.com, it's routed to @afandian.com. Now in practice you can have a custom domain and still have it managed by Google's Mail servers; but it's the domain name itself that sends up the flags.


Yeah that's what I thought GP meant.

It just seems like it should be so commonplace. It just seems ridiculous that it means

> You have to reach a human


I've got one.

When iPhone alarm goes off, the screen doesn't wake up, so I press the power button. Which snoozes the alarm. Not only did I not want to snooze the alarm, I hoped that the alarm would wake the phone up so I can click 'stop'.

I assume that's a bug rather than a holding-it-wrong?


I’ll note that looking at the screen deadens the alarm.

I’ve had it a couple of times where I’ve looked at the alarm on my nightstand, the alarm quietens down to nearly nothing and I fall back to sleep.

My partner missed a flight due to this.


At least this one can be disabled: settings > accessibility > Face ID & attention > attention aware features.


There's a reason I have 3 alarms set ;P


This one has always confused me as well. Tapping the screen, as the other commenter suggested, dismisses the whole thing too, so I have to fish for the stop button in the notifications every time.

Maybe there’s “the Apple way” that we’ve yet to discover.


The Apple way is to have an Apple watch and deal with the alarm there


The problem is there is only one little button on the screen that actually stops the alarm. Everything else you can tap or do to the phone while the alarm is sounding will "snooze" it. It's infuriating.


Surely that’s by design? If stopping the alarm was “easy”, a half-awake person could accidentally stop it rather than snooze it.


If you have tap to wake turned on (it's on by default), you can tap the screen anywhere to wake it up. So long as the screen isn't already on and you don't mash the Snooze button, you should be able to hit stop.

I believe the power-button-to-snooze thing is meant as a usability boost for groggy people: the physical button may be easier to click than some random spot on the screen.


I will object that the point of the alarm is to make sure you're not groggy anymore by the time you deactivate it.


But not everyone lives alone. If you'd like to avoid waking everyone else up - you hit the power button (or indeed any button) while groggy. And if you drift off to sleep despite your best efforts - well, that's why the button snoozes the alarm rather than disabling it.


double tap the screen


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