Keith Barr focused on musical technology at MXR, Alesis and eventually Spin Semiconductor. His legacy is MXR pedal effects like the Phase-90, the MidiVerb digital reverb series and the Spin FV-1 digital reverb chip.
> The 8088's chief virtue was that it was readily available at a reasonable price;
That, and it had a compatible suite of peripheral chips, while the M68K didn't... Something I vaguely recall an Intel FAE gloating about soon after: "And we're going to keep it that way."
If you come across a CZ230S, be aware that you can exfiltrate all 100 of the fixed voicings through SysEx. I got that far, saving those tables to disk; my plan, when I ran out of time and attention, was to SysEx in one of those settings to the last entry in the CZ101's table, which is overwriteable, so as to get 8 notes at a time. Maybe you'll find a place to drop in a ROM with them all.
My anecdata is that, though it's not as effective as pseudoephedrine, phenylephrine actually is effective in an inhaler, and a helluva lot better at clearing up a stuffy nose than "scents and essential oils". Of course, a cylindrical inhaler with a wick inside it doesn't go near my digestive tract... Now I'll have to look around for a replacement inhaler, something quick enough to avert choking-panic. Thanks, CVS.
It's only the oral version which has no effect and is thus being pulled. The inhaled version has more evidence that it works and will remain available.
Commenting to something said within the linked article: 32-bit Devuan (with Trinity Desktop aka KDE3.5 on maintenance) is still available at http://exegnulinux.net/ with Devuan/Debian repos. I'm happily running that on a Core2 Duo laptop.
IIRC correctly from my Late 2007 Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook days, that cpu can handle a 64 bits OS (although in my case the EFI could not so you had to modify it in order to be able to boot a 64bits OS)
The laptop is a Gateway MX8711. I tried the Exe-Gnu 64bit live-USB and it refused to boot, so I shrugged and booted it into the 32bit flavor. Inherent or model-specific (or offended at only having 2G DRAM to play in), it wasn't worth my time to chase down why, not for an ancilliary machine.
Browsing is slow but not that unusable. firefox-esr is in the repos; I prefer palemoon but I'll take what I can get. Gnumeric is faster than LO; both are in the repos. The Broadcom blobs for that Gateway machine are sadly out of date, so I yanked the wifi module out entirely; ethernet works fine, though in most cases I use it landlocked. The editor I prefer (jstar) is TUI, so I mostly work out of xterms.
Use-cases? Remote and while-you-wait work, RS232 and ethernet test console. It's bigger than a netbook but it's what I've got, so I lug it around.
Not OP but I had a Late 2007 Core 2 Duo with 4G ram that could hold its own 3 years ago.
It was not comfortable but definitely usable (unlike a 2005 Imac G5 for example).
A 2013 4th gen i5 laptop with a SSD (major difference in trems of experience) and 8GB Ram remains totally usable for regular stuff (watching movies, Youtube, browsing the web, basic dev work)
The plastic body is generally what fails before everything else.
As long you have at least four cores, 4GB Ram, linux and above all a SSD you should be fine
I'm a ham; my kids aren't... but they grew up with me using Morse (my computers talk to me when they boot up, and when a 'kitchentimer' goes off, and...) so they were naturally exposed to the paradigm. Maybe that's a limiting factor, but...
With CW you're limited to two states: key and unkey. Knocking on a wall, you're not: you can go loud and soft as well. A dah has the same pacing as it always does (3 dits in length), but if its knock is perceptibly louder, at least twice as hard as a dit, in practice that seems to make it hold together as readable Morse, at least for us. Certainly our family signal, questionmark (..__..), is usable that way, so is each son's "call-letter".
Ham radios. The weather. Space weather, because that affects ham radios. Growing old sucks; it's a hobby dominated by the aged. Antennas. Kids these days. We avoid religion and politics, mostly, though there's an increasing segment of MAGA wing nuts who no longer think of their hateful rejection of the majority of their fellow humans as politics. Fortunately, one can spin the dial.
It's the ARRL field day for a few more hours; check out http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901 near 14100 kHz, looking for 2.7 kHz wide voice transmissions (USB), or near 7200 kHz LSB.
Casual small talk, antennas and other ham gear, perhaps trying to speak a foreign language (ham radio worked wonders for both my Russian and my Portuguese!), family, other interests...
Some communications between hams are no more than call signs, signal reports, and 73s (“best regards”, ending the QSO (conversation)). This is useful for things like satellite communications, which are very time-limited opportunities for making contacts.
This last weekend was ARRL Field day, a huge operating event designed to be "practice" for when the "stuff hits the fan" but also just gets a ton of people on the air using portable stations set up in public and austere environments (like in a park pavilion, not in a cozy basement or office).
I made a playlist of as many FD videos i could find on youtube [0]. There's a lot of examples of stations, setups, and the actual contacts - which are very short.
Field day is a sort of contest. In a nutshell, the more contacts you make, the more points you get. So, the contacts are short and have a bare minimum of information (callsign, operating class (#radios + power level) and US state/CAN province).
"Normal" voice and CW conversations are much different, and just sound like two people chatting about life, the weather, family, health, kids these days, or technical radio-related topics like descriptions of their station, propagation studies, or reports of the last hamfest they went to.
There's also "nets" which usually have their "check-ins" give a short report, or none at all (aka short-time). Some nets relay information about severe weather (skywarn / storm spotting), others relay official national traffic in accordance with the Incident Command System (ICS) to practice for wide-spread disasters like hurricanes and earthquakes. The radiogram system still runs via ham radio too, and you can hear national traffic system (NTS) nets relaying messages the old-fashioned way.
Right now, the majority of amateur radio traffic on HF is currently FT8 [1]. IT's a low-speed weak-signal FSK mode, in which operators exchange only each other's callsign, signal report, location (4-char maidenhead gridsquare), and a few extra characters to say hello (CQ), roger (RR), or goodbye (73) in a 77-bit message.
Other stations might not even be hams talking, like APRS, WSPR, or signal propagation beacons. There are quite a few automated stations that perform a variety of tasks.
There's a TON of low-earth orbit cubesats that use amateur radio for telemetry and command/control, and a few operate as a repeater that hams use to relay a signal across wide areas. There are even hams aboard the ISS, as well as a repeater. So sometimes we say hi to astronauts. They don't say much since a lot of people are in line to get that highly-desired contact. Sometimes schools coordinate with radio clubs to have students ask questions directly to astronauts via ham radio. It's old-school, but it provides an excellent learning opportunity about the utility of radio.
Bottom line, hams talk about anything. And some don't talk about anything at all. And some aren't even people. Some are astronauts. It's a very broad, multi-faceted hobby so there's lots to talk about.
> With CW you're limited to two states: key and unkey
This might be true for radio morse, but in the original Telegraph, each element was encoded by two clicks. One click when the morse sounder operated, and another click when the sounder released. In other words, each element is encoded via two clicks, but with different spacing.
And (guessing here) you'd be SOL if there were already 9999 Susies registered when you tried to sign up.
Me, I'm gonna treat it like a firstnick.lastnick format when it arrives at my account. I figure "crb3.cdp1802" is very unlikely to be taken before I get there, but, if I'm wrong, there're lots of other already-memorized device-numbers I can append.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/555_timer_IC