Very neat. I work for a small manufacturer and wanted to implement LED signage like i had at my old gig: show machine speed, job info, etc.
But the signs we used before were serial with ethernet converters that were pretty fragile and as the sole contributor i dont want that hanging over my head.
Are there larger forms of these signs available? I understand TVs are trivially expensive at this point but theres something about the brightness and design of LED displays that seems uniquely better in the manufacturing space.
I got this game for Christmas and wasn’t really bright enough to get through the whole thing at 7 but it was a really interesting game that I’d forgotten about until now.
Just an anecdote: my grandfather passed away a few years ago and he was always into new technology. After he passed when we were cleaning up his home we found no fewer than 11 inkjet printers in his basement.
Every time one stopped working (probably ran out of ink, or printed poorly because of long delays between printing) he would go to Best Buy, get talked up by a salesperson about a nice new printer, and buy it.
>> he would go to Best Buy, get talked up by a salesperson about a nice new printer, and buy it.
In a past life I worked at Best Buy, and the standard printer sales tactics were nuts. If a customer wanted to buy a printer, you were supposed to sell them:
2 packs of color ink (remind the customer that the included cartridges are only half-full)
2 packs of black ink
4 reams of regular paper
2 packages of photo paper
GOLD printer cable
The Best Buy Service Plan, of course
Reminds me of a story of a printer I installed for a customer (could have been Lexmark? It was a very cheap printer). It came with an unpowered USB hub which I thought was odd. The printer was not printing right. I happened to read the instructions for once out of frustration and it mentioned that you MUST use the USB hub. That didn't make any sense as usually a troubleshooting step is to remove the USB hub. But when I put the hub into the chain, the printer started working correctly. I wish I still had the model number to prove it, but there were knowledgebase articles about the hub being required. Probably to correct some mistake in manufacturing where it was cheaper to include the hub than fix all the printers.
Fellow former $BBY-er here... you gotta admit, the bundle pricing Best Buy ran on all of that stuff (with the purchase of a new printer, of course) made it so easy to talk them into it.
When I started I had just left commission-based sales in electronics at Sears and I was amazed at how much better Best Buy was at pushing accessories with big ticket items.
And all 11 of those will still be in landfill when your childrens children are old and dying. It's a pity they didn't make them out of metals that could be easily recycled.
All of them, Aluminium is 2.49 USD per KG, steel is like 4 times cheaper.
We use plastics because they can be moulded into any shape in seconds. Aluminium is used for premium products instead of steel because it's easier to manufacture into shape - you can cut an aluminium beam as large as your arm with a hacksaw in a minute or two. If that was structural steel, you would batrely make a dent in hours. This reflects on wear of cutting and shaping equipment in factories too.
Stainless steel is the king of materials, but a bitch to work with, that's why you only ever see simple shapes made out of it.
There really aren't any sadly. Maybe cast magnesium, like in sewing machines. It'd be better if the printer was built out of some bio-polymer plastic so it just fell apart after 20 years. But we're rapidly getting to a paperless society so give it 10-20 years it'll be less of an issue.
My dad ran a pet grooming business, and he went through probably a printer a year. I always figured it died because of the amount of pet fur in the air clogging up the printer, so at one point I asked him why he didn't put a door on the office to keep the fur out so his printer wouldn't get jammed up with pet fur.
He told me they weren't replaced because the fur killed them, it just wasn't worth replacing the inks since it was so damn expensive. It was always cheaper for him to replace the printer instead of replacing the ink, and because he never held onto a printer for much longer than a year he never bothered trying to keep it protected from the shop environment.
About the only think he ever printed was the occasional door flyer, checklists and general office paperwork, probably a single ream of paper a year at most.
They do, but in over a decade that I remember him buying and replacing printers for the groom shop, I think he only ended up buying replacement ink (because he actually used all of it in under a year) maybe twice.
I think that was when the local print shop either shut down or was too backlogged for my dad to get his business cards done in reasonable time so he used print-at-home business card sheets for a bit to tide him over.
Yeah, totally. He only printed things a few times a year and by then inkjets usually dry and print poorly. I don't fault him but it's interesting to these strange market forces in my life.
As an aside, my grandfather was a terrific guy. He bought a Gateway 2000 PC in the 90's and spent lots of time with me getting Sim City 2000 loaded up on it. He always had some gadget to show me since he knew how much I loved technology and he was very good at it for someone of his generation. I don't begrudge recycling 11 printers as I cleaned up his house and it always gives my dad and I a good laugh and nice memories of an important person in my life.
But incredibly wasteful. For sporadic printing it really makes the most sense to go somewhere where you can print by the page like a public library, office supply store etc. I think I've spent about $2 on printing in the past 5 years.
The most common electronics I see being thrown out these days is some shitty inkjet printer. Unlike a CRT or computer nobody wants them and so they sit by the side of the road for several days.
> The most common electronics I see being thrown out these days is some shitty inkjet printer.
I've had a broken HP inkjet on my desk for 10 years. The only reason I've hung onto it is because it makes for a very nice network-connected document scanner. I got it used from one of my spouse's parents, and I haven't ever even tried to print with it. I keep thinking about replacing it with a multifunction laser printer, but why bother? I only ever really need the scanner.
Ah that sucks. My local library's is pretty good as you can just email the file and use a print release station to print it. They have enough that I've never had to wait. Plus you can add print credit with a debit/credit card if need be.
I got a great deal on a Canon MF743C (a pretty decent color laser multi-function). MRSP is something like $600 (but in deals can be $400).
A guy on FB marketplace was locally selling one brand new for $250 (and took $175 if I picked up same day), because his dad had one that ran out of toner so the father had just bought a new one. It actually came with the new receipts from Best Buy. Looks like BB upsold on lasers too.
Except, it's a low-end business class laser, and they last forever. This thing is great.
As someone who is literally starting an IT department from scratch, this is a really exciting list for me to dig into. There are old favorites like 'mythical man month' that I'm generally aware of, though never actually read personally, and whole new blogs and videos to sift through. Thanks for this.
I work in an organization with a lot of internal line-of-business apps for manufacturing. While there might be hundreds or thousands of users, the problem just doesn't really warrant the extra steps that microservices requires to really work. (If my users want reporting, we can just run reports against the main database. We don't need some Report service implementing CQRS or Event Sourcing to put all the disparate pieces together...)
However, I will say we've taken some considerations from the microservices discussion to heart and thought more about fault-tolerance, ci/cd, and streamlining the deployment process so we've definitely gotten some value from the zeitgeist.
That said, most of our apps end up being a fairly relaxed monolith with some service integrations here and there. And you know what? It's pretty nice sometimes :)
I love daft punk and had countless nights in college studying, gaming, and coding to their albums. I will continue to love their music but totally understand wanting to move onto something new after almost 30 years :)
Best of luck to them in whatever they move onto next
I used to play HL 2 while listening to Discovery, I know, kinda weird, and now every time I hear songs from this album I have HL2 flashbacks. Somehow these are some of the most vivid memories I have, I can still see the screen and the in game scenes
I had this same feeling with SNES games and Diablo 2 and stuff I listened to when I was 10 till 14 (especially with System of a Down). Took me years to disassociate then. Not that I wanted, but it happened eventually.
The Nasa person they have helping narrate what's going on is so genuinely happy the landing went well. It made me kinda tear up. It's infectious just how excited all these people are about this project. Also, I was a bit worried he was going to pass out. 10/10, would watch again (and probably will with my kids)
The audible whew from one of the crew members after maximum deceleration when the telemetry re-established was heart-rending. Years of work, and there's nothing anyone here can do eleven light-minutes away; it was either going to work or one of the thousands of things that had to happen correctly wasn't going to happen.
I know nothing about this tech but could you copy a whole drive bit by bit onto another drive and keep the original while “using up” attempts on a donor drive?
If I'm not mistaken, the newer macs with the T1/T2 security chip ties the drive to the chip-- i.e. the drive cannot be decrypted without that exact T1/T2 chip hardware key (and possibly also the SSD key). Even if it's possible to duplicate the drive, I don't believe it's possible to decrypt it.
But the signs we used before were serial with ethernet converters that were pretty fragile and as the sole contributor i dont want that hanging over my head.
Are there larger forms of these signs available? I understand TVs are trivially expensive at this point but theres something about the brightness and design of LED displays that seems uniquely better in the manufacturing space.