fenwick ❔ @fenwick67@octodon.social

It's so crazy that a CD/DVD/CD burner drive is only $20.

Optical drives have a laser assembly that not only tracks inward and outward to follow the microscopic "groove" in the CD, but the lens shifts up, down, in and out on a tiny electromagnetic assembly, to adjust for warped disks and imperfections.

The motor speed is tightly controlled, and it reads and writes to a magic disk with lasers.

This thing is a miracle of engineering. And it costs less than a steak.

I love cheeky software dialogs TBH

windows 98 experts, I need help.

I have an old thinkpad that came with a blank hard drive, i managed to install an old version of xubuntu on it for fun a while ago, how do I install windows 98 on this? It has a floppy and CD drive. Just obtain a copy of win98 on CD?

like literally here's one of the image URLs: https://gpu-us-east-1b.shapeways.com/service/sws_service_shapejs_rt_v1.0.0/makeImageCached?background=ffffff&jobID=DYGIk_5e543256c480ac577d30f76f9120eb74&view=1.000000%2C+0.000000%2C+0.000000%2C+0.000000%2C+0.000000%2C+1.000000%2C+0.000000%2C+0.000000%2C+0.000000%2C+0.000000%2C+1.000000%2C+-3.000000%2C+0.000000%2C+0.000000%2C+0.000000%2C+1.000000&objTrans=0.964068%2C+0.053663%2C+-0.260179%2C+0.000000%2C+-0.016690%2C+0.989685%2C+0.142283%2C+0.000000%2C+0.265131%2C+-0.132829%2C+0.955019%2C+0.000000%2C+0.000000%2C+0.000000%2C+0.000000%2C+1.000000&width=710&height=528&imgType=JPG&quality=1&antiAliasing=SUPER_3X3&bumpMaps=true&castShadows=false&maxRayBounces=1&style=Material&frameNum=119

Shapeways' 3d model viewer doesn't use 3d rendering in your browser, it literally sends a 3d transform and some parameters over to a server which sends back a rendered image of the object., that gets put in an <img> tag. This is wild.

If I ever see an Amazon delivery robot on the sidewalk I will personally vandalize it

I figured out how to get openGL programs compiling so I made a git repo: https://github.com/fenwick67/opengl-cmake-starter

The Scooby Doo episode of Supernatural is peak TV

I ranted for a solid 20 minutes at work on how IBM's "food trust" has nothing to do with a blockchain but they use the word "blockchain" an unbelievable number of times in their marketing material