At this point Void feels like Slackware for the 21st century. It’s comprehensive and less full of “modern linux” hairballs than some others, but they seem pretty good on package updates. I like it being non-systemd as a first class thing rather than trying to backport it on an uncooperative parent distro.

This is big “if we break your old toys, you’ll HAVE to play with the new ones” energy.

Tell me when they port FVWM. Seriously. FvwmButtons-- a pretty trivial dock except it can swallow other windows-- seems like it would be out-of-bounds on Wayland unless it was owned by the compositor itself to access the other windows. I don’t see any of the new taskbar-tools used with Wayland compositors offering similar functionality (I could be wrong) and that seems an amazing loss of feature parity.

I think it might be stock market floatation. Fiserv and Global Payments are processors, not card networks, for example.

Hamstudy.org is good to cram the license questions, and you can get a basic 2m/70cm band handheld transciever for less than $100 (well, you could pre Random Tarrif Gameshow Time)

He’s the XKCD “one guy in Nebraska” of the leftist Fediverse.

The worry is that it feels like we’re moving past a consumer-directed economy and not in the wholesome Soviet five-year-plan way.

The almighty market has figured out how to collude and cram stuff that people don’t want down our throats (what consumer wanted everything to turn into an enshittified subscription?)

Real people may not want AI slop, but if there’s enough of a sense it will make line go up, we’re getting slop.

On the other hand, this factor might be the salvation: the current AI market is full of 2000-era-dot-com business models based on selling at a loss and making it up on the promise of global domination later. If the VC money dries up, and every “delve” costs whatever the actual amount it costs to drain the oceans and oilfields to pump into an array of Quadros plus sufficiently reimbuse all the ghouls that bankrolled the project, maybe the line doesn’t go up anymore.

That fault is common in vintage stereo amplifiers too. A popular mod is to install a triac so that the switch becomes basically a soft-switch toggling a few hundred milliamperes, rather than the full current draw for less arcing. See https://audiokarma.org/forums/index.php?threads/is-your-unobtainium-power-switch-worth-5-and-an-hour-or-so-of-your-time.504673/ for discussion; not sure if it can be directly applied here.

I bought a '60s VTVM recently. It needs mains voltage, uses two vaccuum tubes, and does less than my $15 Aliexpress digital meter while taking 48 times the space, but golly it’s nifty.

I’d wonder if the existing amateur presence would make the bands hard to sell for “pollution risk”. There’s a lot of kit in circulation, and getting it off the market, including secondhand, would be difficult.

Yeah, they could blow a lot of time and money on FCC enforcement, but it feels like trying to unring a bell. As a telecom, would you be willing to pay for (for example) 148MHz on just the promise the existing users were displaced on paper? That doesn’t mean much when some untrained/curious person finds kit at the Goodwill and tries it out in the middle of your service range.

Of course, obviously fight for every nanometre of spectrum, but that’s probably a legit argument against reclassification: all they’d get is damaged goods of low resale value.

I think they lost the lead to an extent when the ecosystem exploded.

They don’t have anything comparable to Kailh’s click-bar or Gateron’s click-leaf switches.

I wonder if the way to go is to start with the premise of “It’s a way to communicate” and work backwards. Better tooling could make it more amenable to new users, and also help make specific use cases more compelling. Once users have he reason you want to be in the ecosystem-- which I suspect, for many people, might look more like a community than a bag of one-off contacts-- then it justfies going deeper into better equipment and technique.

Discoverability is a huge thing. For example, a cheap SDR, even receive-only, is a magical thing, but you end up getting a waterfall full of “what’s this weird burst” and jumping around the dial trying to chase where the action is. I suspect better software could really help there-- a UI that decodes digital modes and CW in the right place, and archive received signals might make it easier to track the activity and reduce the problem of “I tuned elsewhere and missed something interesting”

If you start with one of the cheap 2m/70cm HTs, you might be able to find a local repeater, and once you work your way through the fidgety UI, even send a transmission. but are you just going to find empty air much of the time. Again, it’s hard to find the action, and make sure you’re actually being a positive contributor. I think this has been a problem for me; I got licensed, got my little HT, but now I have the choice of either listening to static, or waiting for a conversation and hoping I have everything configured right enough not to be an annoyance. Maybe better guide websites and scheduled events can help minimize “listening to static” disappointment times.

I could see a fun community project being an autoresponder bot-- in idle times, it would listen to an advertised frequency, detect speech and CW signals and respond with signal quality reports quickly and conveniently to make it easy for a new user to make sure they’ve got their equipment set up right without barging into a conversation. I know there are ways to test propagation, but a lot of it is “go find a second device and pull up a tracking website”

There might also be room to think of ham radio more as a “transport protocol” than as the main draw. CW and some digital modes feel like they could be packaged up in tools that more resembled modern IM/chat tools to increase accessibility and encourage understanding of best practices. (For example, let the software handle things like regular identification and responding to requests to change transmission characteristics automatically, or at least by providing helpful affordances) Or even a “dashboards and logs” paradigm for recieve-- let the software decode hundreds of hours of signals and then you can crunch it into interesting and useful visualizations.

I admit some of this could be seen as “dumbing down” or steering towards specific narrow paradigms, but that doesn’t have to be the entire universe. It could be the equivalent of AOL or Compuserve to the open internet-- making sure that you can get value out of the experience early on, so people can transition to the broader open platform as their needs and skills grow.

Y’know, considering they’re trying to garner international sympathy, why is there no blanket “hide the Nazi apologetica until after the war” directive?

Even in the US, the military tries to nomibally keep a damper on that stuff.

Shadowy international cabals used to be competent and stylish.

This is buying the Illuminati off of Wish.

I like currency in general as a public art piece. We don’t live up to the potential though.

You can argue that the most successful sculptor in history was Victor D. Brenner, who got his boring-ass profile of Lincoln reproduced several hundred billion times since 1909.

Not to mention I bent all the pins on my Cyrix MII ttying to get it in that stupid socket.

You could get a SDR dongle. The cheap ones probably won’t fo AM well, but they make excellent FM tuners, as well as aircraft, 2-metre and 70cm ham bands with a pretty basic antenna.

ATSC 3.0 is usable. I have a HDHomerun sitting on my LAN with a couple 3.0 tuners.

The big problem is:

• the 3.0 broadcasts are still mostly tests, so you get mostly a respin of a 1.0 channel

• the audio is AC-4 and a lot of software doesn’t support it. There was stuff for Windows but when I looked, the usual suspects (VLC, mpv) on Linux didn’t support it

Why not an aerial for Jeopardy? It’s usually on local broadcast, so you could plumb together a DVR setup if you want it within a unified experience.

There’s some shared delusion that without a HOA to block it, everyone is just champing at the bit to leave a rusted out Pontiac on blocks in their front yard, which will totally cause their neighbour’s property value to fall.

Personally, the next model-home exhibit I visit, I’m asking up front if they mind my plans for a 1:3 scale reconstruction of the Westward Ho

I understand pre-OS X Macintoshes used colons.