Sure. Heck, occasionally I do actually do that, like if I post a piece of information that I’ve looked up and then refer back to it later.

It looks like a fair bit of it was TV-watching, which is now being displaced.

https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/15224.jpeg

https://cdn.cablecompare.com/2022/2/1644941050238-1._Average_Daily_Time_Spent_Watching_Television%2C_United_States_2014-2023.png

Some will, some won’t. Not a hivemind.

I feel like I’m reasonably tolerant towards GNU Hurd.

One last thought- Bakelite seems to love dust. I’m going to dust them regularly, but if there is a way to light them well without making the dust show up well, that would be great.

Are you going to listen to the radios or look at them?

If you don’t need to listen to them, so the glass won’t be an issue, I imagine that you could put them in one of those glass-fronted display cabinets that are designed for this sort of thing, displaying china and such.

EDIT: Also, I remember reading that Bakelite does slowly break down. I don’t know if sunlight accelerates that; it does affect a lot of substances. If so, you might want to keep it away from sunlight.

kagis

Yeah, sounds like it.

https://www.beeplastic.com/blogs/beeplastic-information-station/unraveling-bakelite-understanding-its-disadvantages-and-limitations-in-the-modern-world

Extended exposure to heat and sunlight also degrades pure Bakelite faster than more advanced plastics.

Discoloration – Bakelite often yellows with age and extended UV exposure. Keeping items out of sunlight can minimize this effect.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-LH65WMRWBGCXEN-WM65R-Monitor/dp/B07WT547MM/

Here’s a 65" monitor being sold by Amazon UK. It’s less, though also touch.

EDIT: Though I really hope that that wattage rating is just an error in Amazon’s database.

https://www.amazon.com/Dell-C8621QT-85-6-Touchscreen-Monitor/dp/B0CJ5S18TT

Here’s an 85" monitor.

At 190 lbs, though, that’s getting back into the same “I don’t want to haul that up stairs” territory that CRTs were getting into near the end of their days. I think I’d start looking at projectors with nice screens at that point.

I talked to a Baskin Robins ice cream shop manager during a summer (not peak time for the disease) in the pandemic who was wearing a mask (surgical, not the N95 variety) and asked him when he planned to stop, and he had an interesting point. He said that it was that some customers got upset if they saw someone working at the store not wearing one, that it affected their sales. It sounded like for him, it wasn’t so much whether-or-not he thought that the mask was providing much of a benefit, but a straightforward computation as to what brought in customers: like, if he could get more sales by wearing a fluorescent outfit, he’d wear fluorescent.

I care – all else held equal, I’d rather have snazzier graphics – but I feel like there’s pretty strongly diminishing returns.

And because resources are finite, all else isn’t held equal. You’re giving up time spent working on gameplay or whatever to stick fancier graphic assets in.

Some of my favorite games don’t have much by way of graphics.

I do kind of wish that I could get upscaled versions of a number of games that I enjoy with low-resolution pixel graphics, though – I’d like “high-resolution DLC” to be a thing for successful games like that. Think Caves of Qud or something like that. IIRC Cave Story did that, along with a handful of other games. Would like to have higher-res versions of Balatro. Same for Noita, though there I guess the resolution hooks into the game mechanics, so have to be careful how to deal with that.

I’ve also seen some games with untextured polygons that have worked out pretty well. Star Fox for the Super Nintendo and Avara and Flying Nightmares for the classic Mac came from an era when texturing wasn’t always possible. Carrier Command 2 is much newer, and uses only limited texturing.

Minecraft went a long way with very technically-limited graphics.

There are a lot of good roguelikes that just use text.

I’ve never heard of this job, but with a search or two, it sounds kind of like he rappels to points on tall structures to check for structural issues and such using X-rays.

• lemmy.today. I like their “we aim to try to not defederate with other instances” policy, and they’re geographically near me.

• Kagi. Search engine that doesn’t log or data-mine users; it charges a subscription fee. Does some neat things like specifically index and allow searching of the Fediverse. It works fine, but that’s not really my interest: I really just don’t want to have a search engine provider logging and data-mining my searches, and I’m happy to finally have an option to avoid that.

• Wikipedia. Being the “store of all human knowledge” may be ambitious, but Wikipedia’s been having a pretty good go at it, and has killed off most commercial encyclopedias.

Stuff that I don’t use daily, but do probably have a good chance of having used in a given week:

• Google Earth. There’s no real alternative to this out there: it sucks in a lot of satellite and aerial imagery to let one get some degree of 3d view of much of Earth. Also convenient for measuring distances, including multi-hop trips.

• Amazon. The world’s largest retail selection and is available wherever you live. Twenty years back, one significant argument for living in or near a city was shopping choice. Amazon provides a much larger selection all over. Maybe for some of the younger crowd, that doesn’t seem like a big deal, and it’s a change that didn’t happen overnight, but the change over time is pretty remarkable. I don’t buy everything from them – Walmart.com provides better delivery options for food and some other things that they sell, Monoprice.com has long been my go-to provider for computer cables (which have historically seen obscene markups at brick-and-mortar retail), and I used to use Newegg for their better product database. Aside from the constant nagging to subscribe to Amazon Prime, I’m pretty happy with them.

• YouTube. It’s the world’s largest provider of on-demand video. Not only that, but for a lot of non-fiction stuff, it’s a lot better than any commercial streaming service. I don’t subscribe to their premium service, though I would if I could get a “no log, no analytics” guarantee of the sort that Kagi provides.

• Maybe Tineye. Image-keyed index of images: feed it an image or URL of an image, and it will tell you where it’s seen it, including the earliest time and the best-quality version of the image. It uses fuzzy matching, so it’s capable of identifying similar images with certain kinds and levels of modification. There’s no alternative for figuring out where some images may have come from or digging up less-overly-compressed version of images. I’m surprised that some of the image search providers – which have to build an image index as well – haven’t provided this feature.

Stuff that I used to use daily:

• Reddit. I was kind of sad when they transitioned to the new Web UI, but kept using the old one. But killing off the third-party clients was the breaking point for me.

• Yahoo, then Altavista, then Google. Main search engines. Altavista in particular indexed Usenet for a while, and I believe that Google was the first search engine to introduce image search, which was nice.

• Slashdot. Before Reddit. Didn’t have Reddit’s variety in topics and wasn’t designed to scale up to what Reddit or the Threadiverse are, but it was a good forum for a while. I do prefer Markdown to Slashdot’s HTML subset, though.

For the US:

https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-sector.htm

USB print servers to be rather pricey,

I mean, on Amazon, they look to be $25 and up. I guess “pricey” is relative, but that doesn’t seem all that bad.

I don’t know that they’d be less effort to maintain than a laptop or whatever, though, which OP was concerned about. I mean, you might or might not update your laptop, but I’m dubious that an all-in-one print server is gonna be getting updates at all.

smooth ballpoint

I bet they’re a “rollerball” pen rather than a ballpoint. Those move a lot more-readily than ballpoints, kinda glide.

kagis

Yeah.

https://www.amazon.com/R-2-0-7-Roller-Ball-Pens/dp/B004B7RLWS

They’re rollerball pens.

Lots of different pen manufacturers make those. Sometimes you’ll see gel rollerball pens sold as “gel pens”. If you want an even smoother movement and can live with thicker lines, you can get a broader tip – those have even less resistance.

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

Roller ball pens or roll pens are pens which use ball point writing mechanisms with water-based liquid or gelled ink, as opposed to the oil-based viscous inks found in ballpoint pens. These less viscous inks, which tend to saturate more deeply and more widely into paper than other types of ink, give roller ball pens their distinctive writing qualities. The writing point is a tiny ball, usually 0.5 or 0.7 mm in diameter, that transfers the ink from the reservoir onto the paper as the pen moves.

In comparison to ballpoint pens,

• Rollerball pens have a unique ink flow system for an even, high-performance writing experience.

• Less pressure needs to be applied to the pen to have it write cleanly. This permits holding the pen with less stress on the hand, saving energy and improving comfort. This can also translate to quicker writing speeds. This is especially true of liquid ink pens.

• Their inks usually have a greater range of colors due to the wider choice of suitable water-soluble dyes and/or to the use of pigments.

• They tend to write more clearly than ballpoint pens do.

There are a number of disadvantages inherent to roller ball pens:

• Roller ball pens with liquid-ink are more likely to “bleed” through the paper. Liquid ink is more readily absorbed into the paper due to its lower viscosity. This viscosity also causes problems when leaving the tip on the paper. The bleed-through effect is greatly increased as the ink is continually absorbed into the paper, creating a blotch. This does not affect gel-ink roller ball pens as much. This is one way through which the thickness of gel-ink gives it an advantage, in that it isn’t as prone to being absorbed. Though the bleed-through effect of a gel-ink roller ball is greater than that of a ballpoint, it is usually not too significant.

• Roller ball pens generally run out of ink more quickly than ballpoints because roller balls use a greater amount of ink while writing. This is especially true of liquid-ink roller balls, due to gel ink having a low absorption rate as a result of its thickness. Neither lasts as long as a ballpoint.

• Uncapped roller ball pens are more likely to leak ink when, for example, placed into a shirt pocket, but most pens include caps or other mechanisms to prevent this from happening.

• A roller ball tip is more likely to clog and jam when writing over correction fluid that has not yet completely dried. This often renders the ink cartridge useless.

The WP article doesn’t mention it, but rollerballs also don’t work well with carbon paper, as you don’t need to push hard enough to create an impression from the carbon paper the way you do with a ballpoint. But as long as that isn’t an issue for your application…shrug

I would guess that there’s some mode or version of Windows that turns those things off, because there are gonna be Windows 10 kiosk machines, and the kiosk/digital billboard crowd is not going to tolerate Microsoft throwing full screen stuff up.

looks at community rules

This community is for discussing Trek, not you or your business/website/etc.

I assume copy-paste error?

I’d wager that it’s probably not that hard to obtain a lemmy user’s IP address, whether the admin hands it over or not.

Lemmy permits – arguably not the greatest design decision from a privacy standpoint – for inline remote images in comments. E.g.:

![](https://www.google.com/images/branding/googlelogo/2x/googlelogo_color_272x92dp.png)

Yields:

As soon as that image is loaded, the remote http server knows the IP address of the client viewing the image.

I bet that it does in private messages too, though I haven’t tested it. Send a private message to a user, referencing an image on a server you control – maybe even a one-pixel, transparent image, a tactic that has been used in Web tracking in the past – and the server knows their IP when the image is viewed. Even if it doesn’t, you could probably just respond to a few comments by a user in regular threads, and they’re probably going to be the first to view the image (and probably the only to view all of them).

EDIT 2024-04-11: It looks like there’s at least one lemmy instance that’s running a caching image proxy and rewriting comments and posts specifically aimed at closing this hole (and has been doing so for some months before I made this comment):

https://lemmy.kya.moe/post/521258

I’m guessing, though I’m not familiar with the instance and it has no local communities, that it probably focuses on underage anime porn; based on instance hostnames I’ve seen in the past, I believe that the .moe TLD is something of a convention in that community, so I assume they’re probably worried about legal repercussions for people in some jurisdictions where viewing it is illegal; they probably have a strong incentive to have this function correctly. That doesn’t mean that they’ve actually implemented it correctly, mind. I don’t know if any image formats that the Threadiverse supports inline display of might permit for external references to be embedded in the image, to generate requests that bypass the proxy; it looks like on some browsers, SVG permits for this and is probably one thing I’d examine if I were auditing whatever their code is.

According to the post I linked to, they’re rewriting URLs to point at a local image proxy. It sounds like they’re just proxying the request and caching the image for short periods of time, not persistently mirroring the image, so they probably have bounded storage requirements unless someone specifically attempts to flood the instance. That being said, this could consume a lot of bandwidth.

It’s also possible that it might break images that are intended to be dynamic (though if their proxy is conformant to http proxy conventions, I believe that the original host provides a time-to-live with images, which I believe can request that the cache not retain the image).

They don’t list any technical details of what it is that they’re using, though, and I have no idea if it’s open-source or made available to other instances. Also, I have no idea what it would cost in terms of bandwidth to operate such a proxy. It could be pretty substantial.

While it doesn’t matter now, this approach might also run into problems down the line, if stuff like cryptographic signatures on comments ever become the norm on the Threadiverse, so that one can ensure that an instance isn’t modifying comments (since the instance relies upon doing exactly such a modification to make this work). But as things stand today, I’d imagine that it should reduce the number of parties who have access to an user’s IP address to the instance administrator.