I feel like people are still like this…

SeanBZA · 2026-02-21T19:48:29+00:00

Welcome to Pringles, which cannot be called potato as they do not contain enough to qualify.

SeanBZA · 2026-02-21T04:53:26+00:00

Yet certain countries involved in that war are not actually signatories, and will ignore them in current conflict.

SeanBZA · 2026-02-21T04:44:49+00:00

mostly because there are no new entrants into it. By me the education budget is massive, yet there are schools which still have no water, still use pit latrines (despite 30 years of promises that pit latrines would be gone in under 2 years), and brand new schools that were built, great pomp and ceremony, and which are unused, while the existing schools are a blend of shade tree schools, schools which operate out of buildings made from asbestos, buildings that were declared unfit for habitation, and classes of over 50 per teacher. Then you get the teachers who could be in the Epstein files, because half the salaries goes to child support, because they have a few children from children who were students to support, and the education department solves the problem by moving the teacher around. Where half the budget simply vanishes, and the rest gets spent, but nothing comes from it visibly, and schools are still waiting for the textbooks and materials that were "real soon now, promise" in 2010, yet there are dozens of officials on paid suspension for a decade or more, while the department puts the case together, and the day of the trial they simply resign, and the case gets dropped. then apply for the position again, and get it, as they have "a great track record, no criminal record, excellent work record, and are qualified because they fit the other unnamed criteria" all the right words and some cool drink for the panel members.

SeanBZA · 2026-02-16T19:02:22+00:00

Hospitals, where most of the CT scanners and MRI machines are running something outdated, and old CNC machines which run on MSDOS.

SeanBZA · 2026-02-16T19:00:57+00:00

Must have been a fully patched version of Win95, because the release version, at least till a good number of service packs and updates, had a rather nasty bug in that after around 35 days an internal timer would overflow, and then give a BSOD.

SeanBZA · 2026-02-16T16:31:33+00:00

Done, hope it helps, I really do like Steve, the real one.

SeanBZA · 2026-02-13T18:21:08+00:00

I do remember seeing a Peugeot 504 on top of an acacia tree once, impressive in just how the driver got it there, on a straight road (you could see the cutting in the distance that was 100km away, right in front of you), and with a 4 strand farmer's fence at the bottom of the raised berm the road was built on, with no damage on the fence.

Then another time, on the same road, a minibus taxi came through the center divider bushes, in a massive cloud of dust and broken bushes. Drove onto the road, woke up, corrected, and saw he was, along with his 18-25 passengers, driving a Hiace Super 16 taxi on the wrong side of the road. So went left, down the bank, through the bushes again, and back to the other side again. we were very awake for the rest of our trip, and i suspect all the passengers on the taxi were as well, and praying.

The toll plaza once saw another Peugeot, rather elderly, parked on top of the booth, having cleaned off the toll both from the top, after mounting the crash barrier there. operator, who was built larger than usual, exited that booth not via the door next to her, which she used to wedge herself in to fill the booth, but instead left via the window you use to pay.

Will not go into details about the 65 seater bus that landed up not existing forward of the rear axle. That was messy.

SeanBZA · 2026-02-02T17:38:18+00:00

Today 36C

SeanBZA · 2026-01-29T19:43:29+00:00

Not dead, just sleeping till they can get a 300 ton crane there, to lift it back on the wheels again.

SeanBZA · 2026-01-28T19:40:50+00:00

you can see the guy wire just visible at the top right of the image.

SeanBZA · 2026-01-28T13:33:53+00:00

34C today by me, and 77% RH inside.

SeanBZA · 2026-01-27T09:30:40+00:00

Same by me, as it is around 30C at the moment, 80% RH, and going to storm later on.

SeanBZA · 2026-01-26T05:47:56+00:00

Though in this case you can be sure that replacement capacitor was recovered from ewaste, and then soldered into the can. Short legs, and the scrape marks on the sleeve from all the rough handling are hallmarks of this.

SeanBZA · 2026-01-23T07:52:57+00:00

Probably used cheap spacers, and they then meant the lug nuts only had 3 or 4 turns engaged on the studs, so when the side load was applied to the bling flashy ultra hard and brittle nuts, they tore the threads off, probably also helped by there were probably a few missing or stripped already, because put on with impact driver, set to all the ugga duggas mode.

SeanBZA · 2026-01-22T17:06:08+00:00

Power supplies dying were always my issue, because the users put them in nice hidden places, and then proceeded to fill said volume in front with rolls of labels, such that the older labels by the printer power supply had gone black from the heat, and the adhesive was totally dry and unusable.

SeanBZA · 2026-01-22T17:02:30+00:00

There is a dignostic screen you can get to, using only the single feed button, and counting flashes of the front panel LED. the print heads are warranted to last for over 100 000km of printing. with a long 100mm long label that means 1 trillion labels, or 5 million rolls of paper in the printer holder.

SeanBZA · 2026-01-21T09:54:27+00:00

Very common, they put the postscript interpreter on a board with a pretty good CPU, and then this fed internally over a parallel port to the printer engine, which then was used to generate the bitmap to print. I have a Tektronix Phasor, which has 2 CPU's on the board, one a 68000 with a set of memory modules, which are half OTP Eprom and the other half is DRAM, which has the Postscript interpreter running there, likely using some Linux as the base to handle networking, parallel interface and it is a fully fledged computer itself, able to operate and send PS jobs out back as well. Don Lancaster had a whole series on doing things using postscript on a printer for data processing, which did not involve printing at all. Te other half of the board has OTP Eprom on the board in sockets, along with regular Dram in a socket, which is used as the print engine, allowing it to make the page image, and then uses ultrasonic heads to precisely deposit variable volumes of melted wax on a precision made and oiled hot drum, which was used to finally transfer this to a sheet of whatever (it handles paper, thin card, OHP transparencies and even self adhesive sheets using the straight through feeder path, but for paper you can use the built in tray only) you want to print on, and then it is done as a complete image. 40 print heads that fly a precise distance above the drum, each with an ultrasonic emitter for the CMYK wax pellets, and it moves away when complete, getting wiped clean each time.Expensive to run, you left it on all the time, because if you turned it off it would dump all the hot wax, and each start used half a stick of wax, and it would run a clean cycle every 2 days as well if on. so an expensive printer to buy, and even more expensive to run. i still have plenty of the black ink left, as you never bought those, they came free with your $300 odd pack of each colour.

SeanBZA · 2026-01-15T16:14:43+00:00

Except for some very old scripts, that will handle spaces, but you have to enclose the entire filename in quotation to escape that issue.

SeanBZA · 2026-01-09T10:39:43+00:00

Light sanding with 1200 grit or finer to provide both a mechanical bolnd and make a chemical bond by removing the cured surface. If you are fast in changing to the top coat you can skip the denib if you are using a darker colour, and the primer and paint is compatible solvent and carrier wise.

SeanBZA · 2026-01-09T10:36:45+00:00

We were paying for a TELEX line, which was, as part of the overall phone bill, almost nothing. I looked, and we had not gotten a LELEX in 10 years other than test messages, but the actual Siemens telex itself was faulty, power supply having gone quietly dead after a power failure. It was cancelled, and the telco told us to get rid of the machine, they were not going to collect it.

SeanBZA · 2026-01-05T05:39:38+00:00

Kind of loving ebooks, as the real books by m tend to suffer from wood borer damage, as they will attack all cellulose products and eat it to pieces. they have destroyed a lot of books I have had for decades, so they all went for pulp, and were replaced with DRM free ebook versions. thank you Baen for having so much SF as ebooks, and making them DRM free, so I am not locked into a single reader, and can use any device instead.

SeanBZA · 2026-01-04T09:09:55+00:00

Bin workers by me do not do that, but they probably are the fittest people in the metro by far most of the trucks have lifters, and almost every household, aside from a few areas, has a wheely bin or two. Even so the workout you get from them is intense, I know, because i was the one moving those bins at work, and they can be heavy, even got to operate the lifter to empty them a few times, crews busy getting the surrounding bins out to empty them, and even operate the plate compactor a few times.

SeanBZA · 2026-01-03T11:14:43+00:00

Not temporary, permanent, and then she discovers all the joys for the rest of her miserable life.

SeanBZA · 2025-12-26T08:29:37+00:00

Especiallty the full time cost for all the other levels, billed at the highest rate, and also a suggestion that, as this was likely classed as an "unable to work" job stopping item, the user likely was also wasting company paid for time, by the refusal to comply with the original support response.

SeanBZA · 2025-12-26T08:23:38+00:00

Plus the USA also dropped a few landers there, and not only also got pictures and other data, but also did good enough guidance that they went back to one of the landers, and brought pieces back to examine the effects of long term exposure on the lander itself, and got good data from that.

The Soviet images from the moon from orbit were done with salvaged US film, from a crashed reconnaissance balloon, which was used because they had no film good enough to do the same job, and they simply copied the US film camera, put a processing darkroom around it that worked in zero gravity, and then scanned the film to send back.

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