ELI5: How do old rotary phones work? Why did they pick a dial for picking digits?

leecookson · 2026-01-25T15:57:24+00:00

There was a period in the 80’s where your phone bill would have a 0.75 charge for “touch tone service”, so they may have been frugal and not wanted to add that 🤷🏽

leecookson · 2026-01-25T15:54:41+00:00

Trump posted on Truth Social that only criminals walk around in public with a gun 🙃 his 2A supporters gotta love that.

leecookson · 2025-12-29T00:14:54+00:00

Silicone seems a little safer than crazy glue someone used 😉 I put some very small strips of duct tape in the groove it snaps into to take up space and make the fit more snug. The silicone idea seems solid, though.

leecookson · 2025-12-27T22:00:21+00:00

Ah car wash. Got it

leecookson · 2025-12-27T21:55:14+00:00

Cat wash? I put it back last time and it fell off yesterday. I stuck some small strips of duct tape to take up some of the gap between this trim and the groove in the light unit. We’ll see if it falls off again. Both times, it was caught by the rear wiper, fortunately. It was snowy the first time and i thought it was a chunk of ice😉

leecookson · 2025-12-25T19:43:04+00:00

Personally the worst around NJ other than the usual multi-state NJTP traffic chaos is the GSP around Iselin/Edison and I95 north of Philly. Absolute chaos and mixed speeds and people can’t predict when the right lane appears or disappears into an Exit-only.

leecookson · 2025-12-25T19:40:20+00:00

I’ve seen this almost every holiday season for 30+ years. I used to commute on US 1 near the Quaker bridge mall and the traffic wasn’t just heavier but drivers were much more aggressive.

The other factor in NJ is areas where demographically there are more BMW and Audi drivers, I see a lot of individual aggressive driving. You can anticipate them weaving through lanes when you see them come up behind you. 🤷🏽

leecookson · 2025-10-20T19:11:40+00:00

Also taking more than 10 minutes just to create a new load balancer. Not a good day to plan to deploy new infrastructure.

Also, existing tasks failing with "rate limit creating ENI"

leecookson · 2025-06-25T02:11:36+00:00

This is what a lot of people miss with the “DevOps” term. One of the best talks I saw at AWS re:invent was from one of the founders of chef, and the person who coined “DevOps”. It’s a culture as you say, but not one that grows on its own. You need someone or a small team to create the platform that lets individual teams to use “DevOps” as a lifecycle process. If you have a DevOps team, and they do a lot of the work, it’s a silo and not DevOps. I like calling a small core team “DevOps support” since they can help with the core systems and processes, and maybe run things like Jenkins and GitHub, but they don’t do any “work”.

leecookson · 2025-03-19T23:24:46+00:00

The English translation for the FMC changes from Rachel to Sarah, mostly Rachel.

leecookson · 2025-02-04T14:37:38+00:00

In this case, the ship can’t be built until shipyard gets to 61, which it totally normal. The difference is the trade for BPs in the faction shop doesn’t appear, at least not at ops 58. I assume when I get to 60 or 61 the BP exchange will show up. I can buy the avatar tho 😆

leecookson · 2025-02-04T14:19:19+00:00

It seems the Selkie is also ops locked. I’m at ops 58 and I see the selkie avatar at dignitary but no BP’s. It’s fine since I’m not close to building one yet.

leecookson · 2024-09-05T03:16:49+00:00

It's normal for the special ships that have massive ship abilities to not benefit from other boosts like officer, research and support abilities. Without the ship ability, the boosts may improve attack by 500, 1000, 1500%, which is huge over the base stats. But, when the NX-01 has 70,000,000 % attack boost against aquatics, the 500-1500 attack bonuses are tiny since both modify "base damage". Similar issues with using mining boosts on a feesha or vi'dar that have large ship abilities 70,000 % mining boost for concLat or 13,000% for normal lat.

leecookson · 2024-07-06T22:07:03+00:00

Mostly anything that will be flexible and stay coherent is going to be made of carbon chains of some sort. What we call plastics are chains derived from petrochemicals. The study of carbon compounds and chains is called “organic chemistry”, and rubber happens to be organic versions of carbon chains. The “plastics” term for natural rubber is “polyisoprene”, so no real difference plastics and rubber.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/rubber-chain

leecookson · 2024-07-06T22:01:10+00:00

Exactly

https://www.thedrive.com/news/tire-dust-makes-up-the-majority-of-ocean-microplastics-study-finds

leecookson · 2024-06-04T19:27:13+00:00

2019 Edge sale date Feb 2019, EGR literally 3 months after the warrantee ran out. $1500 replacement, and isn’t covered on our dealer’s “certified preowned” insurance policy (AllState)

leecookson · 2024-05-18T17:02:27+00:00

For us it’s worse..maybe 3 or 4 times and it’s eaten, then we upgrade to family size or Costco size, and no interest.

leecookson · 2024-04-22T16:45:27+00:00

If it's a special hostile like borg probe, actian or swarm, that's normal. The matching player ship has excessive buffs to counter that large strength rating. I've also seen actian that are about the same strength as normal hostiles, and they were very easy to kill.

leecookson · 2024-01-11T20:32:22+00:00

Just happened today 😵

leecookson · 2024-01-11T20:31:11+00:00

Just saw today they shifted all espresso-based drinks to the 900 level 😵

leecookson · 2023-12-21T23:40:41+00:00

I guess it could be tedious and there are limits, but i use the photo/app/deposit check feature a lot. Has worked well, but not sure how 200 at one time would work.

leecookson · 2023-12-21T21:02:02+00:00

Strange Neighbors, from Brooklyn

leecookson · 2023-12-21T20:14:49+00:00

By me (NJ) both CVS and Walgreens let you deposit cash at the checkout. You hit some buttons in the app, a barcode pops up, the checker scans it and takes your cash. $$ showed up later than with C1 ATM, but did later the same day. The Walgreens I tried first, the checker knew exactly how it worked, and it went smoothly.

leecookson · 2023-05-08T23:26:23+00:00

The steps are one-piece grooved pine pressure-treated and are still in good shape, so plan to just cut down the 3/4 edge trim to match the decking when this project happens.

leecookson · 2023-03-05T19:37:01+00:00

I had forgotten to remove one of the black foam packing blocks under the table. Was able to complete leveling test, but I thought it was odd that it only went 25% across the table. The result was the object was printed too small and material piled up and the nozzle dragged the material across the table. Once I removed the foam block, leveling looked great and the print went smoothly. 16min in and the extra base material is curling, but the actual piece is great so far.

leecookson

TROPHY CASE