I used the key to make it easier to open MY lock, and for bragging rights. I had no desire to own anyone else's sports equipment. I'm a slashdot poster, after all.

The school admin was told that what we did was impossible, so your concern never registered on them. Besides, they need to be able to remove locks that students left on lockers past the end of the school year, or on the shared lockers at any time. (These are gym lockers, not hall lockers. Smelly socks etc.) Smelly socks don't warrant any sort of controls on keys.

My brother and I each made a master key for our school's Master combination padlocks that everyone used in gym class, using an old house key and a file. It took a year and a half for the school to find out. They suspended us for three days after telling us that their locksmith had informed them that what we had done was not possible.

A dome doesn't care which way the wind blows, because it's round. Your long low building might have issues with that.

It is a feature, but it's only available to the NSA.

Just yesterday I had to engage with my ISP's support folks to resolve a network speed issue. Fortunately, I had saved the chat sessions from when the same problem occurred two years ago. I ended up pasting part of a previous chat session into the current chat session so that the CSR could see what worked last time. Result: problem resolved in hours, not days

The cost *is* minimal, since they aren't actually doing anything about the byproducts these days. The folks in Nevada who wanted to store that stuff in Yucca Mountain are still working on that plan, while the nasty stuff itself sits on the power plant properties in temporary storage. Paralysis costs nothing (as long as there's no disaster on a power plant site).

I agree wholeheartedly. It took a lot of wire wrapping work to make a computer back then. Later I started designing them for a living, which often involved soldering together the first article and testing the bejeezus out of it. That got harder after BGAs appeared.

He wears his Nixie tube watch every day on the left wrist. His right wrist has held a variety of smartwatches, including an iPod Nano. (I make the Nixie watch, so I'd know.)

Each new clearance light fixture that I bought last week for my 1977 pop-up trailer came with two #194 wedge-base bulbs. The light fixtures cost $4 each. The plastic must be worth something, so I said "under a dollar".

I'm the guy who supplies Woz with his Nixie tube watches. I've had to repair a few of them after too many Segway polo matches. They get just as crusty as anyone else's watch.

I briefly thought about selling the broken parts on eBay, but it seemed a bit too squicky. Although you know the auction would end up on Reddit.

You will wait quite a while to get a charge that way. The devices negotiate the charging current over the data lines. The default is either zero or 100 mA. Best to buy a purpose-made USB data isolator that negotiates a good rate with a built-in microcontroller, but doesn't connect the phone to the charger data lines.

You can build one using a few resistors. See Adafruit's MintyBoost.

That's like most jobs, but not all. Unfortunately, the fulfilling ones tend to pay less. Fortunately, you don't need to go shopping so often to fill that void if you have a fulfilling job.

I work in a lab where we make radio receivers that work at frequencies around 460 GHz. As it is, we have to use a mixer diode to convert to a lower frequency (10 GHz) before amplifying the signal. This technology would be well suited to this application, provided that the noise is low enough. We already cool the mixer to 4K in a vacuum chamber.

Based on how long most of these big telescope projects end up taking, I'd expect late 2020s for it to become usable. We'll see.