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Comment WiFi boombox (Score 2) 146

I bought a Pi to stick into an old Sony Boombox that had a worn out CD player. I added a WiFi USB adapter andI loaded MPD/MPC on it and use it to stream music from the house server. I mostly use it in in the garage and the backyard. I added a USB sound adapter, and spliced its output into the boombox's CD input. Sounds great and now I can listen to any of the albums I've loaded on the server instead of having to carry CDs with the boombox.

Comment Re:Not all contributions / sacrifice are equivalen (Score 1) 121

Robert Heinlein, in Glory road, quoted Major Ian Hay, back in the “War to End War,” who described the structure of military organizations: Regardless of T.O., all military bureaucracies consist of a Surprise Party Department, a Practical Joke Department, and a Fairy Godmother Department. The first two process most matters as the third is very small; the Fairy Godmother Department is one elderly female GS-5 clerk usually out on sick leave.

Comment HP vs TI (Score 1) 359

This reminds me of the first time I tried to use an HP RPN calculator. It was circa 1972, and I was taking undergraduate courses at Rice University. I showed up for my physics final only to realize Id forgotten my calculator, a TI SR-10 - an early replacement for the slide rule, the basic 4 functions, square root, inverse and squared added. There were lots of calculations to do on these tests, and it was gonna be a slog without a calculator. The TA proctoring the exam had his calculator on his desk, an HP35, but he wasn't using it, so I asked him if I could borrow it. With a sly grin he asked "ever used an HP calculator before"? I said, no I hadn't, but, how different could it be, a calculator's a calculator, isn't it? "Sure", he agreed, and pushed it over to me with a smile. So went my first encounter with RPN, which I had never heard of before....I didn't do at all well on that exam. Oddly enough, years later when I got an HP16 for my programming job, I felt in love with RPN, and prefer it to algebraic entry calculators to this day.

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