Seconding the thing about 529 plans. They're ostensibly "for college," but can also be almost a back-door second 401k. You can change the beneficiary more freely; use it for other things like vocational programs / trade schools or adult classes*; roll it over to a Roth IRA (after 15 years); or just plain take the 10% penalty & income tax ~~on withdrawn earnings only~~. There's no required minimum distributions like a traditional 401k, so even then it lets you time it for tax purposes if you do treat it as a retirement account later.

*(as long as they are for credit, things like pottery courses or music lessons count. My university used to offer an adult "social dance" class at 1.0 credit hour that anyone in the community could join. Audit fees for a no-credit class may also count as a qualified education expense.)

  It's pretty nifty for the kids, but if you've already got the other main pieces of your savings & retirement in place, it can be pretty nifty for yourself too. Just especially if you plan to continue your education in a wide variety of allowable shapes and forms.

Aside, for interesting comparison, I currently get exactly 46ms latency to 8.8.8.8 in California using HawaiiTel gigabit fiber here on O'ahu.

I'd had awful experiences with 3D TVs -- dim pictures, crosstalk, headaches from active glasses, etc -- and had zero interest in the technology. When I got my 2015 LG OLED, I didn't even try the 3D for months. However, once I did, I was hooked.

Bright picture, full resolution, passive glasses, beautiful depth -- LG's OLED had seemingly fixed all my issues with home 3D and it is glorious. And then they discontinued it after the next model, also meaning that few people got to experience this pinnacle of home 3D. Argh!

I don't know what I'll do when my TV decides to go, as there just isn't anything comparable on the market, and good 3D is now a must-have as far as I'm concerned.

+1 for the Brio. I've had one a couple of years and it's solid, and the only real package option I've seen. It was also sold out for months at the start of the pandemic.

I have an Azure Kinect cam coming as part of a project that I'm hoping I can use in place of the Brio, so I can replace my parents awful webcam, but the Microsoft cam isn't exactly budget either. I may end up just building a desk mount for my mirrorless camera; as someone above mentioned, many of the camera manufacturers have enable webcam-mode for their enthusiast/pro products due to the current environment.

I splurged on a great deal and picked up a 65" LG OLED TV in 2016. It supported 3D, but I didn't think much about it at the time. My experiences with home 3D had basically sucked in the past, through various iterations. I had a friend who had a nice new Sony TV with active 3D glasses and after a few minutes, it gave me an absolutely awful headache.

However, I tried out the 3D on my OLED TV and was totally wowed. The passive glasses, the per-pixel way that OLED lights the screen, etc, just make for a fantastic 3D experience. Made me a total 3D aficionado. I hate the thought of my TV ever dying, because there is nothing nearly as good to replace it with. As it is, I have to order new 3D releases from Europe.

I think I ran mostly TurboBBS or Searchlight (before they went all crazy and modern with 'RIP' graphics.) Searchlight in particular didn't do certain things the standard way, even if they made other things a lot easier... I seem to remember having issues with the FOSSIL driver too.

The last time I did a thorough housecleaning, I ran across a floppy with Telix and a bunch of SALT scripts. Ah, memories.

Does anyone else recall struggling with the door.sys file on your BBS? One door game generally worked fine, but woe to you when you tried to configure multiple door games on your BBS, particularly with more than one user at a time!

Very sad. He's composed some of my favorite film scores over the years, but the score that I always loved was for "The Rocketeer" (Main Title). I asked my parents to buy it for me on cassette tape, but could never find it in a local store. (Oh pre-internet days!)

RIP Mr. Horner.

This article in Discover magazine about Jack Bitterly's* desire to use new flywheel technologies to power automobiles, is what got me excited about choosing engineering as a college major. It's quite sad that nothing ever came of it, other than a few highly specialized applications, such as the space station. (I read one claim that Kevin Costner's investment in the company was a total loss, but that it had a lot to do with NASA taking over the project and stiffing some of the creditors. Cum grano salis.)

I recently saw that a company called Velkess got a kickstarter project funded for 3-15kWh 48v flywheel storage systems, with expected product delivery dates in the 2016/17 range announced. We'll see if they deliver on promises and if they're in any way price competitive.

*Jack was 77 when that article was published in 1996. Every so often I've looked him up on the internet and as late as 2009, he was still alive and kicking and still working. I've also run across patent applications he has filed as late as 2013. Wow. I hope like heck I'm still that active and doing things I am passionate about in my 90s.

As a fun aside, miles per gallon (MPG) and furlongs per pint (FPP) are equivalent measures as the respective units have the same conversion factor of 1:8.

I fall rather squarely into the prescriptivist class of grammarians (as opposed to the extreme corpus linguists who seem to feel that language is entirely fluid and dynamic and should be bound by no rules whatsoever), but find it perfectly acceptable to use the third-person plural forms for persons of indeterminate gender or identity. While it has often been taught that using the 3rd person plurals in that way is incorrect, there are a number of pragmatic and historical reasons why it isn't so. A couple:

1.) It is readily understood by native speakers; we've been doing it that way for a very long time! Shakespeare, Chaucer, Jane Austen, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George Bernard Shaw, George Eliot, Elizabeth Bowen, C.S. Lewis, Oscar Wilde, all have used 'them' as an indeterminate singular pronoun.

2.) It fulfills a need. Using 'he' causes an assumption, as does using 'she.' Some authors choose to alternate between the two, but that is just confusing. Saying 'he or she' and 'his or her' every time is far too wordy and cumbersome. Considering that English only has a neuter third-person plural, 'they' is a perfectly good stand-in. (Heck, the Germans use 'sie,' 'sie,' and 'Sie' (her, they, You) without any issues. Aside from some fun and intentional linguistic wordplay, ambiguity is resolved through context.)

Yep. I work in patents, where a small incorrect use of grammar or terms of art can mean losing millions of dollars. The classic case in point:

Patent A:
"A vehicle comprising 3 wheels and a motor."

Patent B:
"A vehicle consisting of 3 wheels and a motor."

Assuming it is 1700 or something and no prior-art exists,

Patent A can go on to claim 4-wheeled motorized vehicles (since a 4-wheeled vehicle does after all have 3 wheels), 3-wheeled vehicles with shark fins, whatever. "Comprising" is open-end and interpreted as "it has at least this," or as you say, "including."

Patent B is strictly limited to 3 wheels and a motor, no more and no less. If a competitor uses 4 wheels, or adds shark fins, or two motors, then it isn't covered by the patent. "Consisting of" is a closed phrase interpreted as "having exactly."

The incorrect grammar "comprised of" would be an ambiguity, and as such, interpreted in the strictest way -- limiting as in Patent B.

It may seem worrisome that scientists and engineers of all people -- some of the absolute worst butchers of language and grammar out there! -- are the ones who become patent agents or patent attorneys, but all-in-all, the ones who do so tend to be some of the smartest folks I've met. You need to be well-rounded to do the job.

>> To avoid frame dropping, you need an external TBC (different from the TBC in the VCR) acting as a frame sync.

^This

Let me add for the person asking the question that I found an external TBC extremely useful back when I was transferring family movies from VHS. Even though I used a nice SVHS unit with an internal TBC, some of the worst older tapes still had lots of dropping out, tearing, and sync issues that magically all but disappeared when I fed the signal through the external TBC. Perhaps you don't need it in your case, but I definitely did.

Here's an in informative thread where someone asked about the need for an external TBC. Be sure to look at the images in post #7.

If I have a VCR with TBC, why is a separate unit needed anyway?

I'm a huge fan of classic film, and one of my favorite anecdotes is a conversation related by director Howard Hawks between William Faulkner and Clark Gable in the director's car as he invited both men along on a hunting trip.

Despite being famous in their respective fields, the two men had never met each other. Moreover, Faulkner didn't watch movies and Gable didn't read. As the conversation in the car went on, it got on to the topic of literature. After listening a while, Gable asked Faulkner the best authors to seek out if one wanted to be well read.

Faulkner responded, "Oh, Thomas Man, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and myself of course."

  "Oh," ask Gable, "do you write Mr. Faulkner?"

"Why yes, Mr. Gable," replied Faulkner. "And what do you do?"

I love how the yellow line on the satellite-tracker here crosses within a few yards of my house on full zoom.

Having a satellite crash into my home would not make my day. Having a North Korean satellite crash into my home would not make the North Koreans' day, once Washington got involved. Hopefully it'll just splash down into the ocean or burn up on reentry.