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Analog tape can sound pretty damn good, depending on the total surface area used and how fast it moves past the record/play heads.

Isn't there some way you could calculate the signal density you'd need in any of PDM/PWM/PCM to roughly equate to the quality of signal reproduction of a given tape media, given known tape surface/speed/magnetic density?

It turns out there is https://www.electricity-magnetism.org/magnetic-storage-devic... -- its a bit more complicated than what I'm more familiar with, which is film-grain-to-digital-equivalent resolution.

Anyway, you could do the work to work out the bit depth/signal rate you'd need to equate to reproduction of a given fluxdensity/recording rate. I would bet the numbers for classic PCM/PDM devices line up surprisingly close to certain tape systems.

On the flipside, once you know those numbers, you could also calculate what the expected analog equivalents could be, sample existing analog media/playback systems and use those to systematically characterize their quality, instead of going by earfeel, as it were.


> super slow

    $ units
    Currency exchange rates from FloatRates (USD base) on 2022-12-14
    3753 units, 113 prefixes, 120 nonlinear units
    
    You have: (2 * 238854 mi) / c
    You want: ms
            * 2564.4291
            / 0.00038995034
Over 2.5 seconds round trip. And just imagine the on-call shifts. "Sorry honey, PDU failed. I'll be back four days after the next-next launch window opens."

Many moons ago, I randomly discovered that the built-in text to speech engine on Windows 2000 would pronounce “crotch” as “crow’s nest.” Never found any reference to it online at the time, although today it’s pretty well documented. It’s possible I was one of the first people to find that.

I’m sure it was a bug and not some kind of self-censoring thing, but I had (and still have) no good explanation for it. Language is weird.


Reminds me of the networked vending machines in Computer Science House at RIT [0].

[0]: https://csh.rit.edu/about/projects.html

Full disclosure: I was involved in a hardware overhaul on all those machines, about 15-20 years ago.


Microsoft Word's "Save as Web Page" or GTFO.

Using view source in IE to discover how certain layouts and effects were done and trying to replicate it on Notepad... and then downloading Dreamweaver because you were a n00b and needed that WYSIWYG goodness.

That's ironically still the easiest way to go for HTML emails as the output is almost guaranteed to display well across various email clients that don't implement CSS properly (Outlook).

IIRC Outlook[1] just uses the Word engine internally, so it's going to share the same quirks.

(I also seem to remember that Internet Explorer's Trident engine started as a fork from Word, although that's presumably a bit less direct in the later versions).

[1] At least proper desktop Win32 Outlook, not the dozens of other things Microsoft have called Outlook.


> email clients that don't implement CSS properly (Outlook).

Can anyone explain how this is even possible? It's 2025.


Not the answer you were looking for, but `juice` makes it possible.

https://github.com/Automattic/juice


I think you mean saving a PSD in Photoshop, opening it in ImageReady, slicing it, and then optimizing the slices for web.

Wikipedia seldom disappoints on this kind of thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_inventors_killed_by_th...

Anecdote time!

Some years ago I had a password on an account that contained a space character. One day, out of the blue, couldn’t log in. Went through the reset flow, picked another password that also happened to contain a space, still couldn’t log in.

I started poking at it and realized that I had to enter the space as `+` at the login form. It worked that way. I never quite figured out what they would’ve had to do to get the form encoding so specifically wrong.

Since then, I’ve tried to carefully consider just how “special” I want my special characters to be.


I assume the browser encoded the space to + with x-www-form-urlencoded, then the server never decoded it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percent-encoding#The_applicati...


I've had long form passwords cut short without informing me at all until I failed the account creation, login and password reset multiple times. I counted every character that was displayed during password creation and matched it exactly with what I've entered only to find out the login portal cut my password by one character.

It did give me inspiration for another infuriating username ^


That was only for drives with servo-actuated head arms. Think like what the old black-and-white Macs came with. You could tell one of those drives because it sounded like somebody revving a cordless screwdriver when it was being accessed.

The quiet clicking-type drives use a magnetic voice coil-type actuator, and the loss of power causes them to want to spring back to the park position.


If you’ve got bored hams around, they’ll catch you.


I doubt the FCC will be disbanded in a way that prevents any enforcement of anti-jamming rules. But the only thing local hamsters would do is report you to the FCC, so if it were dissolved as GP posits, it wouldn't matter which hams find you.


A healthy disc shouldn’t wobble enough to push much of anything. We’re talking like 1/20th of a millimeter.


Should be enough to relieve the pads I think? The less wobble the less the pistons need to retract too.

I mean you can hear scratching when the pistons get crusty and the don't retract like they are supposed to.


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