Basically setup and load the tubes with shells; lots of attention is given to safety buffers, and things like orienting the racks so they can't fall facing the audience.
Some states require electronic firing, so everything gets a squib tied into the fuse, other places you can hand-fire with a road flare, which is more reliable, but dangerous. Anything that doesn't launch needs to be re-squibbed or extracted.
Its also wicked exciting, and fireworks from directly below look entirely different. My first show hand firing 6" shells, I distinctly recall knee jerk yelling "what the fuck" over and over, grinning ear to ear; you can really feel the pressure wave from the launch. It also paid $10/hr
There is also an amateur fireworks association as a fyi; people still hand build shells :)
Edit: as for timing, they'd have patterns like, x3 3-inch shells, x2 6-inch, and 1 8-inch; color and pattern were intentional choices. For hand fire, they'd yell out the shell size to fire, one person per size
Not quite, but I think there's a lot of overlap between ADHD and autism, and that the labels are becoming increasingly blurry.
The final paragraph touched on it:
> It is, I think, too early to say with any confidence that autism and ADHD (or KCS) share a common root in monotropism, but the overlapping traits of the people receiving each label clearly demand some kind of explanation, and preliminary results do suggest that each is strongly correlated with monotropism – especially in combination.
Also, a definition of monotropism from their homepage (not my writing):
> I believe that the best way to understand autistic minds is in terms of a thinking style which tends to concentrate resources in a few interests and concerns at any time, rather than distributing them widely. This style of processing, monotropism, explains many features of autistic experience that may initially seem puzzling, and shows how they are connected.
Diagnosed with both (as a child, then again as an adult after ignoring said diagnosis for a long time) I’ve been continually told there is a close link between the two, in that it’s not uncommon if you have one, to be diagnosed with the other.
I’ll say I’ve found “treatments” from both schools helpful. Even though I resisted stuff on the autism side for a long time because I felt “insulted” by it and was convinced it was a diagnosis made in error.
I feel similarly. Sometimes I feel like spinning up an anonymous account on bearblog.dev or matatora.blog where I can write freely without any hassle. For now, though, I have a microblog section as a secondary stream that mixes tech with low-stakes, personal, non-tech bits (music, pictures, showerthoughts, etc).
I appreciate they acknowledge the nuance and shortcomings. When I first heard that baseline = available for 2.5 yrs, I felt that was a big disadvantage to users with older devices.
IMO a better solution would be a tool that scans all your HTML/CSS/JS output for keywords and features, and that returns a list of availability across browser versions. Like caniuse but scanning your whole build directory. That way devs can see for themselves what features they depend on and when they were supported, rather than relying on someone else's green stamp of approval in the docs. Does anyone know if such a tool exists?
> When I see the adware monstrosity that Windows appears to have turned into, I'm actually quite shocked to see sharp folks using it. I must be missing something, like do they have cheat codes to make it usable?
There's at least a few factors:
- like boiling frogs, where things worsen gradually and you don't notice / hurt enough until it's too late
- accumulated bandaids over time to keep it bearable. e.g. knowing what settings to disable, perhaps having powershell scripts to debloat new machines, etc
- inertia. Hard to make big changes in general, even if they would help, because change is hard and usually costly
I think MS Office is also singularly keeping people on Windows. That’s the only argument I don’t have a response to for getting my parents to switch.
I am confident that the lovely folks working on Wine are working as hard as possible to get maximal compatibility, and Wine (and Proton) is really a marvel of engineering at this point, but man I wish they would figure out how to get MS Office 2024 working.
To be clear, this is not a dig at the Wine people; I suspect MS Office is made purposefully difficult to get working on Wine, but man if they could get that working then there could be a huge exodus.
This is an extremely niche problem that is probably not a factor for the vast majority of people: but my organization uses a shared dropbox account for file storage (yes, yes I know). The linux dropbox app does not have the smart download feature where you can see all files and folders but don't need to have them local unless you request them. The only options are to either download the entire dropbox folder, or to selectively sync certain files and folders, and then only be able to see those files and folders.
Given that the dropbox is some 4TB, but I often need to access things that I didn't previously need access to, this is a bit of a deal breaker.
You said it in your first sentence: you know that Dropbox is not designed to function the way you're using it. That's a kind of tech debt that may (will?) bite you in the ass eventually. Linux being incompatible with the way you use Dropbox is just a symptom of poor infrastructure and security practices, though I understand that it's probably out of your hands to fix.
I use linux full time on my home PCs, and I want Libre Office to work for me.
I _can’t_ get equivalent functionality of Excel’s tables (named range, but it dynamically expands and applies formulas as you add more data). If you’ve got excel handy, open it up select a range and press control-L to see it.
There are endless forum threads of Libre Office boosters misunderstanding what the feature does and offering the halfway there equivalent.
I want this to work, but everyone uses excel’s feature set slightly differently and something will be missing for everyone. It’s incredibly annoying.
I don't use spreadsheets much anymore, and I end up just writing scripts for everything I would use Excel for. This isn't a brag, in fact it's sort of the opposite; I often miss the simplicity of Excel and I think for a lot of my scripts I would save time if I did them in in a spreadsheet.
One of these days, I should probably go through a tutorial series for LibreOffice and Star BASIC and properly learn it.
If I need to do any kind of number crunchy stuff I usually use Julia right now. I really like Julia, it's a very cool language and platform, but for small things it's kind of overkill. I should really learn how to properly use LibreOffice.
My dad makes extremely liberal use of the VBA in Excel. LibreOffice does have an equivalent, but it's different enough to where he would be forced to port over large amounts of his code.
I think he could get over the different interface but I don't completely blame him for not wanting to redo all his work.
yes. It's terrible. I can't believe it's taken this long to still be awful. The mix of Java. The awful UI. If you're on Mac/Windows, you should buy Office. And if you're on Linux, you should use OnlyOffice, or Google Docs
I think this software archaeology / history-keeping is really important. Keep up the good work. These paragraphs resonate with me:
> There is utility in those old tools and interesting ideas to be mined. Recently I stumbled across something that by all accounts should have set the world on fire, but whose ideas needed more time to germinate before blossoming much later. Discoveries like this are not just nostalgic “what ifs” to opine wistfully upon, they can be dormant seeds of the future.
> Computing moves at such an unrelenting pace, those seeds may lie dormant for any number of reasons: bad marketing, released on a dying platform, too expensive, or even too large a mental leap for the public to “get” at the time. I see this blog as a way to explore the history of the work tools we use every day. I don’t do this out of misty-eyed sentimentality, but rather pragmatic curiosity. The past isn’t sacred, but it is still useful.
What's your research process? Do you use lots of Internet Archive material? Do you reference any personal artifacts i.e. old hardware or documentation laying around? Any interviewing?
Thanks for the kind feedback, and I'm happy you felt resonance with those words. I use tons of Internet Archive material, but also stuff from various retro enthusiast sites which focus on specific hardware platforms. Lots of books, I look through YouTube for interviews, and include my own personal history with the machines and genres (I don't want the blog to read like a passionless how-to manual). If I had the physical space for a hardware collection I'd do that, but alas. No interviewing of my own, just research into existing interviews up to present day. The main point is really to let the software speak for itself and see if it and I can be friends.
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