There's several listings on eBay. The listings for laptops are in a range I'd consider...
The tricky bit is usually there's a proprietary connector for the specific laptop, but I recall taking a laptop cd drive for another project and it was basically a drive with standard 44 pin mobile ide connector plus a little board to go to the proprietary connector wrapped in a line specific case. I'd guess the ls-120 drives are the same deal.
Back in the day when I had an ls-120 drive, it was much superior to a regular floppy drive for reading floppy disks. So I'd definitely try to get that going as a first step.
Many of us are sysadmins at home. Home Assistant, home NAS, home DVRs, etc. Consumer NASes are in tension against the DIY hacker / homelab people who often run these things. These NASes are just complicated enough to be consumer unfriendly, but not enough for "our" needs. The author has a good point about how NAS hardware is more integrated - less capable for power users - while the software has stagnated into a sort of semi embedded, minimal viable product.
Just yesterday I heard about a friend-of-a-friend type situation where the sysadmin husband was in hospice, and the wife was struggling to figure out how to operate the NAS to recover family photos, etc.
I think consumer NAS manufacturers could add a "foolproof backup connection method," such as a USB port in USB device mode, so the NAS could be easily connected to a laptop by someone with little computer knowledge, in read-only mode.
That said, my home NAS is "the littlest server": an aging ProLiant DL380 Gen8 MicroServer. It's behind a double conversion UPS. SAS card + drives, Proxmox running virtualized FreeNAS, etc. Typical overdone geek build. I have not seen a finer NAS platform for the precocious home admin. I wish there were newer versions which kept the enterprise style "lights out management," and added m.2 and such, but I think HP Enterprise as a company is not interested in the homelab use case.
This is one place I think the 00s did a disservice to security.
It should have been apparent to anyone by that time that "someone malicious physically standing next to the box" is an order of magnitude rarer security risk than "someone connecting from a network" and aligned UX to that.
Oh no! That keyboard was incredible. Very compact, built in TrackPoint (tm) pointing stick, and option to use USB dongle or Bluetooth. It was the perfect KVM / server rack keyboard, and uniquely great as a VR headset keyboard. I remember it was frequently out of stock and would sell out very quickly. Cannot understand why they would discontinue this keyboard.
USB-C has a mode to run analog audio over its cable, called "Audio Adapter Accessory Mode." It uses the D+ and D- pins for Right and Left, and SBU1 and SBU2 for Mic and Ground.
Texas Instruments explains the scheme in a document, "tidub66.pdf."
I know USB-C connectors aren't quite what you had in mind, but they are smaller and more rugged than the 3.5mm connector (in my opinion).
Downside is it is not widely supported, but it is possible. The host device needs to support a way to detect the analog USB-C audio cable (recognized through four shorted pins) and then to split off the analog audio signals before they hit the internal USB transceiver chip.
From the site: "The cathode ray tubes that I am describing here are crude and they are relatively easy to make at home. They are in fact, much easier to build than most technically minded people would ever imagine."
Between this, and icon-only toolbars and ribbons, I think we're reinventing Chinese, badly. Ideographic characters can often convey meaning succinctly.
My vote is to either go back to picture icons, or use Chinese characters with localized pronunciation, so 車 or 车 is car, and so on.
Just like most software icons are not legible without prior knowledge like arrow down mean to save, a circle with a line mean power on/off, etc. Both are ideographic, and I guess some software icons might be a bit more pictographic (like a cogwheel meaning settings because you are interacting with the machine).
Incidentally, the largest group of Chinese characters are phono-semantic e.g. encode both meaning and pronunciation. Over half of all Chinese characters are in that bucket. That actually allows speakers to have some ability to guess both pronunciation and meaning of characters they have never seen. There are rules to guide this.[0]
In Classical Chinese actually. Mandarin, which I assume you mean, is not the language these characters were designed for. But it is related enough that the phonetic hints often (but not always) help.
Classical Chinese had a much larger phonemic inventory than modern Mandarin, and notably no tones. Below are a collection of Classical Chinese reconstructions in IPA that are all pronounced yì in Mandarin today. (like "ee" for English speakers). The creation of tones and other sound changes were fairly predictable, so as you say, the hints often still help today.
Nit point (I'm not sure it's relevant), but we don't know to what degree Old Chinese did or dit not have tones. The very first work to say anything at all about pronunciation is a Middle Chinese text from ~600AD, which already did have a system of 4 tones, albeit a different 4-tone system than Mandarin. Old Chinese pronunciation is a reconstruction from very limited data, not unlike proto-Indo-European, despite being considerably closer to the present.
I just looked it up and the phonetic markers are only like 20-30% reliable. I am shocked at this number as in my experience I would have thought it higher (I would have guessed 60-70%), but it is definitely hit-or-miss. I've never found tones to be predictable.
That might be a better word to use, maybe. But I'm not sure there was an adequate word for the point I was trying to make.
The linguistic definition of ideographic is that it is a language which uses symbols to represent concepts, rather than just literal pictures (pictographic) or sounds (alphabet or syllabrie).
Linguistics textbooks as far as I'm aware do not define symbol in this context, but generally a symbol seeks to represent the concept. Emoji are great symbols - you see an emoji and you largely understand its meaning, even if you have never seen it before.
The modern Chinese writing system is so abstracted that even an otherwise highly educated person that just lacks exposure to Chinese written script would have absolutely no idea what any of the characters mean. 一, 二, 三, sure. Beyond that, no fucking clue.
So yeah, they wouldn't be legible. Because as symbols, they objectively suck until you learn the basic components, structure, and patterns of organization of the characters.
So to the extent that an ideographic language conveys words as ideas through symbology, and to the uninitiated these symbols lack all meaning, it's not really ideographic is it?
But yeah, not legible might have gotten the point across better.
> So to the extent that an ideographic language conveys words as ideas through symbology, and to the uninitiated these symbols lack all meaning, it's not really ideographic is it?
If I write math equations in an unfamiliar and inscrutable notation does that somehow make them "not math"?
I don't think ideography is in the eye of the beholder but rather the creator. Using the uninitiated as your standard doesn't seem to work very well for most things beyond the absolute basics.
The key observation here with relevance to the original topic would probably be that icons that are legible to the uninitiated are likely to be of benefit. Even if you don't really care to accommodate them it's still going to help you to get your choices adopted.
Thus an amusing thought occurs to me. If we did want to switch to Chinese characters for icons it would probably make sense to do so gradually, one app every six months or so.
Many characters aren't ideographic at all. Nothing at all about the structure of 的 (genitive case marker), 是 (be), or 有 (have) hints towards their meaning. A number of others like 好 (good) are ideographic only through convoluted and unintuitive etymologies.
Icon - Ideographic character is a really interesting connection I've never seen made before that seems to capture what is going on. Don't agree with your conclusion to "use chinese characters" though. I don't think it's easy to tell what they depict.
"Remembering the Kanji," by James Heisig, will set you up real good. I recommend this to anyone who starts in with the 3000+ character thing. It is fundamentally different from rote memorization that they would have you do at school, instead using mnemonics and stories.
You're on to something. I tried this too, a few months ago, with offline Ollama/Magistral on Mac. "You're a dungeonmaster for a single player adventure game, with me as the player..."
It lost track of things almost immediately. But the foundation was there.
Maybe if we had a MUD-tuned model...
If it has an approximate way to track state, and a "pre-caching" method where it can internally generate an entire town all at once, room by room, so hallucinations are rarer... actually starts to sound like a traditional DM's method of world building for a campaign.
+1; thanks from another satisfied user. I have an annual SOLIDWORKS plan, but SolveSpace is my go-to for quick stuff. It makes CAD fun. There is a clarity of design behind the software that gives it a zen-like feel.
reply