When we moved to our previous address the butcher down the road had his telephone number on his sign. The last 4 digits were signwritten, the next was an added in screwon house number. Then we went to 6 digits and he had to add another one. Our local code is still 6 digits.
When I lived just outside London our number had 4 digits and was prime.
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Funnily enough, we used to love DAT precisely because you could make bit-perfect copies of the tapes. We werenāt dealing with commercially released music, though, so maybe that was the difference. In fact, now that I think about it, I canāt recall ever seeing an album released on DAT.
I could never afford one, myself, but I knew two people with DAT decks, both of whom used them exclusively for recording live music. We were into jam bands at the time, many of whom either tolerated or outright encouraged their fans to tape their shows and share the recordings with their friends.
But since this was in the good/bad old days before file sharing was a thing, if you wanted to get a copy of the show you had to make a physical copy of the media, like a savage, and the media of the day was cassette tapes. And because cassettes were analog recordings, the lineage of your particular copy of the show mattered a great deal. A copy of the show was awesome, but a 6th generation copy of a copy of a copy (and so on) was much less so.
The problem with analog tape was that, as a practical matter, there could only ever be one original recording of the show, because youād lose just that little bit of fidelity in the copying process. So everyone wanted first generation copies, but the guy with the original recording could only make so many copies; there could only be one seed for any given recording.
But with DAT, you could make a perfect copy of that original recording, and thus you could spread āoriginalā seeds of a show to anyone with a DAT deck. Most people were still listening to shows on analog cassettes, but it was easier to get a first-generation analog tape from the DAT since there were more people able to make those copies. And if you happened to have a DAT deck, you didnāt have to suffer any loss of sound quality at all.
It was awesome (for what it was).
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Hmmā¦ Letraset, mylar, t-squares, mechanical pencils, Koh-i-noor Rapidograph pens, wax pots w/rollers, Linotronic typesetters (Marvels of Modern Technology that those were!), art cameras and blueprint machines, large art supply stores, large profitable art supply stores (on account of all those corporate accounts for art and drafting supplies)ā¦
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It has been comparatively recently that I got into bootlegs for some favored groups and thought the lineage of the recordings listed for some was interesting.
Exampleā¦
Source:
ANA(1) > CDR(2) > WAV [44.1kHz] > FLAC [Level 8]
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How about āit was possible to live a full, rich life without the internet.ā
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Not only possible, but expected.
The internet was for weirdos and freaks. Nobody used their real name online, or used the internet for meeting strangers. How things have changed
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Iām thinking that it was not only expected, there was no choice - no Internet, eh? I recall I kept my curling club in business back in the day - 10 games a week on average, and a bar tab to match. 
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There was after a while. Usenet has been around since the 70s, and Eternal September happened in the 90s. Even after Eternal September there was a stigma attached to the internet, as well as a little danger. I donāt know what changed it. Maybe the Book Of Face, which I totally saw coming
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Still is. Itās just that the rest of the users havenāt realised it yet. Eventually they will all be confined to a few Silicon Valley-approved websites and we will get it all back again.
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Iād argue that Friendster marked the beginning of the modern āInternetā. Web 2.0 gave way to consunption-and-sharing culture on a widespread scale.
The old internet never disappeared. Itās all still here, from dial-in BBSes, primitive weblogs with Perl comment books, to GeoCity-inspired pages of webrings.
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Usenet wasnāt around during my university days. Curling clubs, however, were.
The nice thing about our club was that we all took turns running the bar, so, if the barkeep for that night wanted to go home, ātoss us the keys!ā The other nice thing was that the club wasnāt visible from the street. Iād say the normal situation was that the place closed up well after 3 AM on a weeknight (this being in Quebec and allā¦), so it was go out on the ice and play hard, come back into the clubhouse and play hard.
We may have been wilder and crazier before the Internetā¦
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I donāt know curling, but it sounds like a good group of guys. If Iād spent more time north of the border, maybe I would have learned how to play
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I enjoyed it - chess on ice in some regards, allied with hand-eye coordination and the perception to read how the ice changes. I got to be very good at it, but I suspect I would have enjoyed it even if I were a schmo with two left feet and palsied hands. Iād often join a team of older guys who were off to a bonspiel to have fun as the token āhotshotā, or take a team of people who couldnāt find a team to curl with. If I helped them to eke out a few wins, tant mieux, but weād have fun.
Itās rather like playing the recorder - it takes a lot of work and aptitude to play well, but anyone can have fun playing it. The barriers to anyone joining in arenāt very high (and thatās a great thing).
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The big platter sized Laser discs had a surprisingly long run. In college I took History of Russian Music 347 (following my principle of choosing interesting sounding courses to fill my various requirements), and was surprised to learn that most of the opera was catalogued on laser disc because it had the best fidelity playback of anything at that time. I think they are still around?
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Iām currently in the midst of installing windows on an external sdd because I was perpetually running out of room.
And each time I removed a gigs worth of game that i dindnāt really fancy playing anymore, windows found a way to fill it up with yet more crap.
so, I bought an ssd and a usb case for it, as thatās just how an imac is expanded. (unless you are rich enough for Thunderbolt)
turns out that microsoft will refuse to install to usb3.
so, found a guide to using dism, and managed to install something called Windows S
rebooted, tried to install the bootcamp drivers. NOPE.
I could only install stuff from the windows store. Which I couldnāt access. Because the drivers for my Wifi were on a USB that Apple provided.
Well, I thought, maybe Microsoft has put me in copyright jail. Maybe I canāt turn on the extra features until I put in my Windows Home product key. Nope. Doesnāt work.
Maybe I need to connect to the Licensing servers, Maybe I need to carry my 27 inch imac to the living room and physically connect it to my FIOS router using an ethernet cable.
NOPE.
Maybe I need to activate my licensing key via phone. On New Years Eve. with a good story about why I was using dism.
This all reminds of linux, I thought, back before I used my mac for all things posixy. Except that instead of contacting a fellow nerd, I was about to contact a poorly compensated tech support operator with an extra script from Microsoftās Legal Departments.
so, I researched, and discovered that I might have installed the wrong system image, and Windows S is an real product designed for people who actually like being locked downā¦ The script I was following hadnāt been updated for the new install mediaā¦
back to the web, to learn how dism lists what images are in a particular wim. Ok. need to reinstall with index:3 ā¦
sigh. If this even works, Iāll also. need to migrate my apps. Including at least one program thatās finicky about being installed to more than one machineā¦
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Windows 10 S may be good in another year for very specific niche market. Today, not so much.
One of the support issues with W10 is that every six months, things change and every guide may or may not be accurate.
It does bring some of the art of support back to beung a technomancer.
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Can not be trusted to own a computer?
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More like kiosk, school, work where a locked down environment is a good thing.
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I believe LD is still the clearest way of seeing that Han did indeed shoot first.
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not quite the hacker ethic.
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