It did take forever. Rotary phones work by sending clicks down the phone line that automation equipment listens to. If clicks came too fast the equipment wouldn’t understand it correctly. This was one of the big improvements the touch tone phone brought: it was much faster to dial. Instead of clicks each button generated a tone at a specific frequency and the automated switching equipment could interpret it much faster. At least some of the early phones had a switch to make them send clicks instead, in case the local phone company didn’t support tones yet.

Makes me feel positive about Crucial’s support, though

You also need to keep in mind that there were not nearly as many phone numbers back then. While today a family of 4 might have a cell phone for each person (especially by the time the kids are teenagers), in the 20th century most families just had one number for the whole household (and the earlier you go there might have even been just one actual phone in the house).

Acme has the added benefit of meaning “peak” so it could convey the connotation of being “best”

His real innovation was a less expensive method to produce milk chocolate (although this process seems to produce butyric acid which is an unpleasant taste in chocolate if you’re not used to it) and becoming the first mass-produced chocolate in the US. The Hershey Kiss was just one of many products he made.

No, do it sequentially. To dial 515-2400 you put your finger in the 5, drag it to the stop, then release. Next put your finger in the 1, drag it to the stop, then release. Next put your finger in the 5, drag it to the stop, then release. Next put your finger in the 2, drag it to the stop, then release. Next put your finger in the 4, drag it to the stop, then release. Next put your finger in the 0, drag it to the stop, then release. Finally put your finger in the 0 again, drag it to the stop, then release.

GOG is pretty good because of this. I check in there if I’m considering buying something on Steam. There might still be compelling reasons to buy on Steam, like I bought Parkitect on Steam because a review on GOG specifically called out how the mods really only work well on Steam, but I’m at least checking first and maybe Wishlisting the game on GOG. I have fairly reasonable trust in Valve while Gabe is running it, but I feel like I can have longer trust in keeping copies of installers myself.

They can bring some nice benefits like remote starting in cold (or hot) climates, but there needs to be much better design to minimize the exploitability of these systems.

I haven’t seen one of these in a long time

I have off-and-on searched for alternative software for personal blogs that can be self-hosted and it doesn’t seem like there are many options anymore. The only ones I’ve seen are WriteFreely and FlatPress. Are there any other options you’re aware of?

I was an early adopter of Firefox 20+ years ago. It started going downhill more than 15 years ago and I bailed to Chrome when that launched. It really was better than Firefox at the time. Then Chrome got worse and I wound up back on Firefox, not because Firefox had gotten better in that time but because everything else had gotten worse than Firefox in the intervening time. Also, if going from 48% market share in 2009 to a barely relevant <5% in 2024 doesn’t count as a downfall I’m not sure what does.

This process has been underway since the project switched their focus from the Mozilla Suite to Firefox. Early Firefox was lightweight with limited features and the idea that you would add your own as extensions for the features you wanted. Then it started gaining traction and the Mozilla developers started forcing features in that should’ve been extensions. It’s been downhill ever since!

I guess how new are you talking? I think this said it was based on the 2019 release, but I haven’t heard much about recent releases. Winamp 2 was the classic one most people remember. Winamp 3 was a rewrite that was supposed to be better under the hood but a lot of people didn’t like it, mainly for the new interface it seemed. They jumped to Winamp 5 (2+3) to restore much of the old interface while keeping the capabilities of 3. I never had issues with 5 and continued to use it through Windows 7. Haven’t used Windows much since then so I don’t know how it runs now. There have been very rare point updates since AOL took over and later sold it, mostly bugfixes.

Are you sure this isn’t a scam?

Bench Young and all of a sudden Dalton becomes the first QB this year to throw over 300 yards and 3 TDs.

You can certainly be paid in cash legally. Finding an employer willing to do that, though, might be challenging. It would probably have to be retail or another business that regularly deals in cash.

I like the sound of this for a device, but couldn’t it be more for these new ARM laptops?

The CBA labels insurance proceeds as a “refund from the player,” which qualifies the amount as a cap credit for the club for the following season. In the simplest terms, if a player who eats up a significant portion of a club’s salary cap misses significant time with injury or illness, a club doesn’t have to take it as a total loss, but can recover space for the following year. Plus, insurance premium payments don’t count against the salary cap.

I was curious about how this works. If you’re interested in the business of the game this is an interesting read.

Earlier this year a doctor advised us (male and female) to take prenatal vitamins, and yesterday a nutritionist told us the same. They really just have everything anybody needs, apparently.

I counted backwards once and figured out I was conceived the same month as my parents’ anniversary. I thought I might’ve been the result of their anniversary trip to Jamaica, and for some reason that made me uncomfortable knowing that. A few years later they were talking about the trip and that they didn’t know my mom was pregnant at the time. So thinking more it made sense that I was actually probably from a week or two beforehand, but then that means mom was drinking while pregnant because she didn’t know (although I’m assuming that early doesn’t have much impact).