Resolution of less than 1 meter is normal with a decent view of the sky and a lack of interference. GPS itself is always receive-only on our end as consumers.
What problem are we trying to solve here? At this point in time, guided navigation with completely offline maps and GPS has already been a no-brainer off-the-shelf thing for decades.
I guess you know your cutoff date, then. My own perspective differs.
A couple of years ago, I was involved in a stupid car crash that probably would have been prevented by this kind of system. Everyone was pretty much OK (yay), but both vehicles were ruined. And for me, at least, it was a complete and utter pain in the ass to find something else to drive that fit my intended use.
Does it boot straight into NES games? Does it have an NES cartridge slot? Or controllers? What about the never used expansion port on the bottom? Is it in a NES shell?
>It does have an expansion port that I've never used.
so not an NES one, then
>It's mine, and I can call it whatever I want. :P
that's fair, I call my switch lite a playstation 7. It'd be disingenuous to present it to others as an NES, however. If it meets most or all the criteria above, then it wouldn't be
I worked at a tiny ISP in 2000. We had nationwide (maybe worldwide?) dialups through MegaPoP [1]; they would passthrough auth for user@dgx.net to our radius server, and charge us (IIRC) $5 for each user that successfully authenticated every month. I think we charged $10/month for local dialup only (where they called into our T1 modem bank) and $20/month for nationwide dialup... at least until our modem bank T1 failed and we couldn't get the telco to fix it so we just pushed everyone to the megapop numbers.
[1] I have no idea what they're called now. There's a huge chain of acquisitions. They may have stopped serving this market, but someone still is.
Neat! I didn't know how that worked. The little ISP I used to do some things for had physical POPs in different cities and AFAIK never went with Megapop or similar. Eventually, their POPs became all-in-one card cage devices that took a combination of PRI and T1 circuits and screwed them together with PPP, which seemed quite highly integrated to me at that time.
It does look like these may be Starnet/Megapop numbers, based on the panix.motd.megapop newsgroup mentioned on Panix's website. I did spend a minute trying to find who (if anyone) is steering the remaining dregs of Megapop, but I didn't make it very far.
I called a couple of them that were nearby and a modem answered.
I'm not interested in dialup data services at all at this point in 2026. I have no remaining means with which to use such a thing. The last cell phone I had that could act like a modem got retired in 2009 and the last time I had a dialtone in my house was 2010.
But if I had to guess, then I'd guess that these time machines are still operational.
AFAICT, the line is 100 miles from the border as defined as "the edge of the US," not as defined as "100 miles from a foreign country."
This line[1] encompasses places even as far inland as Columbus, Ohio, and Columbus, Georgia, which are good examples of being perhaps least border-feeling, non-coastal cities that I've ever spent time in.
I wouldn't blame anyone for having never visited the grand metropolis of Fort Wayne, Indiana, but that's within 100 miles of the line, too.
Lots of other unlikely cities are this way are this way as well.
As long as the trillion-dollar machine can continue to provide useful male fashion advice, then I don't really care if there's a bidding war over my attention going on behind the scenes.
That seems like a poor forecast. I've been buying things from Amazon since they really were just a book store, and for this entire time it has seemed like their search has been Not Good.
For instance: I have a small, old cast iron pan that I use to cook eggs. I wanted to buy a very small spatula (or turner, depending on vernacular) to use with it. But the harder I worked to integrate the concept of "small" into the search box, the bigger the spatulas were in the Amazon search results.
It was like being in opposite-land. I ultimately gave up and bought nothing.
But sure: It's absolutely possible that the fashion-oriented utility of a connected LLM will degraded from wherever it is today, and become every bit as terrible as the Amazon search box has always been.
I hope that it doesn't happen, but it certainly can happen.
I was getting more-consistent, useful responses from the then-new voice-operated modes in Android 2.0, ~16 years ago.
Even the paid version, which is included with my Workspace account, is awful. Every time I've tried to use it for something it has lied to me and then immediately followed that lie with a bullshit follow-up question.
Using it makes me feel angry. I don't like feeling that way.
I use Gemini pro at work and home for some LLM tasks and it's fine. Decent for coding.
But the voice implementation of it and integration into Android and Android auto is such a half assed attempt that is being slammed down my throat. It's offensive. And I agree, it's a regression compared to the very old AA auto assistant for basic tasks.
I haven't used it for coding. I don't get very many Gemini Pro prompts with my [very pedestrian] google workspace account. Most of those prompts are spent dealing with the the lies, and after we get that straight there isn't much left for anything resembling actual work.
As a bonus feature: Because it's a workspace account, it forgets everything about what went wrong last time so every session is like a scene from the film Groundhog Day. It is apparently impossible to change this behavior even though I am the administrator.
Overall, I find its utility to be negative -- I'm worse with it than I am without it.
Which is remarkable, I think: I've been using ChatGPT since pretty early on in the demo days and paying for a Plus account for about as long as anyone ever could, and my opinion of that is generally positive. I've accomplished some fairly neat stuff with OpenAI's offerings that I wouldn't have been able to do on my own.
So I'm not generally averse to LLMs. I'm just averse to using Gemini to do anything more complex than turning on a light bulb. :)
I'm glad to hear that you're able to find some utility with it.
The rose-tinted era of things being made to last never really happened. For each of the old survivor washing mashines, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, and Casiotron wrist watches that are still out there doing good work, countless thousands of others were recycled or landfilled because it was better to buy something different than to fix the old one.
It was never cheap to pay someone to work on stuff. The costs of hiring professional labor and the overhead associated with that labor (for service techs, that means things like vehicles, buildings, inventory, tools, training, insurance, book keeping, and covering next week's paycheck even if this week was slow) have always been expensive.
Parts have always been relatively expensive, too. Availability of parts has always been somewhat hit-or-miss.
It seems like an unpopular opinion, but I don't think it came to this. Instead, I think that it started off this way, and that it simply remains this way today.
So, sure: $150 for a new widget? Not so bad. Maybe a pro could get it done in a few hours (maybe they can even get two of them done in one workday!), while perhaps it will take you a day or two to work through R&Ring this thing on your own for the first time.
Whether the total investment (including time) is worth it to you is a personal decision, but that kind of decision-making is also not new. :)
Slightly off-topic but this is why 3D printing becoming popular is a boon to the repair industry. Yeah, the part might be bad, but instead of paying a ridiculous sum for a piece of plastic, you can take the old one, model it, and make yourself a compatible one within a day. Of course, this requires modelling skills and the ability to be able to disassemble the machine but so does any other kind of repair work and at least you are no longer reliant on the manufacturer.
3D printing is pretty neat. I've printed some functional widgets that work well. I can just download the things and then print them, and that's awesome.
I don't know if I'd to be printing a replacement gear for a washing machine, though. The original was probably injection-molded nylon, which is a quite good combination of accurate repeatability and robustness, and presumably had good material compatibility with the other gears.
But despite those advantages, this original part already failed.
Whatever I can print is going to be sloppier and weaker, with a less-compatible material and in a less-compatible shape. If the first part failed because it was underspecified, then this printed part is going to be even less reliable.
Someone with appropriate skills could use that as a set of constraints to design an entirely new (probably physically larger) gearbox that is superior to the original, but that's sounding like Real Design Work. And iterating on design and in-situ testing means taking apart and reassembling a washing machine -- again.
I hate taking apart washing machines. It's awful work.
It seems like it'd more fun to spend $150 on a new gearbox that will probably fail every few years than to iterate on 3D printed washing machine parts at home, but perhaps my proclivities are poorly aligned. :)
Plastic gears in a washing machine just seems stupid, though. That's probably on me for buying a cheap one, but the repair guy said it's extremely common now, even in nicer models
Metal gears also break and wear out. All materials have finite strength and endurance.
It's up to the folks doing the engineering to make sure that the gears last long enough.
After all, it doesn't do anyone any good at all if the gearbox (whatever it consists of) still works after while the rest of the machine has failed.
And plenty of plastic gearboxes exist in the world. We just don't usually hear much about the ones that end up working Just Fine.
I have a 20+ year old cordless drill that I've beaten the snot out of. As cordless drills go, it offers a mountain of torque. I used it to roll new threads into long, extruded holes that were stamped into radiator supports of new Chevy Impala cop cars. Where my co-workers' drills would just flatly give up and they'd use ratchets instead, this drill would finish the job without a complaint. It did take two hands to hang onto the thing when doing this job and it was not kind to the operator even then, but it accomplished the work.
The plastic gears inside are still fine. The plastic drill body is also holding up very well. Again, we don't usually hear much about the plastic parts that outlive the rest of the machine, but those parts have been great.
In this particular case the nicad batteries for it became NLA, and the ones that came with it (and their replacements) are dead AF, so it has no value to me at this point. I really should take it apart, keep whatever bits are interesting to me and recycle the rest of it.
Due to the lack of new batteries, my world of power tools has moved on. This drill is not doing anyone any good how it is -- despite the astoundingly-good plastic gearset still being (as far as I can tell; ran when parked) just fine.
If it had metal gears instead and those also lasted longer than the machine's lifecycle, then that added expense wouldn't have been an advantage at all.
---
Anyway, I aim to be helpful instead of deconstructive here.
If gearboxes are a weak link in washing machines, then it is possible to eliminate them. There are washing machines that don't have gearboxes at all; these are usually front-loaders that only spin-a-ma-thing and that don't really do much in the way of reciprocating motion, but they exist.
Some of them are very stout indeed, though they may appear to be fairly featureless.
Dexter may be at the high end, here, with a belt-driven drum and a VFD-supplied motor; they're made in Iowa. Many places like laundromats and fire stations love these machines for their durability and repairability. Dexter is certainly proud of them; they are not cheap. I once read about their in-house factory testing: IIRC, they take a machine off the line, weld a weight onto the side of the drum that is 40% of the mass that the machine is supposed to handle, and let it run at its highest speed for for 1000 continuous hours. If it fails, they consider it to be a problem that needs to be corrected upstream. It's a pretty good test, I think.
Whirlpool has similarly-shaped mechanisms at a fraction of the cost; many of those are made in Ohio. That's not necessarily an unsafe bet. (I did have a long chat with one of their process guys about things like air-conditioned final assembly areas and conformal coatings once. I've also cleaned up some corrosion on the VFD board's contacts and installed some dielectric grease on a machine that was built in that same plant, but it was built years before this conversation happened.)
Speed Queen is a common consumer favorite. They're still independent, AFAIK. (I've never been inside of a Speed Queen machine or hung out in their factories, so my commentary here is limited. The one I once had in my laundry room was completely trouble-free.)
That's certainly a concern, but it's completely ameliorated by buying real brass wool.
The stuff that came with my (apparently genuine) Hakko 599B is non-ferrous (and is therefore not steel). Refills are Hakko part 599-029.
Soldering iron tips are usually made from copper with a thick iron plating. On Moh's hardness scale, iron doesn't care much about what brass thinks. :)
Yes I've only used the one that came with my Hakko soldering iron, and I just got a replacement from Hakko since my old one is getting pretty full of solder bits.
The tip on my soldering iron is perfectly fine though.
Was never a fan of spendy rapid PID based mini-heaters, but some people do prefer that design.
In situations where PCB ground pours removed thermal-reliefs for power handling reasons, mini-cartridge-heaters often simply don't have enough thermal mass to heat an area fast enough without the control-loop missing temperature ranges and or time limits.
Anecdotally, same reason good portable butane catalytic iron units are often superior to USB-C/battery operated units.
Note Zinc contact is restricted in some places, and that ban includes zinc-brass sources. Best of luck =3
What problem are we trying to solve here? At this point in time, guided navigation with completely offline maps and GPS has already been a no-brainer off-the-shelf thing for decades.
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