asciilifeform: nao really one oughta ~etch~ the holes

asciilifeform: 'least action path'(tm)

asciilifeform: hey it's how all other lensing worx.

asciilifeform: asciilifeform bit his elbows raw going 'wai didnt i think'!111

asciilifeform: was my thought !

asciilifeform: mysteriously (or i guess not, 'nobody does anyffing any moar'...) item aint (publicly) used for anyffin, afaik.

asciilifeform: if you use heavier metal, also worx on gamma.

asciilifeform: worx on all xray. 'harder' (shorter wave) needs moar holes.

asciilifeform: classical http://btcbase.org/log/2014-02-12#498416 solution. ☝︎

asciilifeform: ( i.e. each hole refracts by fraction of degree. )

asciilifeform: it's a compound lens.

asciilifeform: ( tldr : plate of aluminum, with 0.5mm holes drilled. the working surface is ~edge~ of plate. )

asciilifeform: in other olds, apparently i slept through this, but in early 2000s some ru d00d actually built a ~non-grazing~ lens for xray. for pennies, at that. ☟︎

asciilifeform: k. vonnegut.

asciilifeform: if yer thinking of http://btcbase.org/log/2019-01-04#1884373 . ☝︎

asciilifeform: !#s bergeron

asciilifeform recalls mircea_popescu's gedanken- aluminum book

asciilifeform: esp. nice, older, 'edible' ones.

asciilifeform: they sure do.

asciilifeform: ( they're ~ungettable in usa. today i haven't any glass. tho i do have air scrubbers, like in museums.. )

asciilifeform: i remember when i first saw a bookcase without glass doors. 'barbarism'

asciilifeform: loox almost exactly like asciilifeform's ancestral b00k room, for that matter

asciilifeform: ohai mircea_popescu

asciilifeform: there are apparently 2 jacks in the back of the thing, for extra buttons (pedals?)

asciilifeform: feels hefty and nearly 'bakelite', like a solid 1980s periph. i can see why phf picked it up.

asciilifeform: also interestingly, item claims to be made in usa.

asciilifeform: the sphere, interestingly, is supposedly the size of a regulation billiard ball, and some folx have replaced it with the latter.

asciilifeform: in other olds-noose, asciilifeform installed a http://btcbase.org/log/2017-06-27#1674958 , and it's pretty great. ty phf ! ☝︎☟︎

asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: all the race horses are dead. and we race , if you will, while dragging the carcasses around. so i prefer to go with the smallest when possible. ☟︎

asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: possibly i said this before, but i am not fond of arm -- it is horrendously ugly, complex, single-vendored ( the multi-vendoritude is an illusion, they all use same british turd mask ) . i picked it as 'best horse in glue factory' for the application, is all.

asciilifeform: well yes, sweet except for where it runs unixen

asciilifeform: guten morgen BingoBoingo

asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2019-01-04#1884340 << point. i suspect that a good chunk of the interest in old irons is driven by the sheer unfathomable depth of retardation of 'modern' comp ☝︎☟︎

asciilifeform bbl, meat

asciilifeform: there's folx running 'aix' even, that old favourite of BingoBoingo .

asciilifeform: ( interestingly also found that nowadays certain vintage crapples command 4fig prices. why -- cannot say. )

asciilifeform: when i first went to look for the thing, found that there's a whole underworld of vintage crapple people ( and 'amiga' etc ) , most of'em moved to using these things.

asciilifeform: the crapple ftr uses ordinary 512byte blks.

asciilifeform: ( you can actually set arbitrary block size, so the weirdo 1280byte blox will work )

asciilifeform: phf i expect these will work in your 'xl' also.

asciilifeform: at the very least, it's quiet, and pulls 1watt instead of 40, reducing strain on the ancient electrolytic caps..

asciilifeform: i'ma post complete recipe laters.

asciilifeform: to round off the http://btcbase.org/log/2019-01-04#1884258 thrd : item confirmed to work. booted up box with it , it's a mixed blessing ( ~zero seek times, but slightly ~slower~ linear transfer than the mechanical disk. but, theoretically lasts '4evah', given as card can be easily backed up ) ☝︎

asciilifeform: there was, however, warez. asciilifeform got most of his msdos-goldenage stuff from alt.binaries.*

asciilifeform was largely in lurk mode in those days, did not often presume to have what's worth saying.

asciilifeform: he outlived me there by considerable time.

asciilifeform: 'golden age' of usenet may have ended in '93, before i even got hands on it, but 'silver age' imho ended ~decade later. ( when usenet more or less disappeared entirely )

asciilifeform: in the last days of the good old days, it was actually pretty common, in asciilifeform's recollection.

asciilifeform: apparently there were even multiple versions of the thing, i had nfi.

asciilifeform: 'PAR'.

asciilifeform: http://www.slyck.com/Newsgroups_Guide_PAR_PAR2_Files << found it. ☟︎

asciilifeform: iirc it was a plain reed-solomon tho, not newfangled luby

asciilifeform: some defo bothered

asciilifeform: where you only needed e.g. 30 of 36 .rxx etc to magick the whole thing back into shape

asciilifeform: i fughet what it was called

asciilifeform: oh hey remember the luby-style usenet archiver thing

asciilifeform: soon enuff we're back to alt.binaries lol

asciilifeform: tru

asciilifeform: also suffers from practical gnarl -- say the session gets thrown. how many times is the bot to retry upload.

asciilifeform: this is prolly the most practical scheme suggested, to date, for this. but still feels heavy.

asciilifeform: given as most warez is already compressed

asciilifeform: ( assuming incompressible payload )

asciilifeform: classical gpg (base64) is a 400% neh

asciilifeform: 7 folx want to load, each needs a, what, 4GB+ buffer (if turd is 1GB)

asciilifeform: but it won't be very available.

asciilifeform: naturally as-available, how else.

asciilifeform: right, it'd work in principle. but costly on transmitter end.

asciilifeform: ( of much moar, in fact, than $file-length, cuz gpg is retarded )

asciilifeform: pretty heavy on the serving end, tho, needs scratch buffer of $file-length per each req.

asciilifeform: i guess would work.

asciilifeform: as in, per file ?

asciilifeform: with what ?

asciilifeform: i suppose that'd work ( tho still no crypto )

asciilifeform: i.e. receiver puts up ftp ?

asciilifeform: a reasonably-mechanized process for distributing warez to one's l1/l2 might be useful, but i haven't yet devised one that dun break in annoying ways in the field.

asciilifeform: i have a half-written bot that takes a deedbot-style gpg wot decrypt and puts out a single-use emulated ftp login thing. but it is not alive, because gnarly in practice ( if single-shot, resumes dunwork; and no crypto, and prolly this is solvable but i dun have currently the time budget for massaging it )

asciilifeform: i mean on serving end.

asciilifeform: this also. tho it is headachy to arrange in practice.

asciilifeform: aha

asciilifeform: it costs real moneyz to throw up GBs.

asciilifeform: this is a fundamental problem with throwing up warez for 'public'. how to justify to self, the bird feeder.

asciilifeform: aite.

asciilifeform: aa

asciilifeform: possibly dun need torrents after all. ( it is nao smaller than those jpegs from last wk. )

asciilifeform: lol holySHIT is gzip inefficient for disk snapshots. '7zip' gets it down to 256MB !

asciilifeform: ( solid state gadget that replaces the ancient whining hdd in the thing )

asciilifeform: it aint that much good without the iron, but i would like the thing publicly gettable, given as i also baked a 'scsi2sd' config that eats the thing ☟︎

asciilifeform: ( it's ~8GB gzipped )

asciilifeform: i ask because i have a 9GB disk image from that bolix 'macivory' ( recorded using the 'alpha' from earlier thrd ) but am reluctant to simply put on dulap, soaking up bw for errybody

asciilifeform: unrelatedly : hey mircea_popescu , didja have a torrent tracker ? i seem to recall in the log ( tho cannot find. ) or was it an in-house thingie strictly.

asciilifeform: same here

asciilifeform: ( iirc diana_coman was the only 1 afflicted )

asciilifeform: jurov: this is entirely possible. lessee what diana_coman says when wakes up.

asciilifeform brb,teatime

asciilifeform: ( in fact, if anyffing -- encouraged, the type safety makes it less immediately lethal than otherwise would be )

asciilifeform: incidentally i'll add that most published heathen ada proggies use c-style heapism, it isn't banned by the lang per se.

asciilifeform: c programmers who 'stop to think about what it means' tend to go insane and gouge out own eyes etc. so not much experience of this in the field.

asciilifeform: Mocky collected the whole, iirc, set, i'ma link ftr to http://mocky.org/Log-Reference-Why-Ada/ .

asciilifeform: ( e.g. http://btcbase.org/log/2017-05-26#1662671 , and other examples i documented in 2016-7 l0gz ) ☝︎

asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2019-01-03#1884225 << ada is surrounded by a kind of roman 'sudes' fort , consisting of 'why the fuck does it make me do this', kills 99+% of maggots on the spot. at least that's my hypothesis re why the thing remains usable ~40 yrs after first made, unlike e.g. unix ☝︎