Crusty geek. Retired software developer, aspiring musician. Used Unix way before it was cool.

Once I built a pumpkin chucker. Another time, I built an LED cube.

Interests: 3D printing and making in general, synths (playing and making them), learning the bass guitar (rock, jazz, funk), FPGAs and electronics, pinball. I spent 40+ years obsessively coding and studying computing, but that interest has finally cooled.

On Mastodon, I am @kbob.

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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I use my printer as part of larger projects. Furniture gets new legs. Kitchen gets new spice rack. Appliances get small repairs or mods. TV gets soundbar attached. Desk gets hook for headphones. That kind of stuff. It’s all one-of-a-kind and of no use to anybody else, but extremely satisfying to model, print, and use.

    (I had a bunch of photos on Twitter. Can’t link now, might copy to the Fediverse later.)


  • We usually start big purchases like that by reading The Wirecutter. We don’t always buy what they recommend, but they’ll suggest some criteria that we may or may not feel are important and review a number of products. When the Internet is a swamp of reviews-for-pay and SEO non-reviews, Wirecutter has the advantage that they actually evaluate products.

    As for vacuums, we bought a Dyson V15 a few months ago. It’s big, which makes it inconvenient both to operate and to store, but it sucks mightily (in a good way). We haven’t used the plug-in canister vacuum at all for a couple of years now.

    Our older Dyson, a V6, has new batteries and has recently been cleaned, and is relegated to bedroom cleaning. It doesn’t suck nearly as well.


  • I guess I started using Firefox when it was called NCSA Mosaic. A friend showed it to me at Apple in 1993, but I didn’t get what the web was good for then. (To be sure, there wasn’t much there yet.) By 1994 I was working at SGI, and marketing was exploring whether there was a product there for us, so I installed it, started using it, followed NCSA’s daily roundup of new web sites for a while. It was mind boggling – hundreds of sites, and three or four new ones every day! (Yes, those are global totals.)

    By late 1994, Mosaic Communications (later renamed to Netscape, then Mozilla) was poaching employees from SGI, including quite a few people I knew.

    By 1995, my girlfriend (now wife) was shocked to see a URL on the side of a bus. That was our proof that the web had gone mainstream.

    Internet Explorer and Chrome didn’t exist yet, of course.