If you have a TV, you likely already have the receiving device. Antenna can cost, or you can play around with wire length and orientation.

I am devastated that I got rid of my 2000s HP LaserJet (with Ethernet). Only flaw it had was that it didn’t have a duplexer.

The one I’ve heard replaces “brains” with “money.”

Isn’t this extremely genre dependent? And regardless, this has been going on for a long time.

The Supremes? Good looking gals (and great music IMHO).

Grateful Dead? Sure, rough around the edges.

The Doors? Um…ever seen a picture of Jim Morrison? Dude would make Derek Zoolander blush.

Out of curiosity, I asked Spotify for modern metal music, and I got The Black Dahlia Murder — frontman looks like a regular dude who I’d grab a beer with.

Yeah, modern pop places a ton of emphasis on looks, sure. But I think this has been pretty prominent in music for a very long time, be it the airbrushed R&B of the sixties, the androgynous glam of the eighties, or the metro sexual (guy)/model-esque looks of modern pop.

It can be daunting to get into the hobby, there are a ton of niches.

To start: where are you? I’m in the USA, so that’s where my experience is.

License: required to transmit on the ham bands; you can listen without a license.

Range: are you looking to talk to people in your city/region? If so, a cheap “walkie-talkie” style (called “HT” in the biz — best avoid “walkie-talkie”) is a good place to start. These VHF/UHF (very/ultra high frequency) radios are affordable — something from Baofeng(~$30) or similar will work just fine, though they are often looked down on (I have one — for the price, it’s great). You will have the most luck if there is an active ham scene in your area, in large part because they may have a repeater, which can greatly extend your range. Many regions will have scheduled “nets” where you just go around and chat.

If you’re looking for the ability to chat with folks on the other side of the world, you’ll want to look into HF (high frequency). This is much lower frequency, thus longer wavelength, than the handheld VHF/UHF HTs. So…the antennas take up a lot of space. Mine is 52 feet long, in the attic. And the radios are much more expensive (more like $1k new). ICOM 7300, Yaesu FT710 are popular entry level units (but you also need power supply, cables, and antenna).

That said: if you just want to listen to HF, the antenna doesn’t matter as much at all, and you can use an SDR (RTL-SDR probably works?) for listening. You can probably also find a used shortwave radio that covers some of the HF ham bands.

As a long-time Debian user, I’d have to throw my vote behind Slackware for the title of most UNIX-y, which is I guess a bit different from most Linux-y.

Debian got me through grad school, but Slack got me through undergrad on a hopelessly underpowered old ThinkPad — Volkerding is a legend, and Slack will always be dear to my heart.

AI generated, so influenced from all of the above (with a sprinkling of Chrysler LeBaron perhaps?).

This happened to me when Debian switched from SysV to systemd. I am not the only person who experienced this (e.g., https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=147478 ).

This is not to say the systemd behavior is wrong, but it essentially changed the behavior of fstab. Whether this is Debian’s fault, Arch’s fault (per the above link), systemd’s fault, or my fault is a fair question. But this committed that most egregious of sins per our Lord and Savior Torvalds — it broke my userspace.

My favorite was when the behavior of a USB drive in /etc/fstab went from “hmm it’s not plugged in at boot, I’ll let the user know” to “not plugged in? Abort! Abort! We can’t boot!”

This change over previous init behavior was especially fun on headless machines…

An eligible voter who is denied voting for any reason is every bit as bad as a fraudulent vote. CMV.

The only flaw in Corel’s logic was that as soon as you’re running Linux, you lose all desire to run WordPerfect, and develop an irresistible need to align yourself with vim or emacs…

this was always bound to happen as we expand our presence in space.

Yes and no — from a different article:

Radiation associated with Starlink satellites was detected at observing frequencies between 110 and 188 MHz, which is well below the 10.7- 12.7 GHz radio frequencies used for the downlink communication signals.

(The original article said 5M radiation, which should be around 60MHz.)

So Starlink is emitting RF in spectrum where they shouldn’t, which is avoidable, but takes effort.

My guess, and I could be wrong, is that this could be related to something other than the radio(s), such as switching power supplies finding opportunistic structures from which to radiate.

Sure. But this is kinda just accelerationism/xenophobia, no? For example, replace “Idaho” with “Mexico” in your argument, and it gets pretty ugly pretty fast IMHO.

ID residents should be banned from receiving medical care in WA.

But I think accelerationist policies often hurt vulnerable people…

…and I don’t see it motivating people to go vote.

But it can do the opposite perhaps — “motivate” people to stay home who would otherwise vote R. Not that, in general, we should be celebrating voter apathy, but I think that some of these endorsements could dishearten folks enough that they end up abstaining.

I think you need to include energy cost in the preparation stage. Bread requires a hot oven, which is a real amount of electricity — it’s close to $0.40/kWh where I live. From this link it says that a bread maker uses only .36kWh, but an electric oven would be more like 1.6kWh. So bakita single loaf of bread, you end up with a not insubstantial fraction of the total cost going to heating the oven.

Of course, many bull foods require heat, so it gets a little sticky this way. Oats/oatmeal probably wins out here, as you can just soak them overnight.

A bit nuanced in drought-prone places, though — stone is, well, drought-friendly, but a typical lawn is most certainly not. Best would maybe be drought-resistant native plants…

Ford, Harley- Davidson and Lowe’s are among the companies that announced they would no longer participate in the Corporate Equality Index.

Meanwhile, here are the ones that did well on the Corporate Equality Index link.

Ended up with the Yaesu FT710, with a G5RV Jr. in the attic. Internal tuner tunes 40-6 with the exception of 15m and 17m. Very pleased with it so far! Several digital DX so far (Australia, Brazil, Samoa, Japan, Alaska, Hawaii — I’m at CM87/California).

To-do list includes low loss coax (100ft run of who-knows-what currently); debug intermittent Ethernet issues (Ethernet runs parallel to feedline — choke balun/better choking of feedline?); possibly get remote tuner (one step at a time…). Fun stuff!

And water has great heat capacity, with a nice phase change, too.

From reading other links in this post, it sounds like pollution (runoff) is a concern, which is unfortunate.