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.

I’m guessing it wouldn’t work for a variety of reasons, but having cameras digitally sign the image+the metadata could be interesting.

Or go full CW, and just transmit source code in binary as dits and dahs. (So long as you document what you’re doing it should be legal, though I’m not sure if you should use the CE portion of he band since it’s nonstandard…)

I picked up an old HP LaserJet (with the Ethernet option) for free during grad school. It was a great printer — good CUPS/Linux support, reliable, cheap 3rd party toner.

It’s sad how the mighty have fallen. Would never recommend one for someone today.

CrowdStrike incident happened too soon. Could have made serious money…

Not something I have experience with, but have you looked at city/government jobs? You won’t get rich, but afaik a lot of them have stability and pensions — work there long enough and retirement at a reasonable age may even be possible (assuming things don’t go to shit).

USPS comes to mind.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_(title)

As a noun yeah it’s more common in the western world to refer to medical doctors. But its origin is that of teachers, not medical practitioners.

Looks like you edited but kept the “th” suffix instead of “nd” :)

Lol, comment removed. It ended with, “…support for the Chinese Communist party” as a way of finding out someone is a child.

Which was then removed in a, dare I say, childish act of moderation.

(Which is fine, the folks at .ml are welcome to censor as they see fit, of course, and I’m sure this comment isn’t long for this world.)

AFAIK in the USA you can’t have the main batteries be replaceable (I think an aux battery for wireless functions is allowed…).

EDIT: I seem to be thinking of California, maybe not all of US.

What country? AFAIK in the US you can’t make the batteries replaceable. If they are wirelessly linked they can have auxiliary batteries for that, but (I believe) that’s different than the main battery…

EDIT: I seem to be thinking of California, maybe not all of US.

There’s an audio illusion that’s somewhat analogous to the barber pole illusion — instead of a pattern which appears to always go up or down, you can have a sound which seems to always go up or down in pitch: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone

Please be direct and stop beating around the Bush.

In before the .tar.gz/.tar.bz2 gang…

Looks like Slashdot no longer allows Anonymous Cowards. TIL.

(I’m not editorializing — that’s what you’d show up as if you posted anonymously.)

I’ve only recently branched out from router defaults…only reason was that I wanted to VLAN off my home network, and mostly just so [Home Assistant-controlled] smart devices can’t talk to the Internet at all.

It could be fun to implement this under *NIX for fun — cronjob to take screenshots, some OCR, throw it in a database…I’d never want to use this “feature” but as an academic exercise it could be a fun project.

But having it implemented by my OS, and not by me…yikes. No thanks.

Yeah, tenure definitely a double-edged sword. On the one hand, being able to voice potentially unpopular opinions is important. On the other, having dead weight occupying faculty positions which brilliant younger folk would kill for — folks who would be more productive, more engaged, and contribute more to the world — is…well, maybe not great.

Eh, I assume there are a phenomenal number of job descriptions that are just copy-pasted over. Native [language] speaker, 5+ years coding experience in [framework that’s been around for 3 years], etc.