The diffraction effects from a pinhole camera are not what make them work.

I didn’t say this, you did. You’re chasing your own tail.

Is this wit or a genuine request that one of us explainsthejoke.com?

The ratio of the size of the image to the distance from the pinhole is the same as the ratio of the size of the sun to the distance to the sun.

A pinhole camera has no lens. The effect here is like a pinhole camera, but a pinhole camera is nothing at all like a lens. Pinholes diffract light. Lens refract light.

EDIT: Of course you can’t resolve an image through diffraction. That’s not how pinholes cameras work. Diffraction negatively impacts image resolution, but it absolutely happens when light passes through them. But, although lens do use refraction to resolve an image, that same process also has unintended negative effects on image resolution (spherical aberration, chromatic aberration, etc.). I didn’t bring up any of that because it was ultimately a distraction from the important part: narrow gaps diffract light, lens refract light, and pinhole cameras do not work like lens.

That’s not how TV in the 80s and 90s worked. Most of the TV we watched as kids in the 80s would have been reruns of things in syndication. Millenials born in 82 would have grown up watching reruns of Cheers for their entire childhood and likely have memories of watching even some of the later episodes live.

Agreed. 90 minutes to go 2.3 miles sounds like a snails pace. That works out to just under 40 minutes to walk a mile. Most healthy adults should be able to jog or fast walk a mile in under 15 minutes. A 5k is about 3.1 miles and most of the slow runners finish in 30-40 minutes. I would consider 25 minutes per mile a leisurely pace. 40 minutes per mile must mean a lot of signalized intersections. I’ve found a mile or two is the perfect distance to walk home from the bar after a night out (weather dependent obviously). Maybe Google thinks they’ll be walking drunk?

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Dude I’m not arguing that it’s correct or not, I’m saying that this is the way many people used to (and how some still do) use the language.

Yeah, that’s why my comment was basically words and phrases have shifting connotations as time passes and contexts change.

They were also inconveniently experiencing significant negative feedback to their business decision to sell warmed up day old food as a standard operating procedure just before new of the logo drama erupted. If you thought cracker barrel was extremely mid before, it’s apparently gone full Applebee’s microwave kitchen bad lately.

Fake and real photograph used to have a very different meaning indeed.

This is a “real” photo of Denise Richards and Paul Walker:

This is a “fake” photo of Denise Richards and Paul Walker (in the body of a cybernetic T-Rex):

My smartphone isn’t a phone with “extra” features to me. My smartphone is a portable personal computer with extra sensors, a GPS receiver, and wireless internet, which also happens to have a phone app. I don’t want to carry an extra “dumb” phone. I would prefer my smart watch to be the communication and identity hub for me and my devices: holding the SIM card, acting as a wifi hotspot, routing calls and internet to my handheld brick or laptop, etc. Instead of acting like a third party add-on, it would be a mostly distraction free core. Let me use a smartphone, laptop, steam deck, cobbled together cyber deck, or whatever else have you as my local screen, storage cache, and/or proper desktop. Then I can put the screens down or leave them behind without feeling cut off or potentially stranded in a world that practically requires it to navigate with any ease. I want a smart watch that enables me to leave the house without car keys, driver’s license, and credit cards; essentially with nothing but my watchphone. I want to be a cyberpunk Dick Tracy. What I want, with the freedoms and open standards I want, with the privacy I want, without being locked into a single monopoly walled garden, is probably a pipe dream. I want what is probably the next evolution of the “year of the Linux desktop”. But a kid can dream.

That’s not very helpful for connecting family, friends, and especially grandma.

Jellyfish cannot to setup to securely and safely be exposed to the Internet. It is only safe to access through a VPN. That rules it out as an option for sharing with friends, family, or even my own spouse. You call it phoning home to the mother ship; I call it paying Plex to manage user authentication for me. Until Jellyfin’s security holes are patched and it becomes clear that the Jellyfin developers actually care about security, it stays locked down to my LAN. Setting up a VPN is difficult for the average user on a good day, impossible in some circumstances on even the best of days, and is not access I want to hand out (and support) to all the people I share my Plex with anyway.

So edgy.

If someone wrote this article in the early 90s, it would be called “Why I ditched the radio, and how I created my own CD collection.” I think rephrasing it that way really shines a light on why it’s mostly still comparing apples and oranges.

I have a pretty substantial collection of music hovering around 5,000 albums or 1.6TB (mostly lossless FLAC these days, but still some moldy old mp3s and ogg vorbis files from my youth). I’m not even counting the physical media I still hold on to. I still use Spotify for discovery and playlists. I don’t think the depth and breadth of my library will ever match the depth and breadth of the music that I want to listen to in the very next moment. Lots of times I want to listen to the stuff I’m familiar with, and I do that using my own library. But, when I want to: remember a song I heard in the wild, share a holiday playlist with friends, make an obscurely themed playlist of songs features peaches, preview a musician’s or band’s stuff, discover other things that musician has collaborated on, or simply discover new music; I still use Spotify.

There are (or were) bits and pieces out there (many that pre-date Spotify) that can do some of these things. Last.fm (fka Audioscrobbler) was good for tracking listening habits to compare and share with others, it helped a little with discovery. I used allmusic.com a lot long ago to discover the artists that inspired the artists I was listening. If I wanted to share a playlist, I made a mixtape (really it was burning a mix CD). But, all of these collected information only, not the music itself. If I wanted to actually hear a new song, I had to go somewhere and find it first. That often meant literally traveling somewhere else or ordering from a catalog and waiting for delivery. Every new music discovery was a bet made with real dollars that I would actually enjoy the thing or listen to it more than once. Even after napster paved the way for free listening via piracy, one still had to work to actually find the music.

Spotify (and similar services) finally collected (almost) all of it under one app, so that I could discover and listen seemlessly. It is instant gratification music discovery. I’ll never give up my self hosted collection, but I also don’t have much hope that any self curated collection will be able to complete with the way that I use Spotify. Spotify is just the new radio. It’s never the end of my listening though. Just like with radio, when I find something I like enough, then I can expend the energy (or more often expend the money as directly with the band as I can) to add it to my collection.

This is garbage. What are you on about? It is art as an affection. Style as an algorithm. It’s got no sense of balance or intent. It looks like what it is, a copy that doesn’t actually understand what made the original great.

Maybe, but they’re paying attention to the task of scanning items, running the register, and the customer at the front of the line. I don’t really think it’s reasonable to expect them to keep an eye on that moving target as well. I’ve seen the very thing happen: Loading my stuff on to the belt, trying to leave a space because there is no divider available, the cashier is busy concentrating on the other things they are doing and the customer in front of them (not me and my stuff), they grab the last item of the other person’s stuff, scan it and bag it, turn back to check for more stuff (by this time and while the cashier’s back is turned the void I’d left is gone because the belt doesn’t stop advancing until a divider or product blocks the sensor). They may not ever see a gap (only the next item to be scanned).

There’s no perfect solution here, but I don’t see any reason to heap any more responsibility or blame on to an overworked, underpaid, daily abused retail worker just trying to stay sane in one of the most soul crushing and mind-numbingly repetitive jobs I’ve ever known.

The belts usually move forward automatically, eliminating any space left intentionally between two groups of things on it once the first group has been removed from the belt.

A note about surge protectors: Make sure they are actually surge protectors and not just “power strips” that Amazon has mixed into the search results. Power strips are easy to find in many varieties, made by any number of fly-by-night companies; they’ll do nothing to help protect your stuff from power surges. Legitimate surge protectors from reputable companies are much less common. Also, they don’t last forever. An older surge protector may still work as a power strip, but over time they may become much less effective as surge protectors.