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This article was posted to the Usenet group alt.hackers in 1995; any technical information is probably outdated.

Re: Broke for good (was Re: ports?)


Article: 8572 of alt.hackers
From: ppicot@irus.rri.uwo.ca (Paul Picot)
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
Subject: Re: Broke for good (was Re: ports?)
Date: 14 Sep 1995 15:00:58 GMT
Organization: Solipsists Unite!
Lines: 42
Approved: AsYouLikeIt
Message-ID: 439g3a$6ld@falcon.ccs.uwo.ca
NNTP-Posting-Host: oort.irus.rri.uwo.ca
Status: RO

In article <950913.150401.26136@cougar.cc.oxy.edu> t_pascal@oxy.edu
(C. Regis Wilson) writes:
>Hmmm, well.. <root@morningstar.pmms.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
>>I had a car with a very leaky boot and stored a soldering iron in it
>>for some little time. I think I was half awake when I took the thing
>>inside and plugged it in. BANG! Out went the lights, then shortly
after,
>>out went the soldering iron. Ah well.
>>
>You foreigners don't know how to speak english.  What the heck is a boot?
>It must be larger than a bread-box to hold a soldering iron.  I have no
>idea what this paragraph says.

Is this a troll, flamebait, or just good old American arrogance and ignorance?
I chuckle at the Ameri-centric globe-oblivious views, like the paragraph
above, often found in postings from the US.

Wake up and smell the planet, C. Regis Wilson.  The U. S. of A. forms but
a small fraction of the population of the world.  When a USA-ain says "You
foreigners" in an international forum like this, he comes off like a twit.

For the benefit of C. Regis and the few others still oblivious,
boot==car trunk.

#vent off

#damn_now_I_need_an_obhack
#recycle_mail_mode ON
I happened to have the guts of an old chart recorder and a HeNe laser kicking
around doing nothing, and Hallowe'en was coming up... So I took 2 of the
chart recorder galvanometers, mounted small mirrors on the shafts, and
arranged them to steer a laser beam around the front yard to terrorize the
neighbourhood cats.  I drove the inputs to the galvanometer amplifiers
directly from a pair of digital-to-analog converters in my PC.  A [512][2]
array held the XY pairs of a set of points to steer the laser to, so I
could define shapes for the laser to draw.  The bandwidth of the
galvanometers was low enough (500 Hz) that I could do the whole thing
directly in software from a 1.5 kHz real-time interrupt on a desktop
16 MHz 386sx, including modifying the shape of the figure in real
time with a mouse.  Great fun... I should dig it out again this year...
(not original: I got the idea from the "spinning globe" laser
display they
put on at Epcot when they kick everyone out of the park.)





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