Masks are the new normal

These are interesting times. The wearing of masks has been an ongoing recommendation for a while, but we are now seeing it become a requirement for certain places and activities. I suspect that will remain the case for some time.

Our friends over at Ably sent over a package of these blue masks for us and we have extras. If you would like one, let us know when you order and we will include a couple with your shipment.

Which came first?

We are moving away from specifically related computer products for today, but this is a fun one. You are looking at something that everyone has come in contact with at some point. It is ubiquitous. So much so, that I am not even going to offer a hint. Scroll to see what this is.

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That is the business end of duck tape. If you look closely, you can actually see the bits of sticky adhesive. Duck tape has an interesting history. And yes, I am using ‘duck tape’. You will often run into people that insist that no, it is ‘duct tape’. They’re not completely wrong, although they are often completely annoying, like those that insist on calling soccer football…

You can call this duct tape, but the original, and I would argue the correct, name, is duck tape. The tape came about originally without any adhesive and was essentially strips of plain duck cloth used for things like making shoes stronger or protecting steel cables and electrical conductors from corrosion and wear.

What we know of as duck tape today came about during World War II. Johnson & Johnson was tapped to create an adhesive for sealing cases of ammunition to protect them from moisture. It was again made using thin cotton duck cloth coated in waterproof polyehylene with rubber based adhesive.

The duct tape name comes into play after the war in the 1950s. After the success of the tape in all manner of uses in the war, it became a commercial success. Construction projects started using the tape to wrap air ducts, and duct tape was born.

It’s so dirty!

I can’t imagine there are many people that are going to recognize what this is. We are firmly back in the HP classic gear area, and this is a really oddball part. But I found the image rather interesting, so we’re going with it. Double-points if you had any idea what it is. If you didn’t, scroll for the reveal.

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Even the reveal requires some explanation. What you are looking at is a print head from a 2932/2934 series printer. These are impact printers that were introduced in 1983. They were workhorses, but not exactly speedy about getting that work done.

Both of them could print at 200 characters per second, and the 2934 included a ‘letter quality’ option that further cut that down to 67 characters per second.

They were one of the longer lasting printers HP made, thanks to their design and simplicity. It is rather simple to take them apart and refurbish them with new foam wheels for the rollers and sensor. They were very popular as a replacement for Ruggedwriters. Ruggedwriters… I could tell you stories about Ruggedwriters…

Another interesting detail. These printers had no screens for setup. Instead, you would print the menu on your paper, then move the printhead to the section of the menu you wanted, and work through the menu that way. So, for example, if you wanted to change your baud rate, you would move the printhead to baud rate and press enter. The printer would print all the possible choices and you would move the printer to your selection and press enter to confirm the setting.

The printhead we are looking at is actually an old failed unit that was replaced. What appears to be dirt and grime on the head is build up of ink from miles of ribbon rolling across the head.

Just a pinch

Another fun little picture puzzle today. And another pretty common household object. You might not have this exact one at home, but chances are good you have something from the same family. I can’t decide if this photo is ridiculously easy, or deceptively hard. Did you get it? Scroll for the reveal.

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Pliers! One side of the jaws of the pliers on my Leatherman multi-tool, to be exact. I can’t recommend these highly enough. Between the pliers, knife, and screwdrivers, it is easily my most used tool.

Have a great weekend!

Did you know?

We are starting off today with another mystery photo. This is a very common item that you can rest assured you have handled on multiple occasions. There is a very good chance you have this at home right now. You also likely have a digital version of it on your computer. Got it? Scroll for the reveal.

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It’s a standard deck of playing cards. This particular deck is one that I got as a promo for a newspaper that was sponsoring a show I went to. Aside from the games we play, playing cards are very interesting.

Did you know…

Playing cards, in general, date all the way back to before AD1000 in China. But the common 52 card deck we are all familiar with now didn’t come around until a few hundred years later.

That deck has some interesting trivia attached to it. It is said that the 52 cards represent the 52 weeks in the year. The four suits, the four seasons. And if you add up all the pips in the deck you’ll get 364. Then one Joker makes 365 days in the year. And the second Joker makes 366 for leap years. You can even look at the 13 cards for each suit as a representation of the lunar cycle.

Alternative theories posit that the suits represent different parts of society from the middle ages. Hearts are the church, spades are the military, clubs are agriculture, and diamonds are the merchants.

It’s aslo possible that the kings are intended to represent actual kings from history. King David (Spades), Alexander The Great (Clubs), Charlemagne (Hearts), and Julius Caesar (Diamonds).

If we want to go off the beaten path a bit, and you want to feel a little bit old, Microsoft Solitaire is now 30! It debuted on Windows 3.0 in 1990. And if you want to be depressed… analysis says that only 1 in 400 games of Solitaire is unsolvable. Yikes!

Click, click, click

I have long had a fascination for oddball mice and keyboard examples. As oddballs go, this one is not really extreme. But it is so much of its time. What you are looking at is a very old three button Sun mouse that turned up in a box of bits today.

Most of our modern mice still provide some form of middle click, but it is nothing like the importance that was once placed on the function. That is a big middle mouse button. Not some awkwardly clickable scroll wheel that may or may not do anything.

I just tried mine on this computer, and the results are varied… So few things actually support middle-click these days. I suppose it is destined to be a relic as we move further along into our touch and gesture based future, but it is always fun to look back at where it all came from.

That’s a lot of memory*

*or, was, a long time ago

I just ran across this old DIMM and wanted to share it because of that interesting interface. There are 130 of those little holes that correspond to 130 little pins in the memory sockets these go in. You just don’t see that anymore.

This is an A2232-60001. That is a 16MB (yes, megabyte) 800/900 Series DIMM. What it lacks in the size of memory it makes up for in sheer physical size. These DIMMs are roughly the size of a dollar bill.

As an interesting point of reference, I am typing this entry on my laptop, which has 16GB of RAM, or 1000X what this DIMM holds. That, of course, points to a time in our future when we will be communicating with a device that makes the 16GB of my laptop seem laughably small.

The technology train just keeps moving, and it is endlessly fascinating.

Old dog, new tricks

One of the many things I have seen as we all navigate our various stay-at-home regulations is a whole lot of people making their own masks. This weekend, with nowhere to go, I decided to give it a try. How hard could it be? 😀

It turns out, not insurmountably hard, but not exactly what I would call easy. Sewing machines, if you are not familiar with them, are complicated pieces of machinery. It took more than a couple Youtube videos just to understand how to thread the machine before I could even begin to attempt actually sewing something.

But, with a bit of persistance, that bridge was crossed. That led to a fair bit of trial and error. I had a patter I had downloaded, and my first attempt actually gave me what you could call a mask. It was more a mask for a toddler than for a full size person though, and it had no lining to speak of.

That first prototype gave me enough of the building blocks to go off book and modify the pattern to fit my own face, while incorporating a lining that is from an old polo shirt. The end result is not half bad. I even managed to sew in a velcro closure for the strap so it doesn’t have to be tied.

The three photos you see here are of my first finished, and functional, mask. Making it was a fun adventure. It’s always interesting to learn a new skill. I’ve now started on plans for mask 2.0, with a slightly different design and a pattern made from scratch. We’ll see how that goes.

Just a pinch

This is a fun mystery photo. This is an object that pretty much everyone has run across at some point. It’s not an item that you need often, but when you do, it is very handy. Scroll for the big picture.

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It’s a staple remover. Staples, and by extension staplers, have an interesting history. The first functional stapler was invented in 1866 by George McGill. It worked, but was rather labor intensive. 1895 brought the first of what we would consider a modern stapler, from the E.H. Hotchkiss Company. It was such a breakthrough that people referred to the stapler as a hotchkiss.

The really interesting bit though is the introduction of the Swingline in 1937. This is where what you think of now as a stapler came from. The design was so good, that it has pretty much gone unchanged since then.

Throwback Thursday

I am always fascinated by looking at just how far our technology has progressed. Today, we have a great example. What you are looking at in that top photo is my tiny little 128GB USB drive standing in front of the bottom side of a 75MB disk. That’s not a typo. 75 Megabytes. Here’s another shot for some perspective.

Not only is this drive huge, in the length x width x height measures, it is also ridiculously heavy. It tips the Toledos at 6¼ pounds. Another crazy way to look at it… The RAW files I took for these two photos total 63MB, so a third photo wouldn’t fit on that drive. It can hold two photos!

Of course, I am stacking the deck a bit there, using RAW files for the example. But even if we talk about the reduced resolution PNGs you see here, it can hold 12 of them. Given my penchant for shooting 100s of photos per shoot, the mind boggles at how we did things back in the day.

One more bonkers number. I have about 1TB of photo/film files backed up on my cloud drive. Using these, it would take 13,333 of them. And those drives would weigh over 40 tons. Technology is crazy.