ShawiniganHandshake

My family has had pinball machines as long as I can remember. I mostly played them but I also helped my dad work on them from time to time.

A pinball machine is an electrical device running on mains power, so the usual warnings like "don't work on it while it's plugged in" apply. Some machines have high voltage components like Nixie tube displays that require extra caution. I'd recommend against making pinball machine maintenance your first electronics hobby project. Those warnings out of the way, they're not super difficult to maintain if you're electrical and mechanically inclined.

All pinball machines need wear-and-tear sort of maintenance like replacing burned out lightbulbs or worn out rubber bands. The playfield components like kickers, flippers, and drop targets are driven by solenoids attached to the underside of the playfield and these sometimes fail and need to be replaced. The contacts that activate the components sometimes need adjusting since they can get bent after being bit with a pinball millions of times.

The rest is dependent on the age of the machine. 70s and older machines use electro-mechanical state machines that can be a bit fiddly to troubleshoot. You'll need the schematics if you want to maintain and repair one of these machines but most schematics are available online, either digitally or to order as printed replicas. Newer machines use electronic or computerized state machines which are more reliable but if one of the control boards fails, you usually have to replace the whole board.

If you want to get into it, buying a working but neglected machine from the mid-70s and fixing it up would probably be the cheapest and easiest way to get started. Machines that have flaws that make them worthless to collectors like cracked back glass will be the best value for money if you just want one to play with.

Oh, and they're heavy. You need 2-3 people to move one.

At my last job, one of the presales guys was terminated instantly when he tried to expense a client meeting at a strip club.

I haven't read the article but I work with Bloom filters at work sometimes.

Bloom filters basically tell you "this thing might be present" or "this thing is definitely not present".

If you're looking for a piece of data in a set of large files, being able to say "this data is definitely not in this file" saves you a bunch of time because you can skip over the file instead of searching through the whole thing just to figure out what you're looking for isn't there.

You could watch the Canadian coverage: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/how-to-follow-2024-us-election-cbc-1.7368364

As a public broadcaster, CBC is less prone to sensationalism than its commercial counterparts (though it is not immune).

I can't think of a recent time where I've seen an eBook that cost more than the paperback but I haven't been looking specifically. In my experience, the eBook is usually a buck or two cheaper than the print version.

I'm open to being wrong about this.

The expensive part of making books is not the paper. My wife is an independent author and between editing, typesetting, cover design, etc. she spent about $1500 to publish each of her books.

While she could price her books at $1, that would present her with a few problems.

Firstly, people often value things based on what they've paid for them, so pricing your book too low makes people assume it is of poor quality.

Secondly, having positive reviews is extremely important for indie authors because the Almighty Algorithm will reward you or punish you based on the book's rating. Other indie authors she has talked to have seen a noticable decline in their book's rating after Amazon put it on sale and a bunch of people who might not have otherwise read it started buying copies. If you've ever worked retail or food service, you probably know that bargain hunters are often the people who are least reasonable and hardest to please. If the book is too cheap, you may attract an audience that harms its reputation.

Finally, trying to sell 2000+ copies of a book is pretty daunting for small authors and that's about what it would take to break even at $1 per copy.

Could big publishers and well known authors sell books for a buck? Probably. But for the majority of authors who aren't making their living by writing and only sell a few hundred copies ever, that's not really realistic.

He joined the "man-o-sphere" during or shortly after his divorce and that sent him down the right wing rabbit hole.

He lost his mind in the divorce.

The "store things in the recycle bin" people are the victims of a Lotus Notes-ism. The Trash folder in Notes was (is?) excluded from storage quotas, so some people started storing anything they wanted to keep there. Those people told other people to do the same without explaining why and it took on a life of its own as a technological fairy tale.

Strangely enough, this came to mind today. I think it was 22 Minutes and the commentary was "And here's Stockwell Day not campaigning on a Sunday with 23 members of the press."