People have reasoned out that Airbnb can be used as a way to find people in a specific area and send them money. It’s simple — you just book a room or house in Ukraine without actually staying:
I found about this novel approach to crowdfunding from the Facebook account of Christopher “Christophe the Insultor” Buehlman, a comedian and writer whom I know through his insult comedy show at Tampa Bay’s Bay Area Renaissance Festival.
I’ve also read posts where people are giving money to Airbnb hosts in neighboring countries who are taking in refugees.
This morning, I noticed that this blog has been getting hundreds of additional pageviews coming from a Reddit post, and they’ve all been going to an article of mine from 2014: Old tech of the day: Optical disk cartridge and friends. In honor of the renewed interest in old removable storage tech, I present you with the video above, showing an optical disk cartridge’s shutter in action. Enjoy!
My 2014 article features pictures from an eBay listing for a 2.52 GB optical disk cartridge, which featured these photos:
These were mostly used in enterprise computing in the mid- to late-1990s, around the time when external storage technologies were exploding. Back then, I lived in Toronto and was a regular customer at CCBC — short for Computer Consumables Buyer’s Club — where I’d drop money on SyQuest cartridges (44 MB and 88 MB), Zip disks, Jaz disks, and CD-Rs, and look with curiosity at Bernoulli disks, EZ disks, and SparQ disks.
Do you have any online photos of old storage tech? Send me a link in the comments, and I’ll update this post and credit you.
Boggs’ replica of Bob Metcalfe’s concept drawing for what would become Ethernet. Source: IEEE 802.3 Working Group.
When Boggs joined Xerox PARC in 1973, he noticed a techie attempting to network their computers. That techie was Bob Metcalfe, whose name you might know from Metcalfe’s Law (“The value of a communications network is proportional to the number of network users, squared”) or from the company he co-founded (3Com). Together, over the next two years, they would create Ethernet, with Metcalfe being the concept person of the duo, and Boggs turning those concepts into working hardware.
Xerox PARC’s display of some of the original Ethernet gear.
The original Ethernet network was built in 1975 using coaxial cable and could transmit data at 2.94 Mbps. Ethernet has evolved since then, but the underlying principle is still the same:
Messages on the network are broken into packets, which are the unit of transmission on the network.
Packets are tagged with the ID of the destination computer.
Computers on the network on constantly “listening” to the network for packets tagged with their ID.
If a computer “A” on the network wants to send a message to another computer on the same network, “B”, it first checks the network to see if any other computer on the network is currently transmitting anything:
If another computer is currently transmitting something, wait a little bit (where “a little bit” is on the order of milliseconds).
If no other computer is transmitting anything, send a packet that’s marked with the destination computer, “B”.
When you say “Ethernet”, people usually think of this:
But that’s not Ethernet — that’s an CAT-n cable (it could be CAT-5 or CAT-6) with an RJ45 connector. You can also run an Ethernet network on a different cable, such as coax, or even using radio waves. You know radio-wave Ethernet by another name: Wifi.
Here’s the list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events for Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for the week of Monday, February 28 through Sunday, March 6, 2022. Welcome to the month of March 2022!
This list is a weekly service from Tampa Bay’s tech blog,Global Nerdy! For almost five years, I’ve been compiling a list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events happening in Tampa Bay and surrounding areas. There’s a lot going on in our scene here in “The Other Bay Area, on the Other West Coast”!
As far as event types go, this list casts a rather wide net. It includes events that would be of interest to techies, nerds, and entrepreneurs. It includes (but isn’t limited to) events that fall under the category of:
Programming, DevOps, systems administration, and testing
Tech project management / agile processes
Video, board, and role-playing games
Book, philosophy, and discussion clubs
Tech, business, and entrepreneur networking events
Toastmasters (because nerds really need to up their presentation game)
Sci-fi, fantasy, and other genre fandoms
Anything I deem geeky
By “Tampa Bay and surrounding areas”, this list covers events that originate or are aimed at the area within 100 miles of the Port of Tampa. At the very least, that includes the cities of Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Clearwater, but as far north as Ocala, as far south as Fort Myers, and includes Orlando and its surrounding cities.
The mandatory omicron variant announcement
Prior to the omicron variant, there was still a pretty good chance that you didn’t personally know someone who’d caught COVID. Today, thanks to its contagiousness, omicron has made it so much more likely that someone you personally know has caught it — and probably has it now.
Omicron’s out there, and it’s not as “mild” as some people have described it. Be smart and responsible — get your booster, mask up in crowds, favor outdoor and online events, and we can get back to what passes for normal sooner!
This week’s events
I try to keep this list up-to-date. I add new events as soon as I hear about them, so be sure to check this list’s page on Global Nerdy often!
If you’d like to get this list in your email inbox every week, enter your email address below. You’ll only be emailed once a week, and the email will contain this list, plus links to any interesting news, upcoming events, and tech articles. Join the Tampa Bay Tech Events list and always be informed of what’s coming up in Tampa Bay!
Every now and again, Facebook shows me an ad that I feel compelled to click, simply because I can’t believe what I’m seeing and need to know more. The latest of these ads is for the product pictured above: the AutoExec AECRATE-15, which retails at Home Depot for…
$300.
More precisely, it retails for $296.93, which rounds up to $300, but to my mind, that seems pretty exorbitant for a milk crate with a power inverter and stands for a tablet and smartphone. The manufacturer doesn’t even attempt to hide this fact: it’s listed as “Milk Crate Vehicle and Mobile Office Work Station with Phone Mount, Tablet Mount and Power Inverter”.
I’ve designed and developed mobile apps who primary users are people that work in their cars and trucks, so I understand the usefulness of the AECRATE-15, with its ability to support and charge your electronic office equipment and store your paperwork.
Surely this is something that you could put together for considerably less than three “Benjamins”.
Component
Price
Bestek 300W Power Inverter (Plugs into your car’s “cigarette lighter” outlet and provides two household-style electrical outlets and 2 USB electrical outlets)
Juggernaut storage milk crate (Assuming you don’t simply grab one from behind a convenience store, just like every university student building makeshift furnishings or any self-respecting DJ)
An evening covering the overview of wireless defense. We will discuss the challenges you may face protecting your wireless networks. We will also talk about some of tools available for defending your networks. The evening will wrap up with strategies you can implement based on information gained in practical testing . As always we will run through “live” demonstrations as the demo Gods allow.
