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== Let's make a magnetophone / tape player / magnetic tape head at home! == Many people started following me after my DIY magnetic tape and DIY floppy disk experiments. A common request ever since was to make a DIY magnetic head, and, truth to be told, I was curious to experiment with it, too. The task was daunting, and many people were convinced that it could not be done at all. In fact, I could not find a single mention of a successful experiment in the West, and scarce mentions of it in vintage Russian radio hobbyist magazines. But I know that it could be done; my father insists he made some magnetic heads over 40 years ago. Just two weeks ago Hackaday.io made a post claiming that a (really cool btw) hobbyist made a tape player with a DIY tape head. I was excited at first, and then outraged - it was fake news! The DIY tape head was not (and could not be) used in the tape player on the video, and in fact could only erase tape. Now, I present you The Real DIY Magnetic/Tape Head (and a DIY microphone) 🧵~

Zoom Konami Code Every now and then, someone sends me a link to a Zoom meeting I'm supposed to join from my personal laptop. Every time I open said Zoom link, it asks me to install the app. No thanks. In the past it was possible to click "Cancel", and there was a link "Join the meeting from web". But it seems the link is not there anymore. But even if the link is not there, Zoom web client still works. And it works not only in Chrome, but in Firefox too. The link to the web client is:

Zoom

pwa

You're welcome :)

Small desk type analogue computer made by Saunders-Roe with patch panel on top and DC amplifiers plugged in from the right

I want a Unicode extension that will allow me to define a ~16x16 icon, so the result will look kind of like emojis, but the internal structure will be kind of like sixels, so any icon could be defined. Perhaps a similar result could be implemented in certain fonts with Zalgo-style Unicode?

Is there some sort of a tool to export a thread from Mastodon to some simple format, like Markdown, with links to the pictures and alt text preserved? It sounds like a simple thing to make, but I have no bandwidth for it at the moment. The simplest alternative solution I can think of is spinning of my Brutaldon instance with custom CSS and copying text from there.

The Wikipedia Curse, or A Book So Thick It Was Incomprehensible I graduated from the high school before Wikipedia became The Encyclopedia, but I started to rely on it more and more during my university years. For non-experts seeking academic-likr knowledge, Wikipedia is likely to yield more useful results than other top Google results combined. I think it makes us stupider. Not just Wikipedia, but cheap search access in general. But especially Wikipedia. We can look up a thing and we get the impression that we understand something about this thing, while in fact we're in an unfortunate spot of confidence/knowledge chart explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect. As it happens with Dunning-Kruger, I didn't notice it for years. My mum, who's a middle school science teacher, noticed it immediately, observed and documented it. In just a decade, she says, children stopped being interested in science. They can look anything up, read it out loud, and they honestly believe they understand the thing. Most of them don't.