If only they would stop putting 'Water Resistant' on the dials. It seems such a silly thing to boast about. 'This watch has bottom rung water proofing', great.

Great watches and good value for money but that seems an odd design choice to me. Perhaps it makes sense in the Japanese market.

"Adds an estimate of the time left from the straight line to Coral Gables and leans the circle south."

It leans what now?

There’s no numbering, it just counts the neighbours. ‘0-2’ means zero, one or two neighbours.

What are those dark brown cylinder shapes in the sides of the roughly hewn tunnel (first image on the right)?

My hunch: Sound-deadening baffles.

'Exploding the phone' by Lapsley is such an incredible book on the phone phreaks.

Thanks for the kind words! And it's funny, when I saw this story on HN my first thought was "loop arounds and talkable busy signals!" :-).

Thank you for writing it, I think about it often. It is so well researched and written, I could tell it was a labor of love :)

"nor can a Commodore 64 drive read a file you have created on an IBM Personal Computer."

Well I guess, the 1571 drive was released that summer, with the hardware capable of reading IBM PC floppies, but I think it took some years for the software to be developed (Big Blue Reader).

Indeed. Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49750694

Ok, we've merged (most) comments moved thither. Thanks!

Thanks. I'm upvoting that instead

Also ignored is that not all rectangular flags are the same proportions, e.g. the Belgian one is 13:15.

TIL the shiny metal coating on top of vacuum tubes is not an X-ray shield, but a reactive coating to scavenge any remaining molecules out of the vacuum.

You'll find a similar thing in vacuum fluorescent displays as well [0].

[0]: https://ibb.co/XZHWLD3x