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My favorite description of this sort of setup is "coded by vandals".


Yes, yes they do. And they have high-pressure air wars and they short batteries through paper clips chains to see how hot they can get them. Kids still do stupid things, honest.

-a mentor of an unspecified FRC team


Hey now, if those paper clips were actually a short circuit then they wouldn't get hot.

Stupid was the kid who thought he'd try to catch the water balloon in a bucket, missed, and it hit him square in the crotch and bounced off unbroken. Ahh, FIRST hijinks.


We were shooting bottle rockets across our robotics shop using an acetylene torch when my friend blasted the skin off his hand.

Our shop keys were revoked. High school kids do stupid things. But they learn and most live on


Not a Steam game, but an amazing programming puzzle game that I keep looking for a modern version of.

Year: 2001

Title: Colobot

Link: https://colobot.info/

My description: Use code to direct wheeled, hover and flying bots to construct, combat and explore.

Description: Colobot (Colonize with Bots) is an educational, post apocalyptic real-time strategy video game featuring 3D graphics, created by Swiss developer Epsitec SA. The objective of the game is to find a planet for colonization by the human race by establishing a basic infrastructure on the surface and eliminating any alien life forms endangering the expedition. The game takes place on the Earth, Moon, and seven fictional planets. The main feature of the game, which makes it educational, is the possibility for players to program their robots using a programming language similar to C++ or Java.


"Back then", just being nearby and showing interest was often all that was needed. I remember wandering into the engineering computer lab my first day of college and being asked if I wanted an account by someone only a few years older than I. (I promptly locked up my shell, didn't know what to do and power cycled the machine under the desk. Got a quick reminder that multi-user machines didn't need to be the large rackmounted things I was used to. Oops.)

(My story about fathers and punchcards involves hanging out in the lab with my dad when he was doing his CS homework. I had great fun punching dirty words into the scrap cards and crashing while playing lunar lander on the greenbar printer.)


It was like this in the 90s as well. I would hover around noc closets and server rooms and just chat it up with the admin who came by. They were always eager to show off their systems. Then I would ask if they need help and I would end up doing network admin or sysadmin or building a system for them for a few months.

Come to think about it, this is still a solid activity at smaller shops. I have recently gotten work from my colo provider by simply chatting with them. The ROI is not the same as early days in my career but a sale is a sale


Is it really? That's great! I'd think they might be a bit more, um, reserved, nowadays.



Or you can make it go away completely with: https://zoom.us/profile/setting and search for 'apps'. Turn off "Zoom Apps Quick Launch Button" and I believe that makes the dock go away, too.


I think the key would be knowing what flavor of Unix they were on. `bsd man learn` gets me to that page.


Every instance of the flag will be created with a random view and rotation of the planet! (But none will have New Zealand, of course.)

(Or it’s some cool cloth display that shows a rotating version in realtime.)


And by minting each flag as an NFT, the whole project is self funding.

That’s genius!


I look forward to seeing what flag Musk plants when he lands.

Given that some countries are dropping metal flags on the arctic seabed just to claim the mineral rights, I’m sure it’ll be a source of much drama.


Love that one! My first thought was “we’ve already got one, you see; it’s very nice.”

When I decided to start flying flags a few years back, I got one of these. Good conversation starter with the neighbors. (And my Kerbals always flew their missions under this flag, too!)


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