I was quite unable to sing the last verse, and ever since at that point in the carol we've generally exchanged a glance and a barely suppressed giggle.

In a crib service once featuring the Three Kings, it fell to me to sing "Myrrh is mine..." solo from the front. Finishing the verse with "Sealed in the cone-stold tomb", my wife in the front row caught my eye and we both had the greatest difficuly in suppressing a fit of the giggles.

But finally, when I typed
print hello
it said
hello.

So I tried something a bit more advanced:
print 2+2
and it said
5

Took me weeks to sort that out!

Back in the 80's I disassembled the 6800 version in order to relocate it for a 6303 chip which had 128bytes of ram at zero, Tricky working out which addresses were absolute, even to work out what was code and what data.

And small screws getting lost on the workshop floor. We really need a vaccine gainst that.

No doubt it'll work against all forms of cancer as well, not to mention broken legs. And, err.. old age?

Short term backups did exactly what they were meant to - they preserved safety critical system. Full backup of everything would come at colossal cost and probably lie idle for decades. That a very rare event happened doesn't mean it wasn't very rare, just that today your luck ran out.

Very easy to be wise after the event, as demonstrated by so many in the media. When was the last major fire at a primary substation? Ever? The transformer that blew up wasn't the only one on site that could take the load otherwise LHR would still be down. Yes, there are always lessons to be learned.

Could David Wiltshire's Timescape theory resolve this in any way? reader.exacteditions.com/issues/12031...

Who'd be up for a Linux window manager that simulated the same effect? Much preferable to all the effects M$ Windoze wastes so many cycles on.

It probably went through the post in an envelope marked "DO NOT BEND".

At the millisec level, mechanical switches generally don't cleanly switch on or off but bounce between on and off and in-between while the contacts are making or breaking. This plays havoc with electronics unless special measures are taken to "debounce" their output by waiting for it to settle.

The 4th might have been duplicate gnd or NC, but I only used 3 in my homebrew.

(No, it looks like the numeric keypad went out with the homebrew.)

No debounce needed, but in mine, each switch took around 7mA so potentially a bit thirsty by modern standards, though in my homebrew my scanning logic only energised 4 at a time.

I had a hall effect keyboard like that I picked up from somewhere. I used it in my 2nd homebrew computer with a Hitachi CMOS 6800. You can see the scanning logic I added in the bottom right. It went to the tip about 5 years ago. I might still have a numeric keyboard that came with it.

Err, I think you need to move the rings down a bit - they need to be around the equator. Or they'll become dynamically unstable and liable to falling off. And shouldn't they be white? I always understood they were made of ice.

Yeah, got it for Christmas last year. Fascinating, and highly recommended!