The car radio thing only came in here (Oz) in their twilight years just as VCRs and VHS rental became a thing, but it was fabulous to hear a movie IN STEREO! with decent Bass.
Most of the ones that I used to frequent are now shopping centre carparks.
And in “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” and in the “The Great Escape”
Larry Niven’s “Known Space” has quite a few machines, but they’re generally not the point of the story. There’s a lot more about how human and non-human species relate and interact, and how the machines affect their behaviour and choices.
The whole approach of Puppeteers (technically brilliant cowards) and Kzinti (foolishly rash but honourable risk-takers), taken against human approaches is well-written.
Of course, once you comprehend its size, the Ringworld itself overwhelms a lot of the rest of the stories 😲.
Niven’s attitude to women and sex haven’t aged well…
But the stories are pretty good. He knows how to set multiple threads on their way and bind them up together at the end, or at least leave a decent cliff-hanger for a sequel.
Flowers for Algernon is an extraordinary piece of storytelling, without relying too much on “the machines”
There’s a lot of music out there. Not all of it is available on Spotify.
And not all of us want Spotify applying algorithms to our listening choices. I like to be surprised at unexpected gems from artists I’ve never previously encountered.
I search www.live65.com for music in the genres I like. Blues, folk, world, deep breath adult contemporary (no, not the “decades” top 40s lists, more modern stuff)
URLs like these:
http://edge1-b.exa.live365.net/a90706 and this https://cafedelmar.com/radio/
They’re very, very good at turning kitchen scraps and grain into dense protein (eggs).
And you get fertiliser as a by-product.
Water absorbs a tremendous amount of heat, and if it’s being continually replenished from a cold supply, the hot water won’t stay around long enough.
We’re in a bushfire zone, even had one get close, late last year. We looked into suppression systems, and there’s two types - one has a series of garden sprinklers positioned on your roof gutters or overhangs. They get turned on to create a large, extended fan-type spray of water. The idea is not to extinguish a fire, but to absorb the heat so it doesn’t get hot enough locally to ignite your house.
The other type - which we chose - puts agricultural sprinkler heads on your roof peaks. Fed by a substantial pump from storage tanks ( 2 x 22,500 litre/5000 gallons), they throw in intersecting circles out to a distance of about 15 metres/50 feet. The idea is to saturate your roof and walls, and surrounding foliage sufficiently that it won’t ignite.
Firefox on my raspberry pi grinds the thing to a halt, so I created a shortcut:
systemd-run --scope -p MemoryLimit=500M -p CPUQuota=50% firefox-esr
You say it doesn’t top out on memory, so you don’t need the -p MemoryLimit=500M parameter. Set your compiler CPUQuota to maybe 80%, or whatever you can work out with trial and error.
A pint of guinness.
I really enjoyed various communities on usenet. But most of my favouites moved to FB and usenet is now a cesspit of spam. I learned a hell of lot from alt.solar.pv and alt.energy.renewable, and made some great connections via aus.motorcycles. But I wouldn’t bother going there today, even in one of the few remaining feeds.
It was sloped at every drive-in I went to - so you’d see over the canteen/projection room.
Half the fun was queueing for burgers, chips (fries), and/or pizza, and coke between the two features. The other half was sneaking beer in. Then the other half was… what was I talking about?