Tootfinder

AOL is discontinuing its dial-up internet service on September 30; it was launched in 1991 and reportedly had subscribers "in the low thousands" in 2021 (Stevie Bonifield/PC Gamer)
https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/ao

AOL discontinues its dial-up internet, and we're just surprised they even offered it in 2025
Dial-up's days are numbered, after 34 years of service.

01914.
https://writing.exchange/@ernie/114996043264907534

Quick tip for those with young kids who want them to learn how to use a watch with an analogue (dial) style interface.
While the likes of Flik Flak make nice kids watches, they are a little on the pricy side.
Potentially better IMHO however are these kids field/pilot style watches from AliExpress. They cost basically nothing [<$5🇺🇸] and the hour hand points to an inner ring of numbered hours, while the minute hand points to an outer ring of numbered minutes. So simple!

Mapping the Spatial Distribution of Fast Radio Bursts within their Host Galaxies
Alexa C. Gordon (Northwestern), Wen-fai Fong, Adam T. Deller, Lachlan Marnoch, Sungsoon Lim, Eric W. Peng, Keith W. Bannister, Apurba Bera, N. D. R. Bhat, Tyson Dial, Yuxin Dong, Tarraneh Eftekhari, Marcin Glowacki, Kelly Gourdji, Vivek Gupta, Joscha N. Jahns-Schindler, Akhil Jaini, Charles D. Kilpatrick, Chang Liu, J. Xavier Prochaska, Stuart D. Ryder, Ryan M. Shannon, Sunil Simha, Nicolas Tejos, Yuanming…

Mapping the Spatial Distribution of Fast Radio Bursts within their Host Galaxies
We present deep optical and near-infrared observations of the host galaxies of 34 fast radio bursts (FRBs) detected by the Commensal Real-time ASKAP Fast Transient (CRAFT) survey on the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) to compare the locations of FRBs relative to their host light distributions. Incorporating three additional FRBs from the literature, for a total of four repeating and 33 apparently non-repeating FRBs, we determine their projected galactocentric offsets and find a median of $ 4.…

The Jury Assembly room at SF Superior Court is a cell service black hole. At least they have wif---oh wait it acts like dial-up and screws with SSL certs? No thank you.

Well, that's the end of a very long era. Not that I could use it if I wanted to as my land line is long gone.
#aol
#pstn
#dialup

An #Android puzzle: my Samsung S20 has a feature where, SOMEHOW, (there's no icon or side button combo) my screen-off phone will spontaneously pocket dial Emergency 😳
I understand their concern in wanting an emergency call shortcut on the locked screen, but my call history says this happens way too often. Seems only certain trousers, something about the fabric?
How do I turn this feature OFF, other than completely power-off my phone before I dare put it in a pocket?
Throwing it in the lake also not a (current) option.

When you have so many watches and straps, it does get hard to pick a combination! 🤔
#WristCheck

Just picked up this #Salter Improved Family Scale to gift a friend who's getting married and is into old-fashioned stuff and British stuff.
But, it doesn't quite sit at 0. Does anyone have any experience on how to tare a machine like this? There's no knob as far as I can see. The plate on top also doesn't seem like it can be removed without force.
More pictures below. …

Call your Senators now. @… can make it easy, or just dial 202-224-3121 and ask the Capitol switchboard to connect you.
#USpol #bbb

When was the last time you heard a dial tone?
Yesterday / today
Last week
Last month
What's a dial tone, grandpa?

Robust and Flexible Microtransit Design: Chance-Constrained Dial-a-Ride Problem with Soft Time Windows
Hongli Li (Purdue University IN, USA), Zengxiang Lei (Purdue University IN, USA), Xinwu Qian (Rice University USA), Satish V. Ukkusuri (Purdue University IN, USA)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20788

Robust and Flexible Microtransit Design: Chance-Constrained Dial-a-Ride Problem with Soft Time Windows
Microtransit offers a promising blend of rideshare flexibility and public transit efficiency. In practice, it faces unanticipated but spatially aligned requests, passengers seeking to join ongoing schedules, leading to underutilized capacity and degraded service if not properly managed. At the same time, it must accommodate diverse passenger needs, from routine errands to time-sensitive trips such as medical appointments. To meet these expectations, incorporating time flexibility is essential. …

In between other stuff I've been running sims to dial in the ARC6 connector launch to back-side diff pairs.
After sweeping lots of variations I've concluded it's impossible to get it matched using 0.45 / 0.25mm ViP. You can't get above about 90 ohm Zdiff no matter how far you pull back the ground planes, just because of coupling between the vias themselves.
Orange trace is a first test using 0.35 / 0.15mm ViP which seems much happier. Slightly overshot so I need a…

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #VarietyMix
Digable Planets:
🎵 Agent 7 Creamy Spy Theme / Dial 7 (Axioms of Creamy Spies) / NY 21 Theme
#DigablePlanets
https://open.spotify.com/track/12s5QxmU3E9sraIOMmJGmK

This is the best opportunity to dial back the influences of out-of-touch billionaires and corporations.
When our plan works,
Montana will be the blueprint for combatting corporate greed in every state’s elections
— and it all starts with our ballot initiative process.
We are going straight to the people with a constitutional initiative on our 2026 ballot.
Right now, we’re hammering out the final wording of the initiative. Next, it will go to the Secretary of Sta…

Donate to Transparent Election Initiative
Show your support with a contribution.

Hrmm, it's very easy to get the YM2612 to make bad noises...really need to dial in the two instruments. The bass isn't bad, but I am really not happy with the main melody instrument at the moment.
#music #furnace

Hey Mr Sound Man don't touch that dial! #TOTP

Hmm… maybe I should pickup a watch with a "California Dial". 🤔
P.S. For those unfamiliar with this dial layout or even those who have seen it but wondered WTF is going on, this is a nice summary:
https://revolutionwatch.com/california-love/

California Love
With its mix of Roman and Arabic numerals, the so-called California dial has become one of the most sought-after Rolex watches of the modern era.

I've been 'working-from-home' for 30yrs. Microsoft has enabled WFH since I joined in 1995 via Remote Access Services/RAS - over dial-up or ISDN.
This was a Microsoft strength: No one was ever out of touch or "off work hours". We all had laptops, cellphones, pagers, MCI concall accounts & ISDN lines at home. Everyone was "on" all the time. And we liked it.
✅ Flexible Work Was The Promise. The Infinite Workday Is The Reality. - Fobes

Flexible Work Was The Promise. The Infinite Workday Is The Reality.
New research from Microsoft reveals the rise of the infinite workday. Find out why flexibility is not enough and how to fix our broken rhythm on the clock.

Jump hour watch with salmon colour dial and a gray strap.
#WristShort

Opening keynote #DH2025 is @javiercha.bsky.social on Automating the past: AI and the next frontiers of Digital History. His career began in the era of dial up and Flash, his DH career c 2008, the era of THATCamp.
He notes his debt to the leadership of NEH and Brett Bobley; spontaneous applause!

Sonnet 104 - CIV
To me, fair friend, you never can be old,
For as you were when first your eye I ey'd,
Such seems your beauty still. Three winters cold,
Have from the forests shook three summers' pride,
Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turn'd,
In process of the seasons have I seen,
Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burn'd,
Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green.
Ah! yet doth beauty like a dial-hand,…

Tunable, phase-locked hard X-ray pulse sequences generated by a free-electron laser
Wenxiang Hu, Chi Hyun Shim, Gyujin Kim, Seongyeol Kim, Seong-Hoon Kwon, Chang-Ki Min, Kook-Jin Moon, Donghyun Na, Young Jin Suh, Chang-Kyu Sung, Haeryong Yang, Hoon Heo, Heung-Sik Kang, Inhyuk Nam, Eduard Prat, Simon Gerber, Sven Reiche, Gabriel Aeppli, Myunghoon Cho, Philipp Dijkstal

Tunable, phase-locked hard X-ray pulse sequences generated by a free-electron laser
The ability to arbitrarily dial in amplitudes and phases enables the fundamental quantum state operations pioneered for microwaves and then infrared and visible wavelengths during the second half of the last century. Self-seeded X-ray free-electron lasers (FELs) routinely generate coherent, high-brightness, and ultrafast pulses for a wide range of experiments, but have so far not achieved a comparable level of amplitude and phase control. Here we report the first tunable phase-locked, ultra-fas…

Radium Girls in Le Locle, #schweiz
Das Street Art Exomusée Le Locle zeigt eine dunkle Seite der Geschichte der Uhrmacherei. In den 20er Jahren waren viele Werkstätten der Uhrenindustrie mit Radium kontaminiert. Der Künstler SHOK-1 macht dies in seinem Mural sichtbar.
#Mural

I'm not one for the conspiracies, but how does somebody go from having the White House medical team on speed dial to 'oopsie, looks like I have Stage V metastatic prostate cancer! UwU' in five months?

On the Power of Spatial Locality on Online Routing Problems
Swapnil Guragain, Gokarna Sharma
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.17517 https://

On the Power of Spatial Locality on Online Routing Problems
We consider the online versions of two fundamental routing problems, traveling salesman (TSP) and dial-a-ride (DARP), which have a variety of relevant applications in logistics and robotics. The online versions of these problems concern with efficiently serving a sequence of requests presented in a real-time on-line fashion located at points of a metric space by servers (salesmen/vehicles/robots). In this paper, motivated from real-world applications, such as Uber/Lyft rides, where some limited…

A Berny green, flieger - type b style watch, with a green dial.
Yes, it looks similar to a certain Seiko with this dial color and the four o'clock crown but, that watch too steals 90 % of it's design from classic fliegers, so I'm ok with it. 😆
Plus it has a couple of things extra I wanted. Titanium case, sapphire crystal, no logo or extraneous text on the face (like classic fliegers) and it features a "mecha-quartz" (quartz accuracy but the second hand is m…

It's raining again!

Still rocking this for my #WristCheck. I actually really like this one.
On the one hand there is a lot going on on that dial bit it remains readable and everything present serves a purpose. No extraneous text* or logos, so while it is busy, it's also clean.
* Ok, ok maybe the tiny "JAPAN MOVT" at the bottom is pointless but it's so small it's almost not r…

A nanosecond-duration radio pulse originating from the defunct Relay 2 satellite
C. W. James, A. T. Deller, T. Dial, M. Glowacki, S. J. Tingay, K. W. Bannister, A. Bera, N. D. R. Bhat, R. D. Ekers, V. Gupta, A. Jaini, J. Morgan, J. N. Jahns-Schindler, R. M. Shannon, M. Sukhov, J. Tuthill, Z. Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11462…

A nanosecond-duration radio pulse originating from the defunct Relay 2 satellite
We report the detection of a burst of emission over a 695.5 MHz-1031.5 MHz bandwidth by the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder, ASKAP. The burst was localised through analysis of near-field time delays to the long-decommissioned Relay 2 satellite, and exhibited a dispersion measure of $2.26 \cdot 10^{-5}$ pc cm$^{-3}$ -- 69.7 TECU, consistent with expectations for a single pass through the ionosphere. After coherent dedispersion, the burst was determined to be less than 30 ns in width…

Anybody remember this?
This was the Sierra Wireless AirCard 300 that enabled wireless dial-up remote access connectivity over CDPD networking on laptops at roughly 9600bps. Great for Outlook email or accessing small files over SMB.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_…

But look at the 4 on that! Don't these sundial makers know how to write Roman numerals? Where is the QC!?
https://social.lol/@adam/114880680239385409

Since you all seemed to like the Roman numeral thing, perhaps you would like some more watch trivia in the form of a 'magic trick'?
Go to your search engine of choice and do an image search for: wrist watch.
Every [well… almost every!] analogue dial watch displayed back to you in the results will show the same time as my watch shows right now, as I write this†. 🧙🪄
† I am based in the CEST (Central European Summer Time) [UTC 2] time zone.

Waiting is worth it and can be improved with predictions
Ya-Chun Liang, Meng-Hsi Li, Chung-Shou Liao, Clifford Stein
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12822 https…

Waiting is worth it and can be improved with predictions
We revisit the well-known online traveling salesman problem (OLTSP) and its extension, the online dial-a-ride problem (OLDARP). A server starting at a designated origin in a metric space, is required to serve online requests, and return to the origin such that the completion time is minimized. The SmartStart algorithm, introduced by Ascheuer et al., incorporates a waiting approach into an online schedule-based algorithm and attains the optimal upper bound of 2 for the OLTSP and the OLDARP if ea…

Really not a fan of this watch. I sort of hate it a bit. I knew I wouldn't like it before I bought it. I actually bought it mainly to check on some things and see how #Skmei is progressing in certain areas. However even with my low expectations it is disappointing.

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on #KEXP's #MorningShow
The Replacements:
🎵 Left of the Dial
#TheReplacements
https://fdrlabel.bandcamp.com/album/left-of-the-dial-a-pop-tribute-to-the-replacements-2001
https://open.spotify.com/track/7nL0nuLhX6ItOoEq9RpkOO

The yellow strap works, right?
#WristCheck

Garden at Pierrepont Holme Hall, February 2025
#photography #heritagephotography #historichouses #blackandwhite

I kept the gray colour it came with but switched to a softer and less plasticy looking leather strap.
It works but may get grubby, really fast.
#WristCheck

#WristCheck for an insanely good value watch. The brand is Militado and modelled on US field watches. It cost me $47.53🇺🇸 with all tax and delivery costs included. 38mm, with double domed, sapphire crystal ( AR coating), steel sand blasted case, screw down crown providing 200m water resistance and a Seiko VH31 movement with higher than average quartz accuracy plus 4 ticks per second hand …