My recommendation would be to find a local ham group and see if anyone will let you use their equipment. In my experience, hams are very often excited to do this, they have a new buddy to play radio with. Many radio clubs have club equipment for members to use and often gather and set it up during events, especially ARRL’s Field Day. There’s nothing like getting hands on with working equipment set up by an experienced user to see what you really like.

Licensed hams can supervise non-licensed users, so you can get on the air before you have a license if you have a buddy with a callsign willing to let you at the controls.

Especially since OP asked about having a “radio buddy,” I think this is the way to go about that.

1: I bet sometimes you do. If you’ve been driving on US-1-15-501, and 1 splits from 15-501, you may ask which highway to keep following. I know of several junctions like that where “go straight” is an ambiguous instruction, especially if one or more lanes just become an “exit.”

2: In many cases I doubt it’s about you. It’s a layered problem.

First of all, you have the United States Highway “system.” 50 state DOTs each doing things their own way with their own goofy ideas and quirks, some roads designed in the 1740s designed by British or Dutch farmers for pedestrians and horses, some roads designed by wildlife that used to walk through the forest that used to be where this town is now and the people put the roads where the tracks were when they put a village in the forest, some roads that are the way they are because they used to follow a railroad that used to be here, some roads designed by people in the 1950s who were going to revolutionize travel for the atomic age, so your nuclear powered car could whisk you down the highway at 190 miles per hour. And every single piece of this for over 3 centuries now has been done as half-assed as possible, each new layer connecting to all the previous layers as an afterthought.

Describe an entire continent of the above fuckeduppery in software please. Oh, and while you’re at it, there’s only 300 million people in the United States, please implement this for Europe, Australia and Southeast Asia while you’re at it in the same software.

And remember, you’re designing this software for EVERYONE. You’re designing a system to be used by my uncle who has a hatred of Sheetz that borders on religious fervor because you order food in there with touch screen menus. You’re designing a system for the idiot who drove into a pond because the GPS told him to “turn left immediately.” You’re designing a system for the professional driver who knows that I-295 is an auxiliary interstate that diverges from I-95 that will eventually rejoin I-95. And you’re designing a system for people who mostly know their home town and could get most of the way there but they haven’t been out to the warehouse district a lot so you’ll have to give them directions from the highway to the UPS distribution center.

Everybody from the iOS native zoomer to my 1960’s uncle uses Google Maps. You can’t design things that make sense to both of these people.

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So some drivers will want some information some of the time. So at the city limits of Daytona Beach, your phone will mysteriously tell you to continue straight on State Route 92 because that’s where it stops being called International Speedway Boulevard. Because the non-sentient algorithm deciding when to issue verbal directions often can’t tell the difference between a name change and an intersection of two roads. Or even when it can, it may still offer that change to prevent confusing drivers later, because “Turn left onto International Speedway Boulevard.” 20 minutes later “Continue following State Route 92.” “Wait! I thought I was on ISB! How’d I get on 92? *looks down at phone for 3 entire minutes trying to get the least optimized software in history to scroll the map in a way that makes sense, running over every single toddler in Volusia county in the meanwhile.”

So occasionally it will err on the side of caution and tell you something you might not need to know.

A bigger problem I have than occasionally hearing “Keep straight on Highway 20” is “Keep straight on US-20, US-94, US-1, US-15, US-501, US-99, US-98, NC-24, NC-27, NC-17, PG-13, PS-5, N-64, I-95, I-85, I-40, Bragg Boulevard for 1.3 miles.”

It puts the instruction at the beginning, and then it talks so long you forgot what it told you to do. It’s how you stack overflow a human.

I’ve seen it do that for decades now, and in at least two cases I see it happen is when a highway enters town and gains a name, like how Florida Route 92 becomes International Speedway Boulevard when you enter Daytona Beach. Or, when another route joins the corridor you’re on, like throughout North Carolina US-1, US-15 and US-501 weave in and out of each other a few times along with a few state routes joining and leaving.

So I think when it hits points like this, it sometimes interprets them as intersections rather than junctions, and its programming requires it to issue a direction for an intersection. YOU might not see it as an intersection but IT does.

Linux for 10 years now.

I have pretty thoroughly stopped caring about movies.

The only movie in the last 15 years I’ve wanted to sit down and just watch. By myself, not as a thing to do with friends or family, not as something to have sound in the house while I do something else, to sit down with a bowl of popcorn and a beer and WATCH, was Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. So we’ll go with that I guess.

I’ll take a slight tangent to this topic and talk about FOSS software I’ve recently had to give up that I really really miss: Autokey. Autokey is a rough equivalent to AutoHotKey on Windows, it can do anything from on the fly text replacement (type teh and it will correct to the, or type *date and it fills in today’s date) right up to firing whole Python scripts. it doesn’t work on Wayland (apparently there are security features that prevent it from working the same way it does on X11?), and I’ve yet to find a replacement for it that does.

Jackdaws

This

I had a Logitech MX Ergo mouse that allegedly had horizontal scrolling. The wheel could tilt left and right which clicked like a button, and the screen would scroll very very slightly to the side. Worst trackball I’ve ever had.

Just before they stopped making PCs, I saw an IBM computer with a mouse that had one of their Thinkpad clits instead of a scroll wheel. So a proper XY input. I think a blackberry ball would work too.

You know what always weirds me out:

The knife is a technology. It was invented by a person. And that person was not the same species as us. The knife has been around longer than Homo Sapiens.

I’ve commented on this before, but it reminds me of the mortise and tenon joint. The oldest intact wooden structure on Earth is held together with mortise and tenon joints. The man who built it never wrote his name down, because writing hadn’t been invented yet. He never rode a horse, because animal husbandry hadn’t been invented yet. He used stone tools, because copper smelting hadn’t been invented yet. In the present day, Festool sells a tool to make mortises called the Domino which they still hold a patent on. We’re still actively developing this technology which has been with us slightly longer than civilization has.

There are some records which are “threaded” backwards, in that you start at the center and work out rather than start at the edge and work in. This is not standard, automatic turntables might not be able to handle this, but the reason they do this is because of the effect above. You can get greater dynamic range near the outside of the disc, and you probably want greater dynamic range near the end of the recording as the music reaches a climax. Consider Ravel’s Bolero, which is one long crescendo.

Asterisk: At 1 atmosphere of pressure. Lots of people forget that part.

Actually I think I’m wrong.

Apparently the phrase dates from a biology paper published in 1957. I think I’ve been Mandela Effected; I have a memory of several voices coming in and saying science phrases, in between “Bill! Bill! Bill! Bill!” but having just rewatched the intro sequence on Youtube this only happens once and the phrase it says is “Intertia is a property of matter.”

Overheats when you hold down the space bar.

The one I came across had something to do with…you remember Intel Optane? How there was a brief window there where they’d sell you a PC with a spinning rust hard disk and like a 16GB special NVMe drive that acted as a kind of cache for the hard disk? I was replacing that with just a normal NVMe drive, and there’s some settings in the BIOS you have to tinker with. And BIOS settings are bullshit. TMP. XMPP. FLP. TLQ. DKR or LXD. Which combination of these settings means “no more optane, just normal bulk storage on the NVMe socket?” There’s nothing that says anything like that.

I apparently didn’t get this quite right and Windows would get a ways through the install process before failing with an 0x2ac4d7f9f2 code or something. Windows’ installer doesn’t give you a functioning desktop, it’s in its own useless environment, so you have to manually type this into your phone to look it up, which returns no results. Like it doesn’t link to a page on Microsoft’s website because of course it doesn’t.

I then tried to install Linux Mint. Boots to the live environment, I get a full desktop. I run the installer, which fails partway through. The error message spells out the issue in plain English, contains a clickable hyperlink to a relevant wiki page which launches in Firefox because we’re in a live environment, and it has a QR code you can scan with your phone to go to the same page on a smart phone. Armed with this knowledge I got the setting right in the BIOS and successfully installed Linux.

But Windows is just so much more user friendly you guys.

Unless it’s Windows giving you some long hexadecimal number. Those never return any results.

Even in my lifetime power tools have come a long way.

I remember the first cordless electric screwdriver I ever saw. You’re better off using a normal screwdriver, the thing had no speed and no torque. I guess it could take the screw out of the battery door on the remote if your wrists hurt.

When I was in high school, long about 2002, my father bought a Black and Decker cordless drill. 12v, they don’t make the batteries for it anymore, might have been ni-cad at the time, and it could pretty much drill a pilot hole into a 2x4 and then run a wood screw into it.

Twenty years later I’ve got an off the rack homeowner grade cordless drill that will pull the lug nuts off of my truck. I used the damn thing to drive a quarter inch lag bolt through plywood and pine without a pilot hole and it wasn’t even working hard.

The one that really impresses me is my cordless router. Takes a 20 volt drill battery and will easily turn any 1/4" router bit I chuck in it. It’s fairly rare that I use a router that isn’t mounted in my router table or that little cordless job.

Freddy’s Rescue Roundup. Published by IBM for PC-DOS in 1984. It’s similar to Lode Runner.

yeah I’ve been on fire three times and it never occurred to me to stop drop and roll.