Make your own with padding cement. Put the stack of bills in a vice and coat one edge a few times with the cement. I did this for a nephew as a unique gift. Some people being paid with these are suspicious.
Nowhere near as suspicious as the tire shop in east LA late at night on Sunday when I needed a flat patched, and I only had credit cards on me - and a uncut roll of $2s in the trunk.
I pulled that out to cut some off and pay and they all started screaming about feds and told me to get the hell out of there, no need to pay.
As a US person who has, You need to experience euro train travel. The whole experience, from booking using an app to waiting for a train. You’ll find the apps are good, the schedule information accurate and up to date. The apps don’t do stupid things mostly. When you arrive at the station, you’ll find it generally clean and well maintained. Signage is clear and tied into the train information system. Arrival times accurate. You can get a nice sandwich if the shop is open. Intercity Trains are modern and fast. Lots of power ports to plug in your phone. Nice seats. Also great electronic signage in the train. You might even have good wifi. You would not be afraid to use a bathroom in a station or on a train. Best part is that you CAN rely on the trains. Nothing like Amtrak where if it’s on time it’s remarkable.
After my daughter went through two laptops in high school (1st: "I closed a pen in it and broke the hinge" 2nd: "Dad! Someone ELSE knocked it off my desk") I found an ex-state-police toughbook, it even had a carrying handle. Plasma monochrome screen. Slow. But it ran all of the applications necessary for school.
Turns out it had a cool factor all it's own, and she really liked that laptop. She figured out she could neglect and abuse it. I even left the "property of " stickers from the state police on the thing, which gave it extra... something. It was still working when she gave it back to me before she went to college. I think I sold it for $100.
My son's first computer, back when he was 5 years old, was an old Panasonic CF-18 Toughbook that I bought from eBay for that purpose. The smaller keyboard was perfect for his little hands, and the computer survived countless drops, spills, and other incidents.
That was more than 10 years ago. He still has the laptop, the battery is long dead but it runs fine on AC power. Most of the time, it's used as a doorstop.
How could a monochrome screen work for a student? They typically have to look at assignments which often include color-coded graphs, data legends, etc.
Turns out that this isn’t the critical ability required to do well in school. I take your point, I’m sure the monochrome screen would be a challenge sometimes, but literally never the difference between success and failure at the high school level.
Relying excessively on colour is an accessibility no-go, and it also makes life harder for roughly 10% of colour blind people. Just dont be that stupid teacher and find better methods.
If anything is based solely in color for interpretation, it is not accessible. And has no place in a classroom. In Europe 10% of males have problems with colors. I figure there must be similar in the US.
I guess it depends on the school district. My kids were doing video and photo editing, using and creating spread sheets, using other software and accessing science web sites that I'm sure would be nearly impossible or extremely difficult to run on a monochrome screen.
Colour blind doesn't mean someone sees in black and white. It means they have difficulty differentiating between two colours. Often red / green, but not always.
That just proves one struggles with a lot of not well thought out assignments, not with all of them. That still means a badly designed book.
I grew up, as most of my friends, using a lot of xeroed exercise books and exercises notebooks. Monochrome copies, of course.
Never saw anyone having issues with that, weather 7 or 19 years old. If a kid struggles with monochrome computer screen, it means his learning materials are designed worse than post-soviet era 25 year old textbook.
BTW. I am eagerly waiting for better availability of eink monitors.
Red green does not mean that you ONLY have problem with those 2 colors. Means you will have problems with ANY color which is composed of some of the 2. Also there are Red/Blue Green/Blue... basically any combination. So relying in only colors is just bad design.
also, they're not the same colour to me in bright sunlight - one is light murky brown and the other is dark murky brown. under fluorescent lighting they are both the same shade of murky brown.
Sure it will always be a boat anchor compared to a macbook air or a small chromebook but given his daughter laptop had a handle weight is less a factor if it removes the point of a protective sleeve + a backpack and you compare it with an entry level 15.6" laptop.
Seems like they could use something like GammaPix from https://www.imageinsightinc.com/ with their existing drone's CCD camera to estimate radiation levels.
I think I recall Alice and Bob also being mentioned along side Louis Reasoner in SICP problem sets in ‘81 or ‘82…
(Edit) well, according to Wikipedia, the cast of characters for SICP doesn’t include Alice and Bob. In those years the book didn’t exist yet.
Deleo's Autobody was down there near the Good News Garage, that guy was ALSO a character, and Mr. Deleo had a very distinctive voice. I was hoping that one day they'd have him on to answer autobody questions.
Had my '72 Plymouth Fury ("The Boat") fixed at the GNG once or twice. And post-graduation '85 Toyota fixed at Deleo's after a fender bender on the SE expressway.
Our expectations have also changed over the years. Despite the perception of a downward spiral in quality, cars have, in general, become much better. Remember when fuel injection was exotic (well, you probably don't). My first car, a 1971 Plymouth fury, required a special little ritual just to get it started, involving pumping the accelerator a precise number of times, then turning the key. When I started driving it in only it's 7th year of life, nothing smaller than a softball could be put in the trunk, because the thing was seemingly designed to soak up road salt and rot the rear quarter panels, and there were holes that large on both sides of the body work. Have to say that after that, driving a Toyota for the first time in 1985 was... a revelation. Today, cars last longer, have more features. Most econoboxes will make it past 100K miles no problem.
But when today's cars break, there's generally no high school shop class knowledge to fall back on to fix the every-day small things, and anything major requires information, tools, and parts that are beyond most consumers. Remember that the people that work for the car repair places probably didn't have vocational courses in high school, either.
Modern society's items have been value engineered, and it seems like the operating tolerances are narrower as well. Unless there's aggressive maintenance, today's stuff just breaks vs. limping along at some reduced performance level. And some items that previously were built to allow for maintenance are built for wholesale replacement now instead.
It's rare for today's consumers to fix anything, let alone their electronics, but it used to be common for people to try to repair their own TVs by testing and swapping tubes until the 1980s. Of course, before digital TV and cable EVERYONE fiddled with their "sets" to get a good picture. "Snow" and "Rabbit Ears" are not terms associated with TV watching today. I couldn't buy a 40" color TV that spied on my viewing habits in the 90's for the equivalent of today's $299 either.
Shop wisely for your kitchen appliances (mixers, toaster, blenders), high-end cutlery, and tools at thrift shops in neighborhoods transitioning from older demographics. Learn how to sharpen knives and maintain stuff.
Use all your senses: learn what your major appliances and vehicles sound like when they're operating correctly, and listen to them periodically. Extra squeaks or rumbles when the furnace runs? Maybe a new blower motor is in your future. Notice the refrigerator cycling more frequently? You ARE vacuuming the cooling coils periodically, right? Dishwasher door seem easier to operate? Bet one of your balancing springs has failed.
Troubleshooting and maintenance is a life skill.
We were fortunate to be able to buy our first "new" house with new everything 8 years ago. Having all-new stuff was great for a while. The gas water heater lasted 5 years. A nephew plumber replaced it for the cost of the new unit (~1K) vs quoted $5K job by plumbing outfit. Took him 4 hours. The expansion tank started to fail two years later; $69 plus a few minutes of labor. The forced-air ducting between 1st and 2nd floor is undersized, so the single-glower furnace is inadequate to keep the house at a consistent temperature. Finally put in a heat pump this year to partially remedy that situation. Original wall timers for various fans failed about every 2-3 years. Choice is replacing the $20 wall timer with now $25 wall timer, or fixing the original electronics ($1 with a replacement part from Digikey). Original washer, a front loader that came with the new home, failed 1 month (yes, 1 month) out of warranty, with a bad trunion. To fix this required a literal complete tear-down and rebuild with the new tub. GE would do nothing other than send free parts. Our trusted appliance guy said he wouldn't do it, because it took too long (8 hours) and was uneconomic. I did it in about seven, but replaced the washer a few years later, since front loaders just don't get clothes as clean.
