A quick brain-dump 1) this is useful for anyone buying or selling computers & peripherals: https://nj.gov/treasury/taxation/businesses/salestax/salestaxholiday2022.sht... Sales Tax Holiday for Certain Retail Sales August 27, 2022 - September 5, 2022 P.L. 2022, c.21, establishes a Sales Tax Holiday for certain retail sales of computers, school supplies, and sport or recreational equipment when sold to an individual purchaser for non-business use. The Sales Tax Holiday takes place between August 27 through September 5 of 2022. Sellers should not charge Sales Tax on eligible items when purchased during the Sales Tax Holiday. 2) Raspberry Pi Zero and such are still unavailable but the Raspberry Pi Pico is available once again from Microcenter. I just ordered Raspberry Pis and Micro:Bit accessories from https://chicagodist.com/ 10% discount code: FIRSTORDER My order arrived in about a week. Looks fine so far. 3) panix is my main ISP. It started as Big Electric Cat, which is mentioned here: http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/ which mentions:

In 2010, after working a few years on the project, I released a documentary on text adventure games and the people who write them, called GET LAMP. Similar to BBS in the way it covers its technical subject from a storied perspective, GET LAMP brings you in contact with everyone from the minds of Infocom to modern Interactive Fiction authors. Please visit GETLAMP.COM to learn more and order that documentary.

4) Yet another reason to <3 vintage tech: it's easy to repair, unlike recent devices, thus the recent "right to repair": https://techxplore.com/news/2022-08-liberate-tractors-movement-regaining-dev... The software that runs John Deere tractors was successfully "jailbroken" at this year's DEF CON hacker convention, enabling farmers to repair or retune their equipment without engaging with the company that sold them their vehicles. -- Jeff Jonas I'm happy that the telephone was invented by Alexander Graham Bell instead of Alexander Siren or Alex Klaxon. The sound of the phone ringing would've been deafening.