Yours is definitely the spud gun I remember, and I suspect that's true for most folks of a particular age from the UK: a small die cast red gun and a monster potato to feed it ammunition.
If we're talking home made back garden arsenal, the go-to for my generation was the peg gun: https://www.instructables.com/A-Great-Peg-Gun/, which is, in retrospect, absolutely irresponsibly lethal with the right tension elastic bands.
A well-known UK startup, renting an old building just outside of London, is (or was, as of a few years ago) paying square footage cost for an entire floor that doesn't exist. The previous occupants - a government department - had the floor removed to make for higher, grander internal ceiling heights.
I wonder how many niches still use slide rules today. I'm currently training for my private pilot license, and many of the calculations for flight planning are still done using what is essentially a circular slide rule [1]. Having grown up in an entirely digital era it took me a good long while to get used to it, but there's a level of elegance baked into this multi-purpose device that it's hard not to like it.
You're allowed to use an electronic E6B for the written test but IRL I think one's better off with the analog computer because it's harder to make a mistake with it like punching in a wrong number, and also because there's no battery to die.
Makes me smile too. Around 2008 while I was at Yahoo! I built a standalone library called Dhaka (literally stuck a pin in a map and used the place name as the project name) that did almost exactly this. It was used on a few of the EU sites but I left before I got chance to open source it. The problem I was trying to solve was eliminating a bunch of duplicate JavaScript that was essentially sending/fetching data to/from a remote source and inserting/replacing it into the current page.
Or in a similar vein I remember Github making a mediumly big deal years and years ago about having no-reload moving between pages of the directory tree within a repo with... I think their library was called pjax? And it fetched some partial HTML from the server and updated a container, plus having some pushState/popState to make it work with browser history.
The most interesting part of it to me is that the mainstream has gotten so far out over to react and data payloads that the paradigm of "send some HTML and stick it in a container" is seen as revolutionary. Not to say that a well-designed library for doing this is a bad idea, just that... it's interesting to see how it's talked about.
I made some sites with Pjax. It was crazy fast and didn’t have the issues that React had. Back button works 100% of the time, users always had a working link to share and so on.
When I saw this I immediately had to search the comments for Pjax because the idea was quite similar.
I think the main problem was that heavy backends started to go out of style, especially C# ones that had good Pjax support.
Having written a bunch of books on Flash and PHP back in the early 2000s, my experience is very much aligned with this.
For a relatively young guy the income was welcome, and after the first book did well I got a pretty decent advance for the subsequent books. They all sold enough to pay back that advance and so I got quarterly royalties on top too, but given the amount of toil it required - and quick turnaround times with new Flash releases, meaning many late nights - I would have been better compensated doing pretty much anything else.
That said, money isn't the only, or even necessarily the most important or fulfilling, reward on offer. I got the writing gig because I was spending a lot of my free time on various Flash-related forums answering questions and helping people with their projects. I did that for the sheer joy of helping others along in their learning journey, and saw writing books as a massive extension of that.
It very much mirrors my experience of the public school system in the UK: teachers are chronically overworked and underpaid, but do it anyway because it's something of a calling. In fact, that probably applies to a bunch of other public sector roles too, not least the NHS primary care roles.
At the risk of being ridiculed, when I was a lad growing up in the UK I saw something that I later learned might be described as ball lightning.
It was late winter in the South West with overcast skies and melting snow on the ground, and looking out of the window of my bedroom across the street and into the opposite neighbour's front garden - which had been dug over to prepare the ground for vegetable planting in the spring - I saw a sphere of pinkish glowing light falling slowly to the ground. At first I thought it was a balloon, but looking at it more intently it seemed perfectly spherical and as it got close to the ground it hovered there for a good 5 or so seconds, illuminating the ground below. Then it completely vanished without a sound - no bang, no fire, just... gone. I ran out of the house and over to the neighbour's garden to see if I could find any remnants of whatever it was but there was nothing to be found except for what I noted at the time was a weird sharp smell and a small dish-shaped depression in the rough ground below where it vanished.
I obviously can't say for sure that it was ball lightning, and I hadn't heard anything about such phenomena at that point so didn't describe it as such at the time, but every now and again when the topic comes up I can't help but see similarities between what I've seen and some of the reports. At the very least, it's a good excuse to retell this bizarre story from my childhood.
To be fair, on-foot gameplay (née "space legs") has been on the promised roadmap since the original kickstarter campaign, and it's a natural extension of the landable planets and SRV gameplay added in Horizons.
Frontier definitely tried to appeal to the typical FPS crowd with the on-foot conflict zones, which was a huge misstep: it was never going to be good enough as just a small part of a much larger game, and a lot of the existing players are much more interested in the space stuff.
If you ignore the shooty bit of the on-foot gameplay, though, it really does (or at least has the potential to) add to the core gameplay. Being able to walk around station hangers and concourses, prison ships, planetary installations and the planet surface itself is definitely increasing my enjoyment of the game.
The general hope is that they're leaving a bunch of the content releases - hints of new ships, SRVs and new thargoid-related gameplay - until the console releases for Odyssey in the autumn so that a large chunk of the playerbase isn't left behind. Sadly that means that us PC players are currently beta testing Odyssey, but after the recent patches it's just about performant and stable enough to enjoy.
I actually think this release is different. Killing off VR is a big one; while it was used by a small percentage of the player base, they were the ones who were really into the game and kept the community alive.
And more than most games, Elite basically requires you to use third-party tools built by the community to do the more complex stuff like long-distance navigation or trading. Many are already long in the tooth, and Odyssey is rapidly pushing away the most dedicated part of the community.
I'm a regular Elite VR player, and a more careful wording of the state of VR support would be that there is no VR support for the core feature added by the latest expansion: on-foot gameplay. The existing VR support (in the ship and in the SRV) remains and is currently one of the focus areas for fixes, but when you disembark your ship or SRV you're presented with a floating virtual screen.
There's a vocal minority of the Elite playerbase that want on-foot VR over pretty much every other feature request, but I think they're underestimating how much effort first class on-foot VR support would be to implement and how few of the already small VR playerbase would find fast-paced FPS combat comfortable to play in VR.
I can highly recommend the book - Why We Sleep - mentioned at the top of the video. It goes into quite some depth on the reasons for and mechanics of sleep in a way I found approachable for someone with only a layman's understanding of chemistry:
Stripe give you a `funding` property on a card source [0], which at least in the UK distinguishes between debit, credit and prepaid cards somewhat reliably.
If we're talking home made back garden arsenal, the go-to for my generation was the peg gun: https://www.instructables.com/A-Great-Peg-Gun/, which is, in retrospect, absolutely irresponsibly lethal with the right tension elastic bands.