Over a decade ago, I worked in a large bookstore. It was a mostly fun job, largely because of the people who worked there.

I’ve worked in several bookstores over the years, and one thing I’ve noticed – and one thing that a lot of people often overlook, or try to – is that, for whatever reason or reasons, LGBTQ folks tend to make up a disproportionately large majority of the staff. Possibly not true for Christian bookstores, I admit, and I’m not sure about those few dying second-hand stores, but chain bookstores aren’t exactly institutions of rigid heterosexuality, if you get what I’m saying. And the people who work there are, by and large, anything but judgmental. I mean, I spent something like three years working with a woman who was a beaver. That was just her thing. She insisted she wasn’t a furry – “Furries are people who have an animal form,” she used to say, “I’m an animal with a human form. See the difference?” – and everybody just shrugged and completely failed to care, because she was a nice person and good at her job.

Anyway, now that the stage has been set, as it were, an inspirational little story from my retail adventures in the 1990s.
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In the summer of 2008, I – and others, it appears – made a FOIA request to the Department of State for a couple of pages from “Diplopedia”, the department’s internal wiki.

At the same time, I made a request for pages on the same handful of topics to the ODNI, regarding the better-known “Intellipedia” system of wikis.

The plan was to do a compare-and-contrast thing, see what the DOS wiki had to say on certain subjects compared to the wikis of the intelligence community – and Wikipedia.

Fast forward two requests, several phone calls, one administrative appeal, and more than four years, and…
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It’s kind of sad, if you stop and think about it, how much history is getting destroyed these days. I’m not talking about the fad of “upcycling”, wherein all too often perfectly serviceable antiques, or at least things that are old, get – if we’re honest – ruined and turned into… uninspired objets d’art, and then listed for sale on Etsy in the hopes that there really is a sucker born every minute. (I kid. But only slightly.)

No, what really depresses me is how much history is being destroyed, these days, because of inflated precious-metal prices. Grandma’s gold wedding ring? Melt it down! Uncle Bobby’s Air Force wings, in sterling silver? Melt ‘em down! Those old salt cellars sitting in the cabinet? Melt ‘em down!

Artistic value? Historical value? Sentimental value? All subservient to the intrinsic value. Nobody cares about anything except the weight, anymore. Which is a bad thing, because as precious-metal prices have increased several-fold in the last decade or so, the market value of most old jewelry, silverware, and so on has not increased accordingly, so that a really huge number of artifacts from the last two-hundred years are worth, in many instances, the same or even less to collectors than to precious-metal refiners, which is not a terribly enviable situation, if you care about history.
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Macaroni and Cheese. The name, in much of the world, conjures up a familiar image of elbow macaroni in a yellow, cheddar-y sauce. According to Wikipedia, the English-speaking world’s love of the gooey stuff owes much to President Jefferson, who encountered the dish in France in the late 1700s, and became enamored of it.

The Wikipedia article points out a recipe for macaroni and cheese in an influential 1824 cookbook, and it’s quite a simple one, at that: Macaroni, cheese, and butter.

Guess what? That’s not the original recipe for mac and cheese, as we know it. It’s almost certainly not the recipe that Jefferson enjoyed at the White House.
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This is half a quick note for my own reference, half a note for anyone else who might happen across one of these, and half a note to let you know, dear reader, that I’m not dead…

The NSN66 (and, I suspect, very similar NSN66A) is a very old-school six-digit seven-segment LED display manufactured by National Semiconductor back in the early 1970s. I’m not sure what they originally found use in, probably radios. Obsolete for several decades, the global electronics marketplace is such that you can find them new, today, without a whole lot of difficulty, and without paying too much money.

There are several places online that sell ‘em, still, and with a bit of searching you can even find the datasheet, which will tell you it was introduced around 1973, is a 1/8th-inch common-cathode red GaAsP display, that each segment is 3.0V, and draws an average 5ma, with the max rating per segment being 60ma, a pulse width of 10ms, and a viewing angle of +/-60 degrees off-axis.

What nobody seems to tell you is the pin assignments.

Well, if you were looking for that, here you go…

The display module has a row of seventeen holes on 0.1″ centers. Holes 0, 10, and 16 are unconnected.

With the somewhat standard notation that the top is segment A, the top-right is segment B, the lower-right is segment C, the bottom is segment D, the lower-left is segment E, the top-left is segment F, and the centre is segment G, the pinout, viewed from the front, is:

NC | C | 1 | DOT | 2 | A | 3 | E | 4 | D | NC | G | 5 | B | 6 | F | NC

(As the datasheet points out, on the NSN66, there’s only a dot on the fourth digit on the NSN66. I’m not sure if the NSN66A has a dot on every digit or not.)

These are very neat, very small, extremely retro displays well-suited for all sorts of improbable projects. The weird single dot limits its functionality in many regards, but, well, there’s probably a reason they’re plentiful… and cheap…