Standard time, daylight saving time — can we just pick one and stick with it instead of switching twice a year?
This popped up on Facebook Marketplace in my area (Tampa Bay) a couple of hours ago, and if you’re into retro computers, this might be what you’re looking for: a TRS-80 Model III computer, and it still works!
Here’s what the seller, who’s based in Spring Hill, wrote:
Trs-80 model III for sale. Powers on and looks pretty great for it’s age! Asking $150 obo. Please message me with any questions.
For more about this classic computer, you might want to check out the following:
- Old Computer Museum: TRS-80 Model III
- Ira Goldklang’s TRS-80 Revived Site: TRS-80 Computers: TRS-80 Model III
- Matthew Reed’s TRS-80.org: The TRS-80 Model III
- Will Ludwigsen: My Computer History: TRS-80 Model III
- knut.one: TRS-80 Model III
Categories
Saturday picdump for March 8, 2025
Welcome to another Global Nerdy Saturday “picdump!” It’s the weekly article where I post the technology- and work-related memes, pictures, and cartoons floating around the internet that I found interesting or relevant this week. Share and enjoy!
The reason why I stopped using Duo:
Here’s what’s happening in the thriving tech scene in Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for the week of Monday, March 10 through Sunday, March 16, 2025!
This list includes both in-person and online events. Note that each item in the list includes:
✅ When the event will take place
✅ What the event is
✅ Where the event will take place
✅ Who is holding the event
Packfiles’ SaaS, Warp, makes it easy for organizations to adopt GitHub. If your company is thinking about migrating from Azure DevOps, Bitbucket Server, or Gitlab, Packfiles can help.
Find out more at Packfiles’ site: packfiles.io!
This week’s events
- Monday, March 10
- Tuesday, March 11
- Wednesday, March 12
- Thursday, March 13
- Friday, March 14
- Saturday, March 15
- Sunday, March 16
Monday, March 10
Monday at 6:00 p.m. at Mad Hatters Ethnobotanical Tea Bar: It’s the first meeting of the Tampa Artificial Intelligence Applications Meetup Group / Saint Petersburg Artificial Intelligence Meetup Group!
Find out more and register here.
Tuesday, March 11
Tuesday morning at 10, online: Computer Coach will host the webinar, “Career Changing Without Resetting Your Journey,” and learn actionable steps to transition successfully. Recognize your current skills and seize new opportunities without starting from scratch. Register now and take the next step in your career!
Find out more and register here.
Tuesday from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.: Career Source Hillsborough Pinellas’ Spring 2025 Job Fair will take place at EpiCenter at St. Petersburg College in Clearwater!
✨ Why Attend?
✅ Meet employers from various industries
✅ Explore exciting career opportunities
✅ Bring your resume and be ready to network
This event is free and open to all job seekers! Don’t miss this chance to take the next step in your career.
Find out more and register here.
Tuesday evening at 6 p.m. at Vaco (Tampa): Tampa Bay Product Group will feature Jason Vogel, who’ll share how Product Managers can leverage the power of Feature Flags to manage the complexity and risk inherent in deploying critical business systems.
Find out more and register here.
Wednesday, March 12
Wednesday at 5:30 p.m. at Brick House Tavern + Tap, Tampa: Are you passionate about innovation, technology, and entrepreneurship? Looking for a unique opportunity to gain hands-on experience and expand your professional network? Join this event for an exclusive Information Session & Networking Event to learn how you can volunteer at the Synapse Innovation Summit—Florida’s premier event for innovators, entrepreneurs, and industry leaders.
Yes, this is a way for you to attend Synapse Summit for free!
Find out more and register here.
Wednesday at 5:30, online: NextGen Tech and AI of St Pete are holding an online session: an exclusive Tech Talk event where they’ll dive into the latest innovations in the field of Artificial Intelligence!
Find out more and register here.
Wednesday at 6:00 p.m. at the Entrepreneur Collaborative Center, Tampa: Data Analytics and AI Tampa Bay will feature a data case study: Predicting Outcomes of Single-Family Residential Home Same-Year Resales. This project aimed to predict whether single-family residential homes in Florida, resold within the same year, would result in a profit or a loss. Using data from the Florida Department of Revenue (FDOR) Assessment Rolls from 2009 to 2020, they built binary classification models to distinguish between profitable and unprofitable resales. They developed three machine learning models: Logistic Regression, Decision Tree, and Random Forest, chosen for their ability to measure the importance of input variables. Feature importance functions from the Scikit-Learn module were applied to identify the most significant factors affecting resale outcomes.
Find out more and register here.
Thursday, March 13
Thursday at 6:00 p.m. at Embarc Collective, Tampa: Tampa Bay Java Group presents Why Software Testing Is a Waste of Time + Reputation Formula. Testing software takes up a lot of time in the software development process, often the same time if not more than the time required for the development itself. Just like development, testing also requires continued maintenance efforts. This (rightfully so) makes a lot of people in different roles, be it managers, developers or even testers question whether or not that time effort is really justified. With more and more companies deploying every 10 minutes or even less start to wonder: why invest time in testing when you can rollback issues in a matter of seconds, in some cases even automatically?
Learn more about common pitfalls, time wasters, and what you can do to make your testing strategy more efficient in this talk!
Find out more and register here.
Thursday at 6:00 p.m. at Casa Santo Stefano, Tampa: Join Tampa Bay Women in Agile for an evening of networking at Casa Santo Stefano in Ybor City! Don’t miss this opportunity to network with like-minded professionals, gain valuable insights, and empower yourself to excel in your career. Whether you are a seasoned Agile practitioner, looking to advance in your career, or learning about agile, this community is filled with knowledgeable and open minded professionals. Let’s come together to support and uplift each other on our professional journeys!
Come and connect with your Tampa Bay Agile community. All are welcome who support Women in Agile!
Find out more and register here.
Thursday at 6:00 p.m. at Magnanimous Brewing, Tampa: Tampa Power Platform and Tampa M365 will have their regular get-together where you can enjoy beers, socialize, and network with awesome local techies. Whether you’re new to Microsoft 365 or an experienced M365 IT Pro / Developer, this event is a great opportunity to meet new faces and get to know your local counterparts.
Find out more and register here.
Thursday at 7:00 p.m. at Neon Temple: Learn “snake charming” — Furio and his flowing, lucious hair will give you all you need to not just learn procedural Python, but create art with it.
Friday, March 14
Saturday, March 15
Sunday, March 16
About this list
How do I put this list together?
It’s largely automated. I have a collection of Python scripts in a Jupyter Notebook that scrapes Meetup and Eventbrite for events in categories that I consider to be “tech,” “entrepreneur,” and “nerd.” The result is a checklist that I review. I make judgment calls and uncheck any items that I don’t think fit on this list.
In addition to events that my scripts find, I also manually add events when their organizers contact me with their details.
What goes into this list?
I prefer to cast a wide net, so the list includes events that would be of interest to techies, nerds, and entrepreneurs. It includes (but isn’t limited to) events that fall under any of these categories:
- Programming, DevOps, systems administration, and testing
- Tech project management / agile processes
- Video, board, and role-playing games
- Book, philosophy, and discussion clubs
- Tech, business, and entrepreneur networking events
- Toastmasters and other events related to improving your presentation and public speaking skills, because nerds really need to up their presentation game
- Sci-fi, fantasy, and other genre fandoms
- Self-improvement, especially of the sort that appeals to techies
- Anything I deem geeky
Categories
Saturday picdump for March 1, 2025
Welcome to another Global Nerdy Saturday “picdump!” It’s the weekly article where I post the technology- and work-related memes, pictures, and cartoons floating around the internet that I found interesting or relevant this week. Share and enjoy!
According to cybersecurity news site The Record (they’re pretty good; you should bookmark them), newly-appointed U.S. Defense Secretary (and former FOX News host, philanderer, and raging alcoholic with a track record that “falls short of military standards”) ordered U.S. Cyber Command to stand down from all planning against Russia last week.
This is the same Russia that brought us cybersecurity threats such as:
- APT28, better known as Fancy Bear, who were behind the 2016 Democratic National Committee attack during that year’s elections (when Trump won), the 2020 U.S. election attacks, and attacks against allied nations.
- APT29, better known as Cozy Bear, who are more intelligence-gathering focused and are blamed for the 2014 State Department attack, the 2020 Solar Winds supply chain attack, and 2021 attacks on COVID vaccine development.
Here’s what CISA — the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — has to say about Russia. This is from their Russia Cyber Threat Overview and Advisories page, which was on their website at the time of writing, but it might not be for much longer:
Friends in the cybersecurity industry — prepare a lot of headaches in the near future.
Once upon a time, “Skype” was synonymous with “audio chat” and then “video chat.” But that was a while back, and Zoom, Slack, Discord, and (grudgingly) Teams have taken over.
I hadn’t used Skype in so long that I’d thought the service had already been shot down — but that’s actually happening in May, according to Microsoft’s article, The next chapter: Moving from Skype to Microsoft Teams .
So my first reaction was “Skype is still around?”
My second reaction:
