There was also a period where you needed 3.5 AND 5.25 drives to use off the shelf software.

It was a literal 100-level course project in my CS programme in 2000 or so.

You didn’t even do it with a programmed CPU, you used 74xx logic gates and counters wired on a breadboard

Microsoft was probably the only firm with the resources to keep a Chromium fork current while uneinding Google’s enshittifications. But their incentives are too similar for that.

I always liked the premise where the countries that do the necrocacy stuff-- promoting dead generals and leaders to ever higher ranks and titles, still treating them as head of state…

It’s because they’re not dead. Kim Il-Sung is just biding his time in a coffin, gradually getting shoulder cramps as more and more brass is fitted to his uniform.

If only it were.

I took a coach for my last holiday. It was seven hours and $85 where a flight would have been 30 minutes and $60. I was willing to begrudge it, since this has hardly been a banner year for aviation safety in the US.

The Wifi didn’t work, sort of a dealbreaker when you’re traveling through remotest desert with no signal.

The bathroom door lock didn’t work reliably, so it was rattling all the way. Somehow I got assigned a seat next to it on both legs. At least it didn’t smell much.

They left the emergency roof exit/vent popped, a dubious choice on a trip to Las Vegas with temperatures around 40C.

The return bus broke down 15km from the destination so we had to wait sweating for a replacement.

OTOH, no TSA hassle. I still wish Amtrak was an option.

Giant isopods. Thry’re the big, ocean dwelling version of the little segmented crustaceans you find under rotten wood who ball up for defence.

Floats for currency in a payments platform.

The system will happily take a transaction for $121.765, and every so often there’s a dispute because one report ran it through round() and another through floor().

He’s so cute! He can monitor me any day!

I was initially surprised thst the stablecoin boom didn’t seem to involve more commodity or currency-basket pegged tokens.

But they aren’t in it for that, it’s a shiny digital way to go back to pre-1860s protocols where a paper dollar was made up by some dubious piggie and you had to know that it was really worth about 35 cents in government silver coin based on how hard it was to exchange, and insiders could make out like bandits via arbitrage and printing junk that they could pump and dump.

Aren’t most miners running ASICs that are pretty much only useful for mining specific coins? I was hoping we were past the last “people are buying off-the-shelves GPUs for crypto” bubble.

Make something unmarketsble.

My big hobby project was software for 30-year-old computers, not a big market.

Carry slot limits annoy me more.

Weight makes sense from a story perspective. Even a top-spec fighter can’t carry four zweihanders and 500 food rations.

But even the 1-STR mage who might have a legitimate carry weight limit of 2kg, should not be told “you can only carry 3 different types of 10-gram herb.” Especially if he’s allowed to carry 200 units of any one of the types. Give me anything resembling a viable story-based reason for that.

But selling a solution to that is a very popular monetization paradigm for MMOs, so it stays.

Invite your friends for “bonus” resources, or even worse, to unlock progression.

If you want to incentivize me to growthhack your product, let’s talk dollars, not Mystic Sunshine Gems.

On a high level, you can get a cleaner like Deoxit D5 in a spray bottle. Most pots have a slit in them so you can spray into them, then turn the pot through its range a bunch of times. It’s worth a try as a start. Obviously do it while the unit is unplugged.

If you want to consider a more aggressive rebuild, like a capacitor replacement, maybe find a cheap old amplifier at the thrift shop to use as practice for desoldering/resoldering.

You might be able to connect the BT to one input on the amp, like the tape input, and the CD to another.

The Orville has a great take on it too.

There’s an episode where they bring in someone from a scarcity-era planet and she’s freaking out about how they have replicators and future medical tech, and the crew explains to her that if the technology were airdropped on her world, thry wouldn’t be socially ready for it and it would just become a means of further stratification.

I think this instance does something weird with images. It was a ~4MB JPEG on the device, but when I downloaded it again, I got a webp listed at ~750kb, but it absolutely crawls to download. I just uploaded a 2000x1500 JPEG (~230k on disc) to Imgur to fix the performance.

Yep. Been riffing on the PCB for a few years, so now I have seperate units for home and work wuth different cases.

Arataki Itto.

Yeah, the personality would be abrasive but he was basically the first hunk-coded character in the game.

This is actually my second one; a friend purloined my first one upon discovering the ergonomic charms of oni-boobs.

It can’t be a real “as seen on TV” product because they didn’t use the phrase “in the palm of your hand”.

One day they’ll need to sell a larger product and be forced to hire actors with freakishly gigantic hands.

Some mainboards have very few PCI-e slots.

I ended up with a similar adapter because the onboard SATA on my board was flaky with optical drives and I rip CDs.