• 26 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • 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.






  • 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.



  • I’m thinking that even if they want to knock the building down, they could at least part it out. Look at those windows in the wreckage pile! I’m sure there are dozens of small museums around the country who would love to have an authentic White House window to show bored fourth graders on field trips.

    Or, gild them and hand them out as party favours to your donors, as would more befit the architect.









  • I bought an ATSC 3.0 device and it’s basically useless.

    It was an upgrade from an ATSC1 HDHomeRun box, which is legitimately nifty (park it in a corner, hook up a good antenna, and every phone or PC on the network can stream broadcast TV), but the ATSC3 experience is a non-value-add.

    There are ATSC3 channels here-- this was a test market, but nothing compelling. It’s mostly re-encodings of the same content for more efficiency. Nobody’s even saying “watch $special_event in 4K on the ATSC3 channel!”. Software support is flaky (VLC can handle ATSC1 perfectly, but the only software that handles ATSC3’s AC-4 audio is Windows-based and limited) so it’s a half-solution.


  • Lexmark was originally spun off of IBM’s printer and keyboard division in Lexington, Kentucky. You saw a lot of their printers sold with cheap home computers around the turn of the century; they leaned heavily into the “$39 inkjet printer with $75 cartridges that used all three colours to make black” business model, and were largely squeezed out of the home market by customers who didn’t buy their second printer from them. It feels a bit of a throwback to see the name now, but they retreated to the commercial market.

    The keyboard division was further spun off into a firm called Unicomp, who still builds derivatives of the quality “Model M” keyboards they sold on the old PS/2 machines.

    Most full-range manufacturers make servicable printers, as long as you go high up enough in the product line that they’re selling to businesses that care about duty cycles and maintenence costs, although I think at some point you reach units that are sold as an ongoing service arrangement with on-call staff instead.


  • The sad thing is that there is a legitimate problem with copyright now. It presents no alternative to inefficiently begging to individual authors.

    If you want a mountain of content (say, to launch a print-on-demand kiosk with 5M titles, or a streaming service offering every movie released since 1885), there’s no bulk option.

    If you want to offer something the original author doesn’t want to sell anymore (say, a software archive specializing in old versions), the author has a veto and no reason not to act in bad faith.

    If you want to adapt or distribute old content, the rights may be difficult or impossible to trace, leaving you waiting for the lawsuit.

    We need a mandatory-license framework to solve those problems. But the only thing that has come close to addressing the problem was the Ocean Boiling Bullshit Generators pulling the classic techbro “ask for forgiveness instead of permission” play.



  • HakFoo@lemmy.sdf.orgto196Colourules
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    27 days ago

    I recall in the CRT era, yellow-on-blue was considered the most comfortable.

    I can recall always typing “COLOR 15, 1, 1:WIDTH 40” to switch from light-grey-on-black to white-on-blue when I went to program my 386, much easier to read.

    Not sure how those studies map to the different properties of LCD screens.