I built my wife a gaming PC. She’s controller only. It’s basically an xbox. Decided to try ubuntu to see if we could avoid paying for windows.

She’s already 100% Hogwarts Legacy and played a dozen other games.

The only hangup was controller support for Slime Rancher on her 8bitduo. Had to use an xbox controller.

She knows nothing about linux, but she’ll install and play games through Steam no problem.

I personally vote for CEOs publicly embarrassing themselves in more and more degrading ways.

Codeberg apparently

I was excited to learn that homeassistant lets me bypass the atrocious Sonos app for controlling all my speakers from various music sources.

Though at the same time, I’m little disappointed that offTikTok is broken.

WARNING

The docker-down.sh script associated with offtiktok runs a docker prune -f and will delete any unused docker containers you have without warning.

Wow, this is exactly what I was looking for!

I’m curious about this as well. I think all the components are available, but nobody’s clicked them together yet.

This is like a reverse Goldfinger plan. Could have an interesting impact on the gold market if it can be done at scale.

I’m sure most gold mining operations take at least a few years to get permitted and started and then there’s risk that you won’t find as much gold as expected.

Compared to a lump of gold that all you have to do is not lose it and it will appreciate in value all on its own.

At least the Space Race gave us Velcro and Tang.

Laughs in 1200 disc DVD collection

beyond trivial issues

I’d argue that 10-15% of issues are trivial issues and are worth investigating even without a schematic if the alternative is just throwing something away.

I can top that. I got a broken $100 BlueYeti microphone for $10 on eBay. The USB cable they shipped it with was bad.

You don’t have to fix everything, but just doing stuff like replacing connectors and capacitors could probably save 10% of the shit that we throw away, and it’s not that hard to try.

pay to have the unit returned, spend valuable technician time diagnosing and fixing an issue and then pay to ship the repaired unit back.

My point is that in a better world, people could fix this kind of thing themselves. Like offer a discount for their trouble and have them or their mechanic aunt come by and fix it.

Meanwhile, my Wi-Fi router requires a PhD in reverse engineering just to figure out why it won’t connect to the internet.

I do think people in general could benefit from maybe $100 in tools and a healthy dose of Youtube when it comes to this point. My PC of 10 years wouldn’t boot one morning because my SSD died. There wasn’t anything too important on it that I hadn’t backed up, but it was still a bummer. I took it apart, and started poking around. Found a short across a capacitor, so I started cycling capacitors. Sure enough, one was bad. Replaced it. Boots just fine. (Moved everything to a new SSD just in case).

All I needed for this job was a multimeter and a soldering iron (though hot air gun made it slightly easier).

I think the “black box” nature of electronics is mostly illusory due to how we treat our devices. A friend bought a walking treadmill that wouldn’t turn on out of the box. She contacted the company, they told her to trash it and just shipped her a new one.

She gave it to me, I took it apart. One of the headers that connects the power switch to the mainboard was just unplugged. It took literally 10 minutes to “fix” including disassembly and assembly, and all I needed was a screwdriver.

Yet there’s zero expectation of user maintenance. If it doesn’t work, trash it.

Scroll through maker TikTok

This guy might be looking in the wrong places.

Also from this fine media establishment:

• Warning: 73% of garden soil contains hidden drain chemicals affecting families for 18 months
• I tried this 2-ingredient summer mask at 53 and my dark spots faded 70% in 3 weeks (dermatologists explain why)
• Cold plunge warning: this 15-second exposure raises senior blood pressure by 40 mmHg

Also, for a writer named “John,” he seems to really like wearing women’s clothing

And I don’t know where he finds the time to get dressed considering he’s written 18 articles so far today some in just 14 minutes.

many book scanners use a wedge shape and two angled cameras to scan the pages when the book is held open at about a 5 degree angle

Very well executed, though not sure how I feel about the glass plate squishing the pages down like that.

I used to teach AP physics to kids on the weekends. One asked me why Farads were so big. I had to explain that there’s a fixed ratio between Farads, Volts, and Joules. One of them had to be crazy big or crazy small.

See also Coulombs.

Caps are especially scary because they can develop their own charge through static electricity, so large value caps are often shipped with their terminals tied together.

Lucky bastard.