And the fun scientific counterpart of the Boltzmann brain. The idea that in an infinite universe (at least in a couple of the spatial dimensions if not also a time dimension) random fluctuations could combine to form your brain. Including all of your memories, thoughts, hopes and dreams. You think you have had an entire life, but in reality your brain was just formed moments ago. And it may possibly stop existing in a few more moments, this moment being the only one the brain has actually experienced.

When taken to its natural conclusion, the entire Earth of even the solar system or galaxy might have just been created by random chance. The perfect storm of randomness. It may have been created longer ago or just nanoseconds before now. There is no way of telling.

Thermodynamics has been used to counter and strengthen this idea. And with infinity on the table anything goes.

Yes, I lied to my teacher in preschool in the first week of the first year I went there. I was also only just 3 as I had my birthday in the summer and school normally starts in September where I lived at the time.

Then I skipped a grade in elementary school, because my reading and math was very good. So that meant for pretty much my entire education I was the youngest in class. Not very tall to begin with, but definitely the smallest and weakest because of my age. I was made fun of a lot because of that and physed was terrible. One time the physed teacher took pity on me and graded me on the girl scale to not give me a terrible grade, you can imagine how that went over with the rest of the class. But it wasn’t that bad really, I did have a lot of friends and all the making fun of me never went too far.

But suffice to say it wasn’t till uni that I really started to like being in school.

I think it used to be like a dark navy blue. I’ve since gravitated towards RAL 7016. It’s a dark grey that appears blue in some light and almost black in other light.

When I was 3 years old in preschool we had to get in line for the teacher who would write down our name, age, favorite color, etc. on a little badge so they could get to know all the kids. When I was in line the kids in front of me were like my favorite color is yellow, mine is pink and other happy bright colors. My favorite color was a very dark blue, almost black. As I heard the other kids I was like hmmm is my favorite color weird? Am I the weird kid? Is there something wrong with me? So when I got to the teacher I lied and said my favorite color was yellow. She painted a big yellow dot with felt tip pen on my badge which I wore for the next couple of weeks. I felt terrible for lying about it to the teacher, but didn’t want to say anything either.

So yeah that’s when I figured out I have anxiety.

This game is super cool, I love the idea, the concept, the vibe etc. However it is also hard as balls. Be prepared to die often and not really know what to do in order to not die. I’ve started it a couple of times, but even with longer play sessions didn’t get very far.

Well you say that, but near the office park where I used to work there was a gas station that served as the outlet for a local sandwich place. All the sandwiches would get made fresh in the morning and be delivered just in time for lunch. They were awesome, there were lines around the block at lunchtime. They were known throughout the area. The sandwich shop also did deliveries for orders of 50 pieces and up, but the company I worked for only did that a few times a year. Haven’t worked there for over 15 years, but I still remember the taste of those sandwiches.

Yeah I’ve had that one happen. Big team, more than a year of work, thousands of hours, over 1500 of my own hours. Internal presentation to the team at the customer end, they loved it and couldn’t wait for actual launch day. We were all so proud and everyone was happy.

Alas that day never came, the customer went bankrupt due to one of the investors pulling out. Nothing to do with us, just some bean counter did the math and decided they were better off letting the company fold.

I spoke to one of the people at the customer we had worked with throughout the project. She was devastated it was all for nothing and she lost her job as a result. By the time a new investor came around to pick up the pieces, she had found a new job. Spoke to the former ceo of the customer, he had a new job for a couple of days a week at the company that bought up the remainders. He fought to get the project going again, but the new company is very non IT focused, oldskool. So they vetoed it. I later found out one of the project leads was consulted and he had pretty much killed any chance. I always disliked that dude, but he got a pretty good deal out of it or so I’m told.

That’s just the way the cookie crumbles sometimes.

Wow you didn’t like Planet Zoldath? I loved that game. It reminded me a lot of similar games I’ve played in the 80s. Walking around a lot, puzzling, no focus on speed or combat, just trying to explore an alien ecosphere. I absolutely loved that game, especially the variety in the different (randomly generated) maps and strategies you need to use to solve them. Especially the inclusion of aliens that give hints and trade stuff is really cool I feel.

Sure the walking is slow and the two slot inventory is annoying, but I feel just like with Barbuta, that was kind of the point of it. The walking speed isn’t that slow and the map is very small. And there are strategies you can use to prevent a lot of the backtracking. The game does have the flaw of it being randomly generated, it can give you terrible (or impossible) maps. But I went and got the cherry for this game, I loved it.

AI will take jobs when the shareholders think it will make them more money. This has very little if not nothing to do with how good said AI is at the job.

Yeah totally correct. The CRT is only the tube part, the whole thing is the monitor. But when I call it monitor people automatically assume it’s like an LCD. So I would have to call it CRT monitor, but that’s a lot.

I will post a vid of the thing if people care.

Edit: Posted it https://lemmy.world/post/20980504

Yeah the pot is fine, that was the first suspect. Cleaned it and even thought of replacing it, but it measures just fine.

I’ve found several versions of the service manual and combined them to get the info I want. Both seem to be parts of a larger manual, which I can’t find.

I’ve been probing and scoping for hours over the past months. But when the CRT is apart that’s kinda hard, since it has a lot of high voltage I want to avoid. No worries, I have the tools and the experience to work with these things. Over my professional and hobby lifetime I’ve fixed over a hundred CRTs and worked on/designed/built hundreds of other electronics.

I took out a couple of transistors (this thing is almost all discrete components, no integrated stuff) in the horizontal deflection path and tested them and they seem fine. I hooked them up to a function gen and a scope and tested them within parameters. That’s how I found and replaced two other transistors that were dodgy and bringing the thing back to life to start with (it had fully collapsed vertically).

I checked every component in the horizontal deflection path and they all seem fine. And since the thing works most of the time, I suspect they are fine. It might be mechanical, but I’ve tapped all around and that does nothing. If the issue shows up, it stays like that for a while and then randomly disappears again. Only for it to randomly come back.

I’m pretty sure it isn’t a thermal issue, it’s a small CRT which doesn’t use a lot of power and doesn’t really get hot. The issue also appears and goes away randomly. And with the parts open on my bench it still happens. I’ve blasted the entire horizontal path with hot air in case of some cracked solder or something like that. But it still happens.

I suspect it’s actually one of the other circuits that throws off the horizontal deflection. Probably something shorting or close to somewhere. The weird thing is, it doesn’t collapse, it just loses horizontal adjustment. It’s as if the pot is bad, but the pot is perfectly fine. I’ll have to get out my notebook, print out the schematic and start drawing it out. That usually does the trick to get my brain to figure out what the actual issue is. Somehow even after using computers for so long, I need to revert back to how I learnt it in school back in the days to fully engage my brain. Computers probably are too easy and make me lazy.

Finding datasheets and service manuals is a nightmare. So many websites claiming to have the right file, only to end up being a scam and not having any files. Having files they have no right to and are publicly available behind a pay wall. Having weird online viewers instead of just giving the file. Padding the file with extra pages of nonsense so they can claim more pages and a larger file size. Having the wrong file mislabeled. Etc. It goes on and on. And then there’s the sites that redirect a thousand times and then crash the browser. I hope I didn’t just get a virus or something.

All I want is to fix this old CRT from 1981 so I can enjoy it for a few more years, is that too much to ask? And back in those days they actually cared about repairability. Especially the services manuals with scope traces for the test points save so much time troubleshooting.

Archive.org is a good place luckily. If it isn’t down because shit heads can’t behave on the internet. As a species we really like to get in our own way all of the time.

And no I still haven’t fixed up that CRT. It is working now after replacing two weirdly behaving transistors, a new power cord and a new power button (old one worked but didn’t stay on unless you held it on). Replaced a few caps but most tested fine, good quality caps. Even the once I replaced were working, but marginal on the ESR. Cosmetics are also good, but there is still an intermittent fault with it losing horizontal size adjustment. It goes from fine and perfectly working to a little too narrow without any adjustment. 90% of the time it’s fine, 10% of the time it’s faulty and it switches random. I’ve been going mad tracing where the issue is, but I will fix it one day.

I love Inkscape, it’s my go to for vector graphics and use it all the time. That said, I fucking hate Inkscape. It’s slow, buggy and the UI is a mess. But it still holds a special place in my heart and I can’t imagine using anything else.

After fans dug into the lore they found out through a series of item descriptions and beta data the Naked Homer Simpson character was in fact gay. When Hidetaka Miyazaki was confronted by interviewers if he could confirm Naked Homer Simpson was in fact gay, he just smiled and said the fans could find out by looking at the boss fight closely. It turned out if you removed a piece of level geometry a rainbow heart could be seen with the initials H and S below. Thus confirming for once and for all Naked Homer Simpson was in fact gay.

Or at least that’s what I remember from the 3 hour VaatiVidya video about it.

As so often with anything related to maths, pi pops out at the most unexpected places.

Can someone do the math on this? What kind of force would you need on the blade to cut through 15 fat rich person necks? How heavy would it need to be? And what speed, like how high would the drop need to be? Would it be strong enough to just hold at two ends, or would the flex cause issues with it not dropping straight?

At this point it would probably be better to have some kind of pneumatic cylinder that chops off a single head, but does it really really fast. That way you can just drop down the rich asshole, lop off their head, pull the body away and plop down the next one. How much throughput could we get with that?

The electron shells are just a model, that’s not how it really works. Look at this image for a more realistic model of how an atom works:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_orbital#/media/File:Hydrogen_Density_Plots.png

Eli5: Call company that installs solar panels. Give them a bunch of money (thousands to tens of thousands depending). Wait 20 years to get that money back on the lower energy bill. Replace the whole system because it is obsolete. Rince repeat.

For real totally disconnecting from the power grid is a bad idea. That means you need a lot more equipment and battery storage. This increases the investment significantly, without much upside. It also prevents you from selling the power you generate but don’t need back to the power company (but depending on where you live this might not be a thing due to overproduction).

Also depending on you latitude and local climate it may be nearly impossible to go fully off grid without a huge system. Where I live we have about 6 weeks of very little to no sun (low sun combined with a lot of clouds and snow). That means all the power you need during that time needs to be collected previously and stored. This during a time it’s cold af so the power usage is high (using heat pumps for warming the house, which is very efficient). This means a lot of batteries and a lot of solar panels, just to get through these 6 weeks. It could easily triple the costs or more, even if you have the room for it to begin with.

I would analyse the power usage and see where you can save money on. 300 per month seems very high. Where I live energy is much more expensive than in the US and my bill is closer to 100 per month.

Just call a company, have some panels installed for say 2500-5000 bucks depending on how much room you have on the roof and if you need upgrades to your power system. This will save you at least 50 per month on the bill. But be aware the ROI will be on the order of 10-15 years at least and more if you are unlucky. Saving energy is free and means money in your pocket right away.

When they got swept away by the water with their bikes, the movie switches to a montage of them getting the bikes transported to their garage. There they tear down the bikes, replace damage parts, do paint jobs. With a full 10 minute part about how they troubleshooted a misfiring issue on one of the bikes and the full rebuild of a carburateur. There’s even a human interest part where they argue over replacing a part, some of them want to replace the part, others want to attempt a repair. Till one of the wraiths shares a story about how they were a kid working on old bikes with their dad and his dad never believed in throwing parts out, he could always repair it. So they contact a necromancer, which revives the dad for him to fix the part with his dad. And then the movie resumes like normal.