Okay, so you know the trope in spy movies where the launch codes or the diamonds or whatever are at the end of a hallway full of lasers, and the protagonist has to do some cool flip moves (if male) or some slinky contortions (if female) to get around the lasers?

I made that as an arcade game with an Arduino. Some red laser pointer diodes, some photosensors, a few lights, bells and whistles, a fog machine, a few big ol buttons, and you’ve got spy laser hallway. It had a separate “break as many lasers as you can” mode as well, played like a combination of DDR and whack-a-mole.

The second coolest thing I ever programmed was probably the GPS MP3 player. A farmer wanted to add an automatic soundtrack to his Halloween hayride, like when the drove through the spooky graveyard it played ghost noises, it would play music for longer stretches on the road. I used a Raspberry Pi with a GPS HAT and wrote up a script in Python that would compare the actual position with a set of coordinates stored in a text file, and if one matched, it would play an associated mp3 file. The effect was kind of lost because the audio was coming from the vehicle itself, but it’s a hay ride, it’s supposed to be kind of lame. The bedsheet ghosts said woo as you drove past, I’m in the special effects industry, dad.

Windows 11’s TPM requirements.

I recently built a brand new computer for my uncle. He was running a 3rd gen Core i7 machine running Windows 7. I get a call that it won’t boot. I do manage to get it booted, the SMART data shows the hard drive is on its last eyebrows, and anyway he’s running an OS that’s three generations out of date.

I’m a big Linux user, I’ve got my aunt running Linux Mint. My uncle is such a dunce at computers I don’t think I can do that, because he lacks the vocabulary to tell me what he wants his computer to do. “I might use it for business.” In his line of work that could mean anything from going to quickbooks.com to needing some piece of Windows-only shitware. So “Get a .exe from somewhere” had to remain intact.

For everything he actually does with that computer, that old 3rd gen i7 was fine. Replace the hard disk with a SATA SSD, maybe replace the weird 2-4-2-4 some but not all of it is dual channel 12GB of RAM with two 8 GB sticks of DDR3 and let it roll…except no currently supported version of WIndows runs on this computer.

For a large number of people, computers became objectively fast enough in 2015. That’s about when SSDs became standard equipment, fixing any hardware reason for “damn this thing is slow” even out of midrange consumer hardware. Gamers, home labbers and AI startups need more power, the rest of the world doesn’t. And that was a problem for Microsoft.

I do shop at Best Buy, usually for computer parts and accessories. Because my local alternatives for computer hardware and peripherals, AV gear etc. are Wal-Mart and maybe our increasingly pathetic Staples. Or Amazon. Best Buy is literally the only place within 20 miles to buy a GPU in a brick and mortar store.

I don’t watch TV ads though. Is this chick a spokesman?

Mario analogy. In Super Mario games, a green mushroom gives you an extra life, a chance to start over from a point in the past. A red mushroom makes Mario bigger, allowing him to survive some damage that would have killed him. Also in many games it makes him able to do things he can’t when small. RAID arrays often run faster than individual disks would.

It’s not an extra life, it’s another health point. Red mushroom, not green mushroom.

I also have a Synology NAS. It’s okay. I got a mid-range two-bay one. I could be happier with it. Also, I heard that they’re going toward requiring their brand hard drives, so I’m not buying another one.

Now, when that containership a few years ago wrecked and containers full of BMW motorcycles washed ashore…

You know what the problem with USB-C is? In 2010 or so, you could have a fistful of unique USB cables, A-B, A-MiniB, A-MicroB, 3A-3B, 3A-Micro3B, A-Lightning, they’re all different, but you can look at the cable and tell exactly what it does. Most of them are identical in capabilities but have physically different plugs, and the two USB 3 cables are also identical in capabilities but with different client side plugs. ALL of them will plug in and work in the same host-side port.

With USB-C, I can have a fistful of visually similar cables, with drastically different capabilities, and I have no way of telling them apart. The USB consortium has been inconsistent with their branding, it has been applied even more inconsistently or even fraudulently by manufacturers, and there’s no way to inspect the cable’s features without trying it to see if it works.

One actual reason I can think of is they haven’t passed customs inspections. There’s a reason they ask you if you have any fruit or vegetables when crossing national borders, or even some state borders in the US: To prevent the spread of invasive pests. All there need to be is some Brazilian Screaming Mites on those bananas and no plants will ever grow on the island of Britain again.

You will sometimes hear older pilots refer to a magnetic compass as a “whiskey compass.” Magnetic compasses are usually filled with some liquid to dampen it so it’s ever possible to read; an air-filled compass never stops swinging back and forth. Water would be the obvious choice, but then you’ll have an algae filled compass.

Legend has it that the US Navy in World War II used ethanol to fill the compasses. And then the planes would come back with empty compasses because the navy pilots drank it. So they switched to kerosene. And then the marines drank it.

The oldest single player game I keep going back to is Super Mario World on the SNES, Copyright 1990.

I will occasionally play games older than that, but the SNES is where my actual nostalgia begins.

Vorta. Qt based front end for BorgBackup.

I’ve had a few creatures put down. My grandmother’s dog was in such bad heart health she couldn’t really move around anymore. When the creature shakes and whimpers under the strain of standing up, and sometimes just randomly screams in pain, it’s about time to make that difficult trip to the vet.

My old cat Spice lived to the ripe old age of 18, and then she had a saddle thrombus. Essentially a blood clot blocked her aorta where it forks to her back legs. Her back beans turned cold and blue, she couldn’t walk right, she was obviously in distress, so we rushed her to the emergency vet where we were told at her age she probably wasn’t going to survive any treatment, and that she probably had about 3 more horribly painful hours to live. She was actively dying, it was a question of how long do we let her lay there gasping?

I let it get about that grim before it becomes an option.

That’s for the marines.

I have a couple. My phone came with an A female to C male adapter (will turn an A cable into a C cable) that’s about as compact as you can make it, but it is only wired for 2.0. I also have a 4 inch dongle cable that does the exact same thing that is I think 3.0. I just bought some C-A adapters (turns a C cable into an A cable) which look like an A plug with the cable cut off. These aren’t compliant with the USB-C spec and can be misused for bad ideas, like an A-A cable, but it does allow you to carry one USB C-C cable and one adapter and cover a lot of bases.

Well, let me show you something.

You vs the guy she told you not to worry about.

Guess which one of those is a 4-conductor USB 2 cable rated for 15 watts that came in the box with my smart phone, and which is a 3.1 cable that can carry 10Gbps USB data AND a 4k60Hz DP signal AND a USB 2.0 link for peripherals AND 100 watts of power simultaneously. Guess at their relative prices.

And this isn’t even the ultimate cable. The cable I described is 12 year old technology, they dropped the 3.1 spec in 2013! Newer cables can do 20Gbps using both lanes, carry more power, do external PCIe, all kinds of crap.

But normies who charge thay phone, eat hot chip and lie don’t want this cable. They don’t want to pay $15 for 7mm thick cable that’ll pull their Qi charger off their night stand with its weight every time they pick their phone up. They want a thin, flexible strand of spaghetti that will carry 15 watts from the wall wart behind their headboard to the charger on the night stand, successfully negotiating at least two sharp 90 degree turns.

USB-C was supposed to be the universal port. The answer to every question. Recharge your wireless earbuds, recharge your laptop, attach HIDs, very fast storage, high speed network adapters, displays, low latency teledildonics, VR headsets…it was the chosen one, it was supposed to destroy the Sith, not join them. Turns out, the port might be capable of that, but the cable is a different story. There’s 24 pins in the plug, two of which will never be connected (the four middle pins are for USB 2, and there are only 2 wires for that. The cable itself along with the chips in the connectors need to be designed for what you’re doing. And we can’t really steer around that because they’re going to keep adding tech to this connector for awhile yet.

So we’re gonna end up with cables that can do this, but not that. Some applications only require USB 2.0, but the device has a USB-C port. I’m okay with that cable existing, but the industry as a whole has done a piss poor job of selling and marking cables with their capabilities.

I bought the cable above from Cable Matters. They make good cables. They marked each end of this cable with the SS USB 10 mark on one side, and their logo on the other. It doesn’t indicate it’s video or power capacity in any way. You’re supposed to make note of that when you buy the cable, keep track of which cable that is in your collection, and remember what it can do. I’m a neckbeard with no life, and even I’m not gonna get that done.

I remember the original roll-out of USB, things like mice and keyboards very quickly transitioned to USB and came with one of those USB/PS2 dongles for awhile for compatibility with older computers, and then we were into the USB era.

That hasn’t happened with USB-C, large market segments don’t seem interested in making it happen, it’s not getting better, in fact it seems to be getting worse. So kick it in the head and start over from scratch.

Situation: There are 15 competing standards, and they’re all USB.

That’s the winning hypothesis, dumpster diving gooners.

I personally don’t, no. I have it installed on a PC though.