I’m 38, and I remember the last gasps of CRTs in the early 2000s more fondly than the colicky 10-year toddlerhood of digital flat panels that followed.

Apple could remove the audio jack from iPhones because 1. They’re Apple. They could remove the eyes from their customers and 9/10ths of them would stay loyal. and 2. Eliminating the headphone jack mostly locked people out of $20 or less earbuds that might have come free with a previous phone anyway. People grumbled, and carried on using the Bluetooth headphones a lot of them already owned.

AMD doesn’t have the following that Apple does; they’re the objectively worse but more affordable alternative to Nvidia. Eliminating the HDMI port would lock themselves out of the HTPC market entirely; anyone who wanted to connect a PC to a TV would find their products impossible to use, not without experience ruining adapter dongles. We’re talking about making machines that cost hundreds or thousands of dollars incompatible.

I have enough back problems to remember a time when a 32 inch television WAS a big-screen. My family had a 35 inch Sony Trinitron that weighted as much as a motorcycle. You do not NEED a 50+ inch screen.

Mildly spicy take: USB is an unrecoverable disaster and we need an entirely unrelated team to invent something entirely new to replace it because we’re never getting this sleeping bag back in the little bag it shipped in.

USB 1.1 was cool in 1996; it replaced PS/2, RS-232, Centronics parallel, several proprietary connectors, several use cases for SCSI, ADB, Apple’s DIN serial ports, and probably some stuff I’m missing. There was an A plug and a B plug, main problem was both weren’t very obvious which way up you were supposed to plug them. Speed was low but firewire existed for high speed connections.

USB 2.0 was cooler in 2000. The plugs and sockets were identical, the cable was similar but with better shielding, it was as fast or faster than FireWire 400. They did start introducing more plugs, like Mini-B and Micro-B, mainly for portable devices. There were also Mini-A and Micro-A, I’ve never personally seen them. That pretty much finished off external SCSI. Higher speed FireWire was still there if you needed faster than USB but USB 2.0 did basically everything. To indicate USB 2.0 devices and ports, they made the tongues black in contrast with USB 1.1’s white tongues. Didn’t really matter in practice; by the time people had devices that needed the speed, USB 2.0 ports were all machines had.

USB 3.0 took too long to arrive in 2008. The additional speed was sorely needed by then, FireWire was mostly an Apple thing, PCs had but often didn’t use it, so PCs mostly didn’t have anything faster than 480Mbit/s until Obama was sworn in. USB 3.0 is best thought of as a separate tech bolted on top of USB 2.0, they added 5 more wires, a ground wire and two pair of high speed data lines for 5Gbit/s full duplex. The original four wires are also in the cable for power and 480Mbit/s half-duplex. They managed to make the A plug and socket entirely forwards and backwards compatible, the 3B sockets are compatible with 2B plugs (same with micro) but 3B plugs are not compatible with 2B sockets (again, same with micro). Which means we’ve just added two more kinds of cable for people to keep track of! So a typical consumer now likely has a printer with a USB A-B cable, some bluetooth headset or mp3 player they’re still using that has a mini-B plug, an Android smart phone with a micro-B plug, an iPod Touch with a Lightning plug because Apple are special widdle boys and girls with special widdle needs, and now an external hard drive with a 3A to micro-3B plug, which just looking at it is obviously a hack job.

Computer manufacturers didn’t help. It’s still common for PCs to have 2.0 ports on them for low speed peripherals like mice, keyboards, printers, other sundry HIDs, to leave 3.0 ports open for high speed devices. To differentiate these to users, 3.0 ports are supposed to be blue. In my experience, about half of them are black. I own a Dell laptop made in 2014 with 1 2.0 and 2 3.0 ports, all are black. I own two Fractal Design cases, all of their front USB ports are black. Only ports on my Asrock motherboards are blue. I’ve had that laptop for nearly 12 years now, I STILL have to examine the pinout to tell which one is the USB 2.0 port. My Fractal cases aren’t that bad because they have no front 2.0, but I built a PC for my uncle that does have front 2.0 and 3.0 ports, and they’re all black.

USB 3.1 showed up in 2013, alongside the USB-C connector, and the train came entirely off the rails. USB 3.1 offers even higher 10Gbit/s duplex throughput, maybe on the same cable as 3.0. If the port supports it. How do you tell a 3.1 port from a 3.0 port? They’ll silk screen on a logo in -8 point font that’ll scratch off in a month, it is otherwise physically identical. Some motherboard manufacturers break with the standard in a good way and color 3.1 capable ports a slightly teal-ish blue. USB A-B cables can carry a USB 3.1 10Gbit/s signal. But, they also introduced the USB-C connector, which is its own thing.

USB-C was supposed to be the answer to our prayers. It’s almost as small as a Micro-2B connector, it’s reversible like a Lightning port, it can carry a LOT of power for fast charging and even charging laptops, and it’s got not one, but two sets of tx/rx pins, so it can carry high speed USB data in full duplex AND a 4k60hz DisplayPort signal AND good old fashioned 480Mbit/s USB2.0 half-duplex for peripherals. In one wire. That was the dream, anyway.

Android smart phones moved over to USB-C, a lot of laptops went mostly or entirely USB-C, PCs added one or two…and that’s where we are to this day. Keyboards, mice, wireless dongles, HIDs, still all use USB-A plugs, there doesn’t seem to have been any move at all to migrate. Laptops are now permanently in dongle hell as bespoke ports like HDMI are disappearing, yet monitors and especially televisions are slow to adopt DP over USB-C.

Also, about half of the USB-C cables on the market are 4-wire USB 2.0 cables. There are no USB-C data cables, just D+ and D- plus power. They’re phone charging cables; they’re sufficient for plugging a phone into a wall wart or car charger but they often don’t carry laptop amounts of power and they don’t carry high speed data or video.

USB 3.2 turned up in 2017, added the ability to do two simultaneous 3.1 10Gbit/s connections in the same cable, a boon for external SSDs, retroactively renamed 3.0 and 3.1 to 3.2 Gen 1 and 3.2 Gen 2, with 3.2 being 3.2 Gen 2x2, changed to different case logos to match, pissed in the fireplace and started jabbering about Thunderbolt. Thunderbolt was an Intel thing to put PCIe lanes out mini DisplayPort cables, usually for the purposes of connecting external GPUs to laptops but also for general purpose high speed data transfer. Well, around this time they decided to transition to USB-C connectors for Thunderbolt.

Problem: They use a lighting bolt logo to denote a Thunderbolt port. Lightning bolt, or angled squiggle lines, have been used to mean “high speed”, “Power delivery”, “Apple Lightning”, and now “Thunderbolt.”

“Power delivery” sometimes but not always denoted by a yellow or orange tongue means that port delivers power even with the device turned off…or something. And has nothing to do with the fact that USB-C cables now have chips in them to negotiate with power bricks and devices for how much power can be delivered, and nobody marks the cables as such, so you just have to know what your cables can do. They’re nearly impossible to shop for, and if you want to set up a personal system of “my low-speed cables are black, my high speed cables are white, my high power cables are red” fuck you, your Samsung will come with a white 2.0 cable and nobody makes a high power red cable.

USB4 is coming out now, it’s eaten Thunderbolt to gain its power, it’ll be able to do even higher speed links if you get yet another physically indistinguishable cable, and if you hold it upside down it’ll pressure wash your car, but only Gigabyte Aorus motherboards support that feature as of yet.

The “fistful of different cables to keep track of” is only getting worse as we head into the USB4 era and it needs to be kicked in the head and replaced entirely.

I’m reminded of a few projects I’ve seen here and there where a dad with some electronics skills builds a control panel for his kid with a bunch of knobs, buttons, lights, switches, gauges, displays etc. that makes suitably impressive industrial noises as you mess with the controls because what kid doesn’t want that? I want that.

I’m rounding year 15 with a nylon one. I’ve never had a leather wallet last that long.

There is none. These are not made. They should not be made. We will not help you make these.

The reason power plugs/sockets are gendered the way they are is to prevent energized contacts from ever being exposed to touch. A cable that reverses the gender can and almost certainly will expose mains voltage to exposed contacts, which almost certainly will electrocute someone or cause a fire.

Bad stupid wrong reasons people come up with for wanting these:

• Attaching a generator to the circuits in a house. Plug one end into the generator’s outlet, plug the other into a wall socket, and now that circuit in your house, and possibly others, are energized. In addition to the cable being a death hazard if unplugged from the house end, I don’t know how circuit breakers behave when the source is on the load side, and if you don’t throw the main breaker you’re energizing the lines coming out of your house, meaning you’re putting power on the mains. You probably want to do this during a power failure, which means linemen might be working on the lines, they expect them to be cold, but because an idiot bought a generator and some parts from aisle 3 at Lowe’s, it isn’t. If you’re trying to run your generator while attached to the grid to try to reduce your power bill, you deserve the resulting fire. There is a correct way to do this; you can get plugs and sockets designed for this, you’ll often find camper trailers equipped with them, and you need an interlocked switch that prevents both the generator and the power grid from being attached simultaneously.

• You strung your Christmas lights backwards, and now the female end is closest to where you want to plug them in. Okay fine, I’ll just get a male-to-male cable and plug them in backwards, what can go wrong? The male plug at the end of your daisy chain dangling somewhere in a bush, under your eaves etc. in the winter weather getting rained or snowed on is what can go wrong. The correct solution is pay attention to what you’re doing, Clark Griswold.

He finally got his chores done so he can waste time with his friends!

Their parents didn’t hit them hard enough.

Okay, we’ll rename American football to Cricket.

How many moon landings have been done in metric?

An Ask Lemmy topic recently was “what are some video games that don’t exist.” I gave three answers, but held one back because it does technically exist.

SQIJ! for the ZX Spectrum was designed to be terrible by a programmer that, as I understand it, was contractually obligated to program a game, but had grown to hate the company. He wrote a game that turned the caps lock on so none of the movement keys worked, and if you edit the code with a memory poke to turn caps lock off, you’ll find there’s no game. It was written in BASIC, and the first line is the most passive aggressive thing I’ve ever read:

1 goto 2

Well you see, Americans called the game with goalies “soccer” because that’s what the British called it back when we were crown colonies, so when we invented the game with linebackers, we called that “football.” then everyone else heard our word and decided to change the game with goalies’ name to “football.” So as usual, America continues to be correct, and the rest of the world is bound and determined to fuck it up.

You know, I’ve got one of those who doesn’t have any power. His lack of hilariousness is at a maximum.

There will never be another general election in the United States.

So, do you remember back in like, 2004, when “feature phones” like the LG EnV or the Sidekick came out? It had a little more OS to it than a typical flip phone, they often had full keyboards, integration with intant messengers at the time, web browsers, etc? Some were more media focused and had mp3 oriented features, some were social machines for emailing and texting, some were more camera oriented, some more game oriented, you could get a phone that fit your interests.

Microsoft intended to shoulder into that market circa 2008. The year after the iPhone launched. It then took them two years and a billion dollars to develop. Through in-fighting with development of their OTHER mobile product, Windows Phone. And finally in 2010, the era of the iPhone 4, they released the Kin.

The Kin did not perform well, it was very mediocre hardware.

It had no app store or software library at all.

It couldn’t access several instant messengers that were popular at the time.

The few people who did buy one returned them.

It wasn’t Verizon’s fault that Microsoft pulled a Microsoft and poured tons of money into arriving at a trend too late to compete with an overpriced mediocre product.

So, my understanding of auroras is, the planet’s magnetic field draws particles emitted by the sun toward the poles, and as those particles interact with the atmosphere they glow. So without a star and thus without solar wind, where do the aurora come from?

I am gonna try this.