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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: March 4th, 2024

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  • I miss my SoundBlaster Live! card. Excellent sound quality. Last used with the last computer I built, in the late-mid-2000s. That was the second computer I had that had on-board audio, and I just didn’t bother with on-board audio because I just straight up assumed it was going to be shit. Unfortunately it stopped working at some point, along with the GPU (I suspect a static electricity fuck-up on my part, or something) which didn’t matter all that much because I was mostly using the system as a server at that point.

    (I’m going to build a new NAS server from ground up later this year, and I’m contemplating getting an external DAC for it for use with musicpd. Wonder if there’s still SoundBlaster branded DACs, or are they gone? …Oh they’re still around!? Good.)


  • Oh no. You know shit is really terrible when they cannot even afford to communicate at 8 bits. It’s 5 bits Baudot code. Capital letters only. They actually had to pay extra for @, #, and $. Thankfully, by 1870s, % was part of the character set. My heart’s with anyone who can’t just blast UTF-8 out wherever they can.

    (Edit: In case you’re wondering why it has a weird gif attached to it: The Memelord, Musky Elon, has decreed that you can actually attach a shitty random gif FOR FREE. So of course any cash strapped institution will do so.)




  • Well, voting registration as it’s implemented in America isn’t exactly in vogue. As in “oh, you just need to get an ID to vote from now on.” And people without ID need to do some extra paperwork and the office is open 5 minutes every other week, just go through the door located behind the acid moat and bear traps.

    Over here in Finland: Government has a comprehensive record of citizens, they know where everyone lives and who’s eligible to vote. So they send you a letter. “Here’s how to do the advance voting, here’s the polling location you need to go to on election day, Also here’s how to draw the numbers, so this will be less confusing. Just bring this notice card with you. And an ID. If you don’t have an ID, visit the police station and they’ll give you one for free.”


  • Most common mouse problem I have is that grime gets in the wheel and it acts up or seizes up. (Cleaning wheels is also a huge headache with newer mice.) Buttons rarely quit working. …except on some of my Logitech mouses, sometimes the buttons just started going funky or died. My Microsoft wireless travel mouse has kept working for years. I have an Microsoft Intellimouse Optical from early 2000s that I still use with Raspberry Pi, no problems.




  • Hillary was hardly alone in that. Can’t find the exact video, but the point of the video that Jimmy Kimmel platformed Trump, with the guise that the show was “apoliticial”. The video argued that that was not the case. The broader argument: “If you’re atheistic, you denounce the existence of gods. If you’re polytheistic, you acknowledge the existence of multiple gods. Now, if you acknowledge the views of all political candidates going your way, you are not apolitical. You’re polypolitical.”


  • The whole “The_Donald was a FBI honeypot” is a pretty strongly persistent urban legend. And obviously false. Surprises me how many people thought that was legitimate.

    Ask yourself: Shouldn’t there have been results sooner? Would FBI (or whoever) have left an obviously dangerous forum open for honeypot purposes for years and years? If this really was a honeypot operation, wouldn’t they have made arrests as soon as they could? And if this really was the case, shouldn’t we have the details by now (FOIA requests or whatever)?

    Of course not. US law enforcement would have immediately involved themselves if there were any credible threats posted there. But they don’t really do much about festering pits of far-right radicalisation. It was left open with the full approval of Reddit admins. Can’t really claim ignorance on their part either.




  • NOP is $EA, of course, and… um…

    …sorry, I’m just a Commodore 64 scrub, I don’t know nothing about this high and mighty Intel 8086 nonsense.

    [looking up]

    …it’s 0x90 on IA-32? WHAT? Someone told me every processor used 0xEA because that was commonly agreed and readily apparent. …guess I was wrong


  • You’ve not understood to Existence until you’ve gone “oh good. foo-ood.”

    Source: Been a student, subsidised, unsubsidised, employed also, then left alone too. Unemployed, Also an intern, and not as much.

    Foo-ooood is goo-ood. Just grab it. If you can. Tacos are better than death.


  • I remember Nintendo Wii.

    Nintendo: “Hey, a new system update is here.”

    Me: “So what’s new?”

    Nintendo: (shrug)

    Homebrew people: “This patch changed nothing, except they tried to plug a hole. Damn, took us almost 10 minutes to counteract that this time!”

    (OK, there was one system update where they added the ability to run stuff off of the SD card, but beside that, there were a whole bunch of updates where they tried to stay ahead of homebrew/pirates and failed spectacularly.)




  • Scrivener!

    The frustrating thing is that, at least for me, there are no perfect word processors geared for novels and other scenarios where you manage large text masses.

    Scrivener is one of those cases where you have a pretty excellent software that doesn’t have a lot of problems OSS alternatives have. I have smooth time with it. But at the same time, the software always could be better.

    Probably the best OSS novel writing software I’ve used is Org-Mode for Emacs. But, you know, it’s based on Emacs, so it squeaks around the edges and gives the impression that it’s a miracle it runs as brilliantly as it does.