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No one can auth for Minecraft, etc.

myrandomcommenton The biggest CRT ever made: Sony's PVM-4300

Yup! I had 2 x SUN GDM-20E20 hooked up to my desktop in 1990-something. They were Sony screens and they were so clear & bright. They weighed a ton however and even broke a cheap desk I had.

myrandomcommenton Viagra improves brain blood flow and could help to prevent dementia

Viagra = standing at attention pretty much no matter what is going on. Cialis = you have to have the mind/stimulus.

myrandomcommenton I spoke with a Google worker fired for protesting $1.2B Israel contract

All your words seem reasonable with the exception that I do not believe they expect to fired. I have been doing this valley tech thing since before the .bomb and I can tell you I have never seen a more self entitled class of workers in my time here.

myrandomcommenton I spoke with a Google worker fired for protesting $1.2B Israel contract

You 100% have the right to protest. What you do not have is the right to use your access to the company building to protest in said company building. Feel free to stage a protest out front and I 100% support that.

If you truly object to what your employer does then quit. In this case you are highly paid and skilled talent that is not stuck in your job.

I have much more sympathy for the like of service workers, factory workers, et.al. that lack the mobility of jobs that these people have.

myrandomcommenton Hidden Files in C64 OS

This was unique to Commodore. They owned MOS which made the chips so it was not as costly for them to do this. Honestly it sucked longer term because there was no way to really upgrade how the filesystem DOS worked unlike on the Apple or the Atari.

It was cool however because there were tools that offloaded things to the drive CPU. You could also write programs for copying disk that you loaded into the RAM on the drive and then disconnected them from the computer. You used the drive lights to tell you when to swap the disk.

myrandomcommenton Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

This is a reasonable analogy.

myrandomcommenton My streaming fatigue got so bad I started collecting DVDs

I had a ton back in the day. Then I ripped everything. All neatly sorted on my NAS and can be watched via Infuse on the AppleTV. Last year on a whim I purchased an unlocked Sony UHD player to watch something that I could only find on DVD and was region locked to not my area. I also picked up a few UHD titles from https://www.criterion.com/

Since then the number of UHD disc has grown and I have slowly removed things from the NAS in favor of the glorious UHD versions. Have the shelf of disc has made family movie night more fun.

As an aside I did a little experiment. Same movie streamed (at max quality), the UHD disc on the Sony(UBP-X800M2) and same UHD on the PS5. Everyone could without fail pick out which was which.

myrandomcommenton Modeless Vim

In my household for the last 20 years, it is made from pumpkin. First from sweet pumpkins we would pick up every year at the Halloween pumpkin patch that we as a family tradition would take our daughter too. Now it is made from ones grown in our own garden. They are simple to grow. Pick them, roast them, purée them and freeze until needed. We also make a lovely spicy Indian style pumpkin soup from the purée. The pie is quite different from any store purchased pie and well worth it.

myrandomcommenton Things I Learnt in 2023

It is not Rugby but American Football you are talking about.

Rashomon is film by Akira Kurosawa from 1950 where the killing of a Samurai is told from various points of view. That is why the story telling you are talking about is called that.

myrandomcommenton Wi-Fi 7 to get final approval early next year, up to 4.8X faster than Wi-Fi 6

So at home I have 3 Ubiquity APs. My house is long and the APs are setup X-X-X on the center line of the house (for the most part). 2.4Ghz is used only for IoT. 5/6Ghz is used for everything else. My house sit on a large lot. I can still see ~50+ other networks around me. The worse part is that there are 2.4Ghz networks that are set to 40 wide channels and 5Ghz networks set to 160 wide channels. People have zero idea what they are doing, and the defaults from the manufactures are junk. Every AP around me is screaming as loud as they can because people seem to think turning up the power makes it all work better.

The only think I want from the the next version of Wifi would be some sort of technology where all the APs in the area can agree on what they see and optimize so they stop stepping on each other.

In my case through careful site surveys and planning, I have a pretty stable network even managing to have useful 40 wide 5Mhz channels. The radios are all tuned to use the least amount of power possible. One thing also to share, if you plan on using Matter/Thread be aware that some of the channel will overlap with your 2.4Ghz networks. If you are using Apple kit for your border router its is locked to channel 25 which will have overlap with your 2.4Ghz channel 11. My Thread network became very stable when I switched my 2.4Ghz to use only channels 1/6.

myrandomcommenton Smart garage door controller is no longer smart

Glad I saw this. I was about to buy 3 of them. Not anymore.

myrandomcommenton Apple Says There Won't Be a 27-Inch iMac with Apple Silicon

I have both the "Apple" LG 4K and the LG 27" 5K and both just worked for the most part. The 5K is my daily driver plugged into an M1 MacMini.

myrandomcommenton Where does my computer get the time from?

This is a great write up. Easy to follow for those that are non-technical. I sent this to my kid that is pre-med in college and the feedback was "wow, I wish my Chemistry professors wrote up concepts like this."

myrandomcommenton U.S. national debt hits $33T for the first time

A pipeline is an easy fixed target. In a war the US will want to it to end quickly so cutting off the oil will be an easy choice.

https://warsawinstitute.org/china-malacca-dilemma/

myrandomcommenton U.S. national debt hits $33T for the first time

As soon as India see China is loosing they will likely use that to settle all the open territorial disputes quickly.

The US winning just cements the dollar dominance in the world.

myrandomcommenton U.S. national debt hits $33T for the first time

The DoD plans for fighting 2 major conflicts at the same time and always has.

myrandomcommenton U.S. national debt hits $33T for the first time

China has more ships by count and it means zero. Coastal and patrol boats mean nothing.

At the end combine combat arms win the day and there is zero indication that China has sorted that. Heck, I would offer that with their top down structure they never will. Let us not forget in the US military a PFC is taught how to and can call for fire support. You have to be an officer to do that if you are russia or China.

The largest air force in the world is the US Air Force. The 2nd largest, the US Navy and the 3rd, the US Army.

In Ukraine the combine arms concept even without an Air Force that owns the sky is tearing apart what was the 2nd largest military in the world. In a full out war with China the US would own the sky battle space pretty quickly.

I am not saying that China will not sort this at some point, but right now they are looking at Ukraine and going "hum".

Taiwan is a fortress and as long as the people of Taiwan are willing to fight it will be a near impossible nut for China to crack.

Another note is how dependent China is on oil imports. The US could quickly blockade all imports pretty quickly far from the range of land based Chinese missiles. They would be out of oil in 2 weeks. That part of the world has a very defined set of choke points.

myrandomcommenton Why new furniture doesn’t last long

When my wife and I got married we went to a local unfinished furniture store for our bedroom set. We finished it and used it for years. It is now the guest bedroom set. Our bedroom set was inherited from my parents which they inherited from my grandparents. Just recently we received a shipment of my mothers bedroom set from her teenage years that my aunt took after my grandparents passed (this wi go to my daughter after college). We also received my grandparents dining table and a few other pieces. We have my parents 1940s bar, etc. For other pieces we spent years going to estate sales finding the right pieces. When we pass my daughter will receive it all. Some of these pieces are 80 years old and still as solid as the day they where made. I highly recommend investing in good furniture, and in most cases, if you are willing to take the time, you can find amazing pieces via estate sales. Google for listing. We have picked up end tables from the 50-60s that we have seen in antique shops 1/10 their asking price at estate sales. There are tons of sites. It is 100% worth your time.

It was the same thing for rugs. We started with the cheap amazon ones and replaced them with hand made ones via inheritance over time.

Emotionally sitting down in the chair at the dining table my grandfather always sat it was just amazing rush of happy memories. We went with our daughter and added to the family inheritance buy having her help pick out the handmade rug that went under the table. When we where young it was not something we could afford, but now we can we focus on memories for the next generation.

myrandomcommenton Why does the USA use 110V and UK use 230-240V? (2014)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yMMTVVJI4c

The difference is 2 minutes on the boil time of 1L.

myrandomcommenton Former VP Claims Salesforce Lied About Software Capabilities: 'It Was All a Lie'

Fire them. They are wasting your time. Their yo-yo output will be something that is noticed by the rest of the team which is demotivating for them. You gave them a chance.

myrandomcommenton My Overkill Home Network

As someone that has build huge nation wide networks and data centers I can tell you this is far from what I want at home (now)! When I was a young network engineer I had a Sun SPARC5 running OpenBSD as a firewall. Ultra10 for my desktop. I ran my own DNS and a rack of servers. Wifi was new and of course I ran cutting edge OSS firmware on whatever was the latest HW. Too much work!

Today, Ubiquity HW. Enterprise 48 PoE, 1/2.5/10G core, small PoE powered 5 port switch behind TV, etc. for fan out where needed (I did rewire house with Cat6A). 3 of the latest APs that support 6E. NVR for the cameras. TrueNAS MiniXL+ for NAS that I can run K8s on if needed (cheaper to pay IXsysten for the setup then build myself, including time). AppleTV for media. Leviton Wifi switches for remote control power/lights. 5 gig symmetric fiber internet with a Comcast backup that auto fails over (UDMP-SE for firewall). It all just works and I spend zero time on it.

About the only tech head thing I still have is a stand alone 4 generation old CPU (i7) running ... gentoo targeted at that CPU for speed, as a Minecraft server. And honestly that is going to be replaced with a 2 year old SFF box soon with a less complex version of Linux :)

myrandomcommenton LCD TVs won’t see any further development

For what it is worth, I just replaced a Samsung 65” from 2019 (QLED) with a new LG 77” OLED and was really blown away with the massive difference in the picture quality. The living room is full of windows, so the room is really sunny. Even at noon the pictures quality is great and easy to see. TV cost $2700 at Costco. The 2019 Samsung will get rotate into my office replacing a 2016 Samsung that crappy software for ARC was so buggy that it did not even work will with the Samsung sound-bar (having to unplug the TV once every 3-4 power on to allow it to work again).

myrandomcommenton The Bay Area German bar that brought down Apple’s famed iPhone security

I have spent countless hours there over the years. It was an after work place everyone could agree on. As you change jobs over the years, you still end up there, and you will almost always run into someone you know.

myrandomcommenton Mark Zuckerberg on Apple’s Vision Pro headset

Sounds like Blackberry talking about the first iPhone and we all know how that turned out. The $3500 for V1 will be $600 by V3.

This is worth the read.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/06/hands-on-with-apple-...

Here is the most important comment from the story.

--- When you actually put on the headset, though, you'll often find that the promotional video was pure aspiration and reality still has some catching up to do. That was my experience with HoloLens, and it has been that way with consumer AR devices like Nreal, too. That was not my experience with Vision Pro. To be clear, it wasn’t perfect. But it’s the first time I’ve tried an AR demo and thought, “Yep, what they showed in the promo video was pretty much how it really works.” ---

We all watched the demo and thought "wow, but this is the marketing video so lets see the reality."

myrandomcommenton Tell HN: Cancelling HP Instant Ink prevents cartridges from being used

Thanks for this link. I have been looking to replace a 10 year old Brother that started to fail and I was looking for something that supports 5G+WPA3. Could not find a simple data sheet for this but buried in the manual on their support site they list the specs.

Going to compare them to the current Brother line up.

Random: back in the day I had Epson dot matrix printers and they were a tank.

myrandomcommenton Kenji López-Alt spent 5 months studying Chicago thin-crust pizza

Well, how could I pass up the opportunity to ask someone that has the required skill to figure this out?

This place in Portland comes pretty close to getting it correct.

https://newcascadiatraditional.com/

Cheers!

myrandomcommenton Kenji López-Alt spent 5 months studying Chicago thin-crust pizza

Kenji,

Have your books, watch your YT. Love the science behind the food aspect of it. My whole family does. I am proud to say my daughter, now in college, cooks a few nights a week because she grew up in a family that cooks. I have a challenge for you. In my 40s they figured out my heath issues turn out to be Celiacs. Fun. So do you think you could come up with a closes as possible recipe for NYC style pizza that is gluten free?

Cheers!

myrandomcommenton My startup banking story

This is so true. Around 2015 I went to buy a house I the Bay Area. I was at a new startup and my income was quite low. I applied for mortgages but got turned down. Rules about income (your paycheck not balances) to payment were quite strict after 2008. To be clear I could write a check for the house. I call my money guy (I had a modest exit a few years before). He said, “I thought we talked about this at the start, but you need anything financially, legally, etc. you call me.” 24 hours later I had a loan from a private bank that did not have to follow the rules because they did not sell the mortgages on. My advisor has a JD and a CFA and is worth every penny as I have neither of those.

I have a new startup now and bank with Chase. I will say the banker asked the right questions, understood this was a startup and went into all they could offer. My biggest gripe with Chase that some above said SVB sorted, is the ability to get a credit card in a company name without being tied to personal, at the size we are.

myrandomcommenton If the government bails out SVB, expect an “Occupy Silicon Valley” movement

Their will not be some unbounded bailout. There is a process for this type of situation.

Here is a well written Twitter thread that goes over the likely path forward for SVB.

https://twitter.com/armanddoma/status/1634335394350374912?s=...