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Thank you for the input.

I'm not here to argue, nor to support claims that I have not made.

I carefully charged a Motorola G Power 2020 to a 60% SoC (which should be very safe) and left it in the car, unplugged, as a spare. It puffed up in about 6 months.

An ignored Galaxy S7 puffed up while sitting on a shelf, unplugged, in a climate-controlled room.

Some other devices have been fine for far longer periods so it's not like I'm thinking it's endemic or anything (my Sony PSP is still working well-enough with its still-flat lipo cell from 2008), but it's certainly a concern.

I don't miss it.

I got a pair of 9800GTs back in '08 to play with SLI. It only helped with some games, and despite having all those video output jacks the rig only supported two monitors.

By 2015, the essentially-free iGPU part of an i3 Skylake CPU was ~better than the SLI rig.

That's an excellent and terrific point. In this way, the dichotomy between Windows and Linux can be as if they're just two sides of the same "vetted" coin.

Eh? No.

It's just a device attached to a computer.

But in a Plug-and-Play world, its addition is noticed by the operating system -- as has been normal for decades.

Microsoft's Windows operating system sees this new hardware ID and then goes forth to install whatever-the-fuck software it associates with that identification, presumably as a service to the user. (Did Microsoft approve it? Dunno. I'm just over hear eating popcorn.)

Me, too. For me, it was easier without the DarkReader plugin enabled than with it (which is kind of common), but it wasn't great to see either way.

I don't know about "most smartphones," but the FM bits were commonly a built-in with Qualcomm and some other chipsets for a coon's age.

Even the OG Motorola Droid, of 2009, had the parts inside for an FM radio. They just weren't connected to an antenna and the default software stack didn't include any access to those parts at all.

Flagship Qualcomm-equipped Samsung phones up to the S20 or so tended to be ~similar: The FM tuner guts were usually in there, but they often weren't available to use, and even then they sometimes lacked an antenna.

This is not intended to be an exhaustive list. :)

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In my time, I've enabled FM radio on a few different phones that weren't advertised to have that function, sometimes with root-only hacks from grimy corners of the internet, and sometimes by just installing some software that just happened to have the right hooks.

That only applies to the subset of TVs that use Google TV/Android TV.

Not so much for the rest of them that have operating systems with names like Roku TV OS, Tizen, WebOS, and Fire TV OS. They do their own things.

Some of that may be because the common vernacular uses the word "Loctite" to describe any manner of threadlocker.

It is this way even though Loctite also produces a vast array of products that have nothing to do with theadlocker, and threadlockers are available from a wide variety of manufacturers.

My first PC had an ST-225, and I'd like to confirm that it is indeed MFM. (I miss the gronky startup sounds from that thing.)

If you want to modernize the storage for that old PC, then Lo-tech is probably a good choice. They've got a wonderful all-in-one card that includes a mounting bracket, fits into an 8-bit ISA slot, and accepts a CF card directly: https://texelec.com/product/lo-tech-xt-cf-lite-rev-2/

File transfer can be done a number of different ways, including serial ports (USB to RS-232 adapters generally work fine), floppies (USB 3.5" floppy drives are awesome and cheap), and: Networking.

Around the turn of the century, I briefly had an already-old XT machine that had no hard drive, but it did have 10BASE2 Ethernet and Hercules-compatible graphics built into the motherboard.

It was a fun little adventure to get it online with my then-modern LAN and I did a number of unlikely things with it (including a graphical web browser), but the most practical thing it did was connect to a Samba share on my Linux box. It worked great. Old 8-bit network cards are not particularly expensive.

It all depends on how far down the rabbit hole you want to go. :)

It keeps getting cheaper and better -- for me.

I get a lot more use (read: cheaper per interaction) and much better quality results from the $20 that I spend on this stuff every month than I did several years ago.

(And several years before that, it was all essentially unobtanium.)

It had been sustained for something like 14 years, though?

I just noticed that myself. It seems to wiggle the map or something instead of input the letter e.

$120 isn't too bad. I paid $75 in July of 2019.

$750 is nuts.

At home, my solution to that is to use lighting fixtures have Edison sockets inside for a bulb to screw into, just like they always used to.

The fixtures last forever, and may have already been there for half a century. It doesn't need changed.

The bulb lasts as long as it lasts, but is easily replaced. It can be dumb, or it can be smart. It can be changed for different color temperature or CRI or protocol or efficiency rating or whatever.

Right, sure. I can burn through some tokens with Codex. (But I can burn through some tokens with ChatGPT, too, and some people spend a lot of time there. Non-programmers use the bot for all kinds of things.)

What's the ratio of regular users to codex users, might you suppose?

If I had to guess, then I'd guess it is a minimum of 100:1, but my gut tells me that it's probably closer to 1000:1.

I do that, too.

The recycling is in inexpensive stacking totes that have lids; the same kind of totes I sometimes pack in tight for cross-country jaunts. They stay stacked and they don't leak.

Food waste gets composted outside ("it's old, get rid of it"), or goes down the garbage disposal ("i'm just trying to prep dinner here, not save the world"), or frozen in a grocery bag for later trash runs (meat and grease that doesn't want to go down the drain or be composted).

The bagged trash that accumulates here is essentially just non-recyclable plastics that are dry, and an occasional small bag of frozen food waste. This stuff does not leak between home and the dumpster at the shop.

And, I mean: Why not? It's just a car, and before being in the car these things were inside of my house (which is a far more valuable and permanent thing to me).

AFAIK, KHTML used Qt, not GTK. :)

The price of a new Yamaha GX-1 in 1975 was around $60,000, or about $385,000 in today's money.

£11,000

That gives me the same feeling as a concert grand piano or installed pipe organ.

I think you might need to increase the number by an order of magnitude or more to get into the ballpark of [new] concert grand pianos and installed pipe organs.

Yeah, it's inconvenient when the [effectively] black-box router device that only the bot understands goes out to lunch, and takes access to the bot along with it.

But the degree of inconvenience is up to the beholder.

One way is using something like ChatGPT with a pocket supercomputer. It's tedious to get technical stuff done that way, but it can be accomplished. (For those who haven't tried it, the bot can be spooky-good at correctly interpreting cell phone photos of technical text on a screen. This saves a ton of transcription effort.)

Another way is with the phone's hotspot and just about any random computer. Laptops have wifi. Wifi dongles for desktops can be stupid-cheap, and it's useful to have a few scattered around. It works fine (unless one's hotspot data is ridiculously-limited, I guess).

The best way is probably by being prepared with procedural fall-back methods. Keep backups of your configs, and keep the recovery instructions with them. Test recovery; an untested backup isn't necessarily better than having no backup at all. Keep as many historical versions as one wishes, and automate it because procrastination is part of the human condition.

After that: When the router's config gets stuffed up, then the backups and the restore instructions are right there. Just pick an appropriate backup and use it.

We should probably be keeping backups of important stuff like that even in the absence of LLMs. Humans also err, and stuff does break, and what seemed obvious six months ago when we were in the groove might be impossible to remember when we need it today.

Am American. Need work vehicle that can move some stuff that might be fairly big. Minivan is solution. It does the job very well.

If I needed to move more stuff, then the best answer still isn't a pickup truck. It is instead a full-size van (Transit/Express/Sprinter/ProMaster).

Kei trucks seem cool, but they're still trucks. Whatever's in the back is open to the elements, looky-loos, and thieves. Those concerns are greatly diminished with vans.

(A pickup truck with a cap on it that never comes off is a lot like a minivan is, but with more steps.)

Also minivan owner. In terms of weight, it's pretty similar to a RAM 1500 in its ability to handle the gravity of its contents. I regularly move about a thousand pounds of stuff across the country without any issues.

I wouldn't expect it to work with 8 full-sized American adults over that kind of distance: The adults would kill eachother, removing load as it happens. But it seems fine for quick trips in town.

Being enclosed, as it is, does suck for moving things like sofas, but: On the rare occasion that I have needed to move a sofa, truck owners have always lined up to demonstrate the superiority of their road-going machines.

(And that's all fine. I didn't want to move the sofa by myself, anyway.)

The ESP32-S3-WROOM1 module is FCC certified for its own Wifi and Bluetooth emissions when used by itself.

And, well -- that's certainly good.

But the FCC rules cover more than just Wifi and BT, and the whole rest of the widget also needs to comply with them. Of particular interest is FCC Part 15 Subpart B, which covers unintentional radiators. The device would need to comply with Part 15 Subpart B even if it had nothing to do with Wifi or BT.

Putting one part that is certified for one issue into a device doesn't extend a magical blanket of compliance to everything else that the whole of the widget contains.

Does the SPI or I2C bus (or anything else) leak RF beyond allowable limits? Eh, who knows. I certainly don't know. It's easy to say words like "it should be fine," but without testing then nobody actually knows.

The CE mark, meanwhile: That mark means exactly nothing in the US, where the author is located and the devices are sold from. The United States has zero regulatory recognition of any of the processes and/or tests that CE may cover. People often confuse this issue, wherein: They don't think it be like it is, but it do.

A Honda minivan can fit 4x8 sheets of plywood in the dry, under-roof, with the doors closed. Other times, it can seat 8.

The Ram 6000 Max Diesel Rampage Pro: Because homelessness can be anyone's future

I still own a Diamond Rio Volt SP250 MP3-playing portable CD player. How does that fit into this non-timeline? (I bought it in 2001 if that matters.)

Yes.

Or my preferred expression: "Bullshit."

That is an unbelievably slick thing that you've got there.

It feels very light-weight, it's approximately instantly-responsive. Back button works. I don't understand the stats (or my contribution to them), but whatever.

(the closed-captioning pop-up causes some overlay issues for me, though)

moar edit: Upon further review with my very not-special desktop box, I'm reasonably confident that this is the quickest, most-responsive "TV-watching" experience I've had since analog NTSC left the scene ~eons ago. It's fast like switching from channel 11 to channel 13 used to be with the very quickest and most well-behaved of tuners.

What aren't you doing that everyone else is doing?

The platform can't fix what the platform is unaware of.