titusjohnson

About 5 years ago or so I was able to collect my Dad's C64 collection from my Mom's house, buy some new cables and an official C64 monitor off of eBay, and gift him his old computer back for Christmas.

I can't speak to cassettes, we had only cartridges and floppies. My Dad was a prolific pirate, so cases and cases of floppies. I'd say roughly 3 out of 5 worked, and we were able to boot the old game up. Karateka, 4th and Inches, Hat Trick, Bubble Bobble, Impossible Mission...

I was surprised the C64 worked, honestly. It had been stored for nearly a decade in an old Barn next to decrepit plow/cattle equipment from the early 1900's, not protected from the environment at all, just an old cardboard box literally busting at the seams. At least it wasn't on the ground.

I used to budget the bulk of my yearly tax refund for a PC upgrade of some kind. A bit over $1k every year. Something was always due for a replacement in an endless treadmill of avoiding total system obsolescence.

Now, shit just lasts forever. I upgraded from a 1st gen i7 920 _this year_ into some mid-range Ryzen 5. I'm still using the 2070 RTX I bought over 5 years ago to power the HTC Vive and a 1440p monitor; with this new CPU the gfx card is finally getting a workout and has become the bottleneck while also giving me a massively better experience.

I'm tempted by the 9070 graphics cards but honestly, I just don't need it. I can tweak settings on any AAA game and get ~50fps of real frames and I'm just fine with that. I probably won't upgrade the graphics card until I pick up a dramatically better display device that requires it. Maybe the Frame will push the issue, maybe it won't.

I take the pants that have insufficient pockets to a tailor, and ask them to extend the depth of the phone pocket. You can even ask them to do the extension in phone size if you want to restrict its movement in your pocket. On average I've needed about a 3" extension which both restricts lateral phone movement, and also carries it low enough on my thigh that the phone doesn't pinch into my hip when I sit down.

$30 or so later you'll have an integrated Pholster and don't have to carry another thing around with you. For $200 you should be able to update all the pants you have that lack a proper pocket. This is also an incredibly easy thing to sew yourself, by hand, while you watch TV. $30 for a tailor to do the first pair to give you a template to follow, $50 at a craft store will get you some decent scissors, needle, thread, and a yard of whatever material you like. You'll butcher the first pair of pants, but the second, will be better and the third will be perfect.

We need mandatory licensing. It worked for Radio, it can work for Streaming.

There's no reason Netflix and Hulu couldn't both have ALL media available. Then they could actually compete on features and capabilities, not on media catalog.

I'm a big fan of tasteful remakes/remasters/updates. I don't mind paying again. I liked the Monkey Island update, System Shock, Myst, and Oblivion. They hit the right balance of QOL changes to take advantage of modern control schemes and polishing up the gfx to match my rose-colored memories. Oblivion on my HDTV looks so much like how I remember it looking on my 15" Compaq my nostalgia bones vibrate.

About 60 percent thought 5-8 years is the ideal amount of time between versions. Only 11 percent thought 10 years or more was preferable.

This I don't understand. 5-8 years old is the ideal age to remaster? So Skyrim should have had a full-blown remaster by now, if not 2?

I want to see 20 year old stuff get this treatment. Homeworld 1, Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2, Zork: Grand Inquisitor, Max Payne, Mech Warrior.

Emoji, Emoticon, Smiley, to the average user these are all the exact same thing. They mean "fun inline image in my text". Technical people dismissing the Robber or Seahorse emoji as a Mandala Effect is actually a great example of not diagnosing the root problem, aka _not listening to the customer_.

I had massive, massive packs of custom icons installed into my Trillian client going all the way back to the early 00's. So did my friends, and we all knew it. Anyone new to the friend group was installing packs right away too so they could get all the fun jokes that were only applicable if you had the right emoticons installed. Here's [1] an example of a phpBB board distributing their custom icons as Trillian emoticons, so their members can keep the vibe going no matter how they are chatting.

The whole world did not fantasize a Robber emoji. We sent robber smileys. We sent and received gun emoticons, seahorses, aliens, etc. What changes is how those symbols are communicated. The feature shifted from being a local-only token-to-img replacement operation to being encoded in the character set that is delivered, and in that version rev of the "Fun images in text" concept, commonly used pictographs were left behind.

[1] https://www.nightscrawlers.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=9745

Apple doesn't advertise this as the intent, but until the Air I felt that the Phone+Case combo is the complete phone, as it is intended to be used. Add any of Apple's official cases, leather, silicone, whatever, and that's the official "thickness" of the phone. The cameras are recessed, the front display is recessed, the whole phone is wrapped in leather and further customized to your style.

Now the Air has a bump that is so big no case can hide it without also being unreasonably thicc, breaking the trend. I wonder what a case mfg could stuff into the awkward space on the peninsula where the camera is missing so the case provides a uniform surface when laying flat, even if that means a bigger bump on the top when cased. The phone would have a natural angle towards the user, that's kinda nice. Maybe a little bluetooth speaker setup so owners of the Air can more efficiently irritate their fellow passengers.

The problem with Art is Art is whatever the Artist says it is. There is no concrete definition of Art, it is wholy subjective to the perspectives of the creator and the appreciator. Comics & Manga certainly fall under the umbrella of art in a strict sense, they are first and foremost Comics & Manga.

Colloquially when people say Art they mean what they see in a museum, not what they can buy in the corner store. When I subscribe to a generic Art category I want to see artists showing techniques, cool paintings, breakdowns of how marble was carved, and most certainly not catgirl uwu. I might be interested in a post about how comics are made (high effort, interesting content), but I am not interested in a picture from issue #346 (low effort fandom attraction).

Woah... gonna be honest I really thought I was using a v4. Well, Things 3 is fantastic and I highly recommend it.

Not who you're talking to, but there is none. Browsers have had "Bookmark all tabs" functionality for ages, which completely replaces tab hoarding. Especially now that the content of the page you visited 5 months ago isn't actually loaded in memory. It's basically a bookmark, switch to the tab and the content is reloaded.

For work I use Logseq, but I treat it like a .txt file. 90% of my use is the daily journal pages, adding NOW and LATER todos, notes, whatever. The ability to link nodes to other pages or nodes is just good enough to beat out a .txt.

For my personal life I use Things 4. I bought the Mac and iOS versions. Despite the steep price for the Mac version, I think it's worth it. I appreciate how the app is organized. I like that the "Inbox" dumping ground is totally separate from the "Today" queue, that it pulls in calendar events to the Today queue, and the differentiation of Anytime vs Someday. I would forget to check it too, if I hadn't placed a large widget right on my Home Screen. It's the first thing I see any time I unlock my phone, it helps a lot.

I am also an avid user of post-it notes. I like to keep a stack of them on my desk. These are for things I need to complete _today_, if not _up next_. This is how I stay focused when I'm in deep work. "add test for new sort fn", "better name for site/tenant var", "need new fixture for sortables", that kind of thing. When I leave my desk I should have no sticky notes on it, whatever left ends up in Logseq.

Everyone I know charges all their devices over night. Nightstands everywhere have charging docks for all the batteries you cary about your person. The hotels I have stayed at have USB ports about 2 feet from your pillow. Bluetooth speakers are semi-permanently plugged in until they need to be portable. The iPhone has built in smart charging specifically for charging over night.

Unlike my RC Car's high capacity batteries, which come with warnings all over them about proper charging care, not leaving them unattended, no common consumer product I have purchased in the last decade+ has come with any kind of visible warning regarding charging habits.

Common Sense over the last decade or two has shifted towards charging at night so your devices function all day.

I have an old Mac mini in a closet that runs Ubuntu and serves as a Dokku [1] host. My side projects run for free and are accessible inside my network or if I'm on VPN. If the project gets enough love eventually it'll graduate to public hosting and the transition is easy because the app is already built with deployment in mind.

I have saved so much money over the years just not having to pay $20/mo * IDEA_QTY. The Mac mini doesn't take much power and is dead silent.

[1] https://dokku.com

The problem seems to be that my brain gives me a dopamine buzz for merely _imagining_ accomplishing the project, whether or not I eventually implement, publish, and get users for the it.

I get this same buzz from talking about my projects. So today, I do not talk about anything I'm working on because I know I can drain myself of all motivation with one excited conversation.

If I want daydream fuel I buy a Powerball ticket for $2. I get the same dopamine rush doing fictional estate planning as I did spending $10=$50 on a domain and fantasizing about the project succeeding. The Powerball ticket also doesn't circle back around next year asking for more money.

I've also found that having a small homelab that can support Dokku or similar is also very helpful when I want to be productive. Deployable from Day 1 and after every change is a game changer for me, and deploying to an internal host lets me be lazy in all the right ways, as long as I keep track of the sins I commit (you can go a long, long way on a project before you have to add the boring boilerplate that is proper auth, for instance).

I might have to give that a try. It's been decades since I tried a netipot.

I had proper Flu this year, and almost exactly 4 weeks later caught COVID for the first time. Prior to these events I had a 5 year streak of being completely illness free, not a sniffle, not a head cold.

Both illnesses completely K.O.'d me. Literally 5 days straight of laying on the couch alternating between sleeping, sweating, or just groaning when I tried to move. So uncomfortable I couldn't even enjoy watching TV. I spent most of my awake time just kinda.... staring at the ceiling.

During the Flu on day 4 or 5 I was starting to feel a bit better, I was starting to care that my house was a bit of a wreck and the carpet in particular getting pretty gross (lots of dog treat crumbs). I did a half-assed job of vacuuming 2 bedrooms, the living room, and the den. Took maybe 15 minutes. That was the extent of my activity for the rest of the day, I was just wrecked. Had to sit down to catch my breath and get control of some violent shakes.

Next time I catch the flu I have to try going for a jog. It would probably put me into a coma long enough to sleep through the rest of the cold.

Because even with hygiene products, people buy them before they need them and stock up.

One would think so, but in my experience this is not the case on average. Of the half-dozen long term relationships I've had, only 1 partner was ever prepared for the monthly inevitable. For everyone else it was always treated as a surprise. Suggesting to my current partner that she stock up on the products she just used was dismissed with an "oh I don't need that stuff for weeks".

The trope of guys not wanting to go get tampons, or uncomfortably navigating the feminine hygiene isle, did not just appear out of nowhere.

I truly have no idea where all that energy was going.

Growing your body. I was the same in my late teens and early 20's. Family called it the POW Aesthetic. 6'1" & 150lbs, couldn't put an lb more on. I was strong as shit though, in a practical sense. No issue throwing 100lb feed bags over a shoulder and walking it up some stairs into storage, things like that. I was both doing active things all the time, and finishing growing my body. The summer I got my last growth spurt was agony, my bones hurt every night and I was a bottomless void of hunger.

Also, do not underestimate this bit:

All I did for activity was ride bikes some and lift weights a little, plus usual kid stuff, no serious sports or training.

Specifically I believe the "usual kid stuff" part was doing a lot for you, I know it was for me. Looking back I now realize that my "usual kid stuff" was me being very, very active. I was pounding out 20k+ steps a day just moving around the family farm, miles on a bike (often on grass too), and then maybe an hour of pick-up soccer in the evening. This was just normal activity for me back then, I would not have considered any of it Intentional Exercise. Today I'd have to intentionally train for an ironman to even start approaching that level of activity.

I gained 15lbs the _summer_ I got my first desk job, that was entirely because I replaced 8 hours of walking around and doing things with 8 hours of sitting in a chair, and about 30 minutes of walking for breaks and lunch.

Just ban loans against ephemeral assets. Loans must always be backed by concrete things. No funny money.

Growing up on a farm here in the US, electric fence wire (I think 14ga, not 8ga) was always useful. I almost always had a roll & some snips nearby when doing any maintenance. You can fix some broken electric fence, re-bind the fence paneling to T-stakes, and if desperate cobble together some hinges and a latch for an impromptu gate, all with a simple roll of wire.

A foot or two of this wire and you can whip up a stabilizer for hanging any old tool off of a single nail in the barn. A couple feet of it makes a tie-down for any plant or tree branch, sometimes you don't even need a stake, the wire can be pushed deep enough and into a J shape underground that it'll often hold on its own.

In my opinion this is how we shed good coders who are bad developers.

In my experience this aspect is chronically underestimated by devs. The change needs testing. Change Management might need to create artifacts. Help articles might need updating. Certain clients may need a heads-up. All the PMs need to be briefed (this change is outside of their roadmap so it'll be a fun surprise).

As an org grows the piece of the Effort Pie that is Development gets smaller and smaller. It's not that development gets easier, it's that every other part of the process grows in size and importance faster than the Development piece grows.

It takes about an hour of developer time to incidentally produce 20 hours of work elsewhere in the company.

I've been on both sides of this table multiple times, as the IC and as the Manager of an eager IC. Here's a list of all the reasons why I as your manager would also flat-out say No to this situation. (These are of course heavily tainted by my own recent experience of trying to coach a mid-level dev through a very similar problem)

- "Pretty much working" means all the fun stuff is done and the actual hard thing is left to wrap up. It's a useless estimate that only accounts for your coding work, which is usually the smallest amount of work performed on an integration feature like this.

- It's a rewrite so we've gotta do a full regression test on every piece of data that thing pulls back. Since it's old functionality it's not fully covered by our automated tests, so this goes to QA. Our QA team is overloaded so this unauthorized, not on the roadmap project now needs to jockey for priority with things that Marketing is literally making artifacts for _today_.

- "It's already built" isn't really a justification for a priority change, so now I'm in the awkward position of changing priorities for a non-roadmap task and justifying this to every single stakeholder who is respecting the process, or telling you it'll be 2 months minimum before QA can even think about it. Either way no one is happy and now I have to worry about you going rogue again and trying to work channels around me to get this thing shipped out of band.

- It's a full rewrite and going through manual QA, so it's nearly guaranteed that critical, but undocumented business rule fixes were missed. Somewhere in that library is a weird function holding up the world, but it was "obviously cruft" and left out. There's a good chance we won't find the issue until it has already polluted a ton of Prod data. That's why I won't let you do Developer QA. You've only been here a year and this service predates you, me, and the rest of the team, we literally have no context.

- If the client finds out we did a full rewrite, they too are going to do a full regression test on their end. Do you know the size of the shitstorm this is going to bring on us? Every single question, problem, feature change, bug, enhancement, communication, _everything_ we went through over the last XX years since we built this integration is going to resurface. I get re-litigate every. single. thing. "Since you're working on our integration can we get XX, XX, and XXXX?" (each is a sprints worth of dev time minimum), "YYY isn't working, did you guys break it again?" (it's always been broken but now someone gets to spend 3 hours in Datadog pulling logs to prove this).

- I've been using the "Rewrite This Library" and "Refactor That Service" projects as leverage to negotiate for more budget to bring on 2 more headcount so that we could actually do those rewrites with proper time and space. You talking about getting 80% done over a weekend has completely undermined the work I've put into this effort, and at the same time didn't remove the Refactor issue from my backlog. Now I will essentially have to shit-talk you in my own 1-on-1s in order to regain lost ground. "sfn42 is a decent developer but he just doesn't have a lot of context to what's happening outside his role. Needs more time in the oven before he gets the bump to Sr. Maybe I can pull him into more planning meetings so he can start growing in this area" -- congrats you just got invited to 6 hours of meetings a month regarding work you won't perform.

- In 6 months when our team is planning out some future work that's just way too much for the headcount & timeline we have, and you bring up "we could really use another Sr. Dev or two, any word on our headcount request?", I might reply politely with a "still no word if we can pull that off this quarter", but internally I'm wondering if the pain of bringing a new dev up to speed is less than the pain of working with you.

- Lastly, the most petulant reason, you were told No last week. I'm sorry you lost a weekend to this, but a No is a No and I need you to understand that. Other things are happening at this company outside the scope of your purview.

Again, this is all drawn from my own experience. I had a mid-level dev show me a huge refactor he started on the weekend. He was convinced it was almost done, "just a few small things left" is an exact quote. However I knew that this part was literally the smallest bit of the effort. I was seeing at least 3 months of work across 4 departments before it would actually be Done, in Production, and working to our satisfaction.

If I had the space I would normally be just fine letting the young fella just experience that pain. Make him do the scheduling, put him on point for everything, and just let him spin on it for a month or so. I did not have that time and space, so instead we spent a few hours white boarding out the rest of what needed to happen, and thankfully he mothballed his project of his own volition.

I've never thought it was anything but that. Work hard and be rewarded, that's the American Dream.

Why do you let your toddlers run the house, aren't you the parent?

Spam DVD logo upgrades as fast as you can. Open your browser as big as it will go. When the DVD logo gets close to the top, start shrinking the browser slowly. I think the DVD positioning is calculated from the bottom of the page, there's a bug where the logo(s) will get stuck near the top as you shrink the page and will constantly re-register a bounce multiple times per second. Eventually all the logos you buy will get clumped at the top, and you can get 1MM Stimulation per "bounce".

    When you remove profit from the equation, you also remove the incentive to increase supply.

My 2024 Mazda CX-5 has a heads-up display and I quite like it. It presents in the windshield right above my hands on the top of the wheel, shows current speed, cruise status, and lane detection. I feel like I don't have to take my eyes off the road to get a speed update, it's nice.

Can't say that about the USA.

Unlike jewels or greenbacks, you can get value out of cheddar over time by eating a cheese heavy diet. I imagine the tough part here is storing that much cheese for long enough to provide a large impact to your monthly grocery budget.