Chromebooks maybe?

I always figured the browser part mostly falls out of doing the Electron-for-cross-platform thing.

Silly idea: computer vision for classtoom rollcall. Take a photo and it generates a list of absences.

I wish there was a meaningful civilian corps in my country. The military tends to offer two selling points:

• Employer of last resort that takes most-all comers
• Disciplined, all-inclusive experience

which would be valuable for many young adults, but there’s no reason we can’t get a similar model without the whole “die for hegemony/oil/to impress rightwong voters that you’re tough” factor. Surely we’ve got plenty of Corps of Engineers atyle grunt work thete.

I think there would be more sympathy if Cloudflare pointed to a specific limit breached and proposed ways to get into compliance at their current price plan.

“Service XYZ is now consuming 500% of expected quota. Shut it down or we need to get you on a bigger plan.” is actionable and meaningful, and feels a little less like a shakedown.

I’m sick of “unlimited” services that really mean “there’s a limit but we aren’t going to say what it is.” By that standard, freaking mobile telecoms are far more transparent and good-faith players!

Perhaps this also represents a failing in Cloudflare’s product matrix. Everyone loves the “contact sales for a bespoke enterprise plan” model, but you should be creating a clear road to it, and faux-unlimited isn’t it. Not everyone needs $random_enterprise_feature, so there’s value in a disclosed quota and pay-as-you-scale approach: the customer should be eager to reach out to your sales team because the enterprise plan should offer better value than off-the-rack options at high scale.

ARM was designed because the 6502 was approaching end of viability, and Acorn (the maker of the BBC Microcomputer) needed a next-gen product. At the time, RISC was the trendy thing, and I suspect the 286 and 68000 were too expensive to adapt for their products; they weren’t pushing £5000+ workstations like IBM or Unix vendors.

It was light and small because they had a small team; low power was a happy accident.

The US is desperate to rattle sabres with China.

I suspect there’s a lot of nostalgia for the Cold War in the US gerontocracy. They were the centre of the “free world”, who had to accept American foreign policy on a “you’re with us or against us” basis, and they had a permanent excuse to splash cash on defense bric-a-brac, all without the political snafu of actually going to war.

It feels like the PRC avoided being a 1:1 replacement for the USSR; they never represented a “They’ll nuke Dubuque” threat, so you couldn’t rally support the same way. And the West is too wedded to cheap imports and entranced by new markets to accept a hard trade cutoff right now, so they pick little fights (semiconductors, EVs, TikTok) hoping to make bold gestures. Behind the gestures, it’s not about a direct military or national security angle (if people are using social media on military bases, that’s a discipline breach whether it’s TikTok or Facebook) so much as trying to push back the day that the US is not the unquestioned dominant economic and military power.

So in n years when the courts finally sort it out, TikTok will fire-sale to someone who doesn’t know what to do with it and let it rot, 90% of the users will have long ago moved on to the next social platform with a 5-year lifespan, and a bunch of foreign investors will have a bitter taste that if you make a product Americans willingly choose, their free-market-loving government will screw up your commercial investment to punish you for being Communist.

This is the firmware I’ve been working on. Basically I wrote it because at the time (early 2023) there wasn’t a “good” keyboard firmware like QMK or ZMK for the CH32V305. Now it supports keyboards, joysticks, and a rudimentary pointing device made out of a PS2-style analogue stick.

https://gitlab.com/hakfoo1/ch32v-keyboard/-/tree/fightstick?ref_type=heads

That branch has the mapping I used. Note this firmware has a keyboard-centric assumption that switches are wired as a matrix (between two sense lines), even if that matrix is 1x24, rather than just grounding a sense line individually.

The stick portion was one of those “Pandora Box” devices that was built into a cabinet and pre-wired to a crappy Android TV box.

I bought it because I figured it was probably cheaper than cutting a decent looking cabinet and buying the buttons off AliExpress. That also meant it came with a predefined cable harness to fit the Android box. In the hopes of making it tidy, and reversible, I ordered a little throwaway PCB that accepted the existing 40-pin plug and bridged it to a nanoCH32V305 breakout board. Of course, I made a design mistake, so the PCB had bodge wires, so not much was saved.

If you’re starting from scratch, you could direct-wire to the MCU breakout board.

I’m thinking it might be my 2.5G router when it drops. Or worst case, maybe retire the Atom I’m using for a NAS.

I’ve been using some much smaller CH32V305 based keyboard controllers for a while, recently built a fightstick aroubd the platform. Now if only I fidn’t suck at joystick games, having grown up on gamepads.

Sovereign citizens are to civil lawyers as alchemists are to chemists.

They both invented their own lore to try to make the universe do what they want, except the alchemists actually strived to move towards more reliable and accurate science.

Given how people gush over baby animals, this is just the marketing campaign shark preservation needs.

Because Wayland is a hot mess.

I’m not sure we should be dismissive of politicians trying to reduce interventionist foreign pokicy in the abstract. The “US as world police” paradigm is a difficult angle.

From the US perspective, it’s expensive AF, delivers erratic results (see Iraq) and it’s created a lot of enemies over the years, basically handing Russia and China a support base on a silver platter.

On a global level, it does seem a bit weird for everyone to come calling to one nation for support, which doesn’t really encourage a multi-voiced and spirited debate if everything breaks down to “whoever has US backing wins”.

There’s definitely a “we wrote a cheque we no longer want to cash” lock-in factor on this conflict, but maybe it’s also time to stop writing so many cheques.

What kind of amp uses a full farad of capacitance?

The ones I see tend to be a few thousand microfarads, maybe 20-40k for high end stuff. OTOH sometimes you see innoculous looking supercaps for storing settings; I’ve got dome out of an old Technics tuner that are like 3F… at 3v. Not sure there’s enough oomph to do that damage even at 3F.

I’ve heard it phrased as “the only stable API for Linux games is Win32.”

Somewhere I have a boxed copy of Hexen for Linux and I doubt it will run on Void (holding with kernel 6.6.6)

GeoWorks.

Here’s a full GUI vector graphics/word processor/productivity app suite with clean Motif-esque decor and solid multitasking… and it runs on a 512k machine with a 5MHz CPU.

The C64 predecessor was impressive too, but straddles the other side of toy/professional IMO.

This seems to be a difference between US and UK English.

“Chicken Burger” is a reasonably cromulent expression in the UK, but it would always be a “Chicken Sandwich” on the other side of the Atlantic.

Also, “Turkey Burger” has some currency, although that might have just been an extensive marketing campaign trying to convince Americans to swap ground beef for ground turkey.

The West seems to define “democracy” in a very specific form: there MUST be multiple competing political parties and power MUST, at least in theory (compare Singapore, Mexico, etc) regularly transfer between them as the result of elections.

This is something Western states have been able to pull off, but it’s actually sort of peripheral to the theoretical INTENT of democracy-- that the government serves the masses. Good governance is pretty much a by-product of the fear of being voted out of office.

You can, and often do, have the all-sacred elections and peaceful transfer of power and still have a government which isn’t acting in service of its electorate. Sure, you can pick red corporate stooge or blue corporate stooge, but the Overton window is still a narrow slit that represents no real threat to the rich, and factionalism and winner-take-all elections sabotage any actual forward motion.

Meanwhile, the single-party state, unencumbered by having to tear itself apart in battles for the throne every four years, can focus on consensus and actual needs. Good governance can come from a sense of civic duty, or even a smartly weaponized corruption (if everyone thrives, my cut of graft grows with it!)

Not really. Their menu is just permutations of seven ingredients. So only finite diversity and combinations.

Modern DOS 8x16. I like the nostalgic look and boxiness.

The “Packard Bell” jokes are also right there if you want to tickle a large number of '90s kids.