Dave.

“I have no mouth and I must scream” could end up being a plausible way to spend eternity.

Not really, it’s just phrased differently to the usual signup pitch, they’re putting in a middle ground between full “premium” subscribers (whatever that is) and public access with tracking and ad metrics.

Companies need revenue to operate. They get that revenue from advertising data and selling ad slots, or subscriptions. Whether they actually cease all tracking and ad metrics when you subscribe is something I’d doubt though, and that could be a case for the legal system if they didn’t do what they claim.

Personally, this behaviour is the point where I would not consider the site to be valuable enough to bother with.

“ChatGPT, write a letter to the community that says I am looking after this issue with untrusted BLOBs and it is of high importance but do not be specific about anything.”

+++

OK

ATH

NO CARRIER

OK

You are flashing the chip directly so apart from inadvertent short circuits and such if it doesn’t work you can just keep trying until it does.

As for wire length it all depends on how fast they clock the SPI bus when flashing. You’ll probably be able to get away with 20cm or so without difficulty , I’ve driven SPI displays with that kind of wire length before.

Dammit now I have to reduce the block size of my discord-based cold storage filesystem.

They need to learn how to use their tools better. Winscp does all that transparently for you if you press F4 on a file on a remote system. Or maybe they did and you just didn’t see it…

It’s quite a handy function when you’re diving through endless layers of directories on a remote box looking for one config file amongst many.

If library devs do versioning correctly, and you pin to major versions like “1.*” instead of just the “anything goes” of “*”, this should not happen.

Your unit tests should catch regressions, if you have enough unit tests. And of course you do, because we’re all operating in the dream world of, “I am great and everyone else is shit”.

If you’re interested in the systems behind Apollo, go find and read “Digital Apollo”.

It goes all the way through the project and describes in good detail everything, how they developed the control systems, the computer hardware, how the software was designed, how they implemented one of the first real computer systems project management, all the interactions between astronauts/test pilots who still wanted to “manually fly the lander”, the political back and forth between competing teams, the whole thing.

It’s a great read if you have a technical mindset.

Horn switches switch to ground. Power for your original horn relay is supplied from a fused battery source, passes through the horn relay, and when you press the horn button the button completes the circuit to earth, triggering the relay.

So, you need to wire your relay coil like this -

12 volts from a fused battery source to:

Your relay coil, to:

The horn switch, which then switches to:

Ground.

Just like how your current horn relay works.

This also works for older cars that do not have the really. They supply power to the horn, and then a single wire runs from the horn back to the horn button, which then completes the circuit to ground when pressed.

They could have hooked the phone up to a windscreen wiper motor (a high torque motor with a crank arm) and left it to run for a few hours, that would have given them about 10,000 open/close cycles. But no, it’s “let’s hang a 5kg weight off it and use the phone as a bit of a hammer”.

I’m guessing something like:

Robots.txt: Do not index this particular area.

Main page: invisible link to particular area at top of page, with alt text of “don’t follow this, it’s just a bot trap” for screen readers and such.

Result: any access to said particular area equals insta-ban for that IP. Maybe just for 24 hours so nosy humans can get back to enjoying your site.

There was a series of books in the '80s where a systems programmer gets pulled through a portal into your typical magical world, good vs evil, etc.

They subsequently look at the magical spells in use and realise they can apply Good Systems Programming Practices™ to them. And thus, with their knowledge of subroutines and parallel processing, they amplify their tiny innate magical abilities up to become a Pretty Good Magician™. So while all the rest of the magicians basically have to construct their spells to execute in a linear fashion, they’re making magical subroutines and utility functions and spawning recursive spells without halting checks and generally causing havoc.

It’s quite a good allegory for modern times, where a select few build all the magic and the rest just have useful artefacts they use on a day to day basis with no idea how they work

in which case I will go one level down, to the calculateExtraCommissions() method.

In which case you will discover that the calculateExtraCommissions() function also has the same nested functions and you eventually find six subfunctions that each calculate some fraction of the extra commission, all of which could have been condensed into three lines of code in the parent function.

Following the author’s idea of clean code to the letter results in a thick and incomprehensible function soup.

I shall begrudgingly consider it then, with much begrudgement.

But it’s three more letters. No deal.

1. Replace CMOS battery.
2. Get small UPS.
3. Discover that small UPS’s fail regularly, usually with cooked batteries.
4. Add maintenance routine for UPS battery.
5. Begin to wonder if this is really worth it when the rest of the house has no power during an outage.
6. Get small generator.
7. Discover that small generators also need maintenance and exercise.
8. Decide to get a whole house battery backup a-la Tesla Powerwall topped off by solar and a dedicated generator.
9. Spend 15 years paying this off while wondering if the payback was really worth it, because you can count on one hand the number of extended power outages in that time.
10. In the end times a roving band of thugs comes around and kills you and strips your house of valuable technology, leaving your homelab setup behind and - sadly - without power. Your dream of unlimited availability has all been for nought.

Conclusion: just replace the CMOS battery on a yearly basis during planned system downtime.

Jobs also believed that 3.5" was the perfect touchscreen size for the human hand, neglecting the fact that (a) the human hand size varies drastically and (b) people are willing to trade ergonomic perfection for more screen estate because it’s more usable that way.

You’re right, I try to use {insert cryptocurrency that I’m heavily financially invested in} for my every day transactions as much as possible, you should too, and you can get amazing returns as well! It’s win-win nobody loses ❤️

Webrings were themed though, so if your interest was cars, or cats, or ham radio, you could get on a webring for one of those topics and cycle through them.

And it wasn’t all random, you could move left or right on the ring , or jump randomly. So a good webring manager could group sites together as you went around the ring as well.