God the fear of accidentally sleeping through the alarm would probably keep me from sleeping at all

“When you hear the beeping you need to swap out the battery because if you don’t you’ll die. Goodnight.”

Or on Blue Sky or Mastadon

Hell reach put to your reps and tell them that they should have a Blue Sky and Mastodon for if something like this happens in the future.

Ain’t no better time than now due to the Twitter outage.

NGL I usually only do component level repairs on the power boards (or in the case of appliances most of the components are easy to find docs for and are much larger) but I usually find stuff by poking around with my multimeter or looking for obviously blown things. But my experience is more from the realm of appliance repair (and all from experimenting).

Testing capacitors can be done (and if they’re big enough) something I’ll do as well. I ain’t gonna test capacitors that are smaller that a grain of rice.

There are times though that it’s easier to just buy a new board rather than do component level repair.

Good news is that when it comes to TVs those boards are usually really cheap.

Usually if it’s a charging port, it’s pretty common that there’s like dirt in there or something.

But soldering a type C connector is pretty tough due to the size. Especially for my (lack of) experience level.

It could be a learning opportunity for you though.

NGL when it comes to that kind of fault I usually just replace the mainboard, they’re usually dirt cheap and it’s a hell of a lot easier to swap that whole board than it is to poke and prod for an hour just to find out it’s some 40 pin monster with micro-soldiered pins.

The power board is usually what I do component level replacements on. The t-con board and the main board I usually just swap.

For TVs it’s usually really simple, like internal fuses or blown caps. And a few with bad backlights or mainboards that are dead.

For 2 of them it’s been shorts in the LCD itself which meant I had to block the clock pin from the TCON board for the specific part of the screen with the short. Basically killing a line of pixels to get the TV working again. In general if the TV is 4k and smaller than like 45 inches you’ll never see it unless you look for it.

That’s a super involved fix (involving A LOT of trial and error to find the right pin) but it keeps it out of a landfill.

In general fixing a TV is always cost effective unless the actual LCD has physical damage.

In the last few years I’ve fixed about a dozen TVs, they can definitely suck to fix at times (especially the really new ones) but in general the fixes have been simple. And all of them were snagged out of the dumpster at my apartment complex.

And that’s just the TVs I’ve fixed. I like to fix things.

In terms of phones they’re a nightmare though. I’m keeping an eye on HMD phones and Fairphone though as both of them are a LOT easier to fix than other brands.

In the event of my current phone breaking I’d love to get either one of those brands.

I still recommend it with a little asterisk:

Disable a bunch of shit in it or download a privacy focused fork of it (like Librewolf)

Each time I update

So in general that’s each time there’s a new LTS version I want to update to. I don’t so the nightlies or daily branches for most of my software and the ones that I do I basically throw some cash like each quarter or so depending on how much I use their software.

Blender for example I think put about $100 towards it last year, that was only the second year I was able to support them and the first year (4 years ago) I only put $15 towards them. And Blender got the most I put towards a project last year.

This year I’ve already put $30 towards Godot though. It’s ahead of Blender right now in 2025.

I try to do what I can, sometimes I can’t contribute and sometimes I can. I like to help where and when I can.

Unfortunately I may have to hold off for a few months as I just got a suprise bill for $1800 so it may be October (hopefully) when I can throw some cash their way again.

I also contribute to some content creators I enjoy, though not as many as I’d like.

NGL I’d love this too

Unfortunately I have no recommendations as mine have been primarily physical journals

He was all of our friend and we left him behind

We’re sorry Tom, we didn’t think about what we were doing

Getting my friends to shift over is a pain in the ass for sure

Whenever I download a new version of Blender I typically throw them $10 - $15.

Just like with other open source software I use, I give it a shot and if I like it I’ll throw them $10 - $15 each time I update.

Edit: It’s not much but it’s not nothing. No raindrop feels reasonable for the flood and all that.

Considering how often Google’s AI hallucinates some garbage for an answer this is going to be terrible

That repo doesn’t, hell it mentions that you need to dump them yourself not even mentioning the possibility of other means.

Not sure about the others though.

Thank you for the link, I’m definitely sharing this with my friends

Going to peaceful protests are useful because it can help you meet some more like-minded folks.

Not to mention sometimes a protest starts peaceful and then goes to shit.

This so much!

Leave all Bluetooth devices at home as well as they have unique IDs that can be tied back to you as well.

And if you’re worried about your stereo you can always pull the fuse so it gets no power then put the fuse back when you get home.

Need directions? Print them and DO NOT LOSE THE PAPER!

Hitting the sun is surprisingly difficult

Launching into deep space knowing that they’ll never enter another star system on the otherhand…

When they are accurately called “text generators” and not “AI”

But at this point so many people have been misled by it that it may not be possible to educate those that have already been misled just stop others from being misled.