Fre:ac seems to run in a wine package.

Not to mention I bent all the pins on my Cyrix MII ttying to get it in that stupid socket.

It feels like there’s going to be a fire sale on American talent.

Someone should be rising to the moment- the counyry that offers an easy “show your voided American visa/passport and skip through the emigration process” could poach effectively.

ATSC 3.0 is usable. I have a HDHomerun sitting on my LAN with a couple 3.0 tuners.

The big problem is:

• the 3.0 broadcasts are still mostly tests, so you get mostly a respin of a 1.0 channel

• the audio is AC-4 and a lot of software doesn’t support it. There was stuff for Windows but when I looked, the usual suspects (VLC, mpv) on Linux didn’t support it

Why not an aerial for Jeopardy? It’s usually on local broadcast, so you could plumb together a DVR setup if you want it within a unified experience.

As someone who has to deal with PCI compliance issues, there’s plenty of noob mistakes, out-of-date thinking and outright “let’s log this data for debugging purposes even though if any regulator found out they’d nuke us from orbit.”

There are valid questions, many of which revolve around how and why it’s used.

Some systems have brain damaged approaches to diagnostics/logging, license enforcement, or remote service/update systems that create security holes but are not intentionally malicious.

Security is hard and we should remember Hanlon’s Razor.

I understand pre-OS X Macintoshes used colons.

I never seem to get appropriately coded romance scams.

I guess the RFI from my computer is jamming the gaydar.

If I need a Chromium, I feel like Vivaldi has their heart in the right place.

Sadly, the WebSerial stuff didn’t work when I tried it recently.

I tried custom laser engraving caps, some of my favourites:

‘Attack 0’ and ‘Attack 1’, actual key legends on some '80s Casio home computer

‘Run Stop’ from Commodre machines

The “diagonal half full box” inverse video key from Atari XL/XE keyboards.

I suspect the various Jolly Roger designs from either fictional or real pirates would work well. Or various “spell type” or “faction” logos from games.

I read about this. They make the printer WITH a perfectly good USB port and then stick a “no USB” label over it and attempt to force you to use their wireless setup.

https://post.lurk.org/@yaxu/110833261398955782 for more.

I’ve been working on “retrofication” of a “somewhat” modern case and have some notes for that process more than a specific recomendation:

• If you want a 3.5" floppy that works, you can either get a little USB adapter board, or a LS-120 on a PATA-SATA adapter. A Caleb UHD-144 might work, but many BIOSes and Windows still special-case LS-120s as “it can be drive A.” The USB adapters sort of suck, because the USB floppy spec sucks. 5.25, the best you can really do would be to rig up a Greaseweazle (specialised USB controller) which won’t really work like a regular floppy drive

• Instead of a MHz display, you can get a small programmable OLED. Digole offers some that can be hooked to a $1 USB-UART adapter and programmed very easily-- I’ve got some crude code hacked up (C++ for Linux) on my Gitlab (https://gitlab.com/hakfoo1/graphic-oled-control-for-linux) that gives you MHz and a bunch of other stats, but you could probably also rig up something on Windows

• Rustoleum Heirloom White is a very good “panel beige” for the metal side panels. You might also look at their “Satin Ivory” which gives a slightly yellowed tint good for the front panel.

• Intentional colour mismatches can work very well, like if you use an optical drive, paint it a different beige than the rest of the case, to indicate either being different plastic than the main case, or an aftermarket add-on. Tell a story.

• Some features feel like they “post-date” a case. Top-mounted ports seem pretty uncommon on vintage cases the first one I can recall having was well into the Windows Vista era)

• Get a momentary paddle switch, preferrably red, and mount that and it buys you a mountain of street cred.

• Grilles can be cut away and replaced with 3-D printed alternatives.

I’m hoping for MacroSD. About the size of a 3.5" floppy so you won’t lose it easily.

Seriously, it’s interesting that now that we have the tech to make a useful-capacity storage device the size of a credit card, we don’t. Not like those crappy giveaway flash drives printed with a card design, where they had a captive USB head and were 4x as thick as a card, but something with just contacts like a chip card, so you might need to use an external reader but it really preserves the wallet-size concept.

I’d love to have a cheap 16GB card in my wallet with all my health records and a cryptographically signed copy of my will as a one-stop, no cloud required, emergency kit.

If you have a LS-120, it will eject the floppy disc like you were on dome fancy-pants Macintosh!

Well, the example I gave above-- in the early Socket 754/939 days, ASRock sold a bunch of boards with an extra slot that would take a daughterboard that contained a Socket AM2 and DDR2 slots which would theoretically allow a significant upgrade on the “same” mainboard. Not sure anyone ever bought it, since it cost as much as a new mainboard.

The most famous example of this style of weirdness was the ECS PF88, which could be equipped with a Socket 939, LGA775, or a Pentium M depending on daughtercard choices.

But there was also some novel features-- motherboards with tube amplifiers on board (AOpen AX4B-533), a few generations of “instant boot mini-Linux environments”, and some more sophisticated debug tools (I recall some firms trying small LCD displays and voice prompts to replace 7-segment POST code displays-- considering a 128x32 all-points-addressable OLED costs like $1 in quantity of 1, why are those not standard when the motherboard costs $300+?!)

They used to make zanier products (the stuff with ULI chipsets and CPU upgrade slots) back in the 2000s when they were a lowend brand competing with ECS. The feature set between boards is less diverse these days.

Yeah, he was one of a long string of lunatic leaders, which evidently “democracy” has done little to temper. The thing I recall about him was a bit in a reference book to coins and currency: at one point in the 1950s, the central bank issued a 500-hwan note that had a large central portrait of him (the overall design looked like a cheap riff on US currency of the time), and rapidly replaced it because he concluded people folding it in half across his face (as people do with banknotes) was some symbol of defiance to him personally.

They don’t teach that style of crazy in dictator school.

As for the “Korea is a puppet and exists only as long as the US props it up”, duh, but I figure there’s perhaps some chance to exploit some “we’ve been under the yoke so long we no longer notice it” and “we’re a big strong country that thinks it can actually engage internationally” mentalities to loosen the fixation with copyright and chasing those imagined license revenues that will never materialize.

You’d think there’s a whole soft-power paradigm being missed here.

The value of export content well exceeds the license fees you negotiate with the English repackagers. Think of how entire generations view Japan favourably after a steady diet of anime, samurai/ninja stereotypes, and kaiju movies.

Flood the market. Free international rights for all. Sponsor your own damned fansubs if you have to. Use it to soft sell your culture, history, and branding. We need 24 episodes of an isekai animation featuring a bishounen Syngman Rhee stat.

It’s a no-win for them.

They lose the war and pull the trigger, and everyone from the janitor on up is prosecuted by the PRC as saboteurs.

They win the war and have blown up the factory? Goodbye #1 export product.

Its only value is as a hindrance to peaceful negotiation. The threat is actually more useful as a “we’ll pull the plug if you abandon your defence commitments” rather than “we’ll pull the plug when attacked”. That bludgeon prevents Western powers from seeking a managed, Hong Kong/Macao sryle reunification strategy.