XTL
@XTL@sopuli.xyz
- Comment on HDD data recovery 1 day ago:
I’ve once had a hard drive of some particular vintage that wasn’t able to start. I did get it running with a hammer tap. Got the remains of data out and replaced the drive. It was nothing special, a Unix system drive with nothing that wasn’t on tape, but I just had to see if I could fix a hard drive with a hammer.
I also remember one admin who would often be seen walking between computer maintenance room and workshop wing with drives and a blacksmiths hammer labelled “format”.
- Comment on What’s Your Oldest System? 1 day ago:
Psions were pretty amazing. Can’t believe they ran a whole operating system like that on a couple of batteries. Iirc, turning on the LCD backlight doubled the idle power consumption. So the whole system was as heavy as a couple of LEDs.
- Comment on Shopping app Temu is “dangerous malware,” spying on your texts, U.S. lawsuit claims 1 day ago:
¿Por que no los dos?
- Comment on Five Men Convicted of Operating Massive, Illegal Streaming Service That Allegedly Had More Content Than Netflix, Hulu, Vudu and Prime Video Combined 1 week ago:
It’s en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permission_culture - pay the protection money or the enforcers will come for you.
- Comment on Chicken vs Egg 1 month ago:
Yes, unless declared integer.
- Comment on QWERTY Keyboards on a touch screen are still the stupid! 1 month ago:
True. But the rule of thumb is that in order to replace an existing working solution, a new model needs to be at least ten times better in quantifiable ways. Otherwise it’s worth staying with the established solution.
What’s ten times better than qwerty?
- Comment on Bocchi The Rock! (by Dethmaid) 1 month ago:
Wow. An artist (presumably human) who has actually seen a guitar and bothered to draw one roughly correctly. A Strandberg 7, no less. Ok, the strings are ropes and the neck pickup is wonky, but very good work.
- Comment on What's your favourite era for video games? 1 month ago:
Scummvm is much better than the old native interpreter. And the Amiga versions are obviously better than dos though any one should work.
- Comment on How to opt out of the privacy nightmare that comes with new Hondas 1 month ago:
Car infotainment systems have always been outdated.
- Comment on X.Org on NetBSD - the state of things 1 month ago:
Interesting read. Lots of flashbacks to old installs. I think I’ve even used xedit once upon a time.
- Comment on What Calendar and To Do solution do you recommend? 1 month ago:
Really nice and comprehensive looking page. Should probably test drive that some day. Thanks.
- Comment on What Calendar and To Do solution do you recommend? 1 month ago:
PHP warning.
- Comment on TikTok sues the US government over ban 1 month ago:
Read that as family in a basket. Close enough.
- Comment on Republicans are pulling out all the stops to reverse EV adoption 1 month ago:
Burning any carbohydrates in inefficient piston engines is never going to be environmentally friendly, though.
- Comment on Republicans are pulling out all the stops to reverse EV adoption 1 month ago:
They’ve already made contracts and announcements for France as well.
- Comment on Republicans are pulling out all the stops to reverse EV adoption 1 month ago:
Yes. The term has been kind of redefined in practise from massive misuse. Just like many others.
- Comment on Republicans are pulling out all the stops to reverse EV adoption 1 month ago:
The worst of both worlds? Yes, pretty much.
- Comment on Men over 30, what do you keep in your bedside nightstand? 1 month ago:
Phone, alarm clock (because some mornings, at least one of those will fail). Water bottle on the floor so there’s less fuss when I tip it over.
Piles of books have taken over most other surfaces.
- Comment on Time slows down 1 month ago:
C++ feels that way, too.
- Comment on Older patient gamers: what is your preferred gaming platform? 2 months ago:
Playstations that are old enough to become cheap to get but new enough that the local libraries still have a game collection.
Otherwise a Linux pc and gog, flea markets, local used sellers, or other sources.
You can generally avoid big updates simply by keeping the machine offline.
- Comment on YouTube is finally cracking down on third-party apps that enable ad-blocking 2 months ago:
That’s peertube, right? A slight problem is that a lot of the popular content is only on YouTube for the money. Better patronage or sponsoring systems would help with that. For ones not in it for the money, knowing there’s a solid service with community would probably suffice.
- Comment on A large language model trained off of Lemmy would be funny 2 months ago:
It would be a good bot.
- Comment on Why do Americans measure everything in cups? 2 months ago:
It is for people with flaky 3d printers.
- Comment on Why do Americans measure everything in cups? 2 months ago:
K is Kelvin. Kilo is k.
- Comment on Why do Americans measure everything in cups? 2 months ago:
No, it’s just one megafuck.
- Comment on life pro tip!! 2 months ago:
Finally, an application for homeopathy!
- Comment on The 6502 CPU Powered a Whole Generation! | The 8bit Guy 2 months ago:
Sometimes I wish I’d had one and some books back in the day. How different life might have been. Eventually, a 68k was nice, but actual documentation was hard to come by where I grew up. Didn’t actually really learn to use assembly before 8051 classes much later.
- Comment on AMD, Intel, absent from China’s list of approved CPUs 2 months ago:
Maybe it was the same poshter.
- Comment on Have We Reached Peak AI? 3 months ago:
Um, actually clueless people have made “that’s not real AI” and “but computers will never …” complaints about AI as long as it has existed as a computing science topic. (50 years?)
Chatbots and image generators being in the headlines has made a new loud wave of complainers, but they’ve always been around.
- Comment on This was the first result on Google 3 months ago:
Almost every sentence. But funny self review and other things aside, main problems:
“Watts… Contains.” Is a fundamental confusion on what a watt is. It’s like asking how much fast there is in a box.
The answer has a good basic idea, but also a total comprehension failure not just pulling the numbers out of thin air, but badly describing an equation with watts on one side and watt hours on another. Both ignoring realities and getting the hypotheticals wrong.
When they could have just said “yes, you could use a suitable inverter with a suitable battery and a fridge in some cases” or something like that.