[X] My Assistant

I know Amazon can have some pretty shit deals at times, but why do you entirely avoid it?

Because it treats employees badly, and Bezos doesn't need any more money. Unless I'm given a gift card for Amazon (in which case they already have the money), I don't use Amazon. Also try to use smile.amazon.com and give to a good nonprofit. I chose the FSF for maximum irony. I think I had to manually key in their information (they weren't on the list).

Apparently, I'm not the only one who did that. [old.reddit.com] https://old.reddit.com/r/freesoftware/comme..._in_total_from/

Nice. That's a pretty good deal for those parts now, even more so in the past. I struggle to get nice GPUs for cheap; there are so many fakes out there listed at low prices and the major/reputable sites I go to tend to sell not much lower than listed retail price.

This was before bitcoin mining reached peak meme levels, and back when AMD cards were the ones the existing miners wanted.

Also I'll take a moment to say that if the parts haven't been abused (overclocked, overvolted, regularly overheated) then there's nothing wrong with buying used. Since you're not going high-end, there's less danger of damaged parts since the miners don't want the weaker stuff.

I think the 750 Ti was around $130? I remember it was nearly half of what I spent on the computer total. I believe the i5-3350p ran me around $120 or $130.

Now that I think about it, I think I was using some DDR3 RAM I already had back then, and I think I upgraded to 16GB later. That is to say, I don't think the $300 figure includes RAM; Just CPU + MOBO + GPU. Had I bought used, that'd have been easy to do with the RAM. I think if I build another computer I'll buy everything used that I don't already have lying around, but I am not in need of a computer atm. I do have everything to build a Core 2 Quad PC using old parts except a case, I think.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Dec 30 2019, 03:38

Nice. I hadn't heard of some of these sites before, so thanks for the tip @Anime Janai.
Yeah, refurbished stuff often has great deals, but I've had some bad luck with them in the past (ie: several tablets/notebooks/pc components breaking down within a few months. Yikes!). Plus they were from reputable (or at least well known) sites like Amazon/Best Buy. The only upside was that returns were handled relatively easily.

What's your experience been like for evertek/outletpc?

Edit: For sure @dragontamer8740. Cryptocurrency craze totally jacked up the prices for AMD GPUs, which were actually reasonable even at retail price for their performance before. That was around back when the core count race was just starting out. And you're right about buying used. My fixation on getting the parts new definitely costs quite a bit extra.

This post has been edited by swimswim100: Dec 30 2019, 06:42

Because it treats employees badly, and Bezos doesn't need any more money. Also try to use smile.amazon.com and give to a good nonprofit. I chose the FSF for maximum irony. I think I had to manually key in their information (they weren't on the list).

You would irritate Bezos and many Amazon employees if you found a way to funnel Amazon money to the non-profit corporation that Kshama Sawant works for. Bezos' arch-enemy in Seattle is city councilmember Kshama Sawant.

Sawant is a wealthy fanatic socialist who believes the rich should be forced by laws to share most of their wealth. She's tried to get various taxes put onto Amazon and her antics were part of why Amazon wanted two more headquarters outside of Seattle despite being in a wired world. The threats of moving out more of the company to other states made Sawant back off on some of her more rabid attacks. This past Nov 2019 election, she was up for re-election and Bezos put a million dollars or so into the opposition which made it one of the most expensive city council elections for a single candidate in Seattle. Despite that, Sawant won because of course Seattle is full of homeless and minorities that vote because voting is easy as the state law even prohibits checking for citizenship for voting ballots or driver licenses. Thus, illegal immigrants all vote for Sawant (and against Trump of course).
[en.wikipedia.org] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kshama_Sawant

blah blah we should make it harder for people to vote and lots of people vote fraudulently blah blah

Nice and on-topic.

Also 100% on-topic:
I've been thinking about ways to get this Gotek (emulates a floppy disk drive using a USB drive full of floppy images) mounted inside my amiga without cutting into the case. As soon as I've decided on a solution for that, my Amiga's going to be in a pretty nice place. All I plan to do after that's done is to upgrade it to 1MB chip RAM so I can play Monkey Island on it.

And then I'll tidy up this room.

[i.imgur.com] (IMG:[i.imgur.com] https://i.imgur.com/eIZuopYg.jpg)

Also, when I look up the prices of each individual Amiga part I own, it's kind of staggering how much it would have cost me to acquire all the bits individually on ebay had I come across an A500 without any of the extra bits. i think I could probably easily triple what I bought it for if I sold off the parts separately. "Amiga people" are insane.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Dec 30 2019, 13:27

Regretting not getting a bigger HDD

That's why I coughed up for a 2tb SSD for my main laptop. Hardly an upgrade if the drive is cramped.
Still need to migrate data, but I know my 'data' is literally awful nested migrations- this one after I clean up downloads and desktop, I should be able to just merge into my /home. It won't fix the old ones, but it'll dave one more matryoshka layer.

Also, still never threw linux on the cf-18, but that's not really that pressing.

nice ff mousepad

I need to buy a new GC

nice ff mousepad

Thanks. It's probably the thing I get compliments for the most, so I guess it's one of my more brilliant ideas. Just wish I had brilliant ideas when it mattered more. :|
FF3 and 5 are my favorites in the series.

I need to buy a new GC

GC meaning gamecube?
RIP.
Does it have to be a Gamecube or will a Wii work?

Also, still never threw linux on the cf-18, but that's not really that pressing.

Toughbook? Cool.
Only new laptop I actually kind of want is made by Panasonic, but only sold in Japan. 1920x1200 or 2160x1440 IPS, 12" screen (8:5 and 3:2 possible depending on selected model - I want either SV or XZ series; probably XZ since my X201 tablet has spoiled me and it's in glorious 3:2, the closest I'll likely get to a square without buying that $2000 eizo monitor), has a shitload of ports and an optical drive built in. All it's missing is a trackpoint and the classic thinkpad US keyboard layout with the navigation cluster at top right.
Big image. Sorry about the compression, but it should be legible.


This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Dec 31 2019, 15:54

I wonder how bad the vibration on this pump are gonna be

Friend of mine just offered me a free playstation 2 (fat) with a broken PSU. I think it runs off 12V from the PSU, so if that's true I can probably just use an ATX PSU since I don't care about looks. But I'll need to do more research and actually obtain it to investigate. Hopefully it'll just be a fuse or at worst needing to replace the PSU. After all the horrific surgery I subjected my launch PSX to to fix the main board I have little desire to do that kind of repair again on a 2.

I'll be booting games from a hard drive, so I don't care about the disc drive being an unreliable pile of crap. Specifically, Jak & Dakster.

Also, speaking of horrific surgeries, opened up my Commodore monitor the other day and found this inside.
Not going to lie, I'm impressed. I wonder what stories this board could tell me (Click for the full size image; it's worth a closer inspection).
[i.imgur.com] (IMG:[i.imgur.com] https://i.imgur.com/8LsEC4Vg.jpg)

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Jan 1 2020, 05:50

I wonder if this decade anything will actually happen to kill some of the tech monopolies.
I'm probably getting my hopes too high.

I wonder if this decade anything will actually happen to kill some of the tech monopolies.

You mean hope for the Chinese companies to put more of those tech companies out of business.

You mean hope for the Chinese companies to put more of those tech companies out of business.

I don't see Google being killed in the cards.
Nor do I see M$ being killed in the cards.
Fuck AT&T, they deserve whatever they get. Same for Verizon and Comcast.

Also, breaking up != killing.

AT&T's been broken up before, but that didn't make Japanese companies (the big "threat" of the time in 1984) swoop in to fill its position. It's just been allowed to re-converge but now with less oversight than it had before the breakup.

More regulation would be a satisfactory alternative, but I know people hate that even more here.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Jan 2 2020, 03:48

The compose key’s great. Makes it a breeze to type directional quotes, accented characters on US keyboards (without remembering stupid hex codes), and so on.
Wish keyboard manufacturers would just include it instead of the stupid right windows key/context menu key. Would also be lovely if MS/Apple would support it out of the box. It’s sad that it’s now a forgotten relic of 90’s Unix workstations and that people are still using altcodes.

It's 2020, there is talk about the colonization of Mars, and yet Windows is still somehow unable to copy PNGs into the clipboard without losing transparency information
Truly a challenge for the ages

Windows

Sounds like a personal problem.

I made a little stub that overrides a few GTK2 functions so I can run Adobe's stand-alone flash player without any menu bars or URL bars. This is needed because the 'full screen' mode makes keyboard key presses stop working in the Linux build for whatever reason and I'm sick of using the windows version in Wine.

So now I can just hide the window decorations (titlebar) and have a full screen flash player with working keys not using wine.

Only one year to go until flash is dead now; honestly I don't mind it dying too much. I really just will play bloons tower defense occasionally.

Not so much a thought as a statement, but I just found some DRAM on an old luggable laptop motherboard and added it to my Amiga. Now it has a full 1MB chip RAM (and 1MB fast RAM on the sidecar).
Wanna add the capacitors just so it looks right next, but it works as-is. The Fujitsu chips are the new ones. Same timing as the old ones, which I saw as a nice plus.

Had to first take all the solder out of all the vias to put these in, since it looks like they were filled in at the factory.
Then a couple jumper changes is all it took.
Hope I don't regret not socketing them. My justification is that the original chips weren't socketed either and it'd be a tight fit with the keyboard sitting on top.
[i.imgur.com] (IMG:[i.imgur.com] https://i.imgur.com/8BeABZEg.jpg)
[i.imgur.com] (IMG:[i.imgur.com] https://i.imgur.com/RIoZ5c2g.jpg)

I'd be willing to bet a MURS analog radio would better than the shitty talk-around UHF DMR ones they gave us. UHF is a poor band choice for the building, and DMR or any digital modes make no sense for the use case- only 16 channels, dumb radios without messaging or any ID, no need for encryption or security, and it's strictly talkaround. F'n bubblepack GMRS radios wouldn't do much different in practice assuming they do a full 5w.

I decided to dig in to figure out what it was people hated about Pale Moon so much (Note: I don't use Pale Moon, I'm still using Seamonkey).
It didn't take me long at all to find out.
[github.com] https://github.com/jasperla/openbsd-wip/issues/86
[lists.freebsd.org] https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd...ary/112455.html

It's a shame (because I like the idea of certain parts of PM) that the guy in charge is apparently more rabid about branding than Mozilla. (Mozilla eventually allowed some patches in Debian's builds to be used under the official branding [bugs.debian.org] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=815006 .)

Mozilla trusts the Debian packagers to use their best judgment to achieve the same quality as the official Firefox binaries.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Jan 10 2020, 16:12