• 6 Posts
  • 87 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I assume you mean critique on the picture itself and not the house? In that case, these are my pointers:

    I would have cropped out the railing on the bottom. There’s also a lot of sky in the picture, which is a little over exposed. This leaves the house itself muted and flat. Maybe playing with the levels can fix this and bring out more details.

    The angles and location are limited in a case like this. But I feel this isn’t the best angle. The shore side on the left is distracting, especially with the orange roof there. It would be better if it showed more of the water, to give the impression the house is actually on the water.

    Otherwise, neat picture! Good find and excellent subject for photography.


  • Just curious, what kind of deadly situation is created when people leave their cars idling for so long?

    I’m the kind of person that turns the car off if there is a train coming and I need to wait 5 minutes. I can’t imagine leaving the car running for more than a couple of minutes.

    I think if the car is turned on with a button and the key is replaced with a card that works at a distance, a feature that turns the car off when sitting idle for a while seems like a sensible thing. It’s way more likely to be on by mistake than left running for a reason.

    But would love to hear what kind of situations there are, I’m just unfamiliar with them.



  • Well decompiling is only one step in the reverse engineering process. I would recommend taking a look at the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time decompile projects. They reversed engineered the whole thing, which took years and was a team effort.

    In the end they got perfectly readable source code, fully documented. And the most amazing thing is, when compiled with the right compiler and right flags, it recreates the original rom perfectly.

    I would also recommend a YouTuber called Kaze. He’s been working on Mario 64 for years, re-writing large parts of the engine to get some pretty cool stuff going.





  • A 1984 MSX home computer. It was the first computer I had. My grandfather gave it to me in 1985 when he upgraded to a new model. I didn’t have a lot of software for it, but it had Microsoft Basic built-in. With a lot of books from my grandfather, I learned to not only program in Basic, but Z80 assembler as well. I used that thing so much I wore out the keyboard.

    I recently picked up a matching color CRT monitor for it. I never had a color monitor for it and only hooked it up to the family TV infrequently. I saw the color monitor locally for cheap and after doing a lot of repairs and fixing it up it looks awesome. Really cool to see how good of an image my old computer could do. Still love the old black and green monitor though, that’s how I remember it.

    Computer is still running and with a big memory expansion I even have DOS 2.0 running on it. Somebody hacked FAT16 into that, so I can theoretically access 4GB of data. On a machine that only has 64kb of ram to start with.



  • I’ve bought a lot of stuff from AliExpress in the past 10 years. Including some $10.000+ purchases. There have been problems, but overal I’m happy enough with the whole thing.

    I feel everyone is trying their best to make it all work, but in the end it’s pretty complex to get something from the other side of the world to your home. Plus the language barrier can be a thing, where nobody in the chain really speaks any English. Usually the people at AliExpress, the seller and the actual people shipping the goods are pretty far apart from each other (China is a big country) and don’t always communicate the best.

    Now there are of course a lot of scammers, just like on sites like Ebay and Amazon. AliExpress really does do their best to ban the scammers and prevent them from coming back, but it’s like fighting a flood with a broom and doesn’t do much. Recognizing the scammers can be pretty hard sometimes. The trick I’ve used is to either rely on small communities of people interested in the same thing recommending a shop or simply talking to the seller. If the seller is happy to talk to you and willing to do just about anything you ask, it’s probably a scam. If they are kind of grumpy and say this is what we do take it or leave it, you’ve got a proper seller on your hands. Especially with large equipment as I’ve bought, the seller wants to talk shop about the machines all day, but if you have any special requests regarding shipping or customs, it’s a no go. They will also happily provide you a quote for a fully custom machine if you ask, with actual good prices for what it is, but still very expensive.

    If something does go wrong with your order, don’t count on AliExpress doing anything. They are just the platform provider and don’t know you or your order. They aren’t involved in any way and handle millions of orders a day. Just use the tools they provide to talk to the seller, they will often happily help you and every time my shipment got lost, they refunded or sent another. If a part broke in shipment, they shipped me a replacement. And just because the product wasn’t what you thought it was or the shipment got lost in transit or there was something else wrong, doesn’t mean the seller is a scammer. Don’t report them as one, as for small shops this can cause problems and for the larger established shops AliExpress simply ignores the reports. Usually the seller does their best to get you your stuff, but when sending something from one side of the globe to the other, shit happens. International tracking has gotten so much better the past couple of years, so it’s easier to see where it went wrong.

    AliExpress has also gotten very good with customs, they present you a price which is based on what you are going to pay. No hidden fees that get applied later in the process. They discount the product in the shopping cart with an indication of what you have to pay for customs handling and import fees. In the past this used to be a problem, where the price was too good to be true, only to turn out to be exactly that. But these days they are very good.

    So if you have patience, do your homework and be careful out there, AliExpress can be a great source for products. If you want to be a Karen and shout at someone for not delivering the crap you don’t need within 24 hours, please just go to Amazon.

    One thing to note: There is an environmental impact to buying directly from China and there’s no guarantee the products weren’t made by slaves in poor working conditions without mind for safety or the environment. So don’t go buying small crap you can get anywhere from there. Buy locally where possible and if you do order make it something big or buy a larger shipment. But this isn’t really an AliExpress thing, this applies to sites like Ebay as well as other big Chinese shops.



  • I like to think of it in this way: What we call dark matter isn’t the cause/source, but the discrepancies we’ve seen in our observations/data. So anybody who says dark matter doesn’t exist is plain wrong, the discrepancies are there plain as day. And it isn’t a single thing, it’s many discrepancies in a lot of data. Now the name is probably not as good, as it isn’t clear it’s actually matter and it isn’t dark but simply doesn’t interact with EM radiation. So we can’t “see” it directly, only indirectly. The name is so poor, it leads to a lot of miscommunications. But the fact is, the data doesn’t match up. So there has to be something there. And that’s data going back almost 100 years.

    Just like I said about gravity. There’s dark matter, the real thing that exists and we can “see”. And then there’s the theory of dark matter, the how and why, the thing we haven’t figured out yet.



  • People always confuse multiple things.

    There is gravity, the actual effect we see every day all around us. Gravity is a real thing, it exists. Then there’s the law of gravity, this is a math formula you can use to predict the effect gravity has on things. There’s multiple variations of this one, think Newton and Einstein. For almost everything the Newton version works just fine. Then there’s the theory of gravity, this is our attempt to explain why gravity exists and why it does the things it does. This is the tricky one we don’t really have a grip on.

    By mixing these things it is often portrayed that “scientists” don’t know anything, they don’t even understand something as simple as gravity.