jsheradin

I’ve gone to an Ace hardware near me half a dozen times for bolts, etc and I have yet to buy anything. If they have it in stock it’s sold individually and ridiculous prices. I just plan my projects ahead and get everything on McMaster now. Rural King and Tractor Supply have pretty reasonable selections for basic hex bolts, etc. if you need it that day.

There’s a ton of old rumors and “fixes” but it was recently confirmed by Microsoft that the main issue was failure of the flip chip interposer connections caused by incorrectly engineered underfill epoxy on early batches of GPUs. This is the same issue behind Nvidia’s Bumpgate and likely the PS3 YLODs.

BGA solder balls, x-clamps, thermal paste, overheating, etc were never actually a real issue. Heat gunning/towel tricking the console just warped chips enough that they temporarily made contact and would work for a little while. Only permanent fix is to replace the GPU with one made after they changed underfill epoxies.

Now that these consoles are 20+ years old there’s also aging caps and whatnot to worry about too.

I wish there was a way to buy a Kagi subscription without AI assistant bundled in. I never plan to use it and it adds no value to me. I’d rather save the money and get a cheaper subscription.

I picked up a used Revopoint Metro X with accessories for ~$600 a little while ago. There’s quite a learning curve to getting a good scan quickly but a couple afternoons of practice were enough to figure it out. The turntable is pretty flaky (random bluetooth disconnects) but the scanner itself is great.

I daily drive a clapped out 80s sports car with no AC and a broken radio. The true connection you can feel to a classically engineered machine when there’s zero distraction or convenience is hard to describe. You learn every noise, every smell, every quirk of handling and weight transfer, gain intuition about how the chassis will react to every abnormality in the road surface, have the shifter and clutch become subconscious muscle memory where you don’t even realize you’re doing it, etc. There’s a variety of reasons the average person should drive a newer car but I personally love an old hooptie.

Some fun info from Adam Savage about the development and lifecycle of Blendo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0i4dkb5w2Lg

Has anyone, even a child, ever fit in the back seats of a Porsche 928?

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“We will also tell you about something that happened here on one occasion. A man and his wife were going home in the evening after one of these drinking bouts when the wife squatted down to urinate. The cold was so intense that the hairs on her thighs froze and stuck to the grass, so that she could not move for the pain and cried aloud. Then the husband, stone drunk and taking pity on his wife, stooped down and began to blow, hoping to melt the ice with his warm breath. But as he blew the moisture in his breath froze, and so the hairs of his beard got stuck to the hairs on his wife’s thigh. So he, too, was unable to move on account of the excruciating pain; and there he stayed, bent over in this position. And before they could budge from that spot they had to wait for some people to come along and break the ice.”

• The Travels of Marco Polo c.1300

Years ago my friend group was heavily into Beat Saber, custom maps, the whole deal. We played at least 3 hours a day, every day, all piling into a dorm and taking turns on a Vive until we were so tired we couldn’t move. After graduating and moving I hadn’t bothered to set the whole VR rig back up again. I finally dusted it off a few months ago and holy crap have I gotten out of shape. It took me a good 12 hours of playing to get into the swing of things and several more hours to hit full pace but I’m back. I’ve lost 12 lbs too - this game’s intense.