Teknoman117's comments

It just works and it's so, so much faster. Went from an Ender 3 v2 to a Bambu P1S. No more re-leveling the bed, no more first layer adhesion problems, and your prints run 4-6 times quicker.

I would assume it's in order to maintain mechanical compatibility with the previous Pico.

It's the same SoC as the LicheeRV (SG2002)

I would hardly call hardware video decode/encode overrated. A hardware block will do the work with a fraction of the power that the CPU would take to do it, and in the case of something like a Pi 4 or Pi 5, you're now spending all of your limited CPU on video, rather than doing something useful.

Maybe not a problem when you're plugged into the wall, but for those of us using Raspberry Pi's (and other computers) in mobile situations (laptops, robots, drones, etc.), the power consumption is a huge concern.

My main usage of the Pi 4's video encoder was to record the video from the camera "for free" while the CPU was nearly maxed out doing stuff in OpenCV.

4 units per block, 2 blocks per RP2040.

Admittedly this is from a hobbyist perspective, but I'm hard pressed to reach for an ATmega for basically anything these days due to the RP2040, the Pico, and its clones.

I do wish there were more ADC channels though. Even an external analog mux costs more than the whole RP2040...

You don't even need the 8 :), 4 quadrature inputs will fit on one PIO block.

Some lovely person got a quadrature decoder into 24 instructions, so you can potentially still do something useful on the same PIO block if you only need one or two quadrature encoders.

My main trouble with the emulators/virtual machines is that late-90s and early-00s Windows/DirectX games are a huge dead spot.

There are a ton of titles from this era that just don't work on current Windows, even with dgVoodoo. I just want to be able to comfortably get rid of this Win98 SE / WinXP dual boot box I have lying around...

I feel you on this.

I started using Gentoo on my personal machines (Desktop, Laptop, NAS) after I needed to understand it for work. Eventually I fell in love with the developer workflow that it allows.

That was seven years ago. These days I feel like I've spent so much time tinkering for little to no benefit. I've been through LFS a few times so I don't feel that being a Gentoo user made me understand Linux any more than I already did.

So much "emerge --sync && emerge -1 sys-apps/portage && emerge -auUDN @world" and then fix USE flags problems and mask problems and keep rerunning the last command until it actually works.

I somewhat self host everything right now - VPN into my home network to access my NAS. But the user experience of documents and media just feels so poor compared to existing cloud services that I'm tempted to just give up on homelab stuff.

The upfront price of 10+ TB hard drives is hundreds of dollars a drive, you need to replace them every 5 years or so to "trust" them, you need redundant disks because you can never trust them, you need a backup solution, time investment to make backups, and the price of power in the Bay Area means you are spending several hundred a year on power to run the gear. Whereas I could just get 10 TB for $50/month from a cloud provider. It's not like I actually watch or listen to any of the blurays or music rips I've made, which represent most of my data...

I bought a PineNote in early 2022 hoping to replace my reMarkable. I've worn out the battery but I don't want to give money to a company that intentionally makes swapping the battery nearly impossible. Along with the fact they're useless at work because you can't directly use a cloud service, you have to proxy through reMarkable's own service.

I thought it'd be fun to tinker on but then I actually developed a healthy social life and exercise routine again and have found little motivation to stay inside when I'm not working.

Hoping I don't develop an eating disorder in the process of losing weight is a constant thing on my mind. I've had to deeply cut my calories to keep losing. I don't even really noticing myself experiencing hunger at this point which kinda scares me. But all my vitals are great, the fat keeps coming off, and I haven't really noticed much change in my strength in the gym so maybe I'm fine so far?

My roommate/gym buddy is one of the people you describe and while I can't see inside his head, the story he usually tells is that he was once super overweight (he's 5'11 and said he hit 350) and turned into a proper gym rat to lose it. I don't know how much he weighs now but he's got defined abs and large arms. He said that he's basically addicted to the attention he gets as a super fit person. He's charismatic and funny (and a cognitive behavioral therapist), but he basically seems to sleep with whoever he wants. The amount of times I've heard him say he really wants to get laid that night and then see him crawl in at 3 am with yet another (attractive) woman is nutty.

I wonder if the body positivity movement has anything to do with the de-sexualization of reasons to be fit.

In many circles, if I were to say that I wanted to be more fit in order to attract the kinds of people I'm attracted to, the main answer I would get is that I shouldn't feel the need to change anything about myself - that someone who would be more attracted to me if I were to work on myself isn't worth the effort. I heard this from my sibling-in-law constantly. Honestly started to think they were just trying to justify their own disregard of their health.

I started a 430 lb 6'4 man. I'm 320 lb now and while I still have a ways to go, the difference in the attention I get is mind boggling. Women actually flirt with me now. Initiate even. As someone who's felt invisible for a decade, I can't describe how much my mental state has improved.

Here's my favorite web 1.0 site (still seems to be updated).

https://philohome.com/

I have no relation to this site, but as a kid it helped get me into custom electronics to scratch itches I had when building Lego Mindstorms robots - namely when you wanted to sense something Lego didn't have a sensor for.

For one, you have to provide one specifically for your board to boot at all. There is no "common" one that'll get you to a shell on any board.

The main issue is that most SoC vendors just dump a heavily hacked up Linux kernel source intended for Android on you, along with binary blobs (firmware, android hal services, etc.). The drivers aren't in the kernel per se, just enough of a stub for the proprietary blobs to talk to the hardware.

So if the goal is to run a standard Linux distro on the board, you're pretty screwed unless you have the time and resources (or a community) to reverse engineer the android bsp into drivers for the mainline kernel.

The thing that makes the RPi great is that there's actually an entity paying for this development to happen, along with the community. It's certainly far from the fastest ARM board, but even the decade old RPi 1 still gets kernel updates.

I would definitely like to say I do but I definitely do not.

That is one of the Great Filter thought examples already, right?

A civilization whose technology advances faster than its understanding of the impacts of said technology may blot themselves out early on.

Probably the backup and update system for my desktop.

All of my Linux boxes use btrfs as the filesystem.

I have some tools that makes snapshots of all the subvolumes I wish to keep backups of and does incremental transfers of them to my NAS. It will incrementally transfer any non-synced ones as well, so if you run make-snapshots multiple times without backing up, they'll all end up on my NAS eventually.

You can also have it create a writable snapshot out of the latest full snapshot so you can muck around with updates without breaking your current environment. It also updates the rEFInd configuration dynamically so you can boot into old snapshots if the one you're working on is broken. You can also have it spin up a VM to test as well.

I also wrote my own tiny dynamic DNS service I run on my blog's VPS so I can bind my home network's IP address to a domain name. It's just a tiny node.js app that acts an an authentication frontend to update a bind server's DNS config.

The major problems with Metformin are that it frequently makes people nauseous, it causes sperm damage in men (effects go away when you cease taking it + about 3 months), and in rare cases can cause lactic acidosis if you consume alcohol.

Admittedly, I got put on it because my blood work wasn't going in the right direction, but it has noticably increased my ability to lose weight. Not exactly scientific, but in my first 5 months of trying to lose, I was down 30 pounds, in the next 5 months after starting it, I lost about 50 and was less strict about my diet. I was even doing less cardio because I had primary shifted to lifting weights.

Now I'm down a full 100 pounds, admittedly with another ~100 to lose, but I really can't describe how much better I feel. Combine that with moving to have a regular social life, I feel like my life is headed in the right direction for the first time since college.

It's nutty.

I make more than my dad did when he retired, yet, if I were to have kids today I could not provide the lifestyle to them that I had as a kid. And he certainly didn't make what he did at retirement when I was a child. If I had a dual income household, there would be the money to do it, but the kids would lose out on something that I considered a crucial part of my upbringing - a full time parent.

But, the perspective here is that I (and many of the people on this site) work in one of the few remaining well paying professions, whereas my dad was in a "well paying" but not "top paying" field.

It just can't be sustainable...

You're probably right. I vaguely remember being told they only worked on volatile compounds.

My high school in a not-wealthy part of Alabama had a dozen of them in their chemistry lab 15 years ago. Can't be that expensive...