dad bad is the new wife bad.

Abstract: I burned a pair of audio CDs three days ago for listening to in my cars. Two (nearly) identical discs, one for each car. I have largely moved away from optical discs but am making an effort to re-embrace them.

Full text: So when I went to build my PC, I wanted a Fractal Meshify 2 Mini case. I built my cousin’s PC in one, I wanted one too, but they had apparently been discontinued. I wound up with a Pop Air Mini case instead, which in many ways isn’t as nice, but it does feature a pair of 5 1/4" bays hidden behind a magnetic panel at the front of the PSU basement.

One of my little projects was to install one of those multi-format card readers and an old optical drive there, and I got it done a few days ago. I have a USB optical drive, in fact a couple of them, but an internal one is just a nicer thing to deal with. It is my understanding that no one is actually manufacturing those external optical drives anymore; that the ones you see on Amazon with god knows what branding are old laptop drives of whatever spec stuffed into a new case with a USB controller. They’re flaky, janky, and flimsy. Plus there’s never anywhere to put them; they come with short little cables so they’re invariably hard to plug in. So instead I ganked a blu-ray reader/DVD writer drive out of an old Dell I have lying around and installed that, and man is it nicer.

My inaugural project was to make a couple of audio CDs for the car. This project involved little to no piracy; all of the audio came from legitimately purchased CDs that I bought as directly from the band as I could. I want to fund the artists, not the sniveling IP hoarders. So I’ve got discs now that have my favorite 25 out of ~120 tracks I bought from them in my cars. I ripped the discs to FLACs the second I had them and have been listening to them on my phone, my precious originals safely stored in a CD rack.

I also bought a new spindle of CD-Rs, which is also getting harder to do. The ones I bought have inkjet printable labels. And it just so happens my old inkjet printer has a disc printing feature that I’ve yet to use. So I tried it out. Getting this particular printer going in Linux for more than basic features is a no-go; CUPS+Gutenprint is available for at least a thousand makes and models of Epson printers including the models above and below mine in the range, but specifically not mine. I chose to take that personally, but in the meantime I have discs to print. Funnily enough the printer can do this without a PC at all; it has a feature specifically for printing JPGs onto discs, and another feature that I have to assume is designed specifically for piracy:

My Epson XP-830 Expression Premium “Small In One” printer has a built-in feature to copy a CD from the scanner bed to the disc tray. That is, put a CD label side down on the scanner glass, put a printable CD-R on the disc tray, and it will figure it out and copy it. I can think of no purpose for that other than to hand out copies of Now That’s What I Call Music 7 or Windows Vista Home Premium to all your high school friends. It’s useless for things like “File Archives 2011” or “Iron Butterfly Beach Party Mix” but it’s a very user friendly counterfeiting workflow.

So mostly I installed this optical drive for reading rather than writing. I can see a future where I replace this drive with an M-disc burner; I keep threatening to start a Youtube channel, and that might be how I archive video footage, but…I don’t know.

LED bulbs do get warm, not as hot as incandescent bulbs but they do emit heat. You might have to run them longer than a minute to warm it up enough to be immediate about it.

The official answer to this riddle is turn switch 1 on for a minute or so, switch it off then switch 2 on. if the bulb is hot but dark, its 1, if it’s lit it’s 2 and if it’s out and cold its 3.

the adult answer is why do I have only one chance to walk in the room?

An AM4 computer is still pretty capable.

I mean, Dad was watching the kids while Mom did the shopping? sounds like a functional and healthy family to me.

You mean the stripes coming from the corners of her eyes like every tabby has?

Yet I can ask it to. “Whiskey’s illegal. Dry county.” “Well what are they drinking?” “Whiskey. They’s outlaws.”

They do that with dum-dums, I know. I…couldn’t tell you if they’re actually different flavors, honestly, they all taste “fake fruit” to me, but they’re definitely different colors, and instead of cleaning the machine between batches of flavors they just start making the next batch and some of the candy comes out mixed. Perfectly edible just kinda weird so they put a “mystery” flavor wrapper on it. Honestly I respect the frugality of it all.

Some of this shit I think would even catch out a technical person. Like there’s “technical” and there’s “is intimately familiar with optical media DRM software as packaged by Red Hat based distributions.”

The TL;DR here might be “Look this is user unfriendly even for me.”

Okay, we’re going to compile something from Github because I’ve got a weird piece of legacy hardware I want to get running and there’s some guy with a hobby project. Build instructions: sudo apt install something something-lib, something-common fleep, fleep-utils, tonerag. Okay, I’m on Fedora, so change apt to dnf, not found, not found, already installed, not found, not found, tongerag will take up another 162kb, continue y/N? And I’ve had it do that with instructions written for Fedora. Either because the developer didn’t test on Fedora and made the same “just turn apt to dnf” mistake without testing it or it’s an Apple psy-op to make people hate open source.

Some of those are even words.

…because it outright can’t do things? Like, if the flatpak version of VLC doesn’t come with the libraries it needs for DRM…oh well. My washing machine can’t play DVDs either.

https://xkcd.com/1200

I held down the shift key, thank you very much.

Takes ten years and turns out to be a disappointment? That tracks.

I haven’t gone maximum rainbow vomit, but mine is a Fractal Pop Mini Air with RGB case fans, and yeah there were a few more little wires to run. The case actually has a built-in RGB controller, and I used that for awhile, but I got kinda curious and started playing with the onboard RGB, and I’ve got an aurora effect I like through OpenRGB. I think it’s doing that by Linux sending the motherboard’s RGB controller data constantly over I2C so it’s tying up some of my system RAM but fuck it it’s fun.

I have yet to build a computer that didn’t POST on first boot, with one minor exception: My cousin’s Ryzen 5600 machine. I built that in a Fractal Meshify 2 Mini, which has a front IO reset button, and I wired the Reset and the Power buttons backwards. I pushed the power button, nothing. I pushed the Reset button, it booted to the BIOS setup.

I THOUGHT I had a problem with my uncle’s computer; but no, the monitor I was testing with chose to die during first POST. That monitor is behind three different trees now.

So, you joke about that, but there was a time when that was absolutely the strategy. Right around the Pentium 3 era, there was an enthusiast motherboard that came out with two sockets, and the hot advice was to get that motherboard and a pair of Celerons rather than a Pentium 3.

The physical act of assembling the computer isn’t the hard part. Picking out components that will work well together is the tough part.

Hey, that’s a personal question.