There are also other ATC simulation games, but it looks like that particular developer also sells professional ATC training software, so I’d kinda imagine that that “I’m really good at TRACON” might be a better standard than most ATC games in terms of someone being able to be an actual ATC.

i9 14900KS…Fuck Intel, fuck this CPU

If you’re overvoltaging the thing, that’s on the person cranking the voltage up, but I don’t have a high opinion of that CPU in the first place.

I had an i9 13900. It thermally destroyed itself due to the Intel 13th gen/14th gen problems. I also had it on a 360mm AIO liquid cooler, FWIW.

Then I replaced it with an i9 14900 (this one making certain not to even use the motherboard defaults, as I had with the prior CPU, but the manufacturer’s recommended “safe” settings). It also destroyed itself.

At that point, I switched to AMD, after decades of using only Intel CPUs.

It’s not just that the defect made it in. CPU defects happen. It’s that it took Intel over a generation of CPUs to even identify a very prominent problem, and they didn’t stop shipping new product in the meantime, even after they decided that there was a problem, and long after people were talking about the problem on, say, Reddit. You have to have multiple serious QA problems for that to happen. They may have patched that problem via firmware, but I just don’t trust their QA on at least their high-end desktop CPUs.

I’ve used ispropyl alcohol on a few such devices. I don’t know if it’s as effective as acetone—it did take some rubbing—but I did manage to eventually get it off, so I know that it can be used as well.

EDIT: While I’ve run into devices that have seen a range of this, the worst was a Grundig G6 radio. Searching, at least according to this page, it looks like the manufacturer recommends “Purple Power”:

https://swling.com/blog/2021/01/getting-the-grundig-g6-out-of-a-sticky-situation/

If you’ve been an SWLing Post reader for long, you’ve also no doubt read our numerous posts about cleaning off this mess. There are a number of solutions, but it seems the most positive long-term results by employing a de-greasing product called Purple Power (click here to read archived posts). Indeed, it’s the solution Eton Corporation recommends and the one I used to clean my Eton E1 XM.

I have not myself used the stuff, so I can’t personally vouch for effectiveness.

Based on this, it sounds like the solvent that uses is diethylene glycol butyl ether.

EDIT2: Also on that site. Might be a good idea to look at what you’re buying if you do try some:

https://swling.com/blog/2021/01/ron-notes-that-purple-power-is-not-the-same-product-or-formula-across-the-globe/

Ron notes that “Purple Power” is not the same product or formula across the globe

We’re shared a number of posts here about how well the product “Purple Power” cleans the sticky residue off of portable radios than once had a rubberized coating (the coating breaks down over time and becomes incredibly tacky).

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, RonF, who writes from Australia with this important note:

Tip for non-USonians: what’s sold as “Purple Power” (and “Simple Green”, and several other frequently-recommended cleaners for this sort of thing) are not necessarily the same products around the world.

For example, in the US “Purple Power” is an ethylene glycol based cleaner/degreaser; here in Aus, if you ask for “Purple Power” you’ll get a sodium hydroxide based degreaser.

One will clean the gunk off your radio; the other will clean the gunk and most of the labelling off…

It sounds like it’s other countries in Europe as well.

https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1vkgf1k/valve_notifying_hardware_customers_about_a/

They do use same partner. As I got the email and based in UK.

This was why MMO experience was sought out.

—The Far Side, October 15, 1990

Hmm.

A lot of these are going to be just request-driven. That is, they aren’t really doing anything while idling. Thus, they don’t really need to be actually running.

If the idle memory usage is an actual concern — and honestly, the OS is probably just gonna page things out if the software is truly idle and it needs the memory for something else and it has paging space…I kind of assume that someone has built some sort of system that works like inetd, which avoided leaving non-containerized servers running. You register a port, and then inetd listens on it. When someone connects, it starts up the daemon in question (say, Apache or whatever). Just need to start a container on demand here. Maybe close it down after a long-enough period of inactivity.

EDIT:

https://old.reddit.com/r/docker/comments/72sdyf/startrun_a_container_when_incoming_traffic/

Start/run a container when incoming traffic detected

Sounds like you’re looking for inetd.

A more modern version of this is systemd socket activation.

Podman supports socket activation since version 3.4.0 (released Sep 2021).

how i dream of buy a few 12 tb drives.

Rotational hard drive prices are up, but not that far, not like RAM, especially if you’re not getting the largest drives possible.

That’s maybe a doubling on 12TB drives from the trough. I mean, sure, it’s significant, but if you were already talking about getting several, you can certainly get one.

It appears that most people don’t care about spending $100 on a video game.

I’m fine with spending $100 on a video game. I mean, said video game needs to provide reasonable value, but the amount of time I play a game varies way more than game price, is the dominant factor.

I didn’t really like what I played of GTA 5 and probably won’t play this one, but for the right game, sure. If I could get a game I like similar to Oxygen Not Included, which I’ve played for many, many hours, I’d do $100 happily.

pre-orders

Now that I will agree with being a problem.

Maybe it’s for older cards?

Actually, Major Major had been promoted by an I.B.M. machine with a sense of humor almost as keen as his father’s.

—Catch-22, Copyright 1961

They’re like birds, right? Don’t they have a cloaca instead?

searches

Apparently yes, though this author couldn’t resist “butthole”…

https://www.livescience.com/first-dinosaur-butthole-found.html

1st preserved dinosaur butthole is ‘perfect’ and ‘unique,’ paleontologist says

This was a multipurpose hole.

The first dinosaur butthole ever discovered is shedding light where the sun don’t shine. The discovery reveals how dinosaurs used this multipurpose opening — scientifically known as a cloacal vent — for pooping, peeing, breeding and egg laying.

I can’t tell you how to do it under Wayland off the cuff, but you can map a controller’s analog stick to act like a mouse. It’s a little clumsy, but that’ll let you use any mouse-oriented DE.

Some gamepads, like the PS5’s controller and I assume the Steam Controller, have touchpads built into the controller that work as pointing devices.

If you don’t specifically want only a gamepad, I’d probably use a trackball or touchpad and maybe keyboard, as a trackball can be used from a couch, lile a gamepad.

In the global financial crisis, in at least California, which is a non-recourse mortgage state — that is, if someone defaults on a mortgage, the lender can only go after the property — a number of people discovered that if they refinanced, the new mortgage was recourse, and a lender could go after other assets and wages to cover the default. For people who bought into the top of a bubble, then walked away from the house after prices dropped and they were underwater, had negative equity, this was a major issue.

Those rules were later changed, but I would be careful to understand the implications of refinancing a mortgage in your particular jurisdiction, as they may be non-obvious and substantial.

On one hand, I think that it’s fair to point out, and an interesting point.

But…on the other hand, I also think that generally when people say “we did X”, they’re often including people who aren’t their direct ancestors. And the degree to which they do that is context-dependent. Though they probably aren’t going back anything like 20 million years, either, in any kind of common context.

What’s our closest living relative?

searches

Looks like chimpanzees and bonobos, and our last common ancestor was maybe 5–13 million years back.

I guess we would include 'em in “we” if someone was saying “we left the oceans”. But they aren’t gonna make the in-group for “we won that sports game last night”.

There are a number of games — particularly those since SSD storage became pretty much the norm — that do not load a whole level, but load while playing. Why not just load the game (or the level)? Because it lets devices with less RAM store more stuff than they otherwise would. You have more relaxed caps on things lile texture size.

I’d assume that the engine is still going to try to predict what content is going to be needed prior to it being needed, that it’s got a strategy more sophisticated than just “load resource first time it’s requested”. But SSD storage is going to be more forgiving of a miss than rotational storage.

Bethesda uses the term “cell”. I know that their engine uses a square grid as the loading unit, loads a sort of circle of cells around the cell where the player is.

searches

It sounds like the Unreal 5 terminology is “sublevel”, for the units loaded.

https://old.reddit.com/r/unrealengine/comments/1tchk8k/is_level_streaming_even_worth_it_if_your_game/

We might have a habit of being curious and seeing things and patterns that aren’t really there. And it’s frustrating to watch it misfire.

But…maybe it’s worth it to come up with silly ideas on a fair number of occasions if that same tendency sometimes leads us to make valid discoveries that we wouldn’t otherwise have made. Sometimes even people who have wrong ideas run over important things.

There was this guy once who disregarded well-established (and correct) geophysical science with some cockamamie theory that he thought would make him rich. He tried to sell a bunch of people on funding his ideas, who mostly turned him down. Eventually, he managed to get funds and set out to prove his ideas. That experiment would have been suicidal for him — because his ideas were totally wrong, making the experiment lethal — if not for the great good fortune of, during the course of this experiment, making a (very important) real discovery that saved his life. He then tried — not very successfully — to claim that his new discovery actually showed that his ideas were correct.

He was a dreamer, and a bit of a nut, and he was wrong. His name was Christopher Columbus, and he had convinced himself that the circumference of the world was much smaller than was actually the case, and that if there was nothing but ocean to the west of Europe, one could safely reach Asia in a single trip of the sort that ships of the time could make. Instead, he discovered the New World.

There were a lot of other people who went looking down other weird rabbit holes with other weird ideas. They usually didn’t come up with anything worthwhile.

But…that discovery was worth a whole lot of poking around blind alleys.

So, hey, maybe a human tendency towards a bit of being a crank and running down crazy ideas is worthwhile, if it’s the price we pay to occasionally come up with something really amazing down a weird rabbit hole.

That comment is quoting text from an article.

I have not seen that particular cartoon.

However, a common criticism is that there are only a handful of Garfield cartoon “templates” with some bits swapped out, and I have seen plenty of Garfield cartoons in approximately this format: three panels, Garfield is bored, John is emotional, Garfield is bored.

goes back to look at the first year of Garfield

Okay, apparently it predates Garfield, as there was a predecessor strip, Jon:

https://garfield.fandom.com/wiki/Jon,_1976_comic_strips

Jon comic #7, February 19, 1976:

EDIT: Jon #1 looked familiar. It looks like a lot of the first year of Garfield was recycled Jon cartoons too. For example, here’s Jon #1:

And here’s Garfield #1:

So, I get the argument — there’s hardware, why not use it — but it’s got some things that I’m not super-enthralled with, even though the author has clearly put a lot of work into making it work.

• I don’t know how far I’d trust the Linux side of things to automatically come up and stay up. Like, they use a program to trigger Termux at boot and disable battery management to try to avoid having Termux be killed, but the host OS isn’t really designed for this.

• Stuff like the network is outside the control of the GNU environment; Android apps can only do so much. They did mention some of the issues here and looked to work around those limitations.

• I don’t know if Android apps are allowed to reboot the phone; I would guess not. My Termux environment doesn’t have a shutdown or reboot command, which also kinda makes me bet not.

• Android is a lot more amenable to doing things like expecting there to be a user at the screen. Say the phone reboots to do a system upgrade and prompts me for something, which is reasonable to do for a phone but not great for a server. I can’t do much about that remotely.

• I don’t get to update the kernel, and at some point, phone vendors stop shipping updates.

• I don’t have access to all of the hardware.

• Phone hardware does have a battery, which is neat, but it’s also missing hardware that I’d like on a server, like an Ethernet socket and much (or on many phones, any) by way of expandable storage. No external display port (which, given the Android expectations about a user being present, might be something that one might want to have a way to access remotely). Might be possible to add on some of this via USB.

• No convenient way to remotely do a hard reboot, which is something that I’d like on a server. That integrated battery backup also means that you can’t just yank power. I mean, maybe you could rip the power button off and rig up some sort of relay hooked to the contacts or something to hold the power button down using some other system, but…

I think that there might be reasons to do this. Like, 14-year-old-me might have done it because 14-year-old-me has little disposable income, but plenty of time to work on things. If an old phone fell into my lap then, hey, sure. And it’s got interest from an “I’m gonna do this, dammit” standpoint. But in terms of saving money…even with memory prices where they are, low-end, small PCs are not that expensive. Here’s a system with 8GB of RAM and 512GB of SSD for $180. Here’s a refurb — and it is a refurb, but the phone is also used and EOL — for $129 with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of SSD. Those have the ports above, can just run straight GNU/Linux, run x86, are more expandable, are designed with less constraints on power and cooling, and meet or exceed the phone specs. Most of the people who are in a position to hack together a custom server on a phone and are comfortable fixing or working around any issues are also the kind of people who probably are in a position to pull a pretty solid income, and where the time tradeoff becomes increasingly unfavorable.