• 4 Posts
  • 114 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

help-circle



  • August 1999. The last total solar eclipse visible from the UK was 72 years ago, and the next one would be 91 years later. Young Ted woke up to a gloriously sunny day. This would be it!

    An hour before the event we drove out to a nice remote viewing spot with minimal obstructions for miles around. 30 minutes to go, the clouds rolled in. Thick, blanket cloud from horizon to horizon. The eclipse happened. From under the cloud it got a bit darker and the birds had a bit of a freak out but it was otherwise a non-event. We drove back home, disappointed.

    30 minutes later the clouds cleared and the rest of the day was as glorious as the morning had been. 27 years later I’m still bitter about it. Seattle’s got nothing on us!












  • Bit late with a reply but I bought one with this use case in mind, thinking it could be a cost effective family PC, but immediately fell foul of the lack of proper user switching. You can sign in to different Steam profiles but on the desktop everything runs under a single predefined user with admin rights. Fine for a single person but no good for a family needing multiple distinct user profiles and access controls.

    I’ve installed Windows as a dual boot setup but it makes the whole thing much more of a faff, so it doesn’t get used. It’s back to being exclusively a handheld gaming machine.


  • This right here. In the UK we have a little box (ONT) where the fibre comes into the home that essentially acts as a modem and converts the fibre to ethernet and back again and then they provide a separate wireless router that plugs into it. Other than for my current ISP where I had to specifically request that they enable bridge mode (which they did for free), I’ve never had any issues plugging my own router into the ethernet side of this box.

    If your ISP’s wireless router plugs directly into the fibre then you should be able to request that it’s set to bridge mode so that it becomes just a dumb ONT box like we have here. Albeit a large and clunky one.


  • Contacting the registrar is worth a shot and could be your best bet. I recently did a similar thing except the expiring domain was on a pretty obscure country-TLD with only one registrar. They told me how long the grace period was and then I setup a script to check the availability every minute and alert me when it came up.

    Probably not feasible with a .com or similar but they might be able to help in some regard. Edit: though having read about drop catching, that’s definitely your best bet if it’s likely to be sniped!


  • This is very impressive and I’m highly likely to give it a whirl. My question is, though: would it be something that my very non-tech savvy wife could use?

    Eg. I’m thinking setup the app on her phone with a default location and when she asks me for a file I can just tell her that I’ve “put it in the app”, and she’ll be able to easily retrieve it. Also same thing but vice versa, though the video seems to cover that via the Android share menu…

    Again, super impressive. Good job!


  • I used to work at a games studio that would get these delivered fairly regularly, usually paired with a particular motherboard and presumably a custom BIOS.

    I think we were technically supposed to return them but the manufacturers never enforced it, so once the chip was actually released to the public - and assuming the sample was stable enough for general use - the PC would rotate into normal stock and eventually get sold for cheap to staff or end up in the spare parts bin.

    While it was cool at first to get pre-production chips before anyone else, it became pretty mundane and I’m not at all surprised to see them out in the wild decades later. Interesting piece of history though!