HakFoo

Daiso had both alkaline and traditional carbon-zinc batteries in this size. I chose the latter because it's for a 1960s device and I think that was the default battery chemistry in the era, plus modern alkaline batteries seem very prone to leaking when left alone for 10 years.

30 books for $13, and they seem to be available as ordinary PDFs that opened just fine in Firefox under Linux. It appears these are the short novels, though, not the manga.

I recently got my license (General class) and figured I'd start with a "marginally better than a Baofeng" radio, the ~$30 TYT TH-UV88.

The few attempts I've had trying to trasmit have resulted in people reporting "you got the repeater to register, but no sound" or missing significant parts of the message. I suspect the headset/mic setup that came in the box was dodgy at best (the earpiece was cracked in two, and I was never 1000% sure if the little module with a button on it was a mic or just the PTT button that would activate the on-unit mic) so I'm using the onboard speaker/mic. But I'm sure there's an art to "how do I hold the mic, how loud, and how far do I speak from it for optimal legibility".

What's the best way to develop an understanding of these techniques? I feel like it's rude to be just constantly begging for sound-quality reports. I thought about turning on my recieve-only RTL-SDR to record the local repeater, then try different styles to play back, but I figure I don't want to disrupt the regular users with my faulty efforts, and the feedback cycle of having to stop and replay the tape seems inefficient. What's the equivalent of the little icon that throbs when it detects speaking on a Google Hangouts meeting? :D

Alternatively and semi-related-- is there a consensus for the easiest to use/most foolproof mic type? I see ones that look more like a '70s CB handheld mic, like https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256806437867278.html, or ones that look more like a typical mobile phone headset/mic. There's a hamfest nearby next month so I could look at different types of microphone first-hand, but again, we're back to not knowing if it improved my audibility before I hand over the cash.

Currently in an argument- "too thin to be a Gila" vs "too beaded to be a chuckwalla"

Very sluggish, but it's only like 19c today. Maybe 25-30cm long

I've been trying to style my Qt apps since I discovered the old Motif-look Style Plugin still exists; maybe I can have software not made in 1994 that looks like it was!

In the process, I noticed an odd behaviour.

I set up QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=qt5ct so I could use qt5ct to do the basic configuration.

If I set the "general" font as bold, and the "fixed width" value as non-bold, when I reload qt5ct, it's switched to bold. This can also be seen in other Qt programs.

If I manually force the issue by editing qt5ct.conf, manually setting up a block like this, the bold fixed-width font still shows

[Fonts]

fixed="Go Mono,11,-1,5,75,0,0,0,0,0,Regular"

general="Helvetica,11,-1,5,75,0,0,0,0,0,Bold"

I thought this might be some weirdness due to the specific fonts I chose, but swapping in "Liberation Sans" and "Courier 10 Pitch" produce the same situation.

The only way I can have my fixed-width font be "regular" is to also leave the general font as "regular". This is not a connection I expected.

Is this a known issue? Is there a workaround?

So many of the .001% seem to have no visible interests other than running up the score. I mean, most of us, you get to $50 billion, hell, $50 million, and you'd probably quit and spend your days doing something you found personally rewarding, rather than continuing to chase further growth. It's not like they're still working until they can afford that Jet Ski, and then bailing for Ford Lauterdale.

I almost wonder if it's meaningful to try to evaluate them as humans-- to consider whether they're consciously evil-- since it seems like they act like the Paperclip Optimizer from bad sci-fi parables. I've seen more emotional depth from a Hewlett-Packard LaserJet.

You'd think that their spending habits would reveal some element of what little soul they might have-- personal quirks, tastes, foibles. This goes beyond the usual "they could afford to end hunger and disease with couch change" complaint. They aren't doing anything interesting in ANY space! If they had any sort of interests or feelings, they have more than enough resources to make a dramatic statement with their money, and yet, they don't.

Why aren't they indulging their fancies in comical, over-the-top fashion? Instead of a box of Lionel electric trains, they could fund the T-1 Trust. If they wanted to collect coins, they could get a 1804 dollar and wear it to public events as a brooch. If they spent too much time playing Sid Meier's Civilization, surely they could buy into the executive house of some third-world country with the GDP of a typical Quizno's. Probably much better value for money than buying a flaky Mastodon-a-like to use as a Rube Goldberg machine to flip elections. At best, they strap a rocket under their ass and pay a couple plebs' life earnings for 30 seconds release from those pesky Van Allen belts, but even that seems to be just "the generic thing billionaires do" rather than being the obvious conclusion of a rich lifetime interest in astronomy or flight.

Even in their personal estates, does anyone remember anything special about them? Or is it just infinity pools, granite countertops, and rapidly-obsolescing smart technology, the same as men a hundred times poorer, but on a slightly bigger scale? Who will be so bold as to build something that will at least be a cherished monument or celebrated folly in 500 years? What is our era's Versailles or Neuschwanstein?

Hell, one of the few things we can measure from their behaviour is that they're petty and selfish, so why don't we see them systematically buying any company that ever hires their ex just so they can systematically sack them again and again? Or paying hundreds of actors so they can relive their senior year of high school, except this time, they're Prom King. Again, an excellent way to toss around your excessive status and wealth while chasing down the demons that you won't be able to smother in stock options.

At most, there might be some slant towards discernible tastes in where they splash their charitable cash, but even that plays second fiddle to collecting an efficient tax-management strategy. Maybe they toss a few bucks towards research for a disease that their sister happened to have, or to make school kids study the things you think are important, but it's still just one on the list of cheques they write because their accountants tell them to.

We should demand better. It's common to make fun of the gauche behaviour of the sudden nouveau riche-- the 19-year-old with the sportsball contract or $10 million lottery win who buys a safety orange Lamborghini and a gold necklace that Flavor Flav dismissed as too tacky, but at least they look like they are having fun with the money, like they had some idea of "let's do something cool with it" rather than letting it moulder on a spreadsheet somewhere.

At least they could do a more entertaining job of gilding their public presence-- sponsoring statues of themselves in major cities to pretend they were an important general, walking around every day like they were refugees from a catwalk or the Met Gala, running infomercials disguised as glowing life-story documentaries on cheap late-night broadcast time. Hell, use their immense commercial wrath to demand that everyone around them use some invented cockamamie title they can strut around with. Surely they can assign themselves a higher rank than a chicken fryer!

(Alt: The Drake meme. Upper panel shows him hiding his face from "Securing Customer Data". Lower panel shows him smirking at "Securing Public API Documentation")

I'm coming to SF for a few days next month, and am a bit of a retrocomputing enthusiast. Obviously, one of the first items on my itinerary is the Computer History Museum, but is there any place worth visiting if I want vintage-computing souvenirs, not just photographs?

On my last holiday, I went to Toronto and ended up spending a day heading out to the fringes of the city and rooting a scrap dealer's boxes for ISA cards instead of exploring culture, art, or history. :)

I know I should have shown up 10 years ago if I wanted to see the heyday of scrap dealers, but linear time and all. :P

Someone mentioned Anchor Electronics in Santa Clara, but I'm staying downtown and it looks like it's 2 hours each way from there via public transport, and even an hour plus from the CHM. I suspect getting a Waymo may cost a fortune if they'd even cover that area... I try not to be in cars when on holiday, but I can sort of make an exception for a technological novelty.

In this corner, we've had a large female widow for a year or so, but haven't seen her in a couple weeks. There are a few Pholcidae around, but this looks different. Maybe 10-12mm long legspan.

Currently using an X11 system, on an AMD GPU; the window manager is FVWM because I'm a nostalgic old git.

I use two screens, and most games tend to full-screen on one.

Had decent enough results with Proton via Steam on many titles. A few of them needed to be explicitly tagged "don't draw a frame around the full screen window" in the FVWM config, and I had a few where movies did that "show a test card instead of video" but no biggie.

I've recently had two harder nuts to crack. I'm using two games with Lutris: The SNK 40th Anniversary Collection (it was $20 cheaper on GOG than Steam at the time!), and Genshin Impact.

Both of them play fine, so long as you keep the mouse within the full-screen capture area. But if I leave the window (say, using a keyboard combination or pulling the mouse outside the capture area), the games go blank.

SNK shifts the black box somewhat off of its original position, and I think Genshin just goes blank.

I experimented a bit with SNK's "wine configuration" options in Lutris.

"Automatically Capture the Mouse in Full-Screen Window": This reduced accidental leave-the-screen problems, but still had failures if you used a keyboard command to switch windows.

De-selecting "allow the window manager to control the window" causes the window to turn into a weird Win95-esque "mini taskbar icon" instead of going black Pressing the "restore" and "maximize" buttons resizes it to near full screen but retains an ugly Win95 style title bar. Once you restore it in that mode, it's actually well-behaved-- you can move the mouse in and out of the window without it breaking (it seems to freeze when you move the mouse away, but that may be intentional) But still, the weird titlebar and it not working that way until you first "freeze and unwedge it" sucks.

Genshin, at least sometimes, could have its black box minimized and restored and come back to life. I've yet to try the Wine tweaks there.

I suspect the common theme might be that the games are trying to deactivate themselves when they lose focus, but not doing so gracefully. ISTR Genshin on Windows would minimize itself if you switched to another task, and I haven't tried SNK on actual Windows. I'm wondering if there's some unified fix that tells the game it's running in a single screen and when the mouse leaves, it just stayed there. There seems to have been some sort of "cage Wine apps in a virtual desktop" feature, but it seems to no longer be supported.

Original parameters: (full body male vampire hunk), (shirtless), (thin necklace), (standing in graveyard), hunk, (long hair), (red eyes), (holding scepter), (wide angle), masterpiece, detailed, (moonlight background), realistic, (wind blown) Negative prompt: (head cut off), (extra fingers), (moustache), (beard), (anime), jeans, female Steps: 20, Sampler: DPM++ 2M Karras, CFG scale: 6, Seed: 3375192227, Size: 704x384, Model hash: 6ce0161689, Model: v1-5-pruned-emaonly, Denoising strength: 0.01, Hires upscale: 3.75, Hires upscaler: DAT x2, Version: v1.8.0

For years, I've had a wallpaper in rotation of the cover of the manhwa 'Rebirth' volume 1, (reference https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347683512i/29540.jpg) featuring the vampire protagonist in the moonlight with a decidedly surly pose.

I've been smashing my 6900XT into the wall trying to get it to spit out something with a similar vibe, but a few more pixels than I can get out of denoising a 800dpi scan of a small book cover. This doesn't quite do it, but the upturned nose and downward pointed weapon (SD seems to go completely off the rails with almost any weapon you ask for, except torches for some reason), convey an interesting contempt for the viewer.

With some cleanup, I get something like this: https://imgur.com/a/9QwQwlW

I've taken to generating batches of 10 thumbnails images at a time, deciding if anything's worth upscaling to wallpaper size, and cleaning up more in GIMP. Upscaling seems to put way more stress on the GPU than generating the original image-- once my machine politely shut itself down which I assume was the way of responding to a thermal threshold trip (~115C peaks)

After scaling, seems like most of the effort is things like trying to add actual eyes instead of dark spots, cleaning up superfluous features, and a lot of reworking mouths.

The wallpaper is one of the standard XBM images included with the X11 distribution (in OpenBSD, it's at /usr/X11R6/include/X11/bitmaps/mensetmanus).

The fonts are the Modern DOS collection (8x8 for the battery status, 8x16 for the terminal). The window titles use the classic bitmap Helvetica which has no antialiasing and gives it a unique "Vintage system" vibe.

I was going to give it a full CDE install, but the build guides don't seem to work right; I might switch to SparkyLinux for this machine because suspending fails just often enough to be annoying.