I don’t exactly keep up with the latest in emulation, and who knows how Nintendo is going to do things, but my understanding that in a lot of ways GameCube (and WII for that matter) emulation has been in a better place than N64 for a while now, so I’m not too concerned about the switch being able to run it.

While the console itself was less powerful, the N64 is kind of a monster to emulate, it basically speaks a totally different language than any computer (or phone, console, etc) you might try to emulate it on, and there’s a lot of weird special code in individual games that the console needs to deal with, so there’s a lot more for the emulator to do and so you kind of need a comparatively beefy device for the emulation to run well.

GameCube and later consoles work a lot more similarly to how your computer and other devices work, so it’s a lot easier to emulate them.

I’ve seen it explained sort of like if the N64 spoke Chinese, the GameCube spoke Spanish, and your computer speaks Portuguese.

If a Spanish speaker slows down and throws in some hand gestures, a Portuguese speaker will probably more-or-less get the gist of what they’re saying, and Google translate can pretty much fill in the rest. That’s your computer emulating a GameCube game. There’s not too much the emulator actually needs to do, just some minor corrections here and there but mostly things translate pretty cleanly 1:1 between the two languages.

Spanish and Portuguese are wildly different languages though, almost no shared vocabulary, different languages families, even some of the hand gestures may have different meanings, and Google translate is probably going to spit out some weird garbled nonsense if you try to translate anything too complicated through it. It takes a lot more to facilitate communication between the two languages.

Few more ingredients but my carnitas have always been a crowd pleaser

• Pork shoulder
• Coke
• Orange juice
• Chicken stock
• Canned Chipotles in adobo
• Onions
• Garlic
• Spices - I mix it up a bit, but salt, pepper, cumin, cayenne, and oregano will usually get you there. Packet or two of taco seasoning would probably do the trick as well

I tend to eyeball everything, but usually about a 12oz can of coke, oj and stock until it looks right, one onion chopped up, however many cloves of garlic I feel like peeling and chopping

If the pork shoulder fits I do it in a pressure cooker on high about 2 hours, if it doesn’t I do it significantly longer in a slow cooker

When it’s falling apart, pull the bones out, shred (I like to use a mixer)

Then like you, crisp it up under the broiler, and maybe mix in some of the cooking liquid

It’s cockney rhyming slang, it’s best not to think too deep about it

Americans are called yanks, yank rhymes with tank, and septic tanks are a type of tank, so Americans are septics. It’s not exactly flattering but it’s not really as much of an insult as it sounds.

The same kind of logic has them calling “stairs” “apples and pears” because pears rhymes with stairs and apples are kind of similar to pears.

Or “cherry” meaning “lie” because lie rhymes with pie, and cherry is a type of pie.

And the n-word is synonymous with “black person,” doesn’t make it any more ok or less hurtful to use it.

I’m not actually terribly surprised.

Not that most people breed or use them for it these days, but dachshunds are, at their core, hunting dogs. Full-sized dachshunds were bred to hunt badgers, mini dachshunds for smaller animals like rabbits, they have short legs so they can chase animals into burrows, they have a strong sense of smell, and they’re feisty, strong-willed little things.

Again, not to many people breed dachshunds for hunting instincts these days, but some of those traits still remain and once in a while you get one who could still make a capable hunting dog.

From a few minutes googling, it doesn’t look like there’s really any large predators to worry about on that island, and the climate is fairly mild.

I have a friend with a mini dachshund mix, we’re not too sure of the exact mix, we think maybe there’s jack Russell and Beagle in there (both pretty feisty breeds in their own right.) She’s a cute, tiny little, vaguely-hound-looking, old lady dog with tiny legs. She’s absolutely fearless, and despite never having any particular scent training, is a pretty capable tracker. When their other dog ran away and got lost, they just put her on a leash and she led them right to him. I have no trouble imagining her running around on an island, taking down some small critters, and living quite happily on her own for a few years if it came to it.

I don’t have many gen z people in my immediate circles, but something I’ve noticed online re-emerging in the last couple of years is the use of “retarded” as an insult.

I can’t definitively point to gen z as the culprits, I can’t really know who’s behind a username in most cases, it could just be that older generations have found their way to the parts of the internet that I inhabit, or may I’ve migrated to theirs as I’ve gotten older, or that overall attitudes have shifted, but it does sort of coincide with when I figured the younger half of gen z would be hitting the sort of “grown-up” internet.

Maybe I was in some sort of bubble, but for around a decade it felt like that was something we managed to mostly scrub from our vocabulary. It was honestly a little jarring to see it again, like I’d suddenly been transported 20 years back in time surrounded by assholes from my middle or high school.

If you genuinely believe that, you are either living in some kind of serious tech nerd bubble, or you have no idea what replacing the OS means and you’re talking about doing software updates, tweaking settings, and installing apps.

The vast majority of smartphone users probably don’t even realize you can replace the OS, and if they do they probably don’t see the need.

For desktops and laptops, around 71% of them are running windows, somehow I doubt people are buying Linux or Mac laptops just to turn around and install windows on them. Then around 16% of them are running MacOS, and I doubt that any significant number of those are hackintoshes. A fair amount of the remaining 13% or so are probably people who have installed their own OS, but not all, some of them are using ChromeOS, I don’t hear much about people deciding to make their own Chromebook, and some people are buying an off-the-shelf Linux device.

Just kind of spitballing

For starters, you design a robot whose design is to take, for example, 100 steps forward, then take 100 steps back. Then you could:

Have it take a scoop of soil before it turns back, you now have a sample to test

Put some kind of chemical test strips (litmus paper, water quality, etc.) on it and send it towards a puddle of water you want to test. It splashed into the water and comes back, now you can see what the results on those test strips say

Not all electronics are so sensitive to radiation, and to some extent they can be shielded. Building a whole digital robot that’s hardened against radiation would be difficult and expensive. Sticking a couple radiation hardened sensors on an otherwise dumb pneumatic robot that doesn’t need to be hardened would be much cheaper.

Send the robot in with analog measuring tools- thermometers, barometers, film cameras (radiation can expose film, so picture quality may not be great, but it’s better than nothing, and just seeing how exposed the film is could be used to get a rough idea of the radiation level) etc.

Say there’s a big rock, and you need to know what’s behind it. Nowhere in the safety zone has a good viewing angle, and it’s either unsafe to fly over the area or there’s too much tree cover so you can do aerial photography. So you stick a mirror on the robot and send it out somewhere behind the rock off to the side o bit. Now you can look at the mirror through some binoculars or a telephoto lens and see what’s behind the rock in the reflection.

These are just a couple off the top of my head ideas as a layperson, I’m sure that a scientist or engineer actually doing this kind of work whose entire job is to think about this could come up with plenty of other good ways to use this sort of thing.

Electronics definitely make things easier, but we’ve had people doing science for millennia before we figured out how to do anything particularly useful with electricity.

My understanding (and it’s very possible that this is just urban legend) is that they’re intentionally made of paper so if they do get lost they’re more likely to fall apart instead of getting stolen.

They’re not really intended to be something you carry around with you all the time, it’s not like you’re usually going to be expected to produce on the spot during your daily routine. It’s more the sort of thing you’d keep at home with your birth certificate and other such personal documents.

IMO the real boneheaded move was making it a wallet-sized card instead of something more like a birth certificate. If you make something in that form factor, people are going to stick it in their wallets and carry it around with them and it’s going to fall apart.

I don’t think there’s any easy answer here.

If you stay, are you able and willing to fight and to what degree under which circumstances? What do you have to offer? Will you be more of a liability than an asset? How do you weigh your personal safety and wellbeing or those of your family and friends against the country or world? What do your prospects look like in whatever country you choose to flee to?

Ah, you mean the original “razor and blades” business model that ensures repeat customers.

(Yes, I’m aware that many people who use safety razors these days are not necessarily buying from brands that make both the razor and the blades, I am such a person myself, I’m somewhat joking on that)

But even in the realm of “buy it for life” items, you can still end up with repeat customers. Maybe you want a second razor for your travel toiletry bag, or to keep in your second bathroom. Maybe you just see one that looks cooler, or the handle is more ergonomic, or the way you change the blade seems more convenient.

And BIFL items still do sometimes get lost, stolen, given away, thrown out, or sometimes even broken and need to be replaced.

And unless the world’s population starts shrinking, there will always be new shavers hitting puberty who will eventually need their own razor.

With a DNA test, unless you’re questioning paternity or testing for specific genetic traits like cancer risk and such, once your parents have taken a test, you and your siblings don’t really need to, you know what your parents are so you know what you are.

If you intend to continue living in America for now, DO NOT LEAVE THE COUNTRY if it can be at all avoided. Not into Canada, not Mexico, not to any other country, not by land, sea, or air. If you can, stay at least 100 miles away from any border.

Don’t count on your visa, green card, or any other documentation and paperwork you may have being sufficient to allow you back into the country. Honestly, I don’t think we’re far from you being potentially barred from returning even if you’re a naturalized citizen.

If you must leave the country for any reason, do so with the knowledge that you may not be allowed to return. Bring your important documents, extra cash, clothes, etc. make arrangements for your pets, figure out what your next move will be if you get to the US border and are denied entry, where will you go, who will you stay with, etc.

It depends on the context

If I’m just looking for a confirmation that my message was received, and the plans need to additional modification, a thumbs up is sufficient.

If I ask something like “Wanna meet up at the bar after work today?” And get a thumbs up, that’s sufficient. We know where we’re going and when, no more discussion really needed.

If I ask “you free to grab a beer this weekend?” and I get a thumbs up, that’s bullshit. When are you free to grab said beer? Where are we going for it? We have details that need to be hammered out.

My friends family has a shore house we’ve gone to a few times. It’s an old house, built before a/c was a thing, and still doesn’t have any. We throw open some windows and the house stays pretty comfortable, it’s warm but not at all unbearable even when the temps are in the 80s, 90s, occasionally even over 100 (fahrenheit of course)

It does help that it’s at the shore so there’s basically always a nice breeze.

For power tools- very important, if they’re the wrong color they don’t work with my batteries. I’m pretty sure that’s how it works.

Otherwise, not very. Color is pretty much the last thing on my mind, weird colors are kind of a bonus so my tools can be easily identified and so they’re less likely to get lost by blending in, but not a primary reason for me to buy anything.

I’m considering painting on some colored rings around the handles of some of my tools to easily identify them at a glance. Stuff that’s somewhat likely to end up in a pile of similar-looking tools when I’m working with friends. Be nice to say that my hammer is the one with a purple ring around the handle or whatever.

TL;DR

From my end of things, none of these companies are much better or worse than any other. If I had to pick one of the big names I’d say maybe ADT/Everon, but the difference is miniscule. If you can find a smaller local company, that’s probably your best bet, especially if they somehow have a local call center (most of them seem to outsource to central call centers that handle probably dozens of alarm companies)

If you’re in a rich, less-dense town where you can’t count on neighbors being around to see a break in happening to call it in, sure, go ahead and get an alarm. If you’re stuck living in the ghetto, and can somehow afford it, go for it. If you have some sort of fucked up domestic situation where your ex is stalking you or something, it’s probably worth it (but change your code and locks.) If none of that applies to you, just lock your doors and maybe put some lights on timers and motion sensors, and just have a little situational awareness and you’re probably going to be fine. Like I said above, most of the calls I get are false alarms, and of the legitimate ones, most of them get called in faster and more efficiently by the homeowner, a neighbor, an employee, or a random passerby before we ever get the call from the alarm co.

And if you do get one, make sure they’re setting it up right, make sure you’re providing them with correct information and keeping it up to date, and make sure the sensors are labeled in some sort of sensible manner. “Zone 2” means absolutely nothing to anyone.

If I ever personally get an alarm system, it will probably be for fire alarms. Currently though, I have some smart smoke detectors that will send me a notification on my phone if they go off. I think that’s pretty adequate, as long as I have cell service, I can call it in myself if I’m not home, and if I don’t have cell service, that probably means I’m out camping and so my dog is either with me or staying with my parents, everything else in my house is just stuff, and that’s what insurance is for.

I apologize, this became a long rant, too long for a single comment. This comment is mostly rant, I’m going to reply to it with sort of a TL;DR in a 2nd comment, but it’s still probably going to be kind of long, I have a lot of thoughts about alarm companies.

I work in 911 dispatch. What happens when your alarm gets activated is the alarm company receives the signal and then they call someone like me to send police/fire/EMS.

I’m pretty sure that everyone in my profession has a pretty low opinion of alarm companies. In theory the services are a fine idea. In practice, they’re kind of a shit show. I’m not too sure where the biggest issue is with them- corporate decision making, lazy installation techs, incompetent account managers, terrible phone operators (some of them like to call them dispatchers, they don’t dispatch shit) or the customers are all just idiots, but it’s probably all of the above and more.

Starting from the bottom, a whole lot of these places seem to use the same sort of call centers we’ve all come to know and hate from having to call tech support. Most of them have thick accents, and most of the ones who don’t seem to be borderline illiterate. Think back to grade school when the teacher would go around the room having you read a paragraph or two from a book out loud then pass it onto the next person to continue reading, it eventually would come around to the kid who probably had undiagnosed dyslexia and a fear of public speaking, and he’d struggle through it having to sound out each word syllable by syllable while you all just went ahead and read the paragraph on your own. That’s what talking to some of these operators is like. And if you deviate from their script even the tiniest bit they get totally flustered and don’t know what to say.

That’s all well and good in your high school English class when you’re reading through Romeo and Juliet, but when I’m trying to send the fire department out to see if a house is burning down or not it’s maddening when I can’t tell if the address they’re giving me is “7 main Street” so “11 maple Street” either because of their accent, they’re mumbling into the phone with a screaming baby in the background (I’m pretty sure some of them are working from home now) or they just can’t fucking read.

On my call here are the questions I’m asking.

What is the address- house number, street name, apartment/suite number if applicable, municipality (not necessarily the same thing as the town/city on the mailing address, they’re different sometimes, I’m sending your towns police, not delivering your mail)

What is the nearest cross street- to verify I have the right location, damn near every town has a Maple Street, and because I can’t necessarily count on getting the correct town from the caller, this helps me make sure I’m sending help to the right Maple Street and not the one in the next town over.

If it’s a business, and the name of the business. I’ve had alarms called in as residential alarms but the name of the resident is listed as something like “Anderson Construction LLC” so a commercial alarm under just some schmuck’s name. Or it will be the name of some property management company and not the actual business at that location.

For security alarms- is it audible or silent

The area of activation - half of them are just labeled as something like “zone 2” which is useless. I don’t know where zone 2 is, the alarm co doesn’t know, the homeowner doesn’t know, our police and fire sure don’t, so we don’t know where we need to be looking for the issue. Is it a motion sensor? A window alarm? The garage? Your guess is as good as mine. Or sometimes zone 2 is kitchen windows, bathroom door, side room motion, and basement stairs all on the same zone.

Also once in a while they’ll tell me something like it’s a security alarm but it’s coming from the smoke detector.

If it’s residential - what is the resident’s name?

Some sort of contact phone number. Ideally a premise phone number, but at least a residents cell phone, or a keyholder for the business. Some way to get ahold of someone to make sure everything is ok, see if they know why the alarm is going off, confirm if anyone is supposed to be there, figure out how to re-secure the house if they find an unlocked door, get authorization to force entry if needed, etc.

Will you notify- will you be calling the resident, an emergency contact, keyholder, etc. to let them know about this alarm

That’s a lot of ranting on my part, but it’s not much information I’m looking for. On the rare occasion they have all the information and the operator is competent, it takes me just over 1 minute to get everything I need

My entire call ideally boils down to something like:

123 MAIN ST, TOWNSVILLE NY, APT 4
X-STREET: MAPLE ST
AUD, BEDROOM MOTION
JOE SCHMO - 555-555-5555
W/N

There’s not a single one of those fields that they haven’t messed up- wrong or incomplete addresses, no x streets, no name/wrong name, wrong or no phone number, no list of emergency contacts, or the contacts are all outdated and haven’t worked at a company for 10 years. Sometimes all on the same call. I sometimes wonder how they manage to get paid for their service because I don’t know how they’re able to send their customers a bill or call them to ask for money because they don’t seem to have any of that information.

And sometimes they call the wrong jurisdiction, I’ve occasionally had to transfer alarm calls to other dispatch centers around the country.

We had one once where all the information they had was an “address” that was something like “¼ mile past the motor pool” and the zone. Literally nothing else. Somehow our supervisor managed to track that down to an Indian reservation on the other side of the country. I have no idea why it came to us, but we got that call a couple times before they were able to finally update the account information.

Some of that is lazy installation techs not setting things up properly, or customer service and account managers and such not properly verifying information. Sometimes though I think it’s customers providing them with garbage information from the get go.

Also most of these companies have some sort of verification protocol where they try to reach the homeowner to confirm if help is needed and they ask for a password. I get a lot of false alarm calls where they spoke with the homeowner but they didn’t know their password, so they had to call it in. Maybe write that down and stick it in your wallet or something if you can’t remember it.

They’ll call in 3 hours later with an “update” to a previous alarm that our responders have already been out to and cleared from for 2½ hours. And sometimes they’ll call in 2 minutes later with a new request for dispatch and are shocked to learn that we already have help on the way because I literally just hung up with another operator for an alarm at the same location.

And when a sensor is malfunctioning and giving false alarms, no one ever seems to do anything about it. There are houses and businesses that we legitimately have police or fire at almost every night and sometimes multiple times a night because the alarm keeps going off for no reason and it sometimes goes on for months or years because no one can be bothered to get a tech out fix it or at least take that sensor offline.

We had one alarm we kept getting for about a year. The business it was for had been closed for years and the property vacant, even our police couldn’t track down a property owner or anything. Who the hell was paying that alarm bill? I think it only stopped when the building was demolished.

This all pretty much applies to medical alarms like life alert and such too. Missing or incorrect information across the board there. Same address verification, name and phone number, we also want medical history and access information like a hidden key or garage code. We’d rather not have to break down your grandmother’s door to help her up after she’s fallen and can’t get up if there’s a spare key hidden under a flower pot we could use instead.

And the icing on the cake, of the probably thousands of alarm calls I’ve handled in almost 6 years I’ve been here, maybe a few hundred of them have been legitimate, the rest were false alarms or accidental activations. Most of the legit ones have been fire alarms.

And of those legitimate calls, all but maybe a few dozen of them have been called in faster and more efficiently by the homeowner, employees, or random bystanders/passersby who either noticed something suspicious or heard the alarm going off and called it into us before we ever got a call from the alarm company. Hell, sometimes the alarm never even goes off until the police are there clearing the interior of a building after a break-in.

I live and work in what I’d overall consider to be a very safe area. Break-ins are almost vanishingly rare, and when they do happen it’s more likely to be some sort of a domestic thing where your ex wants to steal back the TV they bought you and remembers your alarm code or something like that than the sort of burglary you probably imagine. And when the more legitimate break-ins happen, it’s either in the super rich neighborhoods when the homeowner is out of town, or it’s in the poorer, more urban (this is the suburbs, none of it is really urban, but a couple towns come pretty close) parts of my county, where most of the people probably don’t have the extra money for an alarm system anyway. For everyone else in the middle, I think security alarms aren’t really worth it.

Yeah, steam has definitely done a lot to improve the situation and I’m very impressed with the current state of things.

I just have a bit of a mental block from the last time I seriously tried to use Linux (circa 2009 probably) that I need to get over. A lot has changed since then

Lol, I’ll keep that in mind, internet stranger. I do have a lot of techy friends who I’ll probably offer it up to first, and I haven’t quite ruled out running Linux myself either to keep as my main PC or to use as a media server or something, but I’ll keep you in mind if I’m looking to get rid of it in a few months.

If it does come to that, pay for shipping (or pick it up if you happen to be local) and it’s yours. Feel free to hit me up to ask about it come november-ish if I don’t reach out first. No guarantees it will be available, but I’d rather it go to someone who’s going to use it than be waste

My PC isn’t compatible with Windows 11.

I cobbled it together from spare parts as my wife has upgraded over the years. It was a pretty beefy computer when she first built it, and it’s gotten a couple upgrades along the way, but the CPU and MoBo are probably about 10 years old if not older (it’s an AMD FX-something, I’m unsure of the exact specs, it’s whatever parts were in her bin of cast-offs stuck with a new case and hard drive)

And I’m happily gaming on it. I may not be maxing out the latest AAA titles in glorious 8k epic quality 120hz HDR VR yadda yadda yadda, but I can still run pretty much any game out there on some acceptable mid-to-high quality settings and decent performance.

I’m probably going to have to either upgrade the MoBo and processor come October, or make the jump to Linux (which I’m not exactly opposed to, but I do like not having to fuck with wine and proton to run my games)

It’s a perfectly serviceable board, still doing just fine by me, and there’s no reason it can’t give someone at least a few more good years of use, even as a gaming computer if you’re not a graphics snob.

But if I decide to upgrade, unless I find someone who wants to run Linux on it, or understands the risk of running win10 with no security updates, it’s probably going to become e waste.