It’s not an extra life, it’s another health point. Red mushroom, not green mushroom.

I also have a Synology NAS. It’s okay. I got a mid-range two-bay one. I could be happier with it. Also, I heard that they’re going toward requiring their brand hard drives, so I’m not buying another one.

You know what the problem with USB-C is? In 2010 or so, you could have a fistful of unique USB cables, A-B, A-MiniB, A-MicroB, 3A-3B, 3A-Micro3B, A-Lightning, they’re all different, but you can look at the cable and tell exactly what it does. Most of them are identical in capabilities but have physically different plugs, and the two USB 3 cables are also identical in capabilities but with different client side plugs. ALL of them will plug in and work in the same host-side port.

With USB-C, I can have a fistful of visually similar cables, with drastically different capabilities, and I have no way of telling them apart. The USB consortium has been inconsistent with their branding, it has been applied even more inconsistently or even fraudulently by manufacturers, and there’s no way to inspect the cable’s features without trying it to see if it works.

Jesus. Fuck. Are they STILL making superhero movies?

The oldest single player game I keep going back to is Super Mario World on the SNES, Copyright 1990.

I will occasionally play games older than that, but the SNES is where my actual nostalgia begins.

Vorta. Qt based front end for BorgBackup.

Probably “Native Linux apps are made in Linux-only bullshit by useless neckbeards, and probably only run in the terminal. Real actual apps like Discord made by a for-profit corporation have to be made cross-platform.”

And what did we get for it? If you search “chrome install” in Edge it pulls a Janet, all like

I’ve had a few creatures put down. My grandmother’s dog was in such bad heart health she couldn’t really move around anymore. When the creature shakes and whimpers under the strain of standing up, and sometimes just randomly screams in pain, it’s about time to make that difficult trip to the vet.

My old cat Spice lived to the ripe old age of 18, and then she had a saddle thrombus. Essentially a blood clot blocked her aorta where it forks to her back legs. Her back beans turned cold and blue, she couldn’t walk right, she was obviously in distress, so we rushed her to the emergency vet where we were told at her age she probably wasn’t going to survive any treatment, and that she probably had about 3 more horribly painful hours to live. She was actively dying, it was a question of how long do we let her lay there gasping?

I let it get about that grim before it becomes an option.

I have a couple. My phone came with an A female to C male adapter (will turn an A cable into a C cable) that’s about as compact as you can make it, but it is only wired for 2.0. I also have a 4 inch dongle cable that does the exact same thing that is I think 3.0. I just bought some C-A adapters (turns a C cable into an A cable) which look like an A plug with the cable cut off. These aren’t compliant with the USB-C spec and can be misused for bad ideas, like an A-A cable, but it does allow you to carry one USB C-C cable and one adapter and cover a lot of bases.

Well, let me show you something.

You vs the guy she told you not to worry about.

Guess which one of those is a 4-conductor USB 2 cable rated for 15 watts that came in the box with my smart phone, and which is a 3.1 cable that can carry 10Gbps USB data AND a 4k60Hz DP signal AND a USB 2.0 link for peripherals AND 100 watts of power simultaneously. Guess at their relative prices.

And this isn’t even the ultimate cable. The cable I described is 12 year old technology, they dropped the 3.1 spec in 2013! Newer cables can do 20Gbps using both lanes, carry more power, do external PCIe, all kinds of crap.

But normies who charge thay phone, eat hot chip and lie don’t want this cable. They don’t want to pay $15 for 7mm thick cable that’ll pull their Qi charger off their night stand with its weight every time they pick their phone up. They want a thin, flexible strand of spaghetti that will carry 15 watts from the wall wart behind their headboard to the charger on the night stand, successfully negotiating at least two sharp 90 degree turns.

USB-C was supposed to be the universal port. The answer to every question. Recharge your wireless earbuds, recharge your laptop, attach HIDs, very fast storage, high speed network adapters, displays, low latency teledildonics, VR headsets…it was the chosen one, it was supposed to destroy the Sith, not join them. Turns out, the port might be capable of that, but the cable is a different story. There’s 24 pins in the plug, two of which will never be connected (the four middle pins are for USB 2, and there are only 2 wires for that. The cable itself along with the chips in the connectors need to be designed for what you’re doing. And we can’t really steer around that because they’re going to keep adding tech to this connector for awhile yet.

So we’re gonna end up with cables that can do this, but not that. Some applications only require USB 2.0, but the device has a USB-C port. I’m okay with that cable existing, but the industry as a whole has done a piss poor job of selling and marking cables with their capabilities.

I bought the cable above from Cable Matters. They make good cables. They marked each end of this cable with the SS USB 10 mark on one side, and their logo on the other. It doesn’t indicate it’s video or power capacity in any way. You’re supposed to make note of that when you buy the cable, keep track of which cable that is in your collection, and remember what it can do. I’m a neckbeard with no life, and even I’m not gonna get that done.

As a hardware product, it’s the stupidest thing I’ve heard about since the shakeweight. A non-rechargeable Bluetooth microphone disguised as a tacky ring.

Who is the customer? Who takes “voice notes” enough to need to add a button for it to their hand? Or, ever?

Buried among all the stupid ideas seems to be the promise of offering a Siri/Bixby/Alexa like experience that runs entirely locally on your phone that doesn’t have a home to phone back to. Does it have to be LLM-based, or is that just all tech bros can do anymore? And why can’t the phone’s own mic, or the mic in a Pebble smart watch, do that job? Why center it on a nearly non-functional device?

Remember those bluetooth earbuds that business jackasses wore all the time back in the 2000s? This does less than that.

It is amazing how bloated software has gotten. Used to be, your computer’s OS fit on a floppy diskette.

I remember the original roll-out of USB, things like mice and keyboards very quickly transitioned to USB and came with one of those USB/PS2 dongles for awhile for compatibility with older computers, and then we were into the USB era.

That hasn’t happened with USB-C, large market segments don’t seem interested in making it happen, it’s not getting better, in fact it seems to be getting worse. So kick it in the head and start over from scratch.

Situation: There are 15 competing standards, and they’re all USB.

That’s the winning hypothesis, dumpster diving gooners.

I personally don’t, no. I have it installed on a PC though.

Yeah, “3.0” and “3.2 Gen 1” mean the same thing. Same with “3.1” and “3.2 Gen 2x1”. I’ve bought computer cases in 2025 with the front IO labeled “3.0”.

How are normal people supposed to keep track of this?

Surely there are people who bought Chromebooks for college? Or boomers who bought the $245 Chromebook instead of the $285 Win10S manufactured ewaste laptop?

Name me a feature SteamOS has that Bazzite doesn’t.