Just because it works, doesn’t mean it’s right.

Yeah I can see that. They did well with little pixels, but if you don’t know what you are looking at it may not make any sense.

In the voice of Stone Cold Steve Austin:

Tash - WHAT?! Pet - WHAT?! Ers - WHAT?!

Cause Stone Cold says so.

Serious answer: OP cropped the name out, it was complete on the Canvas.

It says right on it? Bottom right.

I started with Suse 5 when it came out, as something I was interested in removeding about with. I didn’t have internet access at that time, but I did had a couple of books about it (the distro came with a book as well). It was a couple of CDs and a boot floppy disk (booting from CD wasn’t really a thing).

I used it for years for software development and simple tasks like Word processing. Getting my printer working on the thing was a chore, as was basically anything. Especially without internet solving issues was sometimes simply impossible. My scanner simply didn’t work. Getting the desktop environment to run was very hard, I struggled with it for a long time. And once I got it working properly, I got a new videocard and it broke the whole thing again.

The system was very painful to use, it was super cool, but almost nothing ever worked right. And trying to fix removed usually made it worse. But once you did get it working right, it was simply awesome. And the feeling of accomplishment was awesome after finally getting something right. For software development on the terminal it was pretty awesome though. Back then I did almost everything in text mode, as I was used to DOS before that. Going into Windows was something you did only sometimes with Windows 3.11 (and even 95) and I did the same in my Linux environment. The desktop environment used up a lot of memory and was pretty slow, so I preferred the console. It was only later booting into the desktop became the norm (around the Windows 98 era).

I used Suse till version 6.1 (still have that box). I bought version 7 (still have that box as well), but never really used it.

Back then I used Debian to create small internet routers for my friends. I got an old compact computer, put in a floppy with Debian, a couple of network cards and created small NAT boxes like that. This was before NAT routers were the norm, people just had internet on 1 machine, connected directly. But as computers became cheaper, a lot of folk had more than 1 computer in the home. With no real way to share the internet connection between the different computers. Microsoft created the Internet Connection Sharing feature, but that was pretty slow, disconnected often and ate resources on your “main” PC. So my little boxes worked great, I helped people setup a home network, connected my magic box to get every system online. Also helped them setup some port forwarding for the stuff they used.

Because I used Debian a lot, I switched over to Debian for my main rig when Suse 7 released. Used Potato, Woody, Sarge and Etch a lot. Switched around between Debian and Ubuntu in the Lenny and Squeeze era. Have been using Ubuntu ever since, never really had a reason to switch. Debian compared to Suse was so nice, I really liked the way Debian did things. It made a lot more sense for me in my head compared to Suse.

As I removeded around with computers a lot, I always had both Linux and DOS/Windows machines running and even had a couple of dual boot systems. For any kind of gaming DOS/Windows was required back then and I did love to game. I do think Windows 10 will be my last Microsoft OS, since Windows 11 absolutely sucks (use it at work, I hate it). Work stuff has become less and less of an issue to get stuff done on Linux just as well as on Windows. And gaming has come leaps and bounds due to the work on the Steamdeck.

So hope to fully ditch Microsoft in the near future, even though my first ever computer in 1984 ran Microsoft firmware with Microsoft Basic being the default user interface.

Agreed, large spools are too much if you want to play around with all the colors. I have a box of old filament, each spool in plastic with a dry packet and the whole box with a couple of bags of drying stuff and a good seal on the top. But after getting a spool out to use recently (spool about 2 year old) and it printed like removed. I tried putting it in a dryer, but it didn’t help. So I tried more of these spools and they almost all seem to have gone bad.

Such a shame, I should have bought smaller spools, but they are harder to get and often more expensive.

Huh? Dell makes monitors that don’t support VESA mounts?

I’m 99% sure this monitor has a the ability for a VESA mount. The specs you linked say it has. According to Dell they even sell the thing without a stand, that wouldn’t make sense if it didn’t have another way to mount it.

The manual explains the VESA mount: https://dl.dell.com/manuals/all-products/esuprt_display_projector/esuprt_display/dell-p2417h-monitor_user’s_guide_en-us.pdf

Yes normally the tube gets inserted into another tube, which is the stuck into another tube or a foot. This leaves a large moment force directly where the tube is pushed into the other tube. Most likely even with careful use, this tube will break very quickly. The layer joint is the weak spot and the type of plastic most likely isn’t ideal.

Vacuum cleaner parts are made from a high impact plastic, something that’s tough but a bit on the softer side. This way it can take a beating without breaking into a million pieces.

3D printing this is cool and impressive to pull off such a high and narrow print. But practically speaking it makes no sense.

I can also recommend the book the TS mentioned, it is very good and after reading it you will understand regular expressions. It’s fine to use a cheat sheet if you want, cause if you don’t do it regularly the knowledge can sag, but the understanding is what matters. Also depending on the context, different implementations can have slightly different syntax or modifiers to be aware of.

I lent out the book to my brother once and he somehow lost it, so I never got it back. Don’t lend out book guys.

And remember not everything can be solved using a regular expression: https://xkcd.com/1171/

I don’t think you know what an ad hominem is.

Why would Africa be a huge market for Starlink specifically? All of the people who can afford it live in cities that have perfectly good internet. This article is about Ghana specifically, which has excellent internet in the cities.

As for rural areas, sure the internet sucks or isn’t available at all. But not many people live there and they don’t have the money to spend it on something expensive like Starlink. But that’s the same all across the world, not just Africa. And in most rural areas mobile phones are becoming the main source of internet for most people. It isn’t the fastest, but it works plenty fast enough for things like WhatsApp groups and other social media.

So what makes you think Africa would be a huge market, compared to other places?

I don’t know this exact meter, but I had a little optical sensor on my meter for years. There was a dial that rotated once per a given volume, it had a black part and a white part. This way a single led and light detector could measure exact revolutions and be able to read out the value. This way it didn’t have to read the numbers, which is much harder and can’t measure small increments very well.

My meter got replaced with a smart kind years ago, so now I simply have a port that can be read out directly with way more information. But my janky led and light detector thing worked very well for years. Since this was years ago it ran a very simple PIC micro, nothing like a full fledged ESP platform.

Agree, but I think what he’s saying is that with Apollo they focused on the mission. They needed to get 2 people to the surface of the moon and back, everything else was just a bonus. This meant the program died out right away after it was done, you’ve done it and proven you can do it again and now there’s no point. But on the other hand, they got it done because they focused on the minimal viable product first and adding redundancies and procedures to fix removed when failures happened. This made sure whatever happened, the mission would still get done, they would get to the moon and back.

With the whole Artemis and especially the Starship they are taking risks, creating political favorable programs, tech demos and completely lost sight of the mission. I’d say they haven’t really defined an actual mission people can get behind. Destin did a good job at demonstrating the program doesn’t take failure into account, if something goes wrong there is very little anybody can do. And not knowing if cryogenic refueling in space is even viable or how many launches you need 2 years before launch shows how unprepared they really are. Everyone high fiving each other “We are going back!”, but in reality they are so far away from that goal it’s not clear it ever is going to happen.

As always with tech demos the argument is “Look at how cool this is!” “If it were to work, you get so much for so little”. Which agreed is true, if it were to work it’s awesome, you get so much more than with Apollo. But is it in line with the mission? NASA doesn’t know what to do with the extra volume and payload, so I would suggest it isn’t on mission at all. It’s also total vaporware until someone actually does it, and so far all we’ve seen is billions of dollars and very little actual results.

It’s a big pitfall everyone falls in every now and again. Someone pitches a product and asks for funding, the product is great if it were to work as advertised. And even if the prototype isn’t really there at the moment, it can get developed out to the real deal. But there needs to be a fact check to confirm if the product is even possible and what the exact cost and limitations will be. We expect the government and NASA to do this, but Destin pointed out politics is a huge deal and people are afraid to speak up. It wouldn’t be the first time a critical report at NASA got pushed aside, because of politics. Challenger anyone? The whole “Big if true” thing needs to be emphasized, yes if they deliver it would be great, but what is the chance they don’t actually deliver?

I feel like Destin was really hammering on the Apollo 6 Artemis 0 thing and he was totally right. If they keep pushing the way they are right now, they will continue to be at 0. If goals are set too high and it devolves into politics and tech demos, they will never get it done. And if they don’t have the redundancies, fallbacks and procedures in order, people are going to die.

My personal opinion: NASA should ditch Starship right away. It’s not the right tool for the job, SpaceX underbid to drive out competition and the whole thing is based on unproven tech. Delays are expected, cost overrun is expected and they will continue to waste money till the money runs out or somehow they get everything working. SpaceX also has a history of promising stuff which is awesome for a low price, only to massively overrun on cost and scale back on functionality. So the end result is something which isn’t that awesome at all, but only serviceable in best case and not at a low price. This way they push out the competition, but end up underdelivering compared to the competition. (Not only to bash on SpaceX, Boeing has huge issues as well, just highlighting a single SpaceX issue). Starship is in my opinion hugely complex, with way too much bells and whistles, the chances of failure are super high if they even get the thing to work in the first place. The super heavy booster is doomed to fail, the whole a billion engine thing sounds great, if one fails you’ve got so much backups it doesn’t even matter. This idea makes sense in principle, but it requires problems to be detectable and acted upon fast enough not to cause loss of mission. In reality rockets are some of the most energy intense machines and unexpected things happen. And when they do, they happen fast and with a lot of energy. If the engine isn’t shutdown in time, or the shutdown doesn’t solve the issue, you are looking at loss of mission. If the engine damages any part of the other engines or shared infrastructure, you are looking at loss of mission.

I fully support the arguments Destin was making and all of the stuff he wasn’t saying but was clear to everyone in that room. In reality I don’t know what anyone can really do. There is so much involved in a program of this size, it’s hard to change course. And anybody speaking up loses their job. It also isn’t clear what exactly can be done to fix all of the highlighted issues (which is a huge red flag in my mind). So they’ll probably keep pushing and I can only hope we don’t have a loss of crew over this.