jalefkowit

vampiress , 3 months ago to random

Atari VCS 800s are going super cheap right now.

Trying to figure out if they're worth it at over half off…

They're quite gorgeous, and the wireless controllers look decent. Wonder if they can be hacked to emulate more than just what they already do…

Sounds like a yes? Basically a linux machine with a front-end. Not unlike a Steamdeck…

Anyone got one and have feeling about it they want to share?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_VCS_(2021_console)

jalefkowit , 3 months ago

@vampiress Under the hood it's a Ryzen PC running Debian. You can even upgrade it with off-the-shelf PC parts (M.2 storage, DDR4 RAM).

According to them it can boot an OS from an external USB drive, so you wouldn't even have to blow away the existing system until you're really ready to.

Sounds like a lot of possibility there, particularly if you can find one cheap!

https://support.atari.com/hc/en-us/articles/17386500806427-PC-Mode

jalefkowit , 3 months ago to random

Country music is popular across the United States because a quack doctor in Kansas in the 1920s who treated impotent men by surgically implanting goat testicles into their scrotum lost his medical license, so he ran for Governor of Kansas because that job would let him assign new members to the state medical board who would reinstate his license, and he only lost because the Republican and Democratic parties changed the election rules to throw out any votes for him that didn't write in his full name in a single approved way, so he moved to Texas and set up a million-watt radio station across the Mexican border that let him blast quack medical advice and sales pitches for patent medicines across the entire continent, and he needed something to fill airtime when he wasn't on selling joy juice, so he filled it with country music

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_R._Brinkley

jalefkowit OP , 3 months ago

More on John R. Brinkley's one million watt "border blaster" radio station, XER, here.

http://www.theradiohistorian.org/xer/xer.html

jalefkowit OP , 3 months ago

Someone turned the story of John R. Brinkley into an animated documentary a few years back. It's rated 94% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. You can stream it on most online rental services for around $4*.

(* In the US, pricing and availability may be different elsewhere)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgcE6Yyth34

jalefkowit , 3 months ago to random

“Upon seeing videos in the news, I suddenly realized that I don’t know what to do if an earthquake hits while I’m driving. I’ve grown up in the Los Angeles area my whole life, and we had earthquake drills in school that taught us to duck and cover under a sturdy surface, but no mention was made about how to react if you’re behind the wheel.”

https://jalopnik.com/what-to-do-if-an-earthquake-hits-while-youre-driving-1851385095

jalefkowit OP , 3 months ago

When I experienced the only earthquake I've ever lived through (the 2011 Virginia quake), I did by instinct what I had been taught ages ago as a child was the right thing to do during an earthquake: stand in a doorway.

So you can imagine how chagrined I was to discover afterwards that standing in a doorway during an earthquake is now considered to be an extremely bad and stupid thing to do

https://www.washington.edu/uwem/preparedness/know-your-hazards/earthquake/what-not-to-do-during-an-earthquake/

jalefkowit , 3 months ago to random

America is full of towns that will pay tech workers thousands of dollars to move there, the only caveat being that they are among the most boring places on earth

https://www.makemymove.com/

jalefkowit OP , 3 months ago

Many of them are in Indiana, which as an Ohio boy I will just say would be like voluntarily moving to the dark side of the moon

jalefkowit OP , 3 months ago

@afterconnery Ohio is a special place! That's why it has produced so many astronauts, it takes a special place to make its residents want to flee to low orbit

jalefkowit OP , 3 months ago

@afterconnery Which one? How do you like it?

(I am currently in the market for a new place of residence)

jalefkowit OP , 3 months ago

@afterconnery That's cool! I lived for a while in Oxford, not too far from Richmond. I really liked that town. Unfortunately houses there now go for a half mil apiece 🙃​

jalefkowit , 4 months ago to random

I've been struggling to work with this project I inherited that uses Tailwind CSS. I kept trying to use Tailwind styles that were clearly listed in the documentation, but most of them didn't work. When I checked the bundled CSS generated by Webpack, the styles that didn't work weren't present. Which seemed weird! Seeing as how they were official styles listed in the documentation.

It turns out that Tailwind "helps" you at the build stage by monitoring your source files, and only including styles in your output bundle that you actually used somewhere. So if you ever want to use a new Tailwind style, you have to put it in somewhere and then npm rebuild the whole bundle

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/77775132/tailwind-missing-lots-of-styles

jalefkowit OP , 4 months ago

The very first thing that attracted me to web development back in the early '90s was "hey, I can build useful stuff this way without having to deal with a compile step!"

Now I live in hell

jalefkowit , 5 months ago to random

YouMightNotNeedJQuery.com is a fascinating document, in that it makes the argument that you don't need jQuery while inadvertently suggesting that you might WANT jQuery even if you don't need it because so many of the listed tasks are one line in jQuery compared to 10 lines of vanilla JavaScript

https://youmightnotneedjquery.com/

jalefkowit OP , 5 months ago

Like I know I know no cool kids use jQuery anymore, but god damn the jQuery syntax in those examples is so much nicer than the modern JavaScript syntax