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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • 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.

    Chinese 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


  • For the record, the butterball boneless turkey roasts also include a gravy starter.

    I buy a fair number of them when I find a good deal, I have a meat slicer and make most of my own lunch meats and they’re really convenient for that. Even with the added weight from the gravy which I also don’t use, they’d probably still be a money saver if I could keep myself from loading the sandwich up with extra meat.

    I’ve been trying to figure out a good alternative, I may try at some point just cramming some turkey breasts into some meat netting and seeing how well it holds together.



  • I also assumed that was the process here, but from the article this does seem to be something slightly different. Overall process seems to be roughly the same, but they’re using biodegradable materials instead of resin, apparently a mix of egg white and “rice extract”

    Now I’m personally skeptical about how long-lasting something made from egg and rice can be, although I guess there are still tempera paintings (tempera paint is made from egg yolks) around from the Renaissance, so what the hell do I know?

    And the chemicals used to strip the lignin from the wood aren’t exactly the most environmentally friendly, but I guess arguably they’re better than some of the ones used in plastic production.


  • 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.





  • I also don’t like fish

    I find that sushi is less offensive to me than cooked most of the time, so that’s one place to start. Still not something I’d actively seek out but if it’s what’s offered to me I can deal with it.

    I also overall find freshwater fish to be more palatable, I enjoy fishing so if I catch some decent sized trout worth keeping I’ll eat them (it’s more for my wife, but if we’re already cooking it I’ll eat it)

    My mom’s also not a fish eater, but can stomach flounder.



  • 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.



  • There was a guy I knew in high school, he was never the brightest bulb, but he had the rare gift that he realized that he was kind of an idiot and would listen to and try to learn from people that knew more about something than he did. Overall a pretty nice guy, I don’t think anyone really had anything bad to say about him, he leaned a little conservative but if you took the time to explain something from a liberal point of view you could definitely get him to change his mind sometimes.

    I mostly lost track of him after I graduated, I heard somewhere through the grapevine that he had died, turns out those rumors were somewhat exaggerated, but he did get a pretty significant brain injury, spent a brief time in a coma, had some surgeries, nice scar on his head.

    Next time I ran into him a few years later, he had taken a pretty weird turn into some paranoid bullshit, talking about some apocalypse or civil war that he seemed sure was coming and how he was learning to make his own arrows so he could keep hunting when ammo ran out.

    This was a few years before Trump’s first term, I can only imagine he’s spiraled further into crazytown since then.


  • 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.


  • Just FYI, you may need your old keyboard and mouse to initially set up your computer so don’t get rid of them quite yet. You’ll most likely need to boot into the OS to pair them, so that’s probably going to have to be after your initial setup. Also if you ever need to get into your computer’s BIOS I don’t think most of them support Bluetooth keyboards (I could be wrong, I’m not totally up to date on the state of things, my own motherboard is pretty old so that may have changed) so you’ll probably want to keep them around

    Some Bluetooth keyboards/mice do work as a wired device as well or have the option to use a non-bluetooth dongle, but check the specs, just because it has a USB port for charging for example doesn’t necessarily mean it will talk to your computer over USB.


  • Yeah, microcenter is kind of the place to go for computer building as far as brick and mortar stores go. And most of the staff there, at least at the one near me, are pretty knowledgeable and willing to talk shop and let you pick their brain a bit.

    Also just kind of a fun place to walk around if you like electronics, all the weird adapters and gadgets that you know must exist but never actual see in stores are there. The one near me also has a bunch of 3d printers and other maker/tinkerer tools and gizmos.

    And their service department is usually pretty great (although I don’t know if their online appointment system actually works, anytime I’ve brought something in to them with an appointment they kind of act like online appointments don’t exist)

    I haven’t used their PC building service myself, but I’m pretty sure you could pretty much tell them what you want to do with your computer and they’d build you something suitable.