If I need a Chromium, I feel like Vivaldi has their heart in the right place.

Sadly, the WebSerial stuff didn’t work when I tried it recently.

Are you using a shell replacement for the XP style titlebars and taskbar?

Calmira was pretty impressive for a taskbar-based shell, but I don’t recall doing a titlebar swap.

Would we know it if we saw it? Draw two eye spots on a wooden spoon amd people will anthromorphise it. I suspect we’ll have dozens of false starts and breathless announcements of AGI, but we may never get there.

More interestingly, would we want it if we got it? How long will its creators rally to its side if we throw yottabytes of data at our civilization-scale problems and the mavhine comes back with “build trains and eat the rich instead of cows?”

I was surprised the response wasn’t “okay, China made this on 1/50 the budget, so if we do what they did but threw double our budget at it, we can make something 100 times better, and we’ll be so far advanced that we’ll be opening Walmarts on Ganymede next spring, we just need more Quadros, bro”

The argument I could see is for people who want low-stakes imagery on a very low budget.

I used some of the Stable Whatever models to generate some wallpapers for my PC. I’m not talented, so I can get maybe 30% of what I want by hand from a blank page, but if you roll the gacha a few times, I can say “this is 70% what I wanted, and I can clean it up and tweak it to 75%.” If you use it that way, there’s still some personal effort. Sure, it’s still fairly soulless tat, but no more than the prepainted live-laugh-love signs in illegible cursive that clutter our thrift stores.

Yes, if I’m not willing to increase my skills, I should just throw commissions at actual artists, but I’m still way too self conscious to say to someone in person “can you make the vampire prince look 15% more like Liu Kang, and have him carrying a chocolate gateau?”

It also seems real common for blogs and low quality news sites where they need a header image but you don’t need high quality stock photos (how many different photos of traders gesticulating at a display board do you need for economy articles?) Again, low stakes, low budget.

They’re pretty crisp, but the sour cream and onion technology is decades behind Western leaders.

Wasn’t that the idea behing the Chevron doctrine? Leave the specifics up to experts rather than bamboozling Congresscritters about details.

I also loved my HAF XB, but it’s a little shallow when GPUs are over 30cm long. I recently switched back to a tower which fit under desk more easily, but is otherwise pretty mid.

The Jonsbo N5 presses similar buttons, but I wish it had 5.25 bays and more USB ports, and maybe side grips. I suppose you could modify most of those things, but it feels like a waste to rip out all those hotswap cages.

I tried custom laser engraving caps, some of my favourites:

‘Attack 0’ and ‘Attack 1’, actual key legends on some '80s Casio home computer

‘Run Stop’ from Commodre machines

The “diagonal half full box” inverse video key from Atari XL/XE keyboards.

I suspect the various Jolly Roger designs from either fictional or real pirates would work well. Or various “spell type” or “faction” logos from games.

I think the last game I bought for my 386 was Nomad. ISTR having to make space since it required like 9Mb of the 40Mb drive.

30-polygon-per-ship level 3-D space RPG with limited combat sequences. I think I played it wrong because I seemed to walk largely linearly through the story and defeat the Big Bad without seeing more than 1/10 of the galaxy

That lit number plate beside the cab is just so extra.

I’m curious if there’s a tradition of naming locomotives in the PRC. In the US, it’s rare, but in the UK fairly common. I feel like there would be plenty of space on that body for a brass plate honouring some C-list dignitary or local historic event.

I read about this. They make the printer WITH a perfectly good USB port and then stick a “no USB” label over it and attempt to force you to use their wireless setup.

https://post.lurk.org/@yaxu/110833261398955782 for more.

I’ve been working on “retrofication” of a “somewhat” modern case and have some notes for that process more than a specific recomendation:

• If you want a 3.5" floppy that works, you can either get a little USB adapter board, or a LS-120 on a PATA-SATA adapter. A Caleb UHD-144 might work, but many BIOSes and Windows still special-case LS-120s as “it can be drive A.” The USB adapters sort of suck, because the USB floppy spec sucks. 5.25, the best you can really do would be to rig up a Greaseweazle (specialised USB controller) which won’t really work like a regular floppy drive

• Instead of a MHz display, you can get a small programmable OLED. Digole offers some that can be hooked to a $1 USB-UART adapter and programmed very easily-- I’ve got some crude code hacked up (C++ for Linux) on my Gitlab (https://gitlab.com/hakfoo1/graphic-oled-control-for-linux) that gives you MHz and a bunch of other stats, but you could probably also rig up something on Windows

• Rustoleum Heirloom White is a very good “panel beige” for the metal side panels. You might also look at their “Satin Ivory” which gives a slightly yellowed tint good for the front panel.

• Intentional colour mismatches can work very well, like if you use an optical drive, paint it a different beige than the rest of the case, to indicate either being different plastic than the main case, or an aftermarket add-on. Tell a story.

• Some features feel like they “post-date” a case. Top-mounted ports seem pretty uncommon on vintage cases the first one I can recall having was well into the Windows Vista era)

• Get a momentary paddle switch, preferrably red, and mount that and it buys you a mountain of street cred.

• Grilles can be cut away and replaced with 3-D printed alternatives.

A forced sale guarantees ByteDance gets a fire sale price. If there’s any way forward that allows them to sell not-under-duress, there’s a chance for far more upside.

That works even for pure economics game theory, aside from wanting to continue in what they built on principle/commitment/interest in the project.

Would Zuck give up Facebook for the right price? Would he give it up for a highly discounted price of a rush sale?

There’s also the Ploopy, which is modern-oriented but a competent DIY trackball.

I’m so sick of these articles. They never deliver. The cost is $14.99, plus shipping ubless you spend $45. Why can’t their expert researchers find it out thenselves?

Don’t even get me started on “how many roads must a man walk down?”

Missing Sealand…

I don’t understand what Opera brings to the table now except random desperation.

If I want a Chromium browser with the spirit of Opera v12, I’ll use Vivaldi. If I want something skeevy and weird, I’ll use Edge. If I want to debug a stupid website, I’ll use Chrome.

This feels like floating point would not work well.

(Context for the non-programmer-socks crowd) Some systems store decimal numbers in a way that precludes an exact representation of some vslues. So 1/10 might have be stored as 0.0999999999999976, which makes little difference until the inaccuracy gets multiplied and rippled around enough to generate a letter for being 0.0000000047 cents overdrawn.

I suppose for gender, the rounding error is catgirl. we’re all ever so slightly willing to mew and swat away people trying to rub our bellies, it’s just a matter of when it shows up in an unexpecyed place.

I’m hoping for MacroSD. About the size of a 3.5" floppy so you won’t lose it easily.

Seriously, it’s interesting that now that we have the tech to make a useful-capacity storage device the size of a credit card, we don’t. Not like those crappy giveaway flash drives printed with a card design, where they had a captive USB head and were 4x as thick as a card, but something with just contacts like a chip card, so you might need to use an external reader but it really preserves the wallet-size concept.

I’d love to have a cheap 16GB card in my wallet with all my health records and a cryptographically signed copy of my will as a one-stop, no cloud required, emergency kit.