BC TECH
Saved by @jay_millerjay

argh chrome updated and it seems they've intentionally broken custom search engines. I have had a keyword search for "foone" which searches my own twitter, so I just type "foone BLAH" and it gives me a twitter search for when I said BLAH, right?

 but now I get that option in the titlebar of "search twitter self-search" which is the name of the search"
if I just type "foone blah" now...
it ignores the search I have had defined for years and just googles it.
and this is definitely on purpose because they didn't just break it, they changed it. it's now "fooneblah"
there doesn't seem to be an option to make this stop and get the old behavior back :(
I could mostly fix it by hacking around it: write my own "search engine" which redirects to google if the text doesn't start with "foone "
but
1. this will break the "searched from the address bar" magic, which means google will make me do captchas if I search too fast
2. it will break search suggestions too
this workaround works. although from the comments on the bug that might also be a bug and they'll "fix" that workingness later.
https://t.co/KShHdCMzeT
related bugs:
https://t.co/RxcaI3qKK2
https://t.co/JzYlzwWUOk
I like the bullshittery of the developer question of "What appeals to you about space vs. tab?"
which I can't accurately reply to because twitter doesn't let me use 72pt font
here's why it appeals to me:

1. this is how it's been for years. I can type "foone blah" faster than you can blink, man. it's the #1 thing I DO in my browser. what appeals to me is THIS IS HOW IT FUCKING WORKS, DIPSHIT. CHANGING THINGS BECAUSE YOU FEEL LIKE IT IS NOT FUN
2. the space key is placed under one of my fingers while typing, because, and this may shock you, it's heavily used when typing english text.
it's a very common key to press. the tab key is not so centrally located, because it's rare.

AND I SAY THAT AS A PYTHON PROGRAMMER
why don't we change it to ctrl-alt-F12?
What appeals to you about space over ctrl-alt-f12, dipshit?
3. and probably most importantly:

SPACE IS HOW IT WORKS IN OTHER BROWSERS MOTHERFUCKER
I don't just use Chrome. I use Firefox almost as much. Hell, if I go into IE, which I haven't since like 2006, I bet it works using space over there too
Are you just trying to make it incompatible with firefox to punish people who dare use more than one browser?
Because having used multiple OSes/Browsers/Etc for years I can tell you one thing I've learned is that while muscle memory is 100% a thing and it can be retrained, what it's very much NOT good at is the idea of having muscle memory that's contextual.
it's way harder to remember "type foo blah on firefox, and type fooblah on chrome" than it would be to switch from "type foo blah" to "type fooblah" everywhere, for example.
this is why I have a set of hotkeys on my keyboard which do things like open a terminal and they were carefully set up to work exactly the same on my windows machine and my linux machine, so that I don't have to remember "ctrl-alt-t for a terminal on windows, and meta-T on linux"
so this "just use fooneblah!" solution would only work (and I say "work" very loosely. I wouldn't be happy with this solution) if I never used firefox ever again.
WHICH I'M SURE YOU'D LOVE
my favorite example of "no contextual muscle memory" is when I have to switch between a "classic layout" keyboard and one with a function key in the lower-left, like a thinkpad or that BTC-compact keyboard I use so much
every time that happens you WILL end up doing function-C and wondering why it doesn't copy and/or kill the program
That's why, for my Thinkpad, I've got the BIOS option to swap the keys turned on, and I even got stickers to relabel them.
Haven't yet figured out a solution for my BTC-5100.
Maybe I could swap the keycaps and mod the key matrix or reflash the controller?
think about that for a second.
I have a keyboard from the mid-90s and I'm thinking about dumping a 8051 firmware, reverse engineering it, modifying it, and reflashing it onto the keyboard just to eliminate a tiny source of friction in using it.
THAT'S HOW MUCH WORK I'M WILLING TO DO JUST TO AVOID THE PROBLEM OF OCCASIONALLY HITING FUNCTION-C ACCCIDENTALLY
EXACTLY HOW PISSED DO YOU THINK I AM THAT YOU BROKE ONE OF THE MAIN THINGS I DO IN YOUR BROWSER?
hmmm. It's definitely an 8051 but it's a custom-made one:
C32191AE or 1001000220 have no results.
maybe I should just stick it in my EEPROM reader and see if it can dump it as a generic 8051, then flash the modded code onto a replacement flash-enabled 8051?
Gah, this is going to be a pain to mod.
I'd want to desolder the 8051, but look, this controller PCB is basically sitting on top of the main keyboard PCB
And you can sorta see here that there's no connector between the two boards. They just soldered some pins onto the bottom board and then soldered them into the top board.
I assume they did this (rather than just making the bottom PCB double-sided and including all the components on it) is that either they needed more room to route the top components, or they use the bottom PCB for multiple "keyboards"
like this is the PS/2 version but I bet there was an AT version (which is just a different cable, really) and an XT/AT switchable version. and if they ever wanted to make like a Sun version of an ADB version, they could just swap the controller board.
still.
connectors, man. use connectors.
otherwise some punk yelling about web browsers is gonna get annoyed at you 28 years later.

what's a web browser? OH, YOU'LL SEE!
(although to be accurate, Mosaic was released in 1993 so there's every possibility they could have known what a web browser was)
the first major web browser is older than Doom. That's not something that feels like it should be true.
and the first FIRST web browser is older than The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.
It's older than the US release of the Super Nintendo.
That was WorldWideWeb (aka Nexus), launched in December 1990.
it was released to the general public in August 1991.
Zelda: A Link To The Past, The US release of the Super Nintendo, and the dissolution of the USSR hadn't happened yet, but would later that year.
WHEN THE FIRST BROWSER WAS MADE, THE TWO MAIN FOUNDERS OF GOOGLE WEREN'T OLD ENOUGH TO VOTE YET
Oh hey, its's a Foam-and-Foil keyboard.
This use a capacitive method to detect key presses. These seem to have been liked by some companies as a better feeling keyboard than a membrane, but the foam sometimes completely disintegrates so they don't last forever.
Here's the other side. This one seems to be still doing fine after 28 years, though.
Pads closeup.
You can see there's a little foam pad under the foil.
This is apparently for "overtravel". The key actually is detected shortly after you start pushing it down, but to make it feel like you can push it down farther, the foam is there and gets compressed.
Several companies made these, like Cherry and Key Tronic and, of course, BTC.
https://t.co/syXLRu6Rly
TexElec makes replacements in case you need to fix one of these. THANKFULLY I don't, at least not yet.
https://t.co/8xEis5WHID
Anyway I was looking at the key matrix to see if I could easily just adjust these to make ctrl and function switch. Not really, no.
The two pins in the middle go off to other keys (since it's a matrix) so I can't really swap them without affecting other ones
What I could do is chop the traces here, scrape off the solder max, and cross-connect them.
This would be hard because they'd have to cross, so I'd either have to use insulating layers or drill through to the other side.
plus, this is capacitive, and who knows what the tolerances are on that? it's entirely possible that doing all this modding will change the capacitance and now the keys don't work.
so I don't think that's a very good solution. Changing the controller is probably a much better one.
I'm also not sure what those two solder blobs are about.
The ones on top are for a reverse-side jumper connection.
But if you look at the opposite side (I mirrored it so they'll match) you can see that those aren't vias, there's no hole here. It's solely on the top, not the bottom.
https://t.co/GvdQ2dmzzL
by the way, BTC is still around! They just don't make keyboards anymore:
https://t.co/vh3qJTKdSs

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You want to know something about how bullshit insane our brains are?
OK, so there's a physical problem with our eyes: We move them in short fast bursts called "saccades", right? very quick, synchronized movements.
The only problem is: they go all blurry and useless during this

having your vision turn into a blurry mess every time you move your eyes is obviously not a good idea, so our brains hide it from us. Now, imagine you're an engineer and you have this problem.

You've got some obvious solutions you could do.
1. make the vision go black during movement. (Some VR games do this!)
2. just keep showing the last thing we saw prior to movement

both are good options with different downsides, but OH NO. this is assuming everything makes sense and is chronological and (regular) logical.
Your brain does neither of these options, really.

first, it basically puts your visual system on "pause". You're not seeing blackness or even nothing, you're just not seeing period.
then when you finish your saccade, it shows you what you now see at the new position. and then it pretends it can time travel.
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So Sony has this format called Optical Disc Archive, right? It's a high-density storage cartridge, but it turns out it works by cheating.


because if you open it up (which you should never do. trust me on this one)
it turns out... it's blu-ray.


it's a big STACK of blu-ray


And the idea is that Sony built some very complicated drive which you can slot this cartridge into, and it'll open it up and grab out the right disc and just read/write that one

then when you hit the eject button, it shoves the discs back in and closes up the case, and hands you the cartridge.
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@Foone
Something that I didn't realize but hurt my brain to learn:
John Norman (aka John Frederick Lange Jr.), of the Gor series of sci-fi/BDSM novels, is still alive.
He released two books (one of them a Gor book, #35), in 2019.


I guess with the fact that the series started in 1966 and feels like it's always a historical thing... I assumed he had to have quit writing and/or died back in like 1986.

Nope. Still alive, he's 89, and was apparently still writing as of 2 years ago.

also, my brain being what it is, I totally just googled for the book's cover image by entering "trans man of gor" which is NOT the title.

in my defense, how many book serieses look like this WITH THE SAMEAUTHOR FROM BOOK #1 to BOOK #35?


Anyway if you look at any this and think it's a suggestion that you should try reading any of these novels or learning anything about them, you are quite mistaken.

Gor is bad sci-fi and bad BDSM, and you should skip it for either reason.
CULTURE
foone
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@Foone
So someone on IRC mentioned the ending(s) to Zero Wing and I found out there's a cheat code to skip to it. I thought it might have some more "All your base" style dialogue I could put in the generator, but I really wasn't prepared for what ending #1 looked like


ending #2 is some very thin credits


ending #3 is reportedly the "true ending", at least on the European release. The Japanese version has 35 endings.

This one is... more serious? a little?


The other 32 endings are translated here, by

functionally all the japanese endings work like this. you get CONGRATULATIONS and then CATS says something to you.
usually something silly, or possibly the debug menu cheat code
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I'm watching these videos about the Georgia Phone Call and they're talking about if Dominion did any kind of weird hacks, and all I'm thinking is:

I need to get a voting machine.

Yeah, it turns out if you select the party vote option and toggle it Democrat-Republican-Democrat then tap the Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen three times, you'll trigger the Easter egg and you can play DOOM!

Set your location to California, vote no on Prop 22, party vote democrats and select the Green presidential campaign Howie Hawkins, then toggle Prop 22 to yes, then longpress "reset ballot" and you'll get rickrolled.

This is how my brain works. "the voting machines could be hacked! The president might be trying to steal the election! What should I do?

Oh yeah, get a screwdriver and make a voting machine play DOS games."

I wonder if they're still x86 based? The last time we had a big electronic voting scandal, of the they were... But now we're in the arm era.
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you know how Atari called the Jaguar as a "64bit system", because it had two 32bit CPUs? (or because it had a 64bit bus, but let's not worry about that)
we should apply that logic to the current generation of consoles.
So the Switch is a 256bit console. It's the Nintendo 256.

The Xbox Series X? terrible name.
Better call it the "Xbox 512 Blu-ray".
like the Jaguar CD, the Sega CD... the good old days when consoles had their media type in the name.

Boringly the PS5 is also a Playstation 512 Blu-ray, because both of them are using the same AMD Zen 2 CPU.

The Switch one is weeeird. It's built on an Nvidia Tegra X1, which is an 8 core 64-bit CPU, so that should be 512, right?

Well... no. Four of them can't be used. And later documentation doesn't even mention them.

it's some weird system where the system-on-a-chip has four Cortex-A57 cores and four Cortex-A53 cores but only the A57s are usable?
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Neil S W Murray
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1) Looking back on my "career" with @TheNordicWeb over the last 5 years, in retrospect it's easy for me to join up the dots and make sense of the journey:

#cphftw #sthlmtech #helyes 🇩🇰🇫🇮🇮🇸🇳🇴🇸🇪

2)

- Join & start community initiatives to meet people
- Learn from these people about how special the Nordic tech scene is
- Share this with the world through The Nordic Web
- Realise the real value is in the data, particularly in building network
- Use network to raise a fund

3) In fact, it looks all very strategic, but the reality is anything but.

My lack of vision and goals during this 5 year period was _criminal_

Any movement from one step to the next was never pre-planned and was instinctive, or worse, accidental.

4) While I am embarrassed to think of my headless chicken self, there's also part of me that thinks that none of this would have turned out where it did if I had of been deliberate and strategic about this.

5) In fact, I think my genuine love for the Nordics and the ecosystem is the MAIN reason to explain how I raised my fund & managed to move from step to step.

My story is a good example of how passion can be more powerful than strategy in the early stage of an idea/company.
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@Foone
I got a Toshiba T1200, which has a bad screen, and a dead CMOS battery, and I thought the hard drive was broken too...


but I rebooted it and heard a KTHUNK and a really loud spin-up noise and holy shit, the hard drive works!


and it still has files on it. the newest date is January 1994.


It's a 21mb hard drive, with ~37k of bad sectors.

This fucker is never going to spin up again, so I better go find some serial cables and copy shit off now.


The backlight is fucked so I'm shining a flashlight on it.
without it, it looks like this.
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James More
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One of the best decisions I made during a very turbulent 2020 was to leave conventional coding behind and embrace the #nocode movement. @bubble made this a reality. Although my own journey thus far is premature, I’ve learned a lot so here’s a power thread on....


‘How I created @buildcamp sales funnel landing page in under 2hours’.

Preview here 👇

https://t.co/s9P5JodSHe

Power thread here 👇

1. Started with a vanilla bubble app ensuring that all styles and UI elements were removed. Created a new page called funnel and set the page size to 960px as this allows the page to render proportionately on both web and mobile when hitting responsive breakpoints.


2. Began dropping elements onto the page to ‘find the style’. These had to be closely aligned to our @buildcamp branding so included text, buttons and groups - nothing too heavy. Played around with a few fonts, colors and gradients and thus pinned down the following style guide.


3. Started to map out sections using groups as my ‘containers’ to hold the relevant information and imagery needed to pad out the sales pitch. At this point, they were merely blocks of color #ff6600 with reduced opacity set to 5% to ease page flair.
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Brad Kaellner - Stock Compounder
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Incumbents almost always prevail with sustaining innovation

In disruptive circumstances, the entrants are likely to beat the incumbents

H/t Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Solution
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