I got a 1U rack server for free from a local business that was upgrading their entire fleet. Would’ve been e-waste otherwise, so they were happy to dump it off on me. I was excited to experiment with it.

Until I got it home and found out it was as loud as a vacuum cleaner with all those fans. Oh, god no…

I was living with my parents at the time, and they had a basement I could stick it in where its noise pollution was minimal. I mounted it up to a LackRack.

Since moving out to a 1 bedroom apartment, I haven’t booted it. It’s just a 70 pound coffee table now. :/

can you burn a Luigi board?

I think my purest moment of gaming bliss was experiencing completely blind the last handful of worlds in Super Mario Odyssey while buzzed with a few whiskeys. God, my soul was in orbit with that experience. Pure, unfettered joy and whimsy through and through and cinematically epic when it wanted to be. I wouldn’t call it the best game ever or even my favorite game ever, but god damn it, it struck me just right way at just the right time. It was something truly special.

More games I will cherish will certainly follow, and have followed. But for that specific set of vibes and circumstances, I don’t know if I’ll ever top that peak from playing a video game ever again.

Ah, a gellow Ghost Trick enjoyer!

For your unhinged pleasure, if you haven’t yet experienced.

I love The Polar Express.

The most widely hated thing about it is the mocap. Not much to say here, I’m just straight-up not bothered by it. I think it looks fine. It’s not incredibly expressive like a stylized animated film could be, but it doesn’t look actively bad to me in any way.

The way the titular express inexplicably gains and loses rolling stock scene by scene and behaves in absurd ways like bending around the mountain are a common punchline. “BuT iT’s A mAgIc TrAiN!!!” doesn’t really solve it for me either. But on a casual viewing it’s mostly inoffensive. A silly curiosity.

Some say the plot of the film spends too much time aimlessly noodling around and throwing in needless filler scenes. Meh. If you ask me that’s where all the meat of the film is. The actual plot of the film has nothing interesting to say. “Kid doesn’t believe in Santa. Magic Christmas hijinks ensue. Kid believes in Santa now. The end.” Riveting. Nah, the so-called “filler” is absolutely the meal here.

The fact that the film literally has five named characters, and the main character isn’t one of them is hilarious. To even get to that number you have to count both the Scrooge puppet and the kid who the elves were monitoring in a single scene as characters, and after that, one of the remaining three is Santa Claus. Just more weight to my point that the story doesn’t matter, lmao.

Say what you will about the animation, but the cinematography is incredible. So many dynamic long-track camera shots from interesting angles. Especially whenever the steam locomotive is on screen. God, steam locomotives are so fucking cool. I don’t even care that it’s full of inaccuracies if you actually look up close. They put a lot of effort into it and that effort shows. It’s quite the treat.

The set design of the North Pole is fantastic. It’s admittedly kinda fucked that it’s modeled after a real world Pullman company town, but I guess it’s appropriate as a joke about the whole Santa’s workshop thing while also incorporating a neat little nod to real life railroad lore. Beyond that, it’s blindingly radiant of all that Victorian-era charm that most of the modern secular Christmas tradition is born from. The serene night snow amidst the rustic red brickwork illuminated by glowing amber gaslamps… augh, it’s so aggressively cozy!

All the pneumatic and other steampunk-adjacent elf tech is a treat as well. The film is certainly no slouch in breathing its own unique spin of whimsy into Santa’s toy factory. It’s not the most whimsical out there, but it’s definitely putting in work.

Alan Silvestri’s score is phenomenal. It’s all delightfully extra. Every single song in the film that’s an original composition is a banger and every song that isn’t an original composition for the film is part of that time-tested canon of hits from the 50s and 60s. I think a lot of people are fed up sick of the latter but, I dunno, I grew up listening to them on my Now That’s What I Call Christmas CD, and to me their sound is synonymous with that warm, nostalgic holiday cheer I get from the season. Even if I don’t get around to actually watching the movie, you know damn well I’m putting The Polar Express’s soundtrack in my December shuffle.

Genuine S tier Christmas film. Well worth every single fault.

I think the phrasing they wanted was “The person with the least disincentive to do the ethical thing”.

These people aren’t inherently more ethical. They simply have the fewest barriers standing in the way of turning it into action.

I assume the reflowing solder in the oven trick doesn’t reliably work anymore in the era of the high temp solders that are common in laptop manufacturing these days. Bringing the whole board up to flow temp in something as crude as a home oven is almost certainly going to fuck something else on the board.

I recall trying to do a laptop repair with dinky little soldering iron I got at the hardware store and it could not melt a single thing on the board I touched it to. Definitely not a faulty iron because I used it to successfully solder other things. This was at least five years ago. If that little toy couldn’t do it, then the entire board would need to exceed that temp in an oven, which is probably a bad idea since the iron was still managing to visibly scorch things despite not melting any solder.

Invest in a proper heat gun and learn how to use it, or just give up and give it to someone else who has one, imo.

Technically all you need is a DNS server.

No computer knows where <whatever.tld> is located, unless that route is hard-coded in a host file somewhere. It always has to ask a DNS server for that information. If that DNS server doesn’t know, it will probably try asking some other DNS server, and so on up a chain. Eventually, it reaches a master DNS server that either has the answer on-hand somewhere in a database, or it says, “lmao, that doesn’t exist”. All the DNS servers and your PC down the chain take that answer. They might memorize it for a little while and hand it out to anyone who asks them, but after a while they’ll ask their way up the chain again to see if the answer has changed since the last time they asked.

In order to “create” a TLD, all you have to do is make a DNS server that doesn’t ask up the chain. Just pre-program the list of valid domains yourself. You can make them anything you want. You can even “steal” existing domains and make them point to anywhere you want. Nothing is stopping you. Your DNS server will confidently report its pre-programmed answers to anyone who asks.

The catch is that any Internet-enabled device that you want to be able to use your fancy new custom domains needs to be configured to ask your DNS server in particular. People would have to manually set your DNS server as their master server to ask, or they’d have to set it to ask some other DNS server that is itself pointed through some chain up to your DNS server. This is an explicitly opt-in system, and getting a significant mass of people to do that voluntarily is practically impossible. But it’s not technically impossible.

The only reason you don’t have to do this manually with every single device you buy is because most devices either come from the manufacturer with a hard-coded list of DNS servers they should trust by default, or a device on the local network whispers in their ear and tells them who the local DNS server is and the device just goes along with it. It’s still technically an opt-in system; devices are simply either already “pre-opted in”, or there’s a system running on your network that auto-opts-in every device that connects, and most devices are designed to accept that auto-opt-in the moment they detect it.

Provided you manage to get the devices you want to listen to your DNS server, you may additionally want to set up a root certificate authority. The thing that makes the little padlock show up in your browser URL box to let you know the connection is secure. Kind of like the DNS server thing, this is also very simple–just run a cheeky little OpenSSL command or two and you can be a root CA in no time–but it suffers from the same “opt-in” problem. You have to manually configure any device you want to use your system to trust your certificates. Most devices just come with a list of “acceptable authorities” built-in, and those defaults are all most people are using. But nothing is stopping you from adding anything you want to that list at any time. You’re just limited to doing it on a device-by-device basis.

At my company, we’ve set up our own custom DNS server and our own root CA. We serve internal websites at a custom TLD we made up, and we sign them with our custom certificates to keep the connections secure. But that only works because we’ve manually configured our workstations to ask our internal DNS server for DNS requests, and we’ve manually configured all the workstations to trust our root certificate authority. A random device that connects to our network that isn’t configured with either of those things will not resolve any of our custom domains, nor will it securely connect to them. It also breaks if the configured devices aren’t on the local company network, since the DNS server isn’t reachable from the public web. Which is fine for us, since those internal websites aren’t reachable on the public web either. But yeah, that’s an example of the limitations.

If you want to create a TLD that will be auto-accepted by everyone who is already running the default chains of trust (which is probably what most people actually mean when they ask something like this), you have to seek out the big daddy at the root of that chain of trust and ask them to poof your TLD into existence for you. That would be ICANN, and they probably won’t do anything like that without a big fat check and a lot of corporate lobbying.

tl;dr - The tech is built in such a way that nothing is stopping you from making your own toy, and anyone can play with your toy without needing to do much. But if you want your TLD to “just work” for everyone in the world without asking every single one of them to explicitly opt-in, which is probably what you actually want, then no, you basically can’t do that.

As for memory management, macOS is the better option due to its fully integrated virtual memory system which is often on and continuously provides addressable space up to 4 per process.

Wow, 4 whole memories per process?!

I imagine telling an Arch user you use Gentoo is like telling a Texan that if you cut Alaska into two halves Texas would be the third largest US state.

Oh, I expect they well may, in Wreck-It Ralph 2 fashion. They might make it the target of a quick tongue-in-cheek remark at its own expense, but its mere appearance will nonetheless be an ad for the brand.

I mean, if your goal is to keep the meat experience, then yeah, I get your point.

I think that was indeed very obviously the point. The point of both the comment you were replying to and this lab grown meat idea as a whole.

+1 for Reddit API exodus.

Lemmy was sold to me as a Reddit replacement. And it is, superficially. I knew it wasn’t going to be drop-in going in. But the longer I use it the more I think it’s not really quite like Reddit, and never will be. And that’s fine. Lemmy is its own character and I like it for what it is.

I still use Reddit. Lemmy doesn’t scratch all the itches for me. But only old.reddit on the desktop and on mobile with a UI de-shittifying extension. I’m amazed they still offer it at all. Once that’s cut off, something I’ve been bracing myself for for years, I’ll consider the UX enshittification to have fully completed and I’ll truly bail. I simply refuse to use their gentrified UI. And I’m tired as it is having to slap on compatibility layers just to keep their less terrible alternative on life support; I’m not going to do the same thing to make their mainstream UI somewhat more palatable.