Many western social media sites are banned in China.

Not really. As the devs themselves have stated, one of the reasons was that Chinese players don’t have access to most of the established feedback channels like the official discord server and social media accounts so their only option to reliably get the devs‘ attention is through Steam reviews. If I remember correctly, they are (have been?) working on improving communication, for example through an ingame feedback form.

Even a person should not be able to delete critical backups without jumping through a couple of hoops.

Not even that. Calculators have their own limitations related to rounding errors and big numbers. Their results may be deterministic but they are not always accurate.

I have fond memories of the classic Disney cartoons from the 90s. Darkwing Duck, Talespin, Gargoyles…

Hard to say which one is my favorite. Probably Gargoyles. Let’s see how the live action reboot turns out. I hope they can get Jonathan Frakes on board.

They‘re not supposed to make money. They are a non-profit foundation that takes donations to develop an open source project and I expect them to spend those donations on exactly that project and not much else.

Pretty much the two groups that I had in mind but I wanted to generalize a bit.

And the other 80% only stayed because they were either not confident enough in their technical abilities to switch or had no choice (environment would need to be re-certified, software doesn’t work well with wine, boss said no).

I’d need a couple more volunteers to make sure all signals have the same delay.

No fabric at all, just metal rings and a bit of string. They are far from see-through though because they are pretty dense. If you’re close enough you can see a bit of… anatomy… but it’s more on the side of a coarsly knit sweater than transparent fabric.

I remember that Australia was the exact opposite. It has a single outside connection and once it reaches a stable state, it stays there. Every impulse that goes in will come out again and leave the inside unchanged.

Let’s see:

• Back in 2007 or 2008 I attempted to create a CPU architecture that directly uses Brainfuck as its instruction set. I had to put it on hold before it was completed because I had a custom FPGA development board with really bad documentation but if I ever get my hands on an affordable FPGA, it will get done eventually.
• I’ve created a nonogram that solves to a rickroll QR code. I had to rely on the error correction because the exact pattern didn’t result in a well-defined solution but I’ve recently learned about some more parameters that you can tweak on a QR code. So now I just need to acquire or more likely build a QR code generator that lets me manually control those parameters and an automatic nonogram solver so I don’t have to manually solve a bunch of 25x25 nonograms to confirm they have a single solution.
• My plan for tonight is to start porting a 22-year-old handheld game to a ~35-year-old home console. I’ve acquired a C compiler but will probably have to learn assembly for a CPU architecture that was barely used for anything else. There is no chance to ever share the resulting game without getting sued to hell and back again.
• I’ve made chainmail bikinis for a couple of friends.
• Edit: One more because it might be my magnum opus. Have you ever played KJumpingCube? That doesn’t only work on grids but on arbitrary graphs. My friends and I chose a Risk board. Not a digital one. A real life physical Risk board with actual dice on every country that need to be turned by hand. A single game took us about 6-7 hours with the winning move alone taking up the last hour.

That’s just what I comes to mind at the moment. I’m sure if I spend some time thinking or digging around old hard drives, I can find more.

Well… I don’t think it would be the weirdest thing I’ve done with my free time. Would probably barely rank in the top three.

Now I wonder if I can route VGA through unusual items. Cutlery, the railing on a staircase, swords, something like that. As long as I can find six pieces of metal of roughly equal length, it should work.

That’s VGA, it’s gonna be fine. Most wires are either ground or not used for actual image data. R, G and B are analog so noise on those just makes the output noisy, no big deal. That leaves us with HSync and VSync. They are digital signals with 3.3V between on and off and only a single pulse per line / frame so they’re also pretty robust against noise.

So unless you’re going for an extremely high resolution on a really cheap monitor over a long distance, the worst that will happen is that your image will look grainy like TV static. It would take quite a bit of interference before the sync signals degrade enough to not get any image at all.

Yes. That’s literally the first point in my job description.

I almost punched a guy on the train this week for something similar. He had some music on speaker for a while, then asked „does anyone think this is too loud?“. I told him that actually yes, I think it is to which he replied „well I don’t care“ and turned it even louder.

Well, until you open a browser… or five, because these days nobody wants to build native applications anymore and instead they shove webapps into electron containers.

Right now, my laptop doesn’t have to run much. Just a combination of KDE, browser, emails, music player, a couple of messengers and some background services. In total, that uses about 9.5 GB of RAM. 20 years ago we would have run the same workload with less than 1 GB.

I think it’s meant to be short for Mega-elements, so millions of elements.

Hey, at least this one won’t become a murderer when the relationship breaks apart.