Prophet Zarquon

Yes! I had three NiCd to every one NiMH, & the NiCd would all be flat within minutes; then I’d switch to the NiMH for some actual fun & within 30 minutes they’re all spent for the day. Sometimes I stripped the single-use flat cells out of used Polaroid film packs, for just a few minutes of superior power:weight ratio on my littlest RCs

Then there were the flashlights we’d use for hours but if you put the same cells in the GameGear, dead in no time.

LiPo cells were like a revelation…

Come to think of it, the PSP had an optical drive which was a battery hog too; I remember a friend being elated that I’d found an aftermarket pack with more mAh.

If you think that’s rough, try watching CBS Sunday Morning.
I swear to god, that free show that airs on broadcast TV, must be one of the hardest currently running shows to stream.

Well, that & “Shaka Ilembe”

Edit: I say Sunday Morning is hard to stream, because the CBS streaming app repeatedly fails to load the right segment after a commercial break, starting the show over at the beginning; if you skip forward from there, it shows another commercial break after you try to seek. Our last viewing of this 90-minute show, took 3.5 hours.

Migleemo a’ Trois, in 3… 2… 1…

Huh… I just assumed the Andy Dick hologram was so much more pushy that it got the other one deprecated out of pettiness.

Hodor?

Dark Matter

I knew people with NiMh batteries for their RC cars\planes\boats, but the first time I ever saw NiMh AAs, was in a GameGear.

Yeah, Sony lost me when they broke my Linux install and degraded the DVD playback functions, within six months of me buying my PS2. Similarly, the last “good” smartphone I had, was the Palm Treo (650p\680p\Centro); since then, I’ve never had a single phone that granted direct hardware access & allowed unloading/sideloading the OS by default.

Manufacturers want deep control these days; way beyond mere root permissions.

Likewise… I haven’t bought a game on optical media since the Wii.

Hm… I’ve never bought PC software on a disc…!?

And yet I have all these old Windows & Office & game discs… Man, hoarding tech is a weird habit.

Man, I hear “disc drive” & I think “hard disc drive”. I’ve connected optical drives when USB boot wasn’t supported, but the last time I voluntarily used a disc drive was to test an M-Data disc burned to silicon. But yeah, none of these new devices have a HDD or optical (or floppy disk, for that matter).

Those are not discs.

Less “not optimized”, & more “not supported”; IE, accelerations that don’t turn on, because companies like Intel, Broadcom, Samsung, & NVidia, have a long history of only giving preferred partner devteams, prerelease hardware access, much less any peeks at unobfuscated firmware.

I’m very lactose tolerant. I tolerate the gas, I tolerate the cramps, I tolerate the bloating…

Oooh, cheesecake!

“STOP”

Since they said they have “5g home internet (about 10 times faster than the best wired option and 3 times cheaper)”, with “shit ping”, I assumed they meant 5th Gen cellular as their internet service at home.

Only a couple years ago, did we finally get a cable drop in our neighborhood, to actually give faster service than 4G LTE. (There’s still no fiber here, at our location in central Denver.) Because the cable company (Comcast) doesn’t offer a reasonable rate, we use line-of-sight wireless to a local mesh operator. Until then, we used 4G & 5G cellular, as our home internet. It was shit for reliability, but when it worked, the peak speeds beat any residential service available, by a pretty wide margin. Of course, those peak speeds turn to timeouts whenever the highway fills up (& our 5Ghz WiFi still flakes out too, as does the 2.4 Ghz wireless camera, & pretty much anything else that isn’t shielded).

There was no point in running ethernet, with that setup; it was never going to be stable. I still had to run 2 hardwires though: one to the Sony PS2, & the other to an ancient beige switch by the IBM PS/2.

Some people in the mountains & such, are on “5 Gigabit” wireless internet, but most seem to be on even lower speed plans than that. I’m really curious which @Default_Defect@lemmy.world has, because 5th Gen cellular is literally the best internet a lot of US residents can get, despite the abysmal terms & throttling that so many providers employ.

I remember running out of those at work, & intentionally crushing the cheap-ass crimp-tool in my hand, just so I could finish up the next day with pass-through connectors & my Klein tool, rather than spend the next two hours re-terminating connectors that I ‘should have’ gotten exactly right the first time.

15 wired devices, kthx. Once & done.

No more “why’s it down now”; no deauth attacks; no weird outages when highway traffic spikes from nav\music-streaming users getting tower timeouts that cause their WiFi to aggressively cry out for every known SSID.

With wired connections, I set it up once & it keeps working. With WiFi, it’s a constant shouting match version of the Telephone game, with openly malicious actors literally headquartered a few blocks away.

Yes, it seems painfully obvious that the primary driver of new WiFi router sales, is WiFi overcrowding.

Hmmm, that reminds me; I need to separate out all the old ones that say “10BaseT”

802.15.4a/ab/ac, seems even weirder, given what we’ve become used to with AM/FM signaling modes.

After the usual “Huh, that seems like a clever way to send signals” reaction, a closer perusal of the tech & its established industrial capabilities, reveals Surface penetrating radar for machine vision & medical imaging, P2P, P2MP, local file-exchange, low-power low-latency streaming, greater range than bluetooth, greater interference resistance than WiFi, & reduced airtime per Mb, at lower emission power than a hair dryer or cellphone.

Gee, I wonder why it got forcibly channeled into exclusively device-to-device location pings, with no direct radio access or firmware, available to devs?

Seriously, go look at what the military, industrial, security, & medical sectors have already been doing with UWB, then look at the specs for the compact chipsets & SOCs released since 2017, & then look at what BMW, Apple, Google, & Samsung are doing with it. Oh yay, Airtags. I mean, they do work, but they’re about 1/1000th of what the U1 could do, if app devs had access to the radio instead of being gatekept behind the FindMy device-to-device services.