Anbernic devices in particular are known to ship with an SD card that’s preloaded with a fairly large game library. I own a RG351M which did indeed include a cheap card loaded with both the OS and a collection of games by Nintendo, Sega, and many others, plus some strange rom hacks. I immediately swapped that card out for a better one with a better CFW and my own files.

Most other notable names in the emulation handhelds space like Retroid, Ayn, and Ayaneo expect users to be able to provide their own files instead, which I’d say makes more sense.

USB-C video is usually DisplayPort Alt Mode, which uses a completely different data rate and protocol from USB.

Even using old 2016 hardware, a computer and USB-C cable that both only support 5 Gbps USB (such as USB 3.1 Gen 1) can often easily transmit an uncompressed 4K 60Hz video stream over that cable, using about 15.7Gbps of DisplayPort 1.2 bandwidth. Could go far higher than that with DP 2.0.

Some less common video-over-USB devices/docks use DisplayLink instead, which is indeed contained within USB packets and bound by the USB data rate, but it uses lossy compression so those uncompressed numbers aren’t directly comparable.

For that portable monitor, you should just need a cable with USB-C plugs on both ends which supports USB 3.0+ (could be branded as SuperSpeed, 5Gbps, etc). Nothing more complicated than that.

The baseline for a cable with USB-C on both ends should be PD up to 60W (3A) and data transfers at USB 2.0 (480Mbps) speeds.

Most cables stick with that baseline because it’s enough to charge phones and most people won’t use USB-C cables for anything else. Omitting the extra capabilities lets cables be not only cheaper but also longer and thinner.

DisplayPort support uses the same extra data pins that are needed for USB 3.0 data transfers, so in terms of cable support they should be equivalent. There also exist higher-power cables rated for 100W or 240W but there’s no way a portable monitor would need that.

A related issue I still see very often, even with files newly created just this year, is when trying to extract zip files on my Linux systems that contain non-ASCII filenames and that were created on Windows systems, especially ones with apparently non-English locales like Japanese. Need to trial and error the locale I give to unzip and sometimes hack together fixed names with iconv until the mojibake seems to fix itself.

The whole point of copyright in the first place, is to encourage creative expression, so we can have human culture and shit.

I feel like that purpose has already been undermined by various changes to copyright law since its inception, such as DMCA and lengthening copyright term from 14 years to 95. Freedom to remix existing works is an important part of creative expression which current law stifles for any original work that releases in one person’s lifespan. (Even Disney knew this: the animated Pinocchio movie wouldn’t exist if copyright could last more than 56 years then)

Either way, giving bots the ‘right’ to remix things that were just made less than a year ago while depriving humans the right to release anything too similar to a 94 year old work seems ridiculous on both ends.

Btrfs doesn’t have encryption, so you need to do it with luks to an mdadm raid, and build btrfs on top of that. Luks on mdadm raid is known to be slow, and in general not a great idea.

Why involve mdadm? You can use one btrfs filesystem on a pair of luks volumes with btrfs’s “raid1” (or dup) profile. Both volumes can decrypt with the same key.

The baby god event was never officially released, so this actually didn’t canonically happen.

It was released. The Azure Flute and the event where you meet and battle Arceus in the Hall of Origin in DPPt was indeed never released, but this is different.

Arceus had various distributions in 2009-2010; the US one was at Toys R Us for example. Trading that legit Arceus to HGSS and then bringing it to the Ruins of Alph triggers this event which takes you to a special location where you can choose one egg of either Dialga, Palkia, or Giratina.

I switched from Chrome to Firefox in 2019 because that’s when Google adopted Manifest V3 and I never looked back. There were already articles then describing how it’d break ad blockers, and Firefox had at the time just recently released their “Quantum” overhaul which drastically improved responsiveness.

I’m a bit surprised it took five years for Google to drop support for Manifest V2, but the threat has long been there.

The conditions that processors run under in situations like military equipment are drastically different from those of consumer devices. Consistency and stability are more important than performance in those contexts. So much so that RTOS systems like VxWorks are popular in that space. They’d probably already have features like clock boost disabled (or use processors completely lacking it) in favor of a lower fixed clock speed, probably avoiding these issues entirely.

Legitimately playing 4K blu-ray video on a PC without cracking the DRM requires an insane combination of requirements:

• Windows 10 (not 11)
• An Intel processor between gen 7-10 (nothing newer because Intel ditched SGX in 2021)
• Intel integrated graphics (no nvidia/amd)
• Monitor that supports HDCP 2.2 for DRM (some 4k ones don’t)
• An approved optical drive
• Proprietary playback software which costs about $100 USD, separate from the cost of hardware and Windows
• Miscellaneous other requirements for the motherboard features, bios settings, etc.

Meanwhile MakeMKV can rip them on basically any Windows/Linux/Mac system with a compatible BDXL drive.

This board has the StarFive JH7110 SoC. That processor has previously been in very low power single board computers like StarFive VisionFive 2 (2022) and Milk-V Mars (2023), a Raspberry Pi clone that can be bought for as low as $40. Its storage limitations (SD/eMMC rather than NVMe) show how much this isn’t meant for laptop use.

Very underpowered for a laptop too, even when considering this is intended for developers and doesn’t need to be remotely performance competitive. Consider that this has just 4 RV64GC cores, the cheapest Intel board options Framework offers are 12 cores (4P+8E), and any modern RISC-V core is far simpler with less area than even an Intel E core. These cores also lack the RISC-V vector instructions extension.

and it’s free

This is very uncommon in the US. Most major banks (I’m not aware of any exceptions) charge a fee for each outgoing wire transfer, usually $25-$30. Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Chase, and PNC for just a few examples I’m aware of, plus every credit union that has local branches in my area. Some of those banks even add a second fee at the recipient’s side for incoming wire transfer.

They often encourage customers to rely on third party services like Zelle instead for small transfers to friends and family. Many banks’ sites/apps can also handle transfers between two accounts that both belong to the same bank for free too.

A standard called SystemReady exists. For the systems that actually follow its standards, you can have a single ARM OS installation image that you copy to a USB drive and can then boot through UEFI and run with no problems on an Ampere server, an NXP device, an Nvidia Jetson system, and more.

Unfortunately it’s a pretty new standard, only since 2020, and Qualcomm in particular is a major holdout who hasn’t been using it.

Just like x86, you still need the OS to have drivers for the particular device you’re installing on, but this standard at least lets you have a unified image, and many ARM vendors have been getting better about upstreaming open-source drivers in the Linux kernel.

To the contrary, I would expect the sample to skew more towards people who have a heavily customized X session and strong opinions about window managers while drastically underrepresenting average GNOME users who stick with the default Wayland session. Someone who likes their custom setup can still be waiting for a Wayland equivalent while casual Ubuntu users have been defaulted to Wayland on new non-nvidia installs since early 2021.

I tried to do this a while ago with a GNOME system, setting GDM to automatically log me in, but I ended up always getting prompted for my password from gnome-keyring shortly after logging in which seemed to defeat the point. If you use GNOME, you might want to look at ArchWiki’s gnome-keyring page which describes a couple solutions to this problem (under the PAM section) which should be applicable on any systemd distro.

A ground-up overhaul of the copyright system would make things so much worse, not better, considering the current climate of power. In the US for example, MPA, RIAA, Entertainment Software Association, Association of American Publishers, and others wouldn’t want public libraries or the used market to exist at all; they would push for making every single transfer of “ownership” on any media involve a payment to the rights holder. Lawmakers are far more likely to accommodate those groups’ desires than the public good.

The worst parts of the current copyright system are the most recent. Both the DMCA and the extension of US copyright term to 95 years took effect in 1998, and the early 2000s saw many other countries passing laws to make their copyright system closer to US’s in various ways such as the WIPO Copyright Treaty which took effect in 2002 and EU’s 2006 Copyright Directive. Just about the only positive news we’ve seen in US copyright law since then is in temporary exemptions to DMCA’s anti-circumvention rules (Section 1201) which change every year. Copyright law was far less hostile to consumers and the public before the 90s than it is now, and up until 1976 it used to be expected that most media someone consumes would enter public domain within their lifetime.

The digital era makes market relevance far more ephemeral than ever and yet the laws written for the digital era moved copyright in the opposite direction. Movie studios simultaneously judge whether a film succeeded almost exclusively based on its first week of ticket sales and also claim that depriving public domain for 95 years is necessary. Nothing should be able to justify more than 20 years of copyright. Media formats don’t even last as long as copyright; CDs and DVDs rot, game cartridges die, servers shut down, and even books printed on today’s low-quality paper will fall apart.

Some of it is absurd to me, like the way something can be online but geographically restricted.

This is a consequence of contract terms moreso than copyright. One issue in copyright law that this does connect to, though, is the fact that the question of whether the rightsholder keeps a work reasonably available on the market does not impact whether the work retains copyright protections. If copyright law did hypothetically include that limitation, providers would become far more likely to make sure that all content is available in all countries, but even then things could still vary in terms of which content is on which platform.

There’s only one case I’ve found where Wi-Fi use seems acceptable in IoT: ESPHome. It’s open-source firmware for microcontrollers that makes DIY IoT sensors and controls accessible over LAN without phoning home to whatever remote server, without trying to make anything accessible over the Internet, and without breaking in any way if the device has no route to the Internet.

I still wouldn’t call Wi-Fi use ideal even there; mesh can help in larger homes and Z-Wave/Zigbee radios tend to be more power efficient, though ESP32 isn’t exactly suited for a battery-powered device that’s expected to run 24/7 regardless.

That’s strange. As far as I can tell from any web searches, every version Windows still defaults to storing local time to the hardware clock and there are no reports of that changing with an update, nor is there any exposed setting control to configure this behavior outside of regedit. If you’re curious enough, you can check the current setting in the registry at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation. Windows maintains the current time as UTC if and only if the RealTimeIsUniversal key is present and nonzero.

I expect it’s more likely some other issue would make the BIOS display an hour that’s inconsistent with your local timezone. For example, maybe a bug in the BIOS, maybe a timezone offset setting within the BIOS, or maybe a dead clock battery.

Unix time is far less universal in computing than you might hope. A few exceptions I’m aware of:

• Most real-time clock hardware stores datetime as separate binary-coded decimal fields representing months, days, hours, minutes, and seconds as one byte each, and often the year too (resulting in a year 2100 limit).
• Python’s datetime, WIN32’s SYSTEMTIME, Java’s LocalDateTime, and MySQL’s DATETIME similarly have separate attributes for year, month, day, etc.
• NTFS stores a 64-bit number representing time elapsed since the year 1601 in 100-nanosecond resolution for things like file creation time.
• NTP uses an epoch of midnight 1900-01-01 with unsigned seconds elapsed and an unusual base-2 fractional part
• GPS uses an epoch of midnight 1980-01-06 with a week number and time within the week as separate values.

Converting between time formats is a common source of bugs and each one will overflow in different ways. A time value might overflow in the year 2036, 2038, 2070, 2100, 2156, or 9999.

Also, Unix time is often managed with a separate nanoseconds component for increased resolution. Like in C struct timespec, modern *nix filesystems like ext4/xfs/btrfs/zfs, etc.

as soon as the BIOS loaded and showed the time, it was “wrong” because it was in UTC

Because you don’t use Windows. Windows by default stores local time, not UTC, to the RTC. This behavior can be overriden with a registry tweak. Some Linux distro installer disks (at least Ubuntu and Fedora, maybe others) will try to detect if your system has an existing Windows install and mimicks this behavior if one exists (equivalent to timedatectl set-local-rtc 1) and otherwise defaults to storing UTC, which is the more sane choice.

Storing localtime on a computer that has more than one bootable OS becomes a particularly noticable problem in regions that observe DST, because each OS will try to change the RTC by one hour on its first boot after the time change.