Buying a printer?

Just get a Brother. This is still true and has been true for over a decade.

Also, do you really, truly need a “photo” printer? Could you just … have a colour laser instead?

They aren’t too bad at printing images. You know what else they aren’t too bad at? Working for time after not being used for 3 months.

“But the toner is expensive!”.

No, it is not. The price for a replacement set of colour toners is high, but the per page printing cost is much, much lower than inkjet.

Someone made a really good Commodore 64 emulator.

I realise that may not sound too exciting and I was similarly “meh” about it, but they’ve done a genuinely excellent job of it and I was happy to be able to give the author a small amount of feedback about a sort-of bug.

It is slightly pre-release right now but it is in great shape already.

https://breadbin466.com/

#rustlang #c64 #Commodore64 #Emulation

Today I can do 1 pull-up.

Last week I could do zero pull-ups.

Infinity percent gains.

The problem with hiring people with skills and knowledge is you'll generally find it difficult to put them in a box and especially difficult to try to keep them in the box they arrived in.

You can just edit HTML element attributes in a website. Like... just remove the attribute in an input field that says:-

type="password"

And you can just ... see your password as you type it or it gets autofilled by your org's password manager even if your org hasn't granted you permission to be able to view the password.

Obviously don't. I'm just saying it's possible.

... but here's where he screwed up: "Just go to unitedkingdom-apple.com to verify I am from Apple support".

When I called him out on this, he began a mutual exchange of insults, which was quite fun.

But, here's the thing...

He knew my:-

- Email address
- Full name
- My phone number

So that's from a data breach then. Lovely.

I asked "what's the actual scam then?" and his response was "let me log in and find out".

Be careful out there, folks.

Interesting scam.

My Apple devices prompting me "Use this device to confirm password reset"

OK, no issue so far.

Then a call from a UK mobile number. Automated "we have detected attempt to add an authorised phone number from ... Russia. Press 1 if this wasn't you" ... "OK we will contact you shortly"

Dodgy, but no information given.

20 minutes later, call from a US number. American accented guy from "Apple Support" wants to talk to me about this attempt to replace my trusted phone number...

Again, for avoidance of doubt, I'm not an LLM bro. I am experimenting with open source / freely available models on my MacBook.

The model QWEN 3.8 yesterday, with some persuasion, managed to write a C++ program to draw an animated, colourful Sierpinski triangle using ASCII in the terminal. It took a few hours due to a combo of "limited" RAM (48GB) and my inexperience in prompting.

Today I asked it "Do you know 6502 assembly and C64 coding?".

It does indeed claim to know.

It shows its reasoning in realtime, which is like watching someone gradually lose their mind over things they missed and the realisation that assumptions were wrong.

My partner asked “is that really necessary? Is that just how it works or is it doing that purely for you to see?”

I don’t know. I do know that I’m hoping it is essential to the process because it is absolutely thrashing the poor GPU and I can actually hear the fans kicking hot air out of the laptop, which is a rarity.

I’m not “into” LLMs or AI and am actively skeptical of everything about it, but out of curiosity and on the theory “don’t knock what you haven’t tried” I have tonight downloaded “LM Studio” and about as big of a free model as my Mac can handle.

I asked it to generate a C++ program to draw an ASCII representation of a Sierpinski triangle.

It did it. It asked if I wanted a version with colour and animation.

I said yes.

It’s been thinking about that for about an hour. The process is curious.

I bought Factorio after having had it in my Steam wishlist for probably 3 years at least.

Then I refunded it before launching it.

Then I bought it from Good Old Games instead.

I like Steam. It’s convenient. It has achievements. My partner and I do the family sharing thing to expand our mutual game library.

Since Sony’s news regarding death of physical media I’m more aware of what ownership of digital content really means, so now I’m going to GoG first for new games.

Currently boiling my piss: Software that performs a long operation that when I click cancel it pretends to be autistic and gives me the old...

"No, no, look I'm started now and I need to just do this next bit because I'm in the zone. I'll be done in no time"

Do we like Bluesky? If I create an account there am I tacitly supporting something or someone who is actually a complete shit?

Every single piece of audio gear I actually want to buy is ruinously expensive.

Oxi Instruments One MkII £698

Erica Synths Steampipe £980

Linnstrument 128 £1,000

Roland TR-1000 £2,280

No

Can I do `code` formatting?

Are you a PC gaming enthusiast? Would you like a shiny Palit GameRock 4090 GPU?

£1,600 delivered to mainland UK. One careful owner who has swapped this out for a 9070XT.

I am trying to avoid eBay scummers.

#RTX4090 #pcgaming #forsale

Initial thoughts, it’s very fucking gold.

Searching the online (there is WiFi, don’t worry, it’s on my IoT network only) software database reveals how few actually recognisable games are available via this official channel.

This thing works basically the same as my other Ultimate 64 (pre-Commodore version, basically) except with a bit more spit and polish.

The keyboard is wonderful to type on.

It has arrived.

#c64 #Commodore #Commodore64

Found something macOS completely chokes on.

Network SMB shares with a folder with thousands of small files. Finder just cannot cope with it.

Also, I have a lot of SNES ROMs