bluescrn

The bottle caps have become a meme, but one that symbolises Europe strangling itself with overregulation.

A $2200 device and still limited to running dumbed-down touchscreen 'apps' from the App Store.

I used to obsess over audio quality. But then I reached my 40s, and it started to become clear that my ageing ears were becoming the limiting factor.

Now I just embrace the convenience of Bluetooth and usefulness of noise cancelling.

(But then again, even my AirPods or Sony XM4s are high fidelity compared to what many of the kids these days are listening with, small mono bluetooth speakers or playing music out of their phone speakers)

Some sort of signatures to verify legitimate unmodified photographs (taken with a relatively secure device, e.g an iPhone) seems like a reasonable idea

But even then, people will be able to point that camera at a manipulated/generated image (either printed or on a screen). Maybe that one could be solved if the photo included some depth information?

TV shows on the other hand, have suffered extreme shrinkflation.

From 20+ episode seasons every year to maybe 8-10 episodes every 2-3 years.

Yeah, budgets/production values are higher. But characters and storytelling were often better in those old shows (Star Trek TNG/DS9, Lost, 24, Breaking Bad) where they could make those longer seasons every year for 5 or more years in a row. Simply far more screen time for character development.

Retro gaming is rising in popularity for good reasons. And it's not purely nostalgia.

A lot of people aren't enjoying modern games (with modern monetization)

TV quality isn't what it used to be, though.

Got a fairly expensive LG OLED and after 5 years it's developing clusters of dead pixels down one edge. And even if the hardware doesn't fail/degrade, the software is often enshittified (ads pushed to smart TVs)

There's also 'Drinkflation', the ABV of beers being reduced. (Maybe it's mostly a UK thing due to the tax system, weaker beer = less tax)

Pretty sad state of things when simple pleasures like beer or chocolate are hit so hard by enshittification.

At this point, it’s the ExBox :(

Why are cold drinks with sugar and caffeine seen as problematic, while hot drinks with sugar and caffeine are seen as perfectly good?

What I liked about the older, simpler Arduino was that you could move an ATmega328p project from an Arduino board to a chip on a breadboard then to a custom PCB with minimal complexity - with just hobbyist-level skills.

But the boards and modules just seem to be getting ever more complex, with lots of tiny SMD components, removing that path.

It's just down to age. I had a C64 growing up, but it was mostly a games machine. I played with BASIC a bit, but C64 BASIC wasn't great compared to BBC BASIC on the school BBC Micros. And I was a bit too young/lacked resources to learn assembly language and get serious about C64 coding.

For me, the Amiga was the truly magical machine, where endless creative possibilities suddenly opened up (via Blitz Basic, DPaint, OctaMED and more) as well as all the great games.

(Then going to a Pentium with Win95 a few years later felt like a step backwards in some ways... Lots of power but lacking in accessible creative software)

Aside from games, most software is available for both these days

The first one was 8 years ago, in the pre-Covid world.

But their timing was amazing, doing it just days before they announced that they were ending releases of games on physical media.

Retro gaming is an increasingly popular option, too. These days I have more fun messing with Amigas, C64s, and cheap emulation handhelds than big modern games.

Retro hardware prices have been going up fairly significantly though, especially for Amiga stuff.

Consoles don't have true 'generational leaps' any more either, the huge leaps forward in tech used to drive excitement/sales.

Now we get incremental improvements, cross-generation games, and backwards compatibility. And AAA game development isn't exactly doing well these days.

PC gaming isn't exactly in a healthy place either (at least when it comes to hardware pricing/availability). Post-Covid GPU prices were bad enough even before the AI bubble ruined everything.

Taking metalworking tools to a very expensive machine with very limited spare parts availability seems rather extreme.

Bad experiences with heat, fan noise, and poor battery life on Windows laptops.

Hearing also degrades over time. In my 20s I was a lot more fussy about audio formats and hi-fi gear.

Approaching 50, with less sensitive ears and a bit of tinnitus, I’m happy with the convenience of Bluetooth headphones and whatever format Spotify uses.

Yes, building prisons is expensive. But the current UK government seems to treat it as a physical impossibility, while releasing violent offenders early due to lack of capacity.

Somewhat enjoyed the (less-visually-impressive) PC version way back in the day, there weren't many good shoot-em-ups on a 286 PC that could barely scroll the screen, but Silpheed played fairly well on it, and IIRC it was one of the few games that supported the non-standard sound card on my parents IBM PS/1. Actually think it might have been bundled with that PS/1

The word 'colonization' has become rather toxic, though. Maybe we need a new word for occupying barren planets where there's no native life being displaced?

Surely those who need refuge from the worst Islamic regimes are the women, not the men?

As for the housing market, yes, it'd still be in a bad state with zero migration. But at the moment, it seems that we can't build enough to keep up with the migration alone. And when we do manage to build loads of homes, we completely neglect most of the infrastructure needed to support them.

We haven't built a reservoir since the 90s. Transport is a real problem, with the roads overloaded and in bad condition while rail projects seem impossibly slow and costly (HS2 is probably the last one the UK will ever attempt?). And then there's the NHS, policing+prisons, education system, and so on.

They thought climate change was the next war-level crisis, and worked towards that. They didn't anticipate the Ukraine invasion, or the Middle East blowing up again.

No, it requires adhesive-removing chemicals, IPA as a bare minimum, dental floss, plastic prying tools, and some idea of battery safety (so you don't turn it into a fireball by trying to extract it aggressively with a screwdriver).

Genuinely struggled to extract a Switch 1 battery from it's adhesive, and I'm usually perfectly comfortable disassembling+reassembling that sort of thing.

The use of adhesives, in excessive quantity/strength, on fragile/dangerous batteries is the problem, not the screwdriver or brain cells.

The drone war will be quite limited by chip production.

And once the chip fabs have been bombed, civilisation is set by by decades, and may end up fighting a lower-tech war.

> The left wing parties just wish to honour existing international treaties which we have signed to allow genuine asylum seekers.

But these are treaties are no longer fit for purpose, as can be seen by the boatloads of mostly young male economic migrants turning up in the UK to 'claim asylum'. People who've got thousands of euros to pay the small boats traffickers.

If they were refugees fleeing war or other dangers, you'd expect a lot more families - women, kids, the elderly - to be making the journey.

(Of course, legal migration to the UK is vastly higher than illegal arrivals. And this is the larger issue putting pressure on housing, healthcare, transport, and more. But the small boats are a glaring example of a broken system being exploited)

War requires industry. But we've deindustrialised and outsourced the manufacture of almost everything to China.