grapeshot

I don't pay for Amazon Prime, so between shipping and sales tax it often makes financial sense for me to buy a product from an eBay seller over Amazon even at a higher price. You'd think Amazon would want to stop this by banning Prime accounts used to ship to too many different addresses or something.

My favorite YouTube channel for getting to sleep lately is "Mr. Carlson's Lab". Soothing voice, no music and long-winded explanations on electronics repair seems to work pretty well.

Nonstandard headset connectors were prevalent 15 years ago on feature phones and the Game Boy Advance SP, but no one liked them back then either. I just threw out a drawer full of old proprietary cables and accessories from back then, in fact. One of the reasons I bought an iPhone in 2009 was that Apple wasn't actively trying to be hostile to anyone who might want to use it to listen to music like the HTC and LG phones of the time.

Chrome is lately behaving even more unpredictably when scrolling with the spacebar, because now if you click on either the back or forward buttons it puts a focus rectangle on them and now pressing space will go back/forward again instead of scrolling down like I wanted.

The Chrome password manager still crashes the entire browser when trying to save any password with emoji in it on Windows. Firefox works perfectly fine.

It's for CRT Controller (probably after the Motorola 6845 CRTC chip that was in the original PC)

Looks like it's the result of taking exactly 19 terms of a certain Taylor series expansion for π.

Most laptop manufacturers now have a whitelist in the BIOS to prevent the use of wireless adapters that didn't ship with the machine. (Lenovo, HP and Toshiba definitely do this.) Up until Sandy Bridge it was usually possible to patch this out with a modified BIOS update but now laptop BIOSes are signed and this is not possible.

Isolated UTF-16 surrogate code points definitely crash Unity when it tries to display them. (Seen when I pasted some emoji in a text box in TIS-100 and tried to backspace.)

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This is basically correct but the I and Q signals need to be filtered much more drastically (down to a bandwidth of about 1.5 mhz) to avoid artifacts, and more luma detail can be obtained by using a comb filter (summing adjacent lines to cancel the color signal since the phase on each line is shifted by 180 degrees from the previous).

The other common problems in computers as old as that would be leaking NiCad clock batteries (the corrosive gunk coming out of one of those will eat the copper right off the motherboard), tantalum capacitors which like to fail shorted and burn out, and frozen bearings on disk drives.

Modern machines may be more reliable because of the lack of moving parts, but they have other disadvantages in the longevity department. Lead free solder and conductive glue will start to fail after a few thousand thermal cycles. (Conductive glue is especially used to bond flex cables to LCD screens and is not something you could repair yourself.)

There are still a few other things that will limit the life of modern computers.

1. That waxy thermal pad material certainly dries out and becomes ineffective in less than 10 years.

2. Power supplies still have large electrolytic capacitors right next to heatsinks

3. BGA parts with lead-free solder are still going to have a limited amount of thermal cycles they can withstand before the solder balls become brittle.

4. I notice an increasing use of conductive glue to attach flat flex cables in computer parts, especially ultrabooks, and this also has a limited number of thermal cycles before it starts to degrade. (Anyone who bought a Samsung TV between 2005 and 2008 might already be aware of this.) This is probably the worst issue since it isn't going to be fixable for a hobbyist.

Also, I wouldn't even guarantee that firmware in Flash that isn't rewritten often will last 10 years. There are a lot of dead Nintendo Wiis already due to bad blocks in the flash.

I currently own a 30 year old PC-XT and a 40 year old stereo receiver, but they didn't make it to that age without maintenance and replaced components. I'm afraid that in 30 years many of today's devices will have failed in ways that are impossible to get at or repair.

Tesla is trying to keep tight control over the availability of spare parts and diagnostics tools for now, probably because Musk doesn't want any bad press from problems with a salvaged Tesla someone has improperly repaired. This is likely to cause them problems with resale value in a few years once the warranties on the first cars start expiring, and drive up insurance prices for the Model 3.

See the case of the abandoned Stretchla project[1] and the other news report of a salvage titled car that the company refuses to enable charging on because it was worked on by an unapproved mechanic.

[1]: http://cafeelectric.com/stretchla/

I find it unfortunate that I can't completely remove the graphics card from the mid-range system, and I'm not allowed to select a SSD for it either. If I could do those things I would be able to compare this site directly to the PC I built yesterday.

Also I notice that you're missing estimated tax, shipping, and a Windows license from the price.

That wasn't even the only firmware problem with those drives. There was a later bug that would cause the drive to not be recognized after a hard power down, and it wouldn't show up again until you left the computer sitting at the BIOS screen for at least 20 minutes.

It's not just the retina Macbook screens, the image retention issue affects basically every LG IPS laptop panel manufactured before 2013. It's just that Apple wasn't using the IPS panels until the Retina.

Here's what happens when you do mix up 44.1 khz and 48 khz. Van Halen - Jump (Greensboro): http://youtu.be/Mjx_GjyXCs4

It's time I made sure my family's 2007 iMacs are up to date, I guess. At least one of them is probably still on 10.6 because they send me things in Word for Mac 2004 format and that definitely won't run on anything newer because it's PPC-only code.

There will probably be multiple suppliers of these displays, like there were for the Macbook Pros. If the new panel is IPS and from LG, it will probably have the same ghosting problem. (If you have a LG IPS display, you can see this issue clearly by watching a Youtube video in a window for 15-30 minutes and then immediately loading Metafilter in the same window.)

It's possible to do something like that in C. In C++, you can even do some template magic to create all the appropriate functions for each opcode based on something like the original instruction decode ROM. Brilliant and short code, but very difficult to write in the first place. Here's a very apropos example of this technique as applied to the 6502.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y71lli8MS8s

I think part of the problem is that with the advent of the Internet, no computer comes with proper documentation that you can read to learn what a system does and how it does it. DOS was probably the last OS that could be completely described in its paper manual. Now learning about a new system has to be done through Google, experimentation and thoroughly inadequate help systems where it's very difficult to find an answer if you don't know how to describe the problem.