https://massgrave.dev/

If you have to do it legitimately for corporate liability purposes then yes, actually buying licenses will not be cost effective. But activating the LTSC versions is otherwise trivially easy.

I am explicitly using LTSC.

You don’t need a license if you know about massgrave.dev. I’m only using this because our warehouse software requires Windows and the latter is already bought and paid for. Otherwise, Microsoft can bite me.

Isn’t GIMP explicitly a GTK app?

Ooh, a Celeron N4000. I will see you, and raise you this piece of shit we have at work:

My boss bought this as one of those Black Friday “deals” for about $99 USD. The sticker on the bottom doesn’t seem to reveal its manufacturing date but I believe this model was released in 2018. Really, it’s just a netbook in all but name.

We use this specifically to drive a walk-around barcode scanner in our warehouse and the software we have to use on it is Windows only. It’s tiny and still somehow gets stellar battery life, and it’s deliberately so cheap as to be disposable so when the day inevitably comes that it gets smashed, no one will care.

With Win10 IoT on it the thing actually runs tolerably for our intended use case, which is the aforementioned barcode bleeping and nothing else. And at least yours there has a 1080p display; this one is only 1366 x 768 so doing practically anything else on it is excruciating anyway. What amuses me the most about it is that with only 29 gigs of usable storage there literally isn’t enough left over to run Windows updates. I have this thing as ruthlessly pared down as I can get without creating a custom Windows installation or something and for the big updates, you have to attach an external USB drive to it.

I can’t fathom trying to run Windows 11 on it. Fuck all that noise.

FYI, your $600 Maytag did not come with a 10 year warranty. It comes with a 10 year parts only warranty, labor is not covered, only on the compressor. Labor is only covered for one year.

Here’s a compressor. You figure out the rest.

Here’s the fine print:

https://www.whirlpool.com/content/dam/global/documents/202303/warranty-w11655302-revA.pdf

Bronze is still technology. So are stone tools, and sticks when they’re used as tools.

There’s still a Gulf station one town over from me. I don’t know if it’s independently owned and they just kept the signage, or if Gulf as a chain still exists and is just much diminished, or what.

Also, all modern cars still say “unleaded only” on them somewhere, just in a less conspicuous spot since you functionally can’t buy leaded gasoline outside of an airfield anymore. Mine says it on the yellow sticker on the back of the fuel flap.

I was miffed my new (12 years old at this point) car didn’t come with the glow-plug lighter, but I grabbed a random one from a beater at the junkyard and stuck it in the socket and was delighted to discover that it still worked. My first car had one, but the little catch on it was broken so when it was done heating up and popped out, it would shoot out of the socket and wind up under your seats. Fun times.

We already have local governments, too. What a reductive take.

More like the HOAs want to act like a government. But we already have local governments. We don’t need two of them.

Even Stanley at least had a computer. And optionally a bucket.

Yᴏᴜ Hᴀᴠᴇ Dɪᴇᴅ

Pʀᴇss Fɪʀᴇ Tᴏ Rᴇsᴘᴀᴡɴ

Obviously, just play your Wii exclusively on your massive retro 39" CRT television, the one with front glass that’s like 4" thick.

In my household, the TV breaks your controller. Not the other way around.

I built that myself. Most of it is 3/4" ply. The shelves are side-screwed with 2-1/4" Spax screws, not resting on pegs (thus, also they can’t be moved). It’s not going anywhere.

If it weren’t for that damn Switch, the 360 would be the newest console I own.

Here’s what’s just plugged in at the moment, and not in milk crates in the basement:

(Don’t @ me about my shitty cell phone picture I took in the dark. I’m not getting out the mirrorless and the studio lighting for this, plus this way the potato quality handily conceals the fact that I probably also need to vacuum that carpet.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkdBEuQQ0UM

Every dipshit with a freshly minted MBA thinks they’re going to go and disrupt the appliance industry by putting it online and snatching it out from under all those antiquated local dealerships run by out of touch old men who can barely operate a computer. They think they’re going to go from zero to nationwide tomorrow, and they’re so smart because nobody’s thought of it before.

It turns out that dealing with the final mile with appliances is killer, and extremely difficult logistically. That makes the entire operation much more expensive than anyone thinks at first glance. Not just in terms of raw dollars and cents paid to disinterested common carriers to move your product from A to B (who also won’t install the stuff or even bring it inside your customer’s house) but also in damaged and returned products and angry screaming customers who will be initiating credit card chargebacks all the time whenever anything goes wrong.

All of those little local dealerships have had decades to figure out how to move a refrigerator from their warehouse to your kitchen and how to remediate the situation if it all goes pear shaped on delivery day, and all of them only service their local territory for a reason. The further you stretch without some physical presence in where you’re stretching to, the more impossible it becomes to control the logistics.

So yeah, that’s probably in no small part why your fridge would have been so expensive. Amazon is among the latest figuring this out the hard way, and you can’t just slap a refrigerator or a stove in a bubble mailer and dump it on somebody’s front porch.

Or switch Firefox to reader mode (F9), which usually reveals the content of the article with any extraneous CSS trickery removed.

The Quest was never not Facebook. Meta/Facebook bought Oculus in 2014 and even the OG Rift wasn’t released until 2016. Arguably only the DK1 devkit units were produced not under the Facebook umbrella.

The major difference was that they weren’t playing it up at the time and they didn’t yet require you to have a Facebook account just to use the damn things. That came later.

Equip a sensor that figures out how much ethylene is in the air inside the fridge?

Or just open the door every once in a while and look…

And the ultimate outcome of that was, at one point Google enacted some kind of API change which necessitated Samsung to push out an update to remain compatible, otherwise all of your Google enabled features such as the calendar syncing, email, etc. would stop working. Samsung claimed to be developing a patch for this, and ultimately pushed out an update to… only some of their models. For the others, their response was literally just, “We recommend you buy a newer refrigerator.”

Yes, this actually happened.

But since that was going on for ten years ago now, information about it on the Internet is a trifle difficult to find because the search results have largely been overshadowed by Samsung’s more recent smart fridge fuckup. Grand.

Never buy a Samsung appliance.