Captain Aggravated

I bought a Dell Inspiron circa 2014 intending to run Windows on it. I was dabbling in Linux playing with Raspberry Pis, but didn’t really have designs to run Linux on my main computers. I found Windows 8.1 so unlivable that I tried out Linux Mint.

That laptop just kept dying.

I went around and around with Dell support for a semester about that damn laptop. I was going back to school, I bought a laptop for school, I didn’t get that fucking laptop. I did an entire semester of coursework with a Kindle Fire and two Raspberry Pis (a 1B and a 2). They finally replaced the damn thing with a different model, that was missing a lot of features I had ordered. Dell is at the top of my goddamn blacklist.

Anyway, the first x86 machine I ran Linux on, Linux compatibility wasn’t a factor, and then I really didn’t get a choice anyway because I didn’t get the machine I ordered. But I’ve had dental surgeries that I enjoyed more than Windows 8.1.

In the early days, Linux Mint needed a kernel update to support the trackpad. I’m still not convinced the dedicated GPU ever worked. I had an external docking station that was very meh. It did the job though, I actually still have it in service. It won’t run Windows 11 I don’t think but modern Linux runs just fine.

I’ve since built two desktops with Linux compatibility in mind which have worked very well, and a little Lenovo thing to use as a shop tablet which…could be a lot better.

See? That’s great branding.

Europe isn’t a region, it’s a brand.

I just imagine all of the theatrical prints ending up at that theater to die in their projectors.

I wonder how many prints they wore out.

I imagine the other factor is the tooling at the chip fabs. When you can make an entire microcontroller that small, for 20 cents apiece, why bother continuing to make less powerful chips? We can just do this now.

Reading the article, they mentioned “medical devices and earbuds” as potential use cases.

Reading another commenter say it has 16k of flash memory and 1k of RAM in a 2x4 pin package, so even if the core has some speed to it…what exactly are you going to achieve with that?

Other than being 32-bit it’s not too far from the specs of an ATTINY85. I have a couple of those kicking around to play with, it’s 8k of flash, 512 bytes of RAM and 512 bytes of EEPROM and with an external oscillator it can be clocked at up to 20 MHz.

Let’s take my cordless router as an example. It has a brushless motor that can turn at ~20,000 RPM. The microcontroller would have to be able to read the shaft position sensor and make changes to the H-bridge or whatever circuit is driving the motor two if not four times per revolution. How many machine instructions do you think each of those operations takes? Ten? It also has to at least occasionally look at the speed selector to vary the motor RPM, and is probably monitoring the battery or communicating with the battery pack’s own controller to prevent the nine or ten ways you can kill lithium cells by using them.

You’re probably approaching the limit of what you can do with 16k of flash, 1k of memory and 6 IO pins.

It’s going to be about equivalent to the ATMEGA328P you get on a garden variety Arduino can do, albeit with a lot less IO. You’re probably looking at the speed controller in a power tool or the onboard computer of a Qi charger or something. In a lot of cases, you just need something that can run a few lines of C.

I am reminded of my favorite moment from The Modern Rogue, on the subject of implantable RFID chips:

Jason: “Can I crush it up and snort it up my nose?”

Bobick: “If we made a list of things you could do, that would be on the list.”

Yes, I’m aware of this. The point I was making was I got the joke backwards. You’re supposed to laugh all the way through Shrek 2 because the cat sounds exactly like Zorro.

I haven’t seen Zoolander. Ben Stiller is also in that, right?

The only Will Ferrell movie I’ll watch again is Anchorman. Because yeah, in most cases the humor in a Will Ferrell movie is just screaming inappropriate things.

I’ve got a similar problem with Ben Stiller. He is by far the worst part of Night in the Museum. We get a bunch of cool and funny stuff happening only to have it slam to a halt so we can have some “Excuse me, Mister sir, but you, shouldn’t um.” May god damn Ben Stiller to work in an obscure plumbing fittings retailer followed by retirement in obscurity.

Avatar was the best screensaver ever made.

That right there is the millennial experience.

So many culturally defining movies came out before the 1980s that by the time you’re being raised in the 90’s, they’re making children’s media that references it. I knew the plot of Star Wars long before I saw it.

My favorite example is The Mask of Zorro, which…not an old film, but it came out when I was slightly young for it. A few years go by, I’m in high school, and Shrek comes out. Then it’s sequel, with a swashbuckling orange cat voiced by Antonio Banderas. And then I eventually catch Mask of Zorro, and laugh through the entire thing because holy shit the main character sounds exactly like Puss In Boots.

I think the appeal is to have some kind of paper printer that isn’t under the thumb of fucking megacorps.

Some of the OLD HP Thinkjet printers were pretty rudimentary; the original Thinkjet cartridges are still widely manufactured for certain industrial applications. Tell me we couldn’t reprap that shit.

It’s a bit behind the times for gaming though it’ll probably still play a decent round of Counter Strike.

I used a system even older than that (A core i7 with a three-digit part number, circa 2010) a couple years ago to rip DVDs and run MakeMKV/Handbrake, it did the job fine. Decade old computers aren’t the problem, Windows is.

The real thing that Flatpak offers is one place to publish for Linux. You put your app in the App Store for Apple, you put it in the Play Store for Android, you put it in Flathub for Linux.