Back in the day I saw people making attempts at this with gimcrack setups involving household irons. Your method is probably better.

finds themselves in a social circle or job environment hostile to Linux.

Ugh. Tell me about it.

I haven’t tried to run the latest Corel graphics suite in Wine recently, but the last time I did it exploded in my face so spectacularly I think my eyebrows still haven’t fully grown back. I really need that to work for… work. Basically everything else I already use is FOSS anyway.

That is patently false.

…Sometimes we also complain about Facebook or Tesla.

You’re conflating the tuner with the antenna. The person you replied to, however, is correct including the comment about the digital tuner boxes (which convert to an analog signal for old TV’s) being available for free during the analog to digital changeover back when.

Any piece of metal will work as an antenna, even for receiving digital broadcasts. It might not work well, but there is no magical difference between a “digital” antenna and an “analog” one, and since digital television is transmitted over pretty much the same original frequencies as analog was, old analog antennae are already quite well tuned in size and shape to pick up modern digital signals.

You just have to plug your 1940’s antenna into a 2009+ or so television. The antenna itself doesn’t “decode” anything. It just catches radio waves and passes the waveform along to the TV or tuner box. I still use the old 60’s era rooftop antenna that cane with my house, but plugged into my modern TV and it receives digital channels just fine.

His glasses are different in every scene. No consistency. It’s subtle in the first few, but in the last shot they’re a totally different style and shape and have a crossbar over the bridge that wasn’t present in any of the previous scenes.

I was sitting in a diner the other day and one of their TV’s was apparently, for lack of a better word, tuned to that Samsung TV Plus service. I watched it play the same Kia ad four times, back to back. Not in separate commercial breaks. All in one commercial break where the same ad was played four times consecutively.

Just like you, I have to say they found no success in making me want to buy a Kia.

Not even. We just need it to trip over the pronunciation of something, preferably the same thing more than once, and then both the news and social media will latch onto it like a pit bull and with any luck they’ll never live it down.

Carefully watch the kid’s glasses.

Now you can’t unsee it. You’re welcome.

Well, they’re MSRP’ing for $199 at the moment if you don’t spring for the AMS Lite filament changer thingamadoo. To be fair that’s less than several pocket knives I own are worth. I’m not a fan of Bambu at all, but I think you could wind up with far worse for not much less money…

Oh boy. I can’t wait for this to backfire in a spectacular and completely predictable manner.

I have never found the Gex series to be “exciting,” even when it was new. Gex was always a shallow also-ran mascot in the time when everyone was trying to recapture that lightning in a bottle without understanding how it actually worked, and desperately trying to recreate what Sonic and Earthworm Jim and to a lesser extent Toejam and Earl had.

He was marginally less annoying than Bubsy. That’s about all I can say about Gex.

If I really decide to play some sub-par 90’s platforming stuffed with stilted and dated TV and movie references, my 3DO still works. Yes, really…

You should check out an original Famicom, then. Not only are the controller cables only about two feet long, but they’re also permanently affixed to the console. Well, unless you’re willing to dismantle it, anyway.

It seems Nintendo expected gamers to keep the console in front of them and connected to the TV via a cable running across the floor, rather than our now familiar methodology of keeping the console under or next to the TV and only bringing the controller(s) with you. The limited amount of space in Japanese households may have also had something to do with it.

Anyway, if you’re a modern western gamer nowadays it’s annoying as hell. Big N made the right choice when they brought the system to the US in not only making the controller cables significantly longer, but also unpluggable.

Your yearly reminder that the original Paddington Bear stuffed toy was designed and made by Shirley Clarkson and given to her son: Jeremy Clarkson.

Yes, that Jeremy Clarkson. You know, the “Speed and Power!” guy.

(Although this was not the origin of the character himself. Michael Bond bought a generic toy bear from a toy shop and named it after nearby Paddington station. He wrote some stories using the bear as a character, and then they got published, and then he probably got very rich.)

FYI, there is no “better” way to use hydrogen that will result in extracting more energy from it than it physically contains and can be released via oxidation. This is not a matter of “development” or “breakthroughs.” It is physically impossible. The standard enthalpy change of combustion of hydrogen is 141.83 MJ/kg. Period. That’s it. That’s all you can ever get out of it, provided you achieve perfect efficiency (which currently we don’t). Ongoing research is surely working on getting is closer to 100% efficiency, but it will never get past it. You can’t defy the laws of physics.

Insofar as I am aware all current hydrogen vehicles already use fuel cells to generate electricity and use that to drive electric motors for motive power. No one is burning hydrogen in a combustion engine in vehicular applications. There are some power plants that are doing it, though, mostly as a mechanism for storing and later reusing excess energy generated from other sources. You can go cross-eyed reading up on it here, if you are so inclined.

There is the notion of the “hydrogen economy” floating around, that is the use of hydrogen as an energy storage and carrying medium – not, notably, as a fuel for actual generation of energy – but it’s pretty certain that outside of some limited applications this will always be a worse deal than just taking the energy in the form of electricity and putting it in a wire.

Hydrogen is a dead end. The only company left trying to chase that particular dragon is Toyota, and I predict eventually they’ll be forced to admit that it’ll never work en masse for private vehicles. Ordinary consumers can already barely be trusted with gasoline, which is neither under high pressure nor requires industrial grade refrigeration to keep it in liquid form, and is a lot harder to ignite… The delivery systems for hydrogen are extremely complex and must maintain an absolute 0% failure rate or else somebody will either get blown up or frozen to a pump. Gasoline is at least a liquid and behaves predictably when spilled, and doesn’t phase change instantly when it leaves containment. And a mechanical failure in the delivery system can be mitigated by simply shutting off the pump. You poke a hole in a hydrogen filling system and you’re going to have a very interesting time. Current systems have redundancies on top of safety devices on top of redundancies for this reason which makes them fantastically expensive.

Hydrogen also has crap for energy density (around 8 kJ/liter in liquid form, compared to 32 kJ/liter for gasoline) and even if you’re producing it via electrolysis or something is a wildly inefficient way to store and transport energy. If you’re going to use electricity to create and compress hydrogen to transport it and create electricity with it later, it is monumentally more efficient to take the electricity and put it in batteries. So you may as well just to that.

The thing with battery swapping is that it will absolutely require strong government regulation to ensure standardization and fair treatment of owners. Replaceable batteries in consumer devices obviously aren’t a new concept, and before proprietary lithium packs took over everything, every single consumer device was powered by AAA, AA, C, or D batteries which were very well understood by everybody and were – and are – completely interchangeable commodity items that are readily available to this day. That’s the only way it’ll work. Manufacturers will have to be forced to standardize on a set of pack sizes because without oversight they’ll inevitably try to turn everything into a subscription-only walled garden pretty much exactly as you have predicted. But if there is a thing as an equivalent of an AAA vehicle battery (for motorcycles and scooters), AA vehicle battery (for city microcars, NEV’s, golf carts, etc.) and C vehicle battery (full size passenger cars) and D vehicle battery (light trucks) etc., and nobody is allowed to try to make up their own bullshit, then no one will have to give a rat’s ass about battery health, the dealership, lock-in, or anything else. If you buy a used vehicle with a knackered pack in it or your battery gets cacked, you could just bop down to your local AutoZone or whatever and buy a new one. Or push your car to the nearest swap station. You’ll turn in your old one for the core charge. Exactly like how 12v vehicle batteries work now.

We’ll have to get people used to the notion that, yes, these things will be kind of a battery lottery and you may get swapped in a pack that’s in slightly worse condition than your last one if you go around pack-swapping all the time. But you know, the next time you swap you’ll get a different one again. And you can play already this game right now if you want to – just go buy some fuel in a third world country.

Apparently they don’t need him because Ronald was fired… Er, “retired,” in 2016.

The final vestige of the clown that I know of was his silhouette being used in the “throw this into a trash can and not on the damn ground” message on the bottom of their paper bags, but even that seems to be gone now.

Provided they’re fine with cutting off 100% of their business coming from customers older than 50, that’d probably work great. I don’t think they’re quite there yet.

Ah, I see. So it’s cool when we do it (fossil fuel and ag subsidies, the auto industry bailout in 2008, etc.) but not when they do it.

Got it.

Maybe in full HD we’ll be able to determine definitively if anyone in Ivalice actually has a nose.

undermining regional carmakers

I think the word they’re looking for is in fact “outcompeting.”

Yutaro-Katori-with-butterfly-meme: Is this capitalism?