pxi

Is there a reason you can't simply strip the wires back half an inch or so, twist them together and wrap it up in electrical tape (with a matchstick optionally thrown in to keep it from flexing)? Bonus points for soldering the wires, but in the short term it won't make a huge difference. It might be a personal thing, but for something like that I wouldn't bother getting someone to fix it, it'll likely cost a significant fraction of the cost of just replacing it.

On a related note to your musings I came across this presentation from Defcon 24 which was pretty interesting and shows what can be done with relatively minimal effort:

Wow, that looks like it will be good. Glad they're sticking with the oldschool techniques, it'd probably have been easier to go the cgi route.

Sadly suicide has indeed been confirmed by the coroner. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/may/18/soundgarden-chris-cornell-killed-himself-coroner-says

We've a few of them in Dublin. They seem to more-or-less be the McDonalds of sandwich companies, with an (ex) spokesman that turned out to be infinitely more creepy than the clown. The bread is nice. and the food is reasonable but I'd tend to go elsewhere for a sandwich given the option. Favourite? There's a spicy beef thing that they do, it's been so long since I've eaten in Subway that I don't remember the exact name for it - but that anyway with onions and barbecue sauce on honey oat iirc.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/may/18/chris-cornell-former-soundgarden-singer-dies-aged-52 The cause of death isn't currently known. Soundgarden were one of the bands that really defined the musical landscape of my generation. Sad to see him pass so young.

What's 'normal' anyway? Have you ever seen a perfectly normal sunset?

I'd tend to agree, the old 'never meet your idols' thing has held pretty true for me. I'll forever be grateful that I managed to catch their final gig in Dublin. Wasn't their best performance imho - Dublin Castle does host a lot of gigs but I've never heard of them using that particular part of the building for gigs and acoustically it's not really the most suitable - but the final track was awesome, an incredible (and oddly poignant) way to go out. Never been able to spot myself in the concert footage though sadly. I made contact with Sleazy through Myspace shortly after Balance died and he seemed like a perfectly lovely guy, so I suppose you could consider that I have technically met him, but I'd consider online interaction slightly out of the context of the thread so he stays on the list imo. If you want something Coil-related that might pose more questions then it answers, may I suggest looking up 'Did He Fall' by Thighpaulsandra. If I ever meet him I'll certainly be asking him about that song. I'd post the video, but possible forum rule infractions.

Most of them are relatively obscure individuals in fairness, but not knowing who David Braben is... on a space-game forum... tut tut!

These are the ones that first spring to mind: Dead: Robert Anton Wilson Terence McKenna Johnn Balance Peter Christopherson Hunter S. Thompson Living: Genesis P-Orridge Isabella Bunny Bennett Thighpaulsandra Clive Sinclair David Braben

All I can say is whoever made it really likes the arpeggiator on their synth.

So I don't want to drag politics into the forum, but if you were to search for recent news articles about Stephen Fry you might understand why (in the most sarcastic sense imaginable) I am so incredibly proud of my country and its lawmakers.

Finally got round to playing through Tomb Raider (2013) which has probably been sitting in my Steam Library for a couple of years now. Reasonably impressed with it, and it's the first Tomb Raider game that I've finished. It's also the first one to feature QTE's that *didn't* make me want to throw the controller at a wall, which frankly is an achievement in itself. Seeing as Platinum decided to port Bayonetta to PC I picked that up and have been having a bash at it here and there. Good game and performs rather well to boot. Only minor criticism would be the save system.

Same, I didn't watch every episode and the series became somewhat difficult to follow at some point. I've been meaning for years to go back and re-watch it but never got round to doing it.

Two things spring to mind - Recovery from physical exhaustion, but also sleep tends to be when most healing seems to occur in the body. Mental stock-taking. No-one seems to know exactly why, but our brains need sleep more than the body itself. I can personally attest to the power of long periods of sleep-deprevation for bringing out the proper carnival-music kind of crazy once you pass beyond the 72-hours awake point. The real mystery to me is why we need so little sleep comparatively to get back on track, most I've ever really needed was a good 12-hour stint and I'm like it never happened.

Ok this one's a bit of a doozy. Bought an XBOX1 pad to replace my 360 pad which is quite literally starting to fall apart. Now this being a MS thing, you'd think it'd be plug & play in Windows, right? Nope. So off I go and do some RTFM on the microsoft site, find some drivers and install them... driver not supported. It's taken *a week* of googling and faffing around, during which, though it's not explicitly stated, I get the distinct impression that the XB1 pad is only supported on Win8.1 and above. Finally I hit on a steam thread which directs me to the Windows Update Catalogue Page. I search for XBOX1 pad, find nothing. Search for XBOX Pad, up pops about 20 drivers for Win 7. Download the latest one, extract the .cab (another hurdle for the unaware) point windows in the right direction and the damn thing finally rumbles into life. I get that MS would like to politely suggest I update to the new OS but this seriously takes the cake. I'd actually be less annoyed by this whole rigmarole if it'd turned out that there just wasn't a driver for 7. (I'll also point out that I got the same device working in linux in about 10 minutes.)

Not only will Socialblade let you correct the numbers of subscribers to your own youtube account they've now started crowdsourcing the endeavour.

Ah ok so! Well the more you know and all that

https://www.piriform.com/recuva Undelete utilities are a thing.

Glad you're enjoying it, I have it installed but haven't gotten round to playing it yet. I've been continuing my NG+ play-through of Dark Souls. I discovered recently that the game insists on defaulting to my flightstick no matter how I set priorities for my input devices in Window's control panel. Trying to play the game with a flightstick would be amusing in the sense of playing street fighter with a Dance Dance Revolution pad, but would also require a level of gud I'll probably never git.

That was in X:Rebirth.

Wow another great blast from the past, I'll definitely have to take a look at that!

It should be pointed out that to do this legally requires owning a physical copy of the game, and the ability to transfer a backup of that copy to your PC, which for any of the recent games generally requires an appropriately modified console (or in the case of the GC/Wii an extremely small subset of DVD drives from certain specific manufacturers). We don't want a moderator thinking we're discussing things we shouldn't and locking the thread now do we. Anything past the 16-bit era will really be a YMMV situation, but it's still a great use of a spare PI. To bring this back to the switch though, there's plenty of videos popping up on youtube claiming to show working switch emulators complete with download links. Of course it should be obvious that consoles that have been out for less than a month don't generally have emulators capable of doing anything - much less booting games. But a fair number of people seem to be getting suckered into filling their machines with malware.

I think it's highly likely that life exists out there. In terms of what we might find in our own backyard, be it Mars, Europa or wherever, I'd suspect if we do find anything we may well end up discovering that they have some relation to earthbound life of one form or another - I'd be wary of defining such a case as truly 'alien' life. Beyond that, whether we will ever establish contact with other intelligences, that's more of an open question, there's a lot of opportunities for life out there, but space is also staggeringly huge, and then you throw in the timescales - Earth's had civilized humans for thousands of years, and technology like radio for hundreds of years. These are blips in the billions of years that the solar system has existed for, and we realistically have no idea how long we will survive as a civilization, nor do we have any idea how long an alien civilization would persist. We could have missed our nearest intelligent neighbours by a few hundred thousand years, or be too early by a similar amount. Alien plants and the like,we could likely discover a few of them though.

Heh I remember that. Been a long time since I thought of that game.