richfiles

For those who know of me here, you know I'm into electronics, though lack of time has put a massive roadblock on getting anything done lately... Anyway, I have a Hakko 936 Soldering Station, and as far as soldering irons go, it's quite nice. Lately though, I had been thinking my Hakko Soldering Iron was failing. The tip looked very new, but it was just having a terrible time melting solder. I was going through excessive amounts of flux, and work has just been wretched with it. I genuinely thought it was failing me after 14 years of reliable use. I tested the tip temperature with my Soldering Iron Calibration tool (it's a thermocouple temperature meter that can handle peak temps up to a several hundred °C... At least from 0-500°C accurately, I know for sure)... It was 80°C below the set temperature! The next day, I disconnected the handle from my base station and took it to the machine shop where I work. I first tested the machine shop's Hakko, and it was perfectly calibrated... Measured to within 9°C of where the knob was set, which is quite impressive for an analog knob. When I attached my handle to the base station there... Same as before. Mine measured about 80°C LOW! Anyway I took the tip off to examine the ceramic heating element. I thought maybe it had cracked... That's when I realized there were no markings on the tip. The tip wasn't a Hakko tip! Turns out, back when I bought my hot air rework station, it came with a knockoff Hakko soldering iron. It was BAD... Like, I thought it had been damaged in shipping, cause it was bent, but no, the ceramic heating element was just molded with a curve. It was shoddy, poorly made, and I immediately removed the handle from the hot air station and left it disconnected since! I have never used it. Ever. Turns out, one of the shoddy "Chinesium" tips that came with it managed to get put into my good pile, and that's what I've been soldering with for months! These tips were SO BAD, that they lost around 80°C of the heat generated by the heating element, just in transferring it to the tip. I can't even imagine what they're really made of, considering that the lack of laser marked logo and part number (what genuine Hakko tips use to ID the tip type) was the only means I could even tell the two tips apart! A genuine Hakko tip made the soldering iron like new again. I can't stress enough how great Hakko soldering stations are! 14 years, and it's still working flawlessly! It feels like it's still new! Just don't cheap out on knock off tips... They REALLY DO make a difference! Those trash tips that came with my hot air station's auxiliary soldring iron... Scrap is all they're good for! Yikes! Still can't believe I let one of those pics of garbage get stashed with my good Hakko tips... I feel dirty! Btw... I find wetting a brand new soldering iron sponge to be quite satisfying to watch, so click below if you've had a bad day (or even just a meh day) and want to see something mildly satisfying.

There's your answer. By not powering down all the time, you limited the extent of the cool portion of the thermal expansion and contraction cycle. At best you went from idle temps to 100% CPU temps, so it was less of a range. This reduced the thermal expansion stresses, prolonging your machine. My own machine would go for months powered on, only shutting down for maintenance, crashes, or power outages. I bet I restarted only four times in the first year and half. Most crashes were recoverable with Activity Monitor or sometimes some creative fiddling with the terminal, so as long as the Kernel hadn't crashed. This is one reason I never shut down... Longevity. By running my computer at a consistently stay able temperature, it'll inevitably last longer than if I turned it on and off all the time. Running Folding@Home keeps my CPU maxed out, so it even stays at a consistent temp, and my cooler is two flipping radiators extending off my CPU, so it stays at a comfortable temp all year round, as I said, usually centered on 59-63°C! New doesn't always mean great though... My motherboard, expensive as it was, was a terrible product. I called Gigabyte out on my Amazon review, and told them their power regulation was trash, and that their "PowIR" digital regulators were problematic at best. I had issues with power supply compatibility. No joke... The board worked fine on smaller single rail supplies, and VERY well regulated dual rail power supplies, but on any dual rail supply where the rail loading wasn't balanced to a high enough degree of precision, the mobo would trip a power fault condition and shut down without even POSTing! It was the most absurd issue I've ever seen in a computer in all my life... Gigabyte managed to make a motherboard INCOMPATIBLE with a wide variety of IN SPEC high end power supplies, but fine with cheap supplies (single rail). It was such an absurdly convoluted problem that some people still don't belive it, even though here are proof videos on youtube demonstrating how this board is incompatible with perfectly good power supplies! My ragging on them was unfortunately vindicated, as the CPU aux power input regulation actually DID fail on my motherboard! It managed to wait till year 4 to do this, so it was well out of warranty, and the cost of repair was better than having to upgrade Mobo, CPU, and RAM all at once (though I wanted to SOOOOO bad! ) I put up with that bad power supply for a while, but replaced it when a power surge destroyed my old PSU as well as the power supply in my TiVo. My shows were coming on, so I rushed rebuilding the TiVo power supply in a mere 45 minutes! I got it up and running, then did a proper rebuild with ideal parts once I'd ordered the stuff to actually do it properly. Fortunately, I HAD a power supply on hand and used it. It works far better now. https://www.tonymacx86.com is probably the best resource I've found for building a Hackintosh, if you wanna dive in.

You NEED to look up Louis Rossmann and you need to ask this "guy in San Diego" exactly what he plans to do to your hardware. The second you said you would "reflow" the GPU in an oven, I knew you'd fallen for that idiotic fake "repair" garbage that's permeated youtube and shoddy repair shops for over a decade now. This is definitely a thing I'll happily complain about, to spread the word and help people avoid unnecessary costs for fake repairs! It's an illusion... It's fake... It doesn't work... You can sometimes temporarily get a machine working, but re-failure is inevitable. The reason that these failures happen in the first place is due to thermal expansion related stresses. Unfortunately, the reason so many Macs end up with these failures, is Apple makes these dumb machines to run 80-90°C... You turn it on, you turn it off, you turn it on, you turn it off... One day, you turn it on and it never turns on, or it glitches. It's because Apple's horrible thermal regulation results in massive thermal expansion and contraction that actually causes long term harm. It's like bending a paperclip back and forth... Even doing it a little, day after day... Now make that paperclip a tiny metal film (the metal pad of the 1st level interconnection) on a silicon chip (the "die") or a metal trace on a chip interposer (the packaging substrate). These small metal pads (this is what Louis is referring to when he says "bumps"), with a ball of solder bonded to it... That's the weak point! It's not the solder that generally cracks... The chip is what's failing! Solid lump of metal vs thin metal film bonded to a silicon wafer as fragile as glass... Guess which is cracking first! It's mortifying that Apple thinks 80-90°C are even remotely acceptable temps! You have to understand that as someone who has worked in electronics for years, if I built a circuit that had a semiconductor reach 90°C, my first instinct is "Something went wrong". I consider 90°C to be a sign of damage or fault. Not normal operating temperature, like Apple does! As for the "repair", your conventional oven barely even reaches the necessary temperature to melt most alloys of lead-free solder without going nearly to full on broil, and many repair guides screw that up anyway, with temps that will NEVER melt any solder. EVER!!! Just... Seriously... A low melting point lead free solder doesn't even begin to flow till around +217°C, and some alloys don't reflow till 240°C. An oven at 400°F is only at 204°C. What you are doing is causing thermal expansion that can put enough mechanical expansion forces on the pads the solder balls bond to to reestablish a temporary contact. It. Will. Not. Last. It's a technique that might be useful to make a device run long enough to copy data off of it. It's not a technique that is even remotely reliable for long term operation. You say you want a silent computer.. Well then, build it! Throw on a nice high end Coolermaster to even better, a Noctua cooler with some ultra quiet low RPM fans, and an SSD. It'll be super silent AND not run at 90°C! *EDIT* === For an example, I run a Quad i7 3770K. Stock speed is 3.5 GHz, and Stock Turbo is 3.9GHZ. Mine is overclocked. I run 3.9GHz at normal speeds, and 4.1 in Turbo. I have a Noctua NH-D14 cooler with a pair of Noctua fans (one 140mm, and the other 120mm). I run Folding@Home 24/7, unless I am doing video encoding. It means my CPU is at 90-100% usage 24/7. In summer, my CPU temps are 65°C, and in winter, they can be in the low to mid 50s. Average temps, when I regulate room temps constantly is 60-63°C... That's at 100% CPU usage. My system IS NOISY... But not cause of the fans... It's noisy cause I have 8 hard drives spinning, +28TB of spinning platter storage is NOISY. If I could have 28TB of SSDs, I'd be a happy, happy nerd... But I'd be in debt to my eyeballs... So hard drives it is. For you, low noise Noctua fans and an SSD would mean silence. You'd likely need to put your ear on the machine to hear it. === *END EDIT* I run Mac OS, as I prefer it for everyday computer use, but I haven't bought Apple hardware since 2008, and I've long since given up on their shoddy, awful products! I BUILT my own Mac from PC parts, and it's still a real beast, despite being 5 years old! I want to upgrade soon, and when I do, It'll be another Hackintosh. If Apple goes to proprietary CPUs, like is often rumored, then I will finally give up on the Mac as my platform of choice, and switch to a linux platform as my primary. I will be sad that day... It'll be the day Apple truly dies to me. They haven't made a good computer since 2010, when they created the 2010 Mac Pro. Nothing since then, and many things before then were abominable, thermal monstrosities. Anyway, here's Linus Tech Tips video on the proper repair technique. I'm not gonna link Louis's original videos here on the forum... Cause the man has an incredible mouth on him, and I don't wanna link something that might be considered NSFW for strong language. If you wanna see the original videos, search for the following titles: "Reballing flip chip GPUs is B******T - the truth about dead laptop GPUs & repairing them." "Reflowing dead flip chip GPUs is STILL BS!(yes, regardless of what YouTube tells you)" "Followup to (Reflowing dead flip chip GPUs is STILL BS!(yes, regardless of what YouTube tells you))" If you don't mind strong language, I HIGHLY recommend watching all three, and then follow up with the Linus video.

Wait... It's been THAT LONG!?!? No WONDER my best friend is getting fed up with my "I haven't gotten around to watching it yet" replies... Hmm... I'm also pretty sure I figured out the reasoning behind my employer absolutely refusing to bring in a new worker for my department, despite both my coworker and I putting in 10-20 hours of OT a WEEK... (No wonder I don't find time for TV). The soil lab is about to start winding down. We'll get a "helper" or two for a few months, then lose them when spring comes... Then it'll be back to begging for a third, and not getting one... Till summer. Then we'll get an intern or two... Till school starts again... I see what they're doing. Yeah... Joy.

Being hungry is most certainly relevant, when this is the reference! Better to be the dog in this particular scenario!

Oh... So that's an actual literal description of a thing that exists... Huh... I learned something new and mostly useless, but mildly amusing today! I still feel like "countryballs" should be the name of some dish served at a restaurant that also has an "If you can eat the whole thing, it's free" deal...

I'm gonna assume this is some manner of forum word exchange censorship or one amazing auto-derp... Even trying to guess it, I still have no idea what you're talking about? Circle tool to do what? Worse... I feel like "countryballs" should be the name of something served on a plate in Texas or Wyoming... And not knowing (but guessing) what word was originally there, well... I don't like that thought...

Backups.... Backuuuuups..... BAAAAACKUPS.... I've gotten 32GB Thumb drives for $5 before. They were name brand. I feel bad for you. Loosing data sucks, but it's one type of loss that's easily preventable. If you learn anything from this... Buy a thumb drive. Copy stuff you want to keep to it. Buy another and keep it somewhere different than the first and have two copies, incase you loose one of them. When I was young, you would occasionally hear of people having a house fire or some form of natural disaster and losing all their family photos and feeling devastated... There's no excuse to lose data that can be copied perfectly and without any significant cost or loss of quality. Back then, it cost a good bit of money to have duplicate photos made. Now you can dump your stuff onto a free cloud service, an imgur account, flickr, or whatever it is you want to use... copy the stuff to some cheap thumb drives! Don't rely on a single way to store your data. I hear MORE OFTEN of people losing all their photos these days, than back when people legitimately had NO backup copy at all of a physical medium that was not easy to duplicate! In a world where it's a few clicks to copy all of it and create a backup, to send copies to friends or family, to push files online, to duplicate files to your heart's content, there is no need for this kind of data loss! Again, I feel bad for you, but I do hope you use this as a lesson to keep backups of your files. It doesn't save what you already lost, but hopefully, you don't lose what you save in the future!

It's been a decade since I went through that. My family's cat was named Precious, and she was a wonderful family member. She even saved my mother's life (My mother had an incident that required immediate medical attention, and the cat came to get me, and SHE WOULD NOT BACK DOWN TILL I FOLLOWED HER... Our cat truly saved my mother!) I miss her dearly. She was a wonderful cat... Strangely enough... She is quite literally riding with me whenever I go anywhere in my car... I can explain... When she passed away, I provided a lovely box for her and we buried her at my mother's house... Sadly, my mother had to move, so I took on the rather... morbid duty of digging up her box and cremating what remained, so that she could be transported. My mother couldn't stand the though of leaving her Precious girl behind (and I agreed... She had always been family and we were not going to simply abandon her grave). Anyway, My mother had found a nice urn, but my cremation was not as efficient as a proper crematorium would have been. Her bones remained mostly intact, and there was a great deal of wood charcoals remaining... I had the rather somber task of picking out all the rather numerous wood charcoals from the bones and fine ash, to reduce the remains to a volume that would fit inside the urn. (Alas, poor Precious! I knew her... I seem to get all these these morbid jobs... ) Well, the problem is, during the aftermath of the 2009 economic "Ptthht", I too was forced to move. Amazingly enough, in all the jumble of moving two people's houses worth of junk... I ended up giving my mother the remaining unsorted ashes and wood charcoals, and I still had Precious' bones! So... Here I am, reminded of how painful losing a loved pet is. I know what you're going through. It hurts. When you grow up with an animal, they become more than a pet. They're family, and It. Hurts. Now I have to make one more drive to take Precious home... I don't know when I'll get out of work at any reasonable time, so I've simply kept her bones in my car, riding next to me. Whenever I next stop by my mothers place, there they'll stay. My complaint... Reading of your loss and typing about my family's loss is causing me to get all emotional, and I'm already blowing (pun intended) through these tissues cause of this blasted cold! (Oh yeah, I got a cold... grumble grumble...)

Wait... You have a derp for a cat!?! (said absolutely no one with any trace of surprise...) Cats are derps. Adorable, sweet, murderfloof derps, and we love them, except the ones who see through their clever plans for dominating our kind. I remember one winter when it got to -40° (I don't need to tell you if it's C or F, cause at that low a temp, the scales cross). Governor of the state issued an order closing schools due to the low temperatures. I'd leave super early, because back then I had to bike ten blocks to the local elementary school so I could get a ride on a bus that would take me to the high school two towns over. I left before the order went out over the radio, so I biked 10 blocks to school, in -40°(C or F) temps... I waited and waited... Assuming the bus was just running late. It was just cold... No new snow. This was before cell phones were common, but once I realized the elementary school was still locked up (with no signs of teachers being present), I decided they must have called school off anyway, so I biked the ten blocks back home... in -40° temps (C or F, take your pick!). Unfortunately, the governor was a derp (just like all cats), and took his sweet time to make the announcement. My siblings had all left, and so they biked 10 blocks to the school, in -40° (C or F) weather... On the street on the OPPOSITE side of the block as I had been returning. Needless to say, they missed me. I got back, and was told they'd just left... I tried to catch up (in that -40° cold), but made it all the way back to the school, before finding them and telling them, school got canceled... We all returned... In -40° (C or F) temps. I biked 40 blocks in -40° temps... You know who didn't care whether that was measured in Celsius or Fahrenheit back then... THIS guy... Cause it was COLD!!! I was reminded of this because it snowed today. And I hate snow... I could have gone all day not even knowing it had snowed... I was gonna laze around on my day off. Buddy calls me (wakes me), says we should go grab breakfast at this decent restaurant in town. Good thing they serve all day breakfast, cause I was sleeping in... I was tired after a 55 hour work week, and it was 1 PM when I got woke. First, I had to be reminded that some derp (not a cat) took my parking spot, so I had to walk to the other side of the parking lot where the visitor parking is to get to my car. Thanks not a cat... When we got there, I admit, I was pretty hungry, so I ordered an appetizer along with my breakfast. I lamented the fact that I had just spent $3 on a hot chocolate that was served in a mug that was 2/3 the size of the smallest glass in my house... Thanks... I mean, it was tasty, for the few minutes it remained in the glass and not in me. Did not last long once it cooled to a comfortable temperature. My breakfast was great, though one bit of egg was rather undercooked... I'm fine with a runny yolk... Just not a slimy white. Eww... I also couldn't help that they never even bothered to bring my appetizer. That's alright. I got full after all, and just said nothing. Food staff have a hectic enough job as it is. While I didn't complain, I did decide that since my buddy *tipped well, I was gonna play the role of Mister Pink this time around. It wasn't particularly nice... But my buddy does tip well, so I left that task entirely to him... *For those outside of the US... Tipping is pretty common in restaurants with waitstaff. Rather than pay an actual fair and decent wage to their workers, most US restaurants pay waitstaff a pathetic wage, and expect the staff to make the difference in tips. I guess they figure it encourages them to provide the best service to customers... It's... it's dumb, but it's how it is in the US. I know many places elsewhere would look down on tipping.

No, no... Clearly he is the LORDferret... He orders the subordinate ferret to type for him... As he is that ferret's lord. Was this not clear?

You need one of these to print out "ROCKET" to stick over "RACING".

You're preaching to the choir ... I'm a huge Rossmann fan. I don't disagree at all, but that video doesn't go back far enough! Apple has been overpriced, and making mistakes since the INCEPTION of the Macintosh... Since the Apple III. Understand that Jobs STARTED the whole closed concept at Apple with the original Macintosh. Apple would have been far better served by building on the IIgs line vs the Macintosh line, if you ask me. It was a superior machine in all but the CPU... Something that was intentionally throttled, per Jobs, so as to not have a machine powerful enough to self compete against the new Macintosh. I can't tell you how many BAD designs got put out... The LC/Performa 520 and 550 were awful machines, and the Macintosh LC series was full of crippled models, just to artificially create low end models (same parts as the high end models), but justify charging extra for the "high end" version... Literally the same hardware, minus crippling (24 bit busses vs 32 bit busses were a good example of intentional crippling). The PowerPC 5200, and the PowerBook 1400 truly were sins. Creating them was almost certainly morally wrong... Those abominations were created by building machines around limited busses, with the 5200 being a spectacularly horrid example. It MULTIPLEXES a 32 bit CPU over a 16 bit bus. Every other clock cycle accesses different peripherals. There are major issues that cause the use of one peripheral to interfere with another on the opposing clock cycle. At 75 MHz, you might as well have been running a machine that clocked in at only 37.5 MHz... That was on par with hardware released years prior! Given that this was one of the early PowerPC Macs, and they were still doing 68k CPU emulation for backwards compatibility with older 68K Mac apps... The performance on some software was worse than it would be on the older CPUs from machines years older! Worse, parts of the OS itself were still written in 68K code, so parts of the OS were under emulation, running on a crippled machine! My high school made the mistake of filling an entire computer lab with those abominations... The 5300-5500 models corrected those sins and redeemed itself. I still have a 5500 around somewhere. Apple made interesting hardware, and nice software. Sadly they released far too many duds right along with the rare gems, and they overcharged for ALL of it. When Jobs returned to Apple, he did guide them in the right direction. Sadly, that direction soon heavily favored iPods and later iPhones, and the Mac fell to second string as a result. The faltering of IBM's PowerPC CPU to scale to higher clock speeds became a massive hurdle for Apple to overcome, and forced the switch to Intel CPUs. Jobs strongly seemed to favor a simple product offering... At it's core, pro and consumer offerings for desktops and laptops. Consumer offerings favored closed systems, with basic ports and all in one designs, while pro offerings offered more ports, and offered great expandability in the desktop lineup. This was a good thing... Sadly, Apple was already anti-upgrade back then, and really did go out of the way to try to keep the CPU locked to what you paid them for. Sure, you could add RAM and hard drives, and on the pro models, expansion cards, but that was it. Changing a CPU was HARD, compared to standard PCs, and some had the clock speeds locked in the motherboard, not the CPU. Fortunately the last Jobs generation of Mac Pro was more open, even with CPUs, but still not easy to upgrade. It took Tim Cook and Apple only two years, once Jobs had died, to transform the incredibly easy to expand 2010 Mac Pro and turn it into that real turd of a 2013 Mac trash can. Apple has shifted away from pushing performance, to pushing thinness and A E S T H E T I C S. Of course Jobs liked thin too, but it's gotten to the point now where pocketing your stupid phone and sitting is a risk you should avoid, and where laptops can NEVER run their peak theoretical processing capacity, because Apple thinks throttling your CPU so you don't release the magic smoke, and then maintaining a steady 90°C is an acceptable operating temperature for something you set near... Err... Well near important things... In your lap. Appul... You a derp!

Mac OS has iWretched™ full screen functionality... If I want to take a window full screen, ALL my other monitors blank out. It's stupid! I can't full screen a YouTube video in Apple's browser and work on something else at the same time. There's an option to treat each monitor as a separate desktop, but then I get three separate and identical menubars on the top of each screen, separate but identical docks at the bottom of each screen, and things get glitchy if I want to span one window across two or more screens... It's iAwful™ Queue Chrome... I used Chrome, because it used it's own full screen implementation that would simply full screen the window to the ONE screen, without interfering with any other screen... Guess who just abandoned their own fullscreen implementation and switched to Apple's, for a "more consistent user experience"... There are things I want to say to Both Apple and Google right now that are simply put, not appropriate for this forum... So I'll also complain that I must stay silent and not vehemently, verbally vent vile, vitriolic verbiage... Those dumb derps... The best I can do without butchering my "screen spaces", as Appul™ likes to call it is to tweak a few flags that makes fullscreen fill out the Chrome WINDOW... not the screen. For clarification... I don't actually give Apple any of my money anymore. I've mentioned in the past that my build is a Hackintosh. Apple has not made a desirable Mac since the 2010 Mac Pro. Expandable, Accessible... Actual PCIe slots... Replaceable drives... Apple's gone down hill since they lost Jobs. Don't get me wrong... Jobs was never a saint either, but he understood what the customers actually wanted. Cook just runs Apple like it's a fashion show. Get this season's latest bling-bling! Toss that old garbage from last season! No, that's premium Apple glass, no you can't replace that! That would be "counterfeiting"! Eat an iPhone XS, Crook... I read about their latest stunt(s). A man in Europe sent original iPhone LCDs to China to have new glass installed on them (the LCD was fine, the top glass was cracked. There's a way to remove it, and reinstall new glass onto it). Apple got customs to seize the refurbished LCDs under the lie that they were "counterfeit", since they had the Apple logo on them... OF COURSE they did!!! Apple had them manufactured originally, cause they WERE GENUINE Apple parts... With new glass. Apple can't just arbitrarily redefine what refurbish means (they want refurbish to only mean if THEY refurbished it, not if you refurbished it) Apple has also implemented the capacity to disable their newest Macbook Pros from being able to boot if third party repairs or modifications are detected (Say, an LCD is replaced, or the SSD, or the trackpad)... They electronically serial number all the major replaceable components, and now, if the machine tries to boot, it's possible to check if the parts are the ones it was manufactured with, and flag the boot process. It's not known if this is an ability they are prepared to activate with a software update, or something they already implemented... But it's a capability they have now. It's downright anti-consumer. It creates a monopoly by locking out all repair service providers (and even self repair) and ties you to Apple service or no service, and most of the time, Apple just charges so insanely much for repairs that they just segue into the new replacement sales pitch... On top of that, there's the fact that Apple has utterly abandoned the power user. Back in the day, Jobs used to brag about performance. Near the end, things went bad though... The Power PC chips were great early on, but they simply were not a scalable design. They hit hard clock speed limits. My 400 MHz G3 back in 2000 could run circles around a Pentium II clocked similarly, and could about match my P-III at 733 MHz. The irony, is that G3 didn't even have a CPU fan. It just had a small aluminum heatsink that caught airflow from the case fan. That's all it needed to perform! The G4 had a few areas where it excelled, but they had a hard time bumping the clock speeds, and it fell behind the competition. They had to slap massive coolers with direct fans and heat pipes to get their peak speeds. The G5... To achieve it's clock speeds, they ended up switching to liquid cooling! Yikes! They switched to Intel chips, cause they saw Intel would quickly and FAR surpass the PowerPC architecture... Now, where was I going with this? There are strong rumors Apple wants to switch to ARM processors... The same thing they use in the iPhones and iPads... But they want to build their entire desktop lineup with that. A PHONE processor. I get that phones and tablets are incredibly powerful today... But they still don't hold a candle to a proper desktop CPU from Intel or AMD. There's no comparison. Apple already abandoned power users by making their entire lineup put form over function, a sin they've been committing for nearly a decade. Who needs performance when you can make a computer thin! Who cares if it thermal throttles! It's PRETTY, so pretty! Now the rumor is they will switch to phone processors... I don't know if that's gonna happen or not, but it does spell the end to one thing... Hackintoshes. Apple's already switched core CPU architectures twice already... First from Motorola's 68000 series to IBM's PowerPC, and then to Intel's x86 and x64 series. Both times they managed a nearly seamless transition... Which is actually pretty impressive. They could do it again. If Apple DOES abandon Intel architecture... It'll be the end of the Hackintosh. No more cheap PC hardware Macs. To run a Mac, I'd have to actually give Apple money, and with their current anti-consumer, anti-repair attitude... I'll NEVER give them so much as a penny. I'd as soon just build a Linux box as my primary rig... Mind you even that's becoming a can of worms I'm not even gonna touch... Ugh... It just makes me sad though... Apple fell so far from the original tree... The Apple II was a beautiful platform. Open, expandable, accessible... It had that nice cover that popped off so easily! It was a machine built by a nerd, to satisfy the wants of other nerds... My, how far they've fallen... Now it's a fashion statement for hipsters who don't care about how awful a company Apple is being, and just want to show off the expensive toy. It's the all in one you buy for grandma to facetime with the grandkids, cause that's the most CPU intensive thing that machine will ever, EVER do. First and foremost... Apple is the iPhone... Nothing else matters. Everything is tangental to the iPhone's success. Everything Apple does these days is centered on the iPhone. They're trying to make the mac more like an iPhone... But the original core Mac users want a MAC, not a bigger iPhone that isn't actually a phone. I liked Mac OS's interface... Once... But it strays farther and farther from what it once was. It adopts more and more from the iPhone, and I get more and more frustrated by it... Eventually, I'll just end up abandoning it. I just DON'T wanna use Windows... I can't stand Windows... It's getting to be that there are NO good options it seems...

My car died the other day. Engine would turn, but made no indication of spark... My old car did the same thing... I'd held onto it for parts... till three months ago. Sold it to someone for real cheap so they could turn it around and use it as a trade in. Exact same problem. Exact same part... Brand new on my old car... I sold it. $234 repair... Again...

Some types of moths will eat cloth, hence why mothballs exist. If the speaker has a cloth cover, they might be attracted to it... No idea, I guess. Maybe they dig your jams.

Sadly, no. TI also forced planned obsoleteness on all the old gen calculators by simply choosing not to support them with the USB TI Graph-Link cable. It was different when I had a working Power Mac G3 with both USB and a serial port... But these days, that old software's not been opened in at least a decade and a half. I DID make a program, back in high school, to solve polynomials, and another to solve the quadratic formula. because i showed the teacher how it works, and because i wrote the program to show the work (and not use the built in solve tools, but to break it down manually), she allowed me to use it for tests, since she felt it was a clear sign I understood how to do the work.

What drove me crazy were the MINOR but software breaking variations between different versions of the calculators, and the lack of higher end graphics commands on the then higher end (at the time... late 1990s) models like the TI-85 and TI-86. Why have higher resolution screens, but then reduce the number of available graphics commands! Why have one model REQUIRE every command to close the parentheses, and another not... Usually... Consistency, TI! They charge enough for these bits of antiquated 1980s era tech that there's no justification for that level of NON-interoperability... Especially when they hold the cartel for educational institution approved hardware... Trust me... I ran into this a lot. I used to overclock and install backlights and memory expansions into the old TI calculators for people, over the internet, back in 1997-2000, and I was the premier TI-BASIC nerd of my high school during the four years prior.

I've NEVER had issues with the time I came in at work. They were always incredibly flexible... Till I recently put my foot down and said I needed to leave earlier to get to my other job. I've mentioned many times that I work part time, and they've left my department understaffed for a whole year, and that I'm stuck doing full time hours (or more) on most days... I told them the hours were interfering with my other job, which pays not quite, but very nearly double what they pay (and I told them that), and that I was not going to prioritize the lower paying job, and would be leaving earlier, in accordance with the part time nature of my position, so that I would be able to perform my other job without falling behind in either production or sleep (examples such as an 18 hour day or a 74 hour week are NOT reasonable). So what do they do? A week later, they tell me out of the blue that they're shifting my shift an hour earlier, and now they're suddenly not nearly as flexible with my start time as they had been before... No now instead of my "part time" hours being 8+... Now my leaving 2 hours earlier has left me still stuck working a typically 7 hour shift, but now I'm losing an hour of sleep in the morning... I've been dead on my feet... With the other job, I tend to be stuck working late... Sometimes into the am hours... So now with the changed mornings... Yeah... I'm just nothing but fatigue all day. The good news, is it sounds like we may have finally gotten that desperately needed third crew member... Or rather, they'll hire "sometime in the fall" Quite frankly, if they just replaced me, I wouldn't even care, but hopefully I can cut back down to REASONABLE part time hours, and make the real MEAT of my income at the other job. I WILL be demanding of them that I be returned to my former shifts, from back when I first started... I'll take a cut to my pay checks, but so be it. I want as FEW hours at the lab, and as MANY hours at the machine shop as I can make happen. I'm sick of that place! I'm just so fed up though... They KNOW they have me by the drogue chutes... Their health insurance is a joke. By being part time, I DON'T qualify for the employer insurance, and thus qualify to buy into the state provided health insurance... and the price is actually DECENT... two digit monthly premium, very low copays for visits... I can handle it... my rent is also income adjusted... They know if I were to just quit, I'd probably lose all my qualifications (voluntary reduction of hours). They know they can push me to do whatever they want, and I have to just shut up and take it, to stay on the good health plan... I can't tell if they're doing it knowingly (that's evil boss level right there), or if they're that utterly oblivious to how badly it's burning me out, and killing my time to sleep. I've always been a 'loyal employee"... The type to stick with a company for years. I value a stable, reliable job over hunting for the next raise or whatever. In 2 years, they shifted me from fiercely loyal and happy to work there, to actively hating being there, and on a few instances, leaving work, still in my work clothes, and going to direct competitors and asking for applications... I've done that twice... Didn't get in, but oh well. It still FELT good...

I've been buying Dakota, Minnesota, & Eastern model trains lately, so I can build up my collection for the day when I can actually build a model railroad (I'd rather buy them now, when they're barely affordable, rather than later, when they're impossibly unaffordable)... I keep buying them whenever I see one pop up... And I just realized out of all the different ones I've been buying, one person keeps putting ONE up on ebay, letting it get bid up, then waiting a week and repeating. I have no idea how many they have. I didn't even realize I had bought from the same person... and paid shipping on two separate occasions. On the bright side, I can always ask how many they got, and see if they'll put up a buy it now lot of 'em all, for the high bid price, per unit... Assuming they'll even go for it. Before I die, I'd like to be able to pull a unit train with at least 40-80 grain hoppers. That's several hundred, to over a thousand dollars, long run... like I said, I'd like to buy these now, while it's still possible to even afford them.

Something, something, whines about being one post off from being the one to roll this thread's page count over to 100 pages...

Stupid apartment rules... I have nearly three meters of windows... but I have to move my printer from in from of it cause "it's in front of the windows. It could be an obstruction hazard during a fire emergency"... An emergency where I would step half a meter to the left or to the right and bust out the other 7.5 meters worth of window to escape... Assuming my path to the exit, 8 or 9 meters away is also blocked, perchance... Rules for the sake of rules can be pretty dumb sometimes... God, I need to get back into a proper house, and not this crummy apartment. Oh yeah, and I worked 18 hours yesterday... 12:30 AM to 6:30 PM (18:30).

Oh God, I miss those days, when all I had to deal with was a couple hours of homework. What I'd give to have that back. It's 3:14 in the morning, and I've been working since midnight. I plan to keep working for another hour or two, take a quick nap, then go to my main job at 8 in the morning. I'll likely be there till 3-5 (15:00 to 17:00) in the afternoon, and then after a quick nap, I'll be back to this soldering for my second job. I still need to get 10 hours of work soldering, before the end of tomorrow. This is after I had a discussion with my boss at my main job and informed them that the number of hours they're having me do is interfering with my secondary (but much higher paying job), and I explained to them that we now have a new "blanket order" (that's where a customer orders a large quantity of an item, but they say they want the purchase spread out over time... So we had an order of 320 circuit boards, spread out so I build 40 per month, over the next 8 months). That triples my workload at the second job. Before adjusting my hours, I actually worked 74 hours in a single week, only about... I think it was about 2 weeks ago. The next week I "only" worked 55 hours in one week. I haven't had "free time" to work on my KSP Instrument panel for an entire year... Like honestly... Haven't even touched the build! it's driving me crazy! I'd do almost anything to have the free time that i had back in school... Even college wasn't this busy! I know you probably are sick of hearing this, but enjoy being a kid while you can. Enjoy the ease and laziness of school days while you can.

I really need another 8 TB hard drive... or three... I really need to consolidate my cage of old 2 TB drives and retire those old things. You'd think I was an airport runway when that fleet spins up... So for my actual complaints today... I wanted to purchase several N scale covered hopper cars for my collection. There were four DM&E and some other misc stuff I wanted, but the four DM&E ones were what I REALLY wanted... Problem was, the guy wanted $12 to ship the first one... Fine, fine... but $7 for each additional one... For just those four, it'd have been $33 to ship four little bits of painted plastic. I've had twice that quantity shipped for $7 total! The REAL kicker... "Buy it now on each one, and I'll refund you the difference in shipping afterwards... That threw up all kinds of red flags to me! I sent a message saying ebay has a system in place to handle combined shipping on Buy it Now items, that what he was asking for shipping, and the way he was doing it really threw up red flags (scammers do that kind of stuff). I never got a response, and the ebay sales never changed... So I moved on. Now, suddenly, two and a half weeks later and ebay is suggesting more of his stuff to me in the "recommended listings"... I was gonna ignore it, but checked. After over half a month, he's gone an changed everything to how I suggested he do it... It ALL sold out. All the stuff I wanted, now that his shipping wasn't insanely broken and borderline scammy... All sold. Thanks... Glad I could help you sell your stuff with the advice I gave. Could have at least replied back and said, "Hey, I fixed it, buy my junk!" Oh well... I suppose I can always just buy new... Retail is only $7 more than the going used prices... Oh wait... I can't. Apparently, the ONE factory in China making all this N scale model stuff for TWELVE DIFFERENT COMPANIES just up and shut down... No notice, no heirs, and the owner is sadly having health issues... Also TWELVE model "manufacturers" put all their eggs into one basket, and now have no new product being produced, possibly for several months, as they try to find another Chinese company to acquire the tooling and set up a new production line... For TWELVE COMPANIES!!! Literally can't even buy the things new now! Twelve... So another thing... Landlord is doing inspections (that's a complaint in and of itself). Saw they replaced someone's closet or bathroom door. They're real narrow hollow core doors with no panel insets... 24 x 80 inches (~60 xm x 2 m). These, as it turns out, are AMAZING for model railroad building. They are super light, easy to cut into, if you need to, yet are surprisingly rigid. They're cheap too... That size door new is only $30, and a scratch & dent is a measly $20... And here I got one for FREE!!! How is this a complaint? Oddly enough, MY closet door has a hole punched through it in the EXACT same spot (maybe a bed frame's leg punched through while trying to round the bend into the bedroom)? My old landlord patched the hole rather than replace the door or leave it be... My door could have been a second freebie, and not my fault either, but no! Had to be fixed before my time...

In 2003, my father and I decided to hike up camelback mountain outside phoenix, while we were on vacation. It was a fun four hour hike. The summit was less hike and more rock climb. Got a great photo of my Dad up there, him holding up a flag, overlooking the city below. We didn't even bring up the flag! It was already there... Extremely photogenic! LOL Anyway, when we got down to the other side, there was an open sided park shelter. My dad is a farmer. Always has been. He never goes to a gym either... He comes up with ideas... A 5 gallon bucket, a rope, a pulley mounted to the ceiling of the barn, and a shovel handle becomes a set of adjustable weights. Just add more to the bucket for more weight. He spotted a metal pole in the rafters of the structure, and immediately knew what it was for... He goes to do some post hike pull-ups, and some young guys say hello, mention they're the ones who put up the pole, and they all agree to a friendly competition. most of them do between 4 and 7 total... My dad did 21 pull-ups... I was quite solidly proud of the dude... 3x the best they could offer! While he's starting to get on in years now (he just started collecting social security this year), my dad's very lean, and has a lifetime of muscle toning from his life of physical labor and casual self training. There was no such thing as a weak closet hangar pole in the house I grew up in... If it couldn't handle his weight, it got beefed up. He used to lift himself with the door frames... To this day, it blows me away he could do that. He once climbed my elementary school building by just gripping the corner of the building... That one was pretty crazy... I think it was cause of someone losing a ball to the roof while he was there to pick us up or something... That's just how my dad is! Of course, it's been 15 years since then. He's got more aches and pains, less hair (he once had an afro!), and I suspect no one is more aware of his building limits than him. I doubt he could still do 21 today... I bet he'd only make it to the low teens! He's actually still in pretty great shape, but I always worry how things will be in another decade...