totm nov 2023 Thread to discuss negative things in a very general way, just see where it goes y'know?

[richfiles]

11 hours ago, Selective Genius said:

A few Langur Monkeys invaded my kitchen garden. They destroyed the eggplants, ate the Rose flowers (8 of them) and messed up all the remaining plants. They broke the pots, rampaged the compost bin and injured my favorite stray tomcat...

I'm sorry to hear about the mess and injuries they caused. Sounds like Ghoru is a real tough kitty! Hopefully the little guy will be fine, and put a little fear into those dumb monkeys. Hopefully they'll stay out of your garden in the future.

Are there any deterrents that will drive them off (like played sounds of larger species, or some manner of smell or taste deterrent that can be applied around the property, that won't harm or deter the cat? Good luck!

[Selective Genius]

13 hours ago, richfiles said:

Are there any deterrents that will drive them off (like played sounds of larger species, or some manner of smell or taste deterrent that can be applied around the property, that won't harm or deter the cat?

They are not a regular threat. They stay put for most part of the year, except the winter when they move to more populated parts of the city for easier access to food.

And yup, Ghoru is one heck of a fighter. If you stroke his back and tummy, you can feel scabs and scars under the soft fur. That guy is always fighting other cats who challenge his territory. I found him as a kitten at the bus stop and took him in. He was very delicate and docile initially but he was ousted by another tomcat named 'Maon'. Pure guy was so humiliated he left us for 4 months. 4 months later, he returned a changed cat and challenged Maon almost immediately. They duked it out for 3 days and ultimately Ghoru won, and has been the king of the hill ever since. There were several other challengers, the most notable being Ghoru's mate's brother. Ghoru messed that cat's leg. The other cat healed, but left our compound humiliated.

[Guest]

14 hours ago, Selective Genius said:

They are not a regular threat. They stay put for most part of the year, except the winter when they move to more populated parts of the city for easier access to food.

And yup, Ghoru is one heck of a fighter. If you stroke his back and tummy, you can feel scabs and scars under the soft fur. That guy is always fighting other cats who challenge his territory. I found him as a kitten at the bus stop and took him in. He was very delicate and docile initially but he was ousted by another tomcat named 'Maon'. Pure guy was so humiliated he left us for 4 months. 4 months later, he returned a changed cat and challenged Maon almost immediately. They duked it out for 3 days and ultimately Ghoru won, and has been the king of the hill ever since. There were several other challengers, the most notable being Ghoru's mate's brother. Ghoru messed that cat's leg. The other cat healed, but left our compound humiliated.

I'm guessing he took the "tomcat" part way too seriously, since he's not a fighter jet he decided to roleplay as a fighter cat

 

next thing you know he brings a boat home, starts jumping from it and walking inverted

Edited January 1, 2020 by Guest

[StrandedonEarth]

On 12/31/2019 at 11:09 PM, Selective Genius said:

They are not a regular threat. They stay put for most part of the year, except the winter when they move to more populated parts of the city for easier access to food.

And yup, Ghoru is one heck of a fighter. If you stroke his back and tummy, you can feel scabs and scars under the soft fur. That guy is always fighting other cats who challenge his territory. I found him as a kitten at the bus stop and took him in. He was very delicate and docile initially but he was ousted by another tomcat named 'Maon'. Pure guy was so humiliated he left us for 4 months. 4 months later, he returned a changed cat and challenged Maon almost immediately. They duked it out for 3 days and ultimately Ghoru won, and has been the king of the hill ever since. There were several other challengers, the most notable being Ghoru's mate's brother. Ghoru messed that cat's leg. The other cat healed, but left our compound humiliated.

It sounds like there’s a feline sensei in the jungle, training cats to be tigers...

Edited January 2, 2020 by StrandedonEarth

[έķ νίĻĻάίή]

20 hours ago, StrandedonEarth said:

It sounds like there’s a feline sensei in the jungle, training cats to be tigers...

Tigers are big cats (supposedly).

Training cats to be tigers.

Tigers are already big cats.

Mind blown

 

Also, the Chinese school students have to go to school on Christmas. Why

Edited January 3, 2020 by έķ νίĻĻάίή

[kerbiloid]

5 hours ago, έķ νίĻĻάίή said:

Also, the Chinese school students have to go to school on Christmas. Why

To study without the others' noise.
It's a privilege.

Edited January 3, 2020 by kerbiloid

[έķ νίĻĻάίή]

4 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

To study without the others' noise.
It's a privilege.

You sure about that? Go to school as in they don’t even have a winter holiday. The school term continues through our holiday times, as they have their holiday through Chinese New Year. They have normal school on Christmas as they don’t even celebrate it.

Spoiler

I did some research. And I live next to a school.

 

[qzgy]

Winter break is ending and I am flying back out of NJ to the Netherlands to continue studying tomorrow.

I am not particularly enthusiastic about leaving actual home for another 6 months, especially after a bit of winter break. It is what it is though I suppose....

[Delay]

Today's complaint: "Our" cat has a tapeworm. Me being me I am massively concerned right now since humans are also mammals.

I say "our" because it just lives in our house for most of the time, but we don't officially own it.

[YNM]

On 1/3/2020 at 10:00 PM, έķ νίĻĻάίή said:

Also, the Chinese school students have to go to school on Christmas. Why

Eh, better than having exams on Christmas Day... or working full-time on said day.

[kerbiloid]

8 hours ago, Delay said:

I say "our" because it just lives in our house for most of the time, but we don't officially own it.

Associated cat.

[Benjamin Kerman]

I've been trying to figure out a problem in my life for the past 7 months and I've finally come to an answer about it, and it is very much not the one I'd like it to be. It's the beginning of a long, hard road...

[richfiles]

I caught a nasty head cold. Nuf said... sniffle

My real complaint, I was soldering the other day, and was getting a little bit hungry. Decided to grab a bag of chips instead of making something.
I get to near the bottom of the bag, and I see... light... Whaaaat... I look at the side of the bag, straighten out the crinkle, and see a one inch (2.5cm) hole chewed in the side! 
There's never been any trace or evidence of a mouse problem at my place. I suspect the place I got the chips from is where it happened.

I disinfected my mouth and stomach by downing all the remainder of the C₂H₅OH contained in my fridge. YUCK! 

Of course, I developed a nasty cold thanks to a family gathering (full of kids, also referred to as mobile pathogen carriers). Still, it FELT like I was getting sick cause of the... Incident.
I know that the incubation period for a cold tends to be a few days, so I know better, but still... It makes the gears in your head spin...

Edited January 11, 2020 by richfiles

[kerbiloid]

As you haven't seen a dead mouse, at least you can be sure the chips were edible.

Also, you are lucky the mice didn't find the bottle.

Edited January 12, 2020 by kerbiloid

[richfiles]

Bought the chips while I was out getting parts at a big hardware store (think something big, like a Lowes or Home Depot, but another chain).
There's forklifts running in and out the building, doors constantly opening... It's inevitable that rodents find their way into places like that.
They set traps by the doors, but you know one gets through now and then. I drew the short stick and ended up sharing my snack with a mouse. Blegh! 

Edited January 12, 2020 by richfiles

[Delay]

Since Wednesday I've occasionally had short bursts of feeling queasy and having semi-constant stomach aches. It got so bad that I decided to leave school that day to see a doctor. I've taken medication and I already felt much better by Sunday, so I decided to go to school today just like usual.

Nope. I've had a bit of a relapse. Which is why I'm home already (12:52). Today I should have been at school until 4:45!
Aside from feeling terrible I couldn't concentrate that much, I had to bend forwards to keep my nausea in check.

I'm sick for tomorrow as well. Let's hope it gets better quickly.

Edited January 13, 2020 by Delay

[StrandedonEarth]

Day three of commuting in treacherous winter conditions. The highway was either a sheet of ice or in whiteout. I just keep my Yaris rolling-slow and steady past cars in the ditch, a lot of them were people who had passed me earlier. 

Edited January 15, 2020 by StrandedonEarth

[fulgur]

On 1/12/2020 at 8:14 AM, kerbiloid said:

As you haven't seen a dead mouse, at least you can be sure the chips were edible.

There's a dead animal under the floorboards in my school. Windows are open 24/7 and it still stinks.

[kerbiloid]

26 minutes ago, fulgur said:

There's a dead animal under the floorboards in my school. Windows are open 24/7 and it still stinks.

Didn't you read the news?
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/windows/end-of-windows-7-support

It's dead Windows 7 is open and stinks.

[Delay]

10 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Windows 7 is open and stinks.

But less than Win10.

[kerbiloid]

2 minutes ago, Delay said:

But less than Win10.

Win10, dead or alive, smells the same.

[richfiles]

Back when I soldered the Diode ROM sockets onto my "DSKY" style display for my Kerbal Instrument Panel project, I ended up using surface mount resistors, cause that's just what I had on hand at the time. I needed around 100 resistors, and ceramic surface mount "chip" resistors were all I had at that quantity. I knew when i installed them, that the ceramic was fragile, and I was hanging an electronic assembly off the end of them, plugged into a socket.

It was only a matter of time before some broke. Had an entire row break all together. Sorry for the blurry pic, but the entire second row from the edge snapped off. You can see the gap between the white ceramic and the metal socket pins above it. It's a cheap fix. Buying 250 resistors will be enough to fix these, and have plenty enough to do the other LEDs on the other parts of the instrument panel. It's under $4 for all the resistors. It's just annoying that I'll have to waste the time to desolder all the existing resistors, then replace them, one by one, with new resistors. Those have secure, sturdy leads, and should hold up. Desoldering about 100 resistors, and replacing them all, not gonna be fun.

Edited January 16, 2020 by richfiles

[Lisias]

Sooo... Yeah, I kinda masochist, I use a MacMini . A 5.1 MacMini . Hell of a machine, did the job perfectly - until that Spectre stunt from Intel, in which Apple issued some emergency fixes ONE MONTH before the EoL of the product transforming it on a computing brick. Still do most of the professional work, but became kinda draggy on gaming.

Ok. Last November I secured some money for a new second handed rig. Obviously, I gone for a i7 this time, that extra cores will be handy. But boy, how things were expensive around here! Lots of research, and then disaster strikes - a guy offered me a MacMini 6.2 i7 at 70% of the price of a new generic i7 rig on the same category (space is at premium around here). Other than the BlueTooth not working properly (what's a killer for this product, as everybody but me use BT keyboard and mouse on this thing by reasons beyound my compression - what's wrong with cables? This is not a mobile platform!). And since I already have an older rig that can donate the BT thingy if needed, hell - why not? It was the cheapest of the viable options (believe it or not).

Shoved a cheap SSD as boot device, kept the 1T HDD for data, made a mirror of the boot drive on a partition on the HDD (just in case) and this little daemon is fast. Nice rig for working, not too bad for gaming. Except... Apple. Apple happened again. (sigh)

I think I know why Apple is deprecating OpenGL - they broke it. I had two UI freezes on this thing: one by playing KSP and using Facebook on another Space, another freeze playing KSP and using VNC. On the old rig, I already had detected glitches when both KSP and Facebook are running, but it was only an annoyance. Now it's serious, the while Mission Control just freezes. I also detected some problems on switching Spaces when the machine is swapping to disk. Apparently nobody had tested Mission Control when the applications are being swapped to disk. Pathetic.

Well, oukey. No Facebook and no Screen Sharing while playing KSP. I can live with that.

But I can't record videos neither. (sigh)

QuickTime worked perfectly on the older rig, but on the new one I loose frames and sometimes entire multiple seconds of the playing. It's apoplectic.

This is a software problem, not a hardware one. The old rig is running on Sierra, the new one is using Mojave (guess when I will upgrade to Catalina? Probably when Hell freezes out). I don't know from what hole Apple hired their "software engineers", but I will tell you something: I known to what hole these idiots are going to.

 

 

[richfiles]

Yeah, Apple has in the last few versions of their OS, REALLY made some GENUINELY BAD decisions, and allowed some lackluster and mediocre code out the door. I've been using Macs since 1992... I have a Hackintosh right now. I'm not sure how much longer Mac OS will even be worth bothering to make run on anything at all. One thing I'll give Steve Jobs credit for, is he had a knack for having a direction. He kept Apple focused on consumer centric products. Macs under his design either were nicely expandable for pro users, or all in one and simple to set up for the home users. There used to be a focus on computational power, and genuinely useful features. A decade and a half ago, I used to have all the Macs at my house, My G5, a G4 Powerbook, an old iMac, all sharing CPU for video encoding, using xGrid. In 2008 I bought a PS3, but then I lost my job the next year. I was experimenting with an open source implementation of an xGrid node build for Linux, trying to get it to run on the PS3. I'd planned to replace my aging G5 back then, but the job situation was pretty bad back then, and I couldn't afford to blow money, even on a used Mac. Of course, Sony killed OtherOS mode on the PS3. I never forgave them for that...

Ultimately, ever since Steve Jobs died, Apple has been veering further and further away from being a useful computer maker, and more towards just a different smartphone brand that isn't compatible with all the other ones. It's beyond infuriating to have no control over Apple's spiral away from being even a minorly relevant computer platform. I feel like Apple is more concerned with making high tech fashion accessories than actually useful (or durable) devices. They genuinely don't understand the entire market that wants products they refuse to even make. They are more interested in aesthetics than performance or quality, and the software on the PC side is being dumbed down and locked down in ways that long time users of the OS find abhorrent. They take an active stance on rejecting customer wishes over the pettiest of issues. Their feud with Nvidia stands at the forefront, and their T2 chip is edging toward nefarious levels of control over upgrades or repairs... And don't even get me started on Apple's blatantly anti-consumer grade anti-repair policies, or the blatant lies and misinformation they spread to attack third party repairers.

I will ultimately always have a Hackintosh, and maybe someday, even a REAL Mac (I'd love to get a used cheese grater someday), but I have a bad feeling it will forever be a vintage Mac, exclusively restricted to running old Mac OS apps. I don't know how long Mac OS will remain even tenable as a daily driver OS. I HATE the feel of Windows with a passion, but Mac OS is slowly changing into something I don't recognize either. I already refuse to use the Spaces feature, because it drastically breaks certain things when running quad monitors. That "feature", when disabled, now breaks fullscreen support in some apps. I can't full screen Chrome, cause it will blank all my other monitors, and the option to fullscreen in window mode got removed. I wanna pull out my hair at the way they change or remove genuine functionality, and punish you for sticking with an older way to do something, cause you don't like the problems their new way introduces. At what point, do I just give up and say "I'm starting to hate Mac OS as much as I hate Windows... what's the difference, even? At least Windows will actually run games and do a functional full screen"...

I'm not even gonna go into the toxicity of Apple user support forums, besides calling it what it is... A fanboi echo chamber where all problems are your fault, third party repair is a scam, you can't get your data back from your dead iPhone, and if you legit have a problem a forum should be able to solve, you get laughed at for not knowing how to use Google. NOTHING gets answered on an official Apple forum, and no truth is spoken. Only propaganda for the great Appul.

Edited January 17, 2020 by richfiles

[Lisias]

And I was kicked in the balls again. (sigh).

It's something related to the Virtual Memory, for sure. As the memory pressure rises, things start to break - I would guess that the clowns are swapping VRAM memory? On MacMini, the CPU and GPU shares memory, and as the GPU demands grows, more is stealed from CPU, and the kernel needs to remap things on the Global Descriptor Tables.

In a way or another, rogue events on the UI event handler of the Finder hinted me about what were being broken by the stunt, and I found a way to salvage the session and prevent a reboot:

• open Terminal.App (it must be the Terminal.App, not iterm or any other replacement, as chances are that they will crash due the GPU problem - these fancy terminals uses the GPU, and with the GPU playing havoc, they became useless)
• killall KSP
• killall Dock
• killall Finder 

This normalizes the problem for the current user, and prevents the disease to spread to another logged users.

note: This is not on KSP or Unity, it's Apple being Apple and destroying their ecosystem.