Dusty @ChlorideCull@fuzzy.systems

I'm on the board of the union club in our office, and it's always fun to see our aggregated pay stats, because I'm the only one in our systems with the "Other" gender, and some of the excel formulas get confused when N=1

how to ruin the tension of a horror game: give the player a shotgun

how to instantly bring that tension back, twofold: big bad monster does not slow down after getting a hole in their chest from said shotgun, and you're now out of ammo

#Twitch tip: if you want to get rid of the name of your guest while using Guest Star, use this custom CSS

.guest-star-participant__name { display: none; }

just had a terrible idea: I don't have to do this if I install Windows on a USB 2 pendrive, and use the integrated HD Graphics 2500

might do this to see just how bad performance is

just realized that I may need to have a second PSU piggy backed because of the GPU, and because I'm missing the cables needed for an SSD

so, it turns out one of the missing pins was not missing, but rather just incredibly mangled and smashed to the bottom!

before tossing the machine into the recycling I decided to just feel around the missing pins with some tweezers to see if there was a short, lo and behold, there the VCCIO pin was! With incredible luck I managed to put it back to where it belongs

one of the pins is still gone, but it's most certainly connected to the pin right next to it, so that is fine

HOLY SHIT NEVER MIND

i'll be honest - might call it here, I won't get a replacement mobo until after christmas (at which point it's too late) and replacing it with a regular mobo would involve a new PSU as well, and so on, and so on. I don't feel like rushing that before the end of year, especially with my energy being the way it is right now.

now that covid is done kicking my ass for the most part:

the reason it's not working is because there are two pins missing in the CPU socket

fuck LGA argh

i bet it's a cost issue because it would be $0.0001 extra per CPU, because the computer industry loves saving money

another example of that is ATX12VO - where we are being sold that moving the creation of the 3.3 and 5 V lines from the PSU to the motherboard will magically make it more power efficient

news flash, how efficient that voltage conversion circuit is has no relation to where it is, they just want to push this because suddenly everything is 80+ Platinum, because outside prebuilts the entire system as a whole isn't evaluated for efficiency, only the PSU - that "more power efficient" circuit could just be placed in the PSU instead, but the fact is that that increased efficiency is baloney

also, why do CPUs have, like, genuinely 350+ ground pins, and 50+ pins for each power rail, and 150 extra for the main power rail? I know some would be for signal integrity, but couldn't you tie together some of them on the substrate instead at least

like I feel that removing a couple hundred pins would allow you to use more durable pins at least

nice to see that AM5 is adopting the same garbage CPU mounting as Intel has that necessitate switching out the entire mounting mechanism to achieve good heat transfer because pressure is by stock inconsistent and off-kilter

Well, okay, one caveat, each pixel row in the image has to be a multiple of 4 bytes, so you may need to prepend a data length to your "image data" so you can pad it to a multiple of 4

BMP is great because it doesn't have any interspersed data, it's just a header and then raw image data, so you can just generate a header that fits your data, and boom, instant filter circumvention

all known email filters in the universe: hmm a high entropy file that I don't recognize, sorry, this is getting dropped

all known email filters in the universe when faced with the same file, but with a BMP header: *clueless*

one of the things I'm personally the most proud of as a "professional software developer" is that when our team was given a product that was on life support that had roughly 10 active users - a Windows app made for Windows 8 with the help of a contractor from Microsoft - I took personal custody of it inside the team, and proceeded to cut the maintainance burden in more than half by just updating it to be a UWP app, then used that freed time to massively update it under the hood, improving response times, etc.

By sneaking in more work that the product owner wouldn't have accepted whenever there was an item related to it, I made it so it had roughly 50 active users by the time I quit the team, and orgs who had bought it but wasn't using it was looking to on-board

Personally, I think the best feature I made is that I made client errors be exported as an RSA encrypted error report encoded into the color values of a PNG, so users could attach it in our support system - before that errors would be sent to the server which would spit them out in a giant log file, so the time to just get started on looking at an error report from a customer went from 1-2 business days to 5 minutes

fun fact: you can use powershell to remove the TPM protectors from a bitlocker volume so you can recreate them, without having work forcibly wipe your machine because the mandatory windows 11 upgrade changed the TPM measurements