Not the person you responded to, but my Android 11 tablet is not signed into Google (yes, the device I’m commenting from right now on Lemmy).

I disabled Google Play Services and almost all the built in Google apps. I had to do that because Google Play Services is exactly how Google backdoored the whole OS to install kill switches wherever the hell they want, and they’re already starting to try to do that age check shit on me to even so much as watch The Outer Limits on YT or alternatives.

I’ve had to revert some of my apps to older versions because newer versions are literally telling me that they either no longer work at all, or won’t work in the near future.

My red flag warning came from an update of the simple FOSS Bubble Level app from F-Droid. Like seriously, Google gonna try to block a simple FOSS Bubble Level app because I’m not logged into Google?

Fuck that, I prefer to sideload my apps, so I’ll take the hit of disabling Google Services to keep the full lockdown from happening.

Just don’t. Don’t feed Spez, don’t feed his cronies or the AI bots sucking the life out of the internet. Your sanity will thank you in less than a year.

I didn’t see all that much of The Twilight Zone either, but I did watch practically every episode of The Outer Limits, particularly the newer color episodes from the 1990s era. Man I miss that show, every single episode was amazingly well done!

I heard somewhere that zombies eat brains…

So, is Artificial Intelligence actually the zombies, coming after the children’s minds? 🤔

You’re not too far off base actually, remember when convenience stores used to sell spice?..

They’ll sell whatever they legally can, and even then some things are still in that grey area…

So, it’s been decades since I was a teenager, and AI chatbots weren’t even a thing. Hell, I didn’t even have the internet as a teenager, so maybe I’m totally out of the loop, but someone riddle me this?..

They’re age checking and gatekeeping social media, but not age checking and gatekeeping AI chatbots?

Do I have this about right, or am I missing something here?

Whatever the future of petrol, you gotta consider they sell way more than fuel. They’re called convenience stores for a reason, which I semi-jokingly refer to as addiction stations. They can and do sell basically anything they legally can that people are addicted to, beer, cigarettes, soft drinks, energy drinks, candy, hot food, etc…

So, whatever the long term future of petroleum, the stores themselves for the most part aren’t going anywhere, they’ll keep selling every sort of quick grab fast selling goto items that keep the customers coming back.

It literally made my day to realize anyone out there is still interested in such things these days.

People like you keep my hope in humanity alive.

https://tutorial.math.lamar.edu/

https://jargon-file.org/

You’ve actually read this far?

Thank you for appreciating my words and the time it took to type them.

Sam’s Photofacts: https://repairfaq.org/

Edit: I am not Sam, this is just a treasure trove of information on how to troubleshoot and repair discreet electronics.

Sam Goldwasser is to me almost as important as Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman…

I long ago lost that monitor and related hardware over the sands of time, moving one place to another multiple times.

The benefit though was that I effectively quadrupled the number of pixels on screen from the common 1024x768 resolution of the time.

1024x2=2048, 768x2=1536

I was basically pioneering early extra high definition video output before it was even a thing.

The images themselves wouldn’t look any different, except smaller as each pixel was only 1/4 of original size, giving me a much larger visible pixel area for image editing.

It wouldn’t have helped gameplay much though, as I had to sacrifice framerate to accomplish that.

Edit: You definitely can’t do shit like that on modern LCDs, that category of overclocking is exclusive to old CRTs.

TL;DR - Much higher pixel resolution, at the cost of framerate.

It was officially rated for a max of 1280x1024, 50Hz progressive. The more common resolution of choice back then was 1024x768, 60Hz.

Well I wanted a much higher resolution than that, so by absolutely maxing out the horizontal output transistor frequency to 64KHz and doing some quick number crunching, I was able to make a custom display mode of 2048x1536, 25Hz interlaced.

Although the vertical refresh rate got both cut in half and also switched to interlaced, it still absolutely qualifies as overclocking, because the horizontal output transistor (HOT) is basically the most stressed out non high voltage component in any CRT monitor.

Running the HOT at the bleeding edge of the manufacturer’s frequency rating of 64KHz could and would indeed burn it out prematurely if run too long like that, especially without additional cooling, so I didn’t run it too damn long like that, but I just wanted to see if it was even possible.

The monitor itself was from 1994, so it was effectively all analog, no digital onscreen menus, no signal checking and no error message on the screen to say boohoo video mode not supported, the monitor just tuned itself to the signal and frequencies I calculated and arranged for it.

It did however have quite a few analog image transform buttons on its front panel though, for things like trapezoid and shear distortion, raster rotation, corner bowing, etc, lots of things most monitors from 1994 didn’t have, which meant the CRT yoke had probably twice as many deflection coils as a regular consumer CRT.

Not bad for a monitor from 1994 that probably never saw anything over 1024x768 in practical use before I ever acquired it. I got literally 4 times the pixels of the typical desktop resolution of the time.

Was it worth it? For daily use, no. For learning experience, absolutely!

Yeah, you’re right about shitty computer brands ~20 years ago. Turned out they were all shitty in the long run, as that was back during the Taiwanese counterfeit capacitor plague… ☹️

As far as vehicles go, I don’t much care for luxury features, that’s just more points of failure. And now they got all the sensors, modules, cameras and stuff on the CAN bus, which is good for the manufacturer because it reduces the copper wiring, but bad for the consumer, as one faulty shorted sensor can take down the entire data bus and basically brick your car.

Just give me a vehicle that cranks, runs, drives, and stops when I got places to go, and is easy to troubleshoot and repair as necessary. The most luxury I care for is heater and air conditioning. I’ll trade in the push button windows for hand crank rollup windows as long as the vehicle comes with a spare tire. I don’t want any vehicle that tracks everywhere you go, records everything you do, and can be bricked remotely by the police.

Our current vehicle is a 2005 Hyundai Tucson, roommate’s had it going on 4 years now I think, for $3000. At first it had some running issues, but after a new coil pack, crankshaft position sensor, and mass airflow sensor, it purrs like a kitten ever since. And those sensors are cross compatible between Hyundai Tucson and Kia Sportage from 1999 to 2010, meaning both used and new parts aren’t too difficult to find.

And it’s not on a payment plan, he outright owns it 👍

And that’s half of how we ended up in the era of enshittification.

Let’s say one of the control knobs on your 15 year old dumb stove fails, shorted out, where as soon as you turn it to low heat the eye is blazing hot at full heat. Do you?..

• A. Just not use that eye anymore
• B. Buy a new control knob and get another 10 years out of it
• C. Buy a whole new stove, that may last 5 years, and wants you to connect to the internet so they can eventually brick the firmware

We went with option B, way cheaper than a new stove, plus none of the headaches of modern digital technology. Like, why do appliances need modern digital technology? A stove heats food, plain and simple, and that’s all it needs to do.

And look at these new refrigerators coming out, that fail within weeks to months, maybe at best a couple or few years. When your grandma’s old fridge was passed down from her mom and has been kicking strong for 50 years, save for that new door seal installed like 15 years ago…

Sigh, we live in a disposable dystopia anymore ☹️

Probably so, I got zapped quite a few times myself.

That’s probably what’s wrong with me ain’t it? 🤔

Yes. Well, the older ones anyways, before they got full digital phase locking anyways.

I had a dumb but rather high tech 15 inch CRT for it to have come from 1994. No smart logic though, just a few relays you had to trigger with certain frequencies. No error messages, no safety checks, the thing either accepted the signal or it didn’t. Or it could explode, that was the fun in trying, and yeah it actually worked and didn’t explode!

How did I do it? Well, by then I had an XP system and an Nvidia GeForce FX 5200. Wait, this was in late 2005 or early 2006 come to think of it…

Anyways, I checked all the details of the monitor’s supported frequencies, both horizontal and vertical. I found the max resolution, while compromising on the framerate, I used 25Hz interlaced to achieve that, with the Nvidia Control Center of the time…

No, I was born half blind as a bat, and nobody would let me get close enough to see anything up close.

My vision is about 20/500 without glasses, meaning that if I should be able to see it from 500 feet, I have to be 20 feet away to see it. Very very blurry without glasses.

I finally got glasses at age 8, and finally saw a clock at age 9. I had to teach myself how to read it though, but that was kinda easy once I could actually see the damn thing! 🕘

Nah, oldschool ancient Roman nonlinear timekeeping actually makes more sense in this context. In their timekeeping, 6am was sunrise, and 6pm was sunset, no matter what time of the year.

You wanna prevent people from getting sleep schedules messed up, let’s go back to the old nonlinear timescales, where 6 and 6 are always sunrise and sunset.

Quarter mile walk for me, sometimes mom had to get up and take me to the bus stop in a boat after a heavy rain. In pitch black dark.