I was actually thinking coloured O rings to define specs, but that still means I’d need to have a colours guide somewhere too…

…yours might be a more practical solution. 🤔

To clarify; I have a 100W Ugreen Nexode 4 Port USB Charger that I use to charge my laptop (~60W), Steam Deck (~40W), iPhone (~20W) and AirPods (~5?W).

The problem is if my original product cable has gone walkabout temporarily and I need to use a random one to stand in - there is no clear way of telling if I’m accidentally using a 5W-max cheap cable to try and keep my laptop charged while working.

Obviously there are some context clues depending on cable thickness etc., but with how common cosmetic braiding is becoming a thing - even that’s getting harder to rely on.

Yes, you can. The charger and the device communicate between one another what they can support, and pick the highest one they both agree on.

E.G. my laptop charger can charge at full speed (100W) for my MacBook, but only at 20W for my iPhone.

That bit is pretty straightforward and transparent to end users (there are a few rare conditions where devices might not agree on the fastest, and have to fall back to a slower one); the issue is more with cables not having sufficient gauge wire, or missing connections that prevent the charger and device from communicating their full functionality.

It’s been more of a pain in the arse than initially expected.

Most motherboards (for example) only have 2-4 USB-C ports, meaning that I still need to employ A-C and C-C cables for peripherals etc.

My main gripe is that the standard just tries to do too many things without clear delineation/markings:

1. Is it a USB 2.0 (480Mbit), 5Gbit, 10Gbit or 20Gbit cable? Can’t really tell from the plug alone.

2. More importantly, for charging devices: How the heck do I determine maximum wattage I can run?

For all its faults, at least the blue colour of a USB-3.0 plug (or additional connectors for B/Micro) made it easy to differentiate !

Now I’m eyeing up a USB Cable tester just to validate and catalogue my growing collection! 🤦🏻‍♂️

Ever since watching the latest season of Clarkson’s Farm, I can’t help but hear him say ‘space penises’ any time I read the word mishrooms…

He was discussing options where people oppose both ads and subscriptions as methods of payment for consumed media.

IMO YouTube Premium is the only subscription that I will probably never cancel as not only does it pay more to content creators than ad revenue does (per individual viewing), it directly financially supports the hundred-odd creators I enjoy (large and small).

If the cost is too high for you to justify, you can band together with friends to split the costs of a Family Plan and/or do as I do and VPN back to my home country where the cost is significantly less than it is where I live now!

…or it’s available on the service you subscribe to, but not in your region.

I just thought it was a speech impediment… 🤷🏻‍♂️

I doing think it was an one thing, but more-so a build-up over time - a death of a thousand cuts, if you will:

It was a cultural moment generally, just think back to all of those celebrity commercials (“I’m Mr. T and I’m a Night Elf Mohawk”). All cultural moments pass eventually.

The third expansion (Cataclysm) was quite weak to begin with; coupled with a lack of content in the tail-end of the second (Wrath of the Lich King), which itself was incredible - narratively wrapped up the story that began all the way back in Warcraft 3.

So a lot of people chose that time to bow out of the game, as it required a fair bit of time dedication and seemed like an appropriate time to do so - given the narrative pay-off.

Lastly, the introduction of a number of game tools to automate the group composition process meant that the impact of player reputation on servers was severely diminished. Before then, there players who were toxic (stealing items, intentionally killing the group, failing quests) were infamous on a server.

Once this tool was further opened up to allow for groups to form across multiple servers - the sense of community was shattered as you would have no way to know if the person from another server was good/bad etc. it stopped being about bringing in the individual player, and just getting a body in to fill a role.

As someone who was lucky enough to get to experience those first ~6 years; it truly was lightning in a bottle.

20 years on, I am still friends with a number of those I met in WOW - and an in contact with a few more beyond that!

Unfortunately, it does feel like that sense of community those early years fostered are long gone, save perhaps a blip when Classic first launched.

Who knows when the next game will come along, which will be able to foster such relationships.

If it’s within your budget, grab a Steam Deck and use it in docked Desktop mode. It’s a pretty great introduction into Linux IMO, especially due to the fact that Valve themselves are maintaining the OS, and since it’s running on a fixed hardware platform - most online solutions should be applicable to any problems you may encounter.

Worst case, you don’t like it you can always eBay it off to recoup most of your costs?

IMO: Pirate it guilt-free without a second thought. If you enjoy it, and deem it worthy of a rewatch - then buy the DVD/Blu-Ray.

Then rip a quality copy of it, and delete the previously downloaded one.

It’s not a stupid decision, but a stubborn one.

I’m 100% OK with that; Apple is heavy on design aesthetics. If a user doesn’t like that, they can just use their own preferred mouse - wired or otherwise.

In order: Soy, Coconut, Almond, Macadamia.

Almond uses way too much water to be environmentally sustainable, and macadamia just has a weird after-taste that I don’t like.

Soy has a bit of a bad reputation (unfairly so, due to bad ‘bro science’); but I quite like the taste and it has a pretty low emissions/water footprint comparatively.

Going by that argument though, then EVERYTHING is an indirect act of God.

Bullet wound? Clearly it was God’s will, for ordering the universe in such a way that an individual was armed at that point in time to cause you harm.

Cancer? God willed the carcinoma onto your skin.

Maybe it’s just Argumentum ad absurdum, but insurance companies are basically arguing against their own existence.

It was called Kurushi here in our neck of the woods; and I’m glad I’m not the only person who still intensely remembers that game from a demo disc.

I ended up picking up a mint copy to add to my collection; well worth it IMO.

In Australia, we could call that Carer’s Leave; Mental health days are a valid use case (at least at my work).

Edit: Mind you, we are also a country that needed to implement a Public Holiday ahead of the AFL Grand Final (similar to SuperBowl) because a significant portion of the population were taking ‘sick days’! 🤣

I specified one generation of hardware backwards compatibility; beyond that software emulation would be more than sufficient.

The PS5 is backwards compatible with all but ~6 PS4 titles. Sure that’s entirely because of the shared x86-64 architecture, but it makes the PS4 stand out like a sore thumb for its lack of direct generational backwards compatibility.

By the end of the PS3’s lifecycle the Cell processor has been die-shrunk multiple times, reducing power consumption, heat output and PCB space required. It could then share the rest of the PS4s existing IO chips and circuitry.

There was literally no reason for backwards compatibility to be removed beyond corporate greed. Blindly accepting it, and actually trying to justify that as a good thing is one of the key reasons this hobby has gone down the toilet.

Hard to improve on perfection, but they had to keep their UI designers employed I suppose?