Just get the LED equivalent, it uses far less juice 
What are you talking about?!? You can kill two birds with one stone. Easy-Bake Tube Amp cakes add unique sweetness to all music.
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ThingMaker, I literally burned two of those up.
Mark Gosdin
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Amid the constant mediocre minor football bowl games pre New Years, we have a welcome break tomorrow.
Arsenal v. Liverpool
Gunners!!!
Merry Christmas everyone! 
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Challenge: Who will have the last post of 2023?
@Torq ? @SenyorC ? @taronlissimore ?
@android ? @PaisleyUnderground @Polygonhell @prfallon69
@generic ? @hottyson?
Or someone else? And who will get the first post of 2024?
Entries will be adjusted for longitude. And this raises the question. When is New Year’s at the North and South Poles?
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I already did the first of 2024, you guys are so '23 
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What part of
don’t you understand?
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Barring any message from @prfallon69 , I am closest to GMT, which, as we know, is the “boss” of all time zones!
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I used to get confused if a post was from “Roark” or “Rhodey”. I don’t get confused with these icons.
ABL (Anybody But Liverpool)
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A little late, but the South Pole follows New Zealand time. The North Pole is not attached to any geo-political entity, so it’s whatever time you want it to be there.
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Weird, possibly, random observations for the start of the year …
Audio Related:
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I now have more hours on the Sennheiser HD660S2 than I did on my HE-1.
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THIE AUDIO Monarch MKIII are an almost perfect alternative to the Empire Ears Odin, for when I don’t mind giving up a little on the technical side, but also want a more prominent bottom-end (albeit less than a Raven or Legend).
Must do a proper write-up of these …
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7Hz x Crinacle Zero:2 … bought a handful of them to toss in with my portable game systems, Apple 3.5mm dongles, and so on. Very impressed in general. Can’t go wrong for <$25. Often can’t be bothered to switch them out for something else once I have them in my ears.
Not quite as pleasing, overall, as the TRUTHEAR x Crinacle Zero:RED, at least for music, but also less than half the price. Both were surprisingly enjoyable (perhaps unnecessarily-faint praise).
Things I have enjoyed far more than I expected to:
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I was very late to the party on this one (as a confirmed retro-gamer). I was never willing to deal with the long/uncertain delivery dates. But I snagged one in December (where it was shipping the same week), and have been loving it ever since.
Mostly I am using it with actual cartridges, but it is very flexible and easy to use if you have legitimate access* to images for games as well (more convenient than carrying cartridges around).
It’s a lot more convenient (and easier to see) than my actual original hardware.
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Anbernic RG35XX Plus & RG35XX H
While I would wait, a while, on these before jumping in if you’re not very technically inclined … if you’re a retro-gamer they’re quite a nice (and inexpensive) way to dabble. Not sure about the legality of the included games, but I’m only using them with games I have legitimate copies of**.
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I am a definite AFOL*** and used to maintain a complete UCS Star Wars collection. I sold that, and have mostly just done the big NASA sets (Saturn V, Discovery, Lunar Module, IST) since then - along with a few novelties like the Globe, Map, VCS/2600, Piano, and Pac-Man sets.
Even coming from that background, the Concorde set is fantastic. The build is interesting and fun. The model looks gorgeous. And it’s surprisingly large … in a good way. And for what it is … it’s very reasonably priced.
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Cuban Christmas Dinner (Noche Buena):
Oh. My. God. Whole roast pig? Are you kidding? And I got it twice, from 1st generation cuban friends (now living in FL), in a week. Unbelievable.
Of course … now I have to buy my own pig-roasting box …
Even the sides were amazing …
Random Irritants:
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The obnoxious, loud, incomprehensibly fat, slobberingly-drunk and unnecessarily ugly, nob-weasel that sneezed all over everyone (didn’t even attempt to cover his mouth/nose) in the bathroom halfway through my last cruise - and giving me the cold-from-hell (no, not COVID … and the first cold I’ve had in 4+ years).
In the exceedingly unlikely event I ever see said poo-rooster again, I will be hard pressed not to assist him in an rapid, unscheduled, mid-ocean disembarkation. Possibly preceded with a good, hard, punch up the bracket.
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Any TV series that finds success in the early stages of its first season, and then pivots to draw the story out for several more seasons than it can support and THEN fucking ends without resolving the original plot-arc!
*It’s very flexibile and easy to use even if you don’t have LEGITIMATE access to images for games (“ROMs”), but I’m not touching that aspect of things.
**Yes, I have either original cartridges, discs and/or boards, or just the actual (original) ROM chips from full-size arcade machines.
***Adult Fan of Lego.
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New firmware/software for this dropped today.
Useful improvements.
Compared to the Analogue Pocket, though, applying updates to these things is a lot of fannying about.
(Download a multi-part 7zip file, from a Google Drive share - which has usually exceeded its quota, extract it, image an microSDXC card from it … which requires something like “balena Etcher” (no simple file copy here) …)
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I had my eyes on the Anbernic handhelds for a while… No performance complaints? The form factor looks wildly nostalgic, which I make up adds a lot to the experience.
I ended up getting a ROG Ally instead - not a direct comparison by any means, but more of an all-arounder for my gaming habits. The performance is wildly impressive for a handheld device, even with demanding AAA games (I’ve found 900P to be the sweet-spot). Though it does take a commitment to tinkering with things like fan curves, and experience in the fine arts of Windows drivers and registry tweaks to get it to a happy place. I was amazed to be getting better FPS and a smoother overall experience with Starfield on a handheld than I do on my Xbox Series X. Sure, you can’t compare 900P to 4K, but with the screen-size and viewing distance it looks great… Pretty useless on the go unless you’re packing a 65W+ power bank or plugged into AC. Although I got it for travel, I’ve found myself mostly using it docked on my LG C2. 4K OLED + 120Hz + indie Windows games / emulation from the living room is dreamy with an Xbox controller. Only thing missing is Freesync - damn LG and their lack of DP input! Oh and if you see someone playing Tetris Effect: Connected on an airplane, it’s probably me.
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No … but I’m not trying to run PC games, of any kind/era, on it.
There’s about 100 truly classic arcade games (think stuff no older than 1985, with most of them older than 1982) I care about, and a handful of console games coming up to the SNES/Genesis era. It handles all of those without issue. It’ll do PS1 and PSP games, also, and those are generally fine.
To be fair, if there were cores for all 100 of those arcade games on the Analogue Pocket, I’d probably just have stuck with that.
Though there’s definitely something special about playing classic GameBoy games on a display that looks just like the original (down to the sub-pixel boundaries/substrate) … and then being able to flip it to something modern, mid-game, so it’s much easier to see.
As the same time, the Anbernic stuff, especially at $65, is still very impressive. I can replace one next-day if I break/lose it (unlike with the Pocket … where I have a spare unit in case I break one).
The screen is a bit small for arcade games in vertical mode (most of them), but it’s crisp and clear enough, refreshes cleanly and is more than bright enough.
It’s not without issues … so far I have not gotten sound via HDMI output working on any MAME or VARCADE game, nor have I gotten any Bluetooth controllers to work at all, but otherwise they’re a nice, very portable and inexpensive, way to play around with this stuff on the go.
I expect by the time GarlicOS 2.0 is final for the RG35 XX Plus or H the whole thing will be a lot smoother/simpler. It’s very “hobbyist” at the moment. And, again, updating the thing requires directly imaging SD cards.
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More GAI/LLM/GPT “fun” …
Among the current cohort of want-to-be software engineers I’m mentoring, there is a LOT of consternation about AI making them jobless.
This was this weeks’s example as to why it’s not likely in the near future …
(I’m deliberately using naive/primitive prompts here to illustrate a point)
PROMPT: Create a photograph of a devious-looking black-and-white cat (tuxedo cat), subtly sharpening its claws, and clearly plotting something evil, while trying to look sweet and innocent.
Okay, this is not bad (especially given the extremely naive prompt).
I can’t really tell it’s sharpening anything, and its a bit TOO cute to be plotting anything (except maybe a nap), but the basics are there.
We’ll try again, in the same session:
PROMPT: That needs more evil. And more claws.
I mean, DAMN … is that not awesome? Looks just like one of my moggies when I won’t let him outside.
It only lacks the “subtle” and “cute” parts.
And then …
PROMPT: Keep the image exactly the same but make the eyes more innocent.
“I’ve updated the image of the menacing tuxedo cat with more innocent-looking eyes, while keeping all other elements the same.”
Oh dear …
… and this is why LLM/GAI/GPTs are not usefully interpreting requirements anytime soon. HUMANS can’t do it reliably … machines have a long way to go.
I shouldn’t mock, though. I used GPT4/DALL-E 3 to create all of the images for one of my startup’s websites. Icons. Logos. Thematic illustrations. In minutes. For much less than even the cheapest FIVERR artist would charge.
I’m not going to show you what Google’s “Gemini” came up with, but if you’ve read any tech-news this week I’m sure you have a good idea.
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The middle illustration is not a “tuxedo” cat. It’s an “Orca” cat.
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