A 1984 MSX home computer. It was the first computer I had. My grandfather gave it to me in 1985 when he upgraded to a new model. I didn’t have a lot of software for it, but it had Microsoft Basic built-in. With a lot of books from my grandfather, I learned to not only program in Basic, but Z80 assembler as well. I used that thing so much I wore out the keyboard.

I recently picked up a matching color CRT monitor for it. I never had a color monitor for it and only hooked it up to the family TV infrequently. I saw the color monitor locally for cheap and after doing a lot of repairs and fixing it up it looks awesome. Really cool to see how good of an image my old computer could do. Still love the old black and green monitor though, that’s how I remember it.

Computer is still running and with a big memory expansion I even have DOS 2.0 running on it. Somebody hacked FAT16 into that, so I can theoretically access 4GB of data. On a machine that only has 64kb of ram to start with.

Never answer, the scammers sell data to each other. As soon as you answer, they know they’ve got a live number and the number of calls will multiply.

Also there’s millions of them, pissing off a couple doesn’t really do anything.

I’ve bought a lot of stuff from AliExpress in the past 10 years. Including some $10.000+ purchases. There have been problems, but overal I’m happy enough with the whole thing.

I feel everyone is trying their best to make it all work, but in the end it’s pretty complex to get something from the other side of the world to your home. Plus the language barrier can be a thing, where nobody in the chain really speaks any English. Usually the people at AliExpress, the seller and the actual people shipping the goods are pretty far apart from each other (China is a big country) and don’t always communicate the best.

Now there are of course a lot of scammers, just like on sites like Ebay and Amazon. AliExpress really does do their best to ban the scammers and prevent them from coming back, but it’s like fighting a flood with a broom and doesn’t do much. Recognizing the scammers can be pretty hard sometimes. The trick I’ve used is to either rely on small communities of people interested in the same thing recommending a shop or simply talking to the seller. If the seller is happy to talk to you and willing to do just about anything you ask, it’s probably a scam. If they are kind of grumpy and say this is what we do take it or leave it, you’ve got a proper seller on your hands. Especially with large equipment as I’ve bought, the seller wants to talk shop about the machines all day, but if you have any special requests regarding shipping or customs, it’s a no go. They will also happily provide you a quote for a fully custom machine if you ask, with actual good prices for what it is, but still very expensive.

If something does go wrong with your order, don’t count on AliExpress doing anything. They are just the platform provider and don’t know you or your order. They aren’t involved in any way and handle millions of orders a day. Just use the tools they provide to talk to the seller, they will often happily help you and every time my shipment got lost, they refunded or sent another. If a part broke in shipment, they shipped me a replacement. And just because the product wasn’t what you thought it was or the shipment got lost in transit or there was something else wrong, doesn’t mean the seller is a scammer. Don’t report them as one, as for small shops this can cause problems and for the larger established shops AliExpress simply ignores the reports. Usually the seller does their best to get you your stuff, but when sending something from one side of the globe to the other, shit happens. International tracking has gotten so much better the past couple of years, so it’s easier to see where it went wrong.

AliExpress has also gotten very good with customs, they present you a price which is based on what you are going to pay. No hidden fees that get applied later in the process. They discount the product in the shopping cart with an indication of what you have to pay for customs handling and import fees. In the past this used to be a problem, where the price was too good to be true, only to turn out to be exactly that. But these days they are very good.

So if you have patience, do your homework and be careful out there, AliExpress can be a great source for products. If you want to be a Karen and shout at someone for not delivering the crap you don’t need within 24 hours, please just go to Amazon.

One thing to note: There is an environmental impact to buying directly from China and there’s no guarantee the products weren’t made by slaves in poor working conditions without mind for safety or the environment. So don’t go buying small crap you can get anywhere from there. Buy locally where possible and if you do order make it something big or buy a larger shipment. But this isn’t really an AliExpress thing, this applies to sites like Ebay as well as other big Chinese shops.

I feel like many of these got at least a spiritual successor if not an actual successor. That counts as a second chance right and means they aren’t forgotten?

Like Gauntlet has like 9 sequels and the last one released just 10 years ago. There’s also many games that are heavily inspired by Gauntlet. Same for The Settlers, which had a new game just last year.

The online for seamless coop isn’t actual online, it’s limited to the functionality of the mod and doesn’t use the official servers. You can in principle get cheaters on that, but most people have it setup to only connect to friends. And when you are using mods you are probably just having fun and playing for the memes instead of being a hardcore PvP player.

I personally love seamless coop, I had hoped FromSoft would have made the coop like that from the beginning. So happy mod makers are putting in the time to make it work. I’ve played over 100 hours with my brother and had so much fun. I can recommend mods like The Convergence as well, combined with seamless it’s so much fun.

3** status codes: 4000%

Oops

Agreed, removed

Good advice, just to add to this:

• Comments should be part of code review, having at least two pairs of eyes on comments is crucial. Something that’s obvious to one person maybe isn’t so obvious to another. Writing good comments is as hard or harder than writing good code, so having it checked for mistakes and quality is a must
• Comments aren’t the actual documentation and aren’t a reason not to write documentation to go along with your code. Often I see larger projects where each class and function is documented in comments, but the big picture and the how and why of the overall structure is completely missing. Remember that in the real world you often have a lot of folk that need to understand how the code works, who aren’t programmers themselves. They can’t read the code or don’t have access to the code. Writing documentation is still important.
• Please for the love of god when you change code, check if the comments need to be updated as well. Not just around the immediate area, but also the entire file/class and related files. I’ve worked on large codebases before with a high wtf factor and having the code do something different to or even opposite the comments is a nightmare. I’d rather have no comments than wrong comments.

A 1000 ways to suck, a practical guide for how not to live your life.

Fun fact: in Dutch the word pagina is pronounced exactly the same as vagina

And did you sit on the bag on the way home?

You chose to buy it at that price. What does it matter what the original price was or how much the seller made? You thought the price was fair, had the choice to not buy it or buy it somewhere else.

This isn’t like scalpers buying up items, creating artificial scarcity and driving up prices for profit. This is just plain old capitalism.

Presumably the price also included shipping and handling fees, since you bought it online. So in the end the seller probably made just a couple of quid, he deserves to get paid for what he does no?

In the game the little guy wins, so you made it work?

I love Salt, but man his videos are getting way too long. I put the speed at 1,25x for any of his videos and the pacing is still perfectly fine.

I’ve heard people enjoy his videos with some drugs and I get it, it sounds super chill. But this length is a stretch for me, it could be half the time and lose basically nothing. And this is coming from a guy who enjoys long format videos like hbomberguy.

One of the most important ones is this one: https://joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu/jrc-news-and-updates/stemming-tide-beach-litter-2018-09-25_en

This was the basis for the decision to mandate the caps be attached to the bottles, since they found a lot of caps and less bottles. This would indicate a lot of caps get separated from their bottles, which this change should mostly fix.

The other was an interview with this guy: https://zwerfinator.nl/ I can’t find the interview, no idea why, but he hasn’t published the results yet (no idea why, it was scheduled to be published I think, but somehow got delayed). They were saying the new pfands really helped and the number of bottle caps have gone down. But this is highly depended on the location. For example a lot of research is focused on beaches, where there is obviously often a large delay between the deposition and the collection. In city centers this time is often much shorter, so the impact of changes are seen faster.

So sorry to disappoint, it’s too soon for a peer reviewed study diving into this. Also with all the other changes the EU has mandated on litter and single use plastics, it would be hard to quantify which implementation has what effect.

But my thinking was: There is for me good data showing this is an issue (which I was doubting) and the solution seems solid enough. Other changes like pfands on small bottles and cans have made a big impact (research is available for this, for example https://open.overheid.nl/documenten/ronl-8b11214f23388b3395402609d76286475b4f2908/pdf). And the people doing the research say they’ve seen results that it works. So that was enough to convince me.

If somehow the caps being attached doesn’t lead to less caps in litter, that would be a very interesting result. Without a doubt the EU would change the regulation to fix it, depending on why they think the change didn’t work. But this would not lead to the caps being like they were in the past.

So sorry, I read it a couple of weeks ago and it changed my mind. Just thought I would share. I’ll try to find what I read later, I can’t find it on mobile and search engines suck these days.

I can’t find it on mobile right now. It was a preliminary result, because the attached caps haven’t been required that long. Also most countries have implemented extra pfand systems for small plastic bottles, which also helps. So it’s tricky to say which regulation helped most.

But there are plenty of sources of how many bottle caps there are in the streets and oceans. And how harmful they are to animals who think the small bright things are food.

It also makes sense, instead of the bottle and the cap becoming seperate pieces of trash, it’s now a single piece. So it reduces the number of pieces if not the volume of trash.

Also for people from the US where bottles are shredded and caps typically not recycled. In Europe the caps also don’t get recycled, but instead removed. The bottle is then checked for leaks and defects and if it passes it’s cleaned and then reused. Actually recycling plastic is hard, so this way a bottle can be used at least two or three times.

You don’t get your pfand in many cases if the cap isn’t on, as well as the label many times. This isn’t so much needed for the recycling but important for the whole process. For example groceries are required to take in bottles, but are allowed to limit this to bottles they sell. So the barcode om the label is checked for this purpose. The label is removed in the recycling process. The cap is required to motivate people to return those and not have them turn into litter. It’s also a hygiene thing for the people handling the bottles, often there is liquid still in the bottle and without the cap it comes out during handling.

I will find the data later when I’m on desktop.

Yes I hate them as well, they always get in the way and putting the cap back on is super annoying.

However, since these bottles were introduced data has shown they work. Bottle caps were one of the most found items in trash picked up from the streets. The number of bottle caps has gone way down since these were introduced.

So I’ve accepted them. Can’t argue with data. I’ve never returned a bottle without a cap in my life. I’ve never thrown away a cap separate from the bottle. But turns out the world is full of psychopaths who throw the cap in the street. Probably the same kind of person who throws their trash by the side of the road from their car. Fuck those people.

Oh I see why they shut down the Super Mario Maker 1 servers, money is getting tight at Nintendo.