They ruined each other. I preferred both when they didn’t affect each other - Your neighbor didn’t get her news and science lessons from a crackpot blog, and your favorite online community wasn’t based on identity politics. The only identity that mattered was your username.

Now, that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time…

After getting hooked on Metal Gear: Solid, without owning a Playstation, Bleem helped me get by.

Nej

Yup. I think the engine improvements that allowed for the gravity gun to be a m7ch more prominent HL2 thing.

That ep with the trip to Australia. They go there to make amends after Bart tricks an aussie kid into accepting a collect call from the US, lasting several hours.

This is the toilet at the US embassy, engineered to swirl the right way so that US personnel there don’t get homesick, nodding to earlier in the episode when Lisa makes the claim to Bart about the swirl being the other direction on the southern hemisphere, which caused Bart to make that collect call to begin with.

Yes, I have in fact played knifeyspooney before.

It’s mostly to combat spam. I created a lemmy account with an obviously bogus e-mail account, hopped on matrix and reached out to the instance admins and they activated my account manually after I asked nicely.

This person has never had to file an expense claim for meals that are paid by the employer.

Yes, it’s only a dollar or two. But it’s a dollar or two that my employer has to pay extra.

I once picked up one of those dirt cheap breakfast toasts from burger King. My expense report stated “Worst breakfast ever. Never again.”

I love how features like these are quickly adopted by some dev in some basement, resulting in support built in the OS and automatically supported.

For example, I recently got myself a brand new Lenovo Legion 7, and the intention was always to nuke the windows install and get Linux up and running. I was curious about the hotkey too adjust the fan/cooling schema, as it seemed to rely on some proprietary Lenovo windows program.

Less than an hour after picking it up at the post office I had a basic Linux Mint ip and running with the GPU drivers working well, and the hotkeys worked out of the box.

I prefer the left road. The right one leads to a perception of being awkward AND stupid.

It is. Typo.

And I think Ralph Wiggum should be included just for that extended meta

Need to add Ralph Wiggum somehow

Derp, we both missed the obvious one. How stupid of us: Elevator

Via some sort of implement that helps such an ascent. Like a ladder. Or maybe an escalator. Those were the only ones I could think of.

For those who didn’t know: This is Robert Plant, the vocalist of Led Zeppelin. A dove spontaneously landed on his hand during a concert. They (the doves, not the band) were released from cages at the end if Stairway to Heaven, and one of them decided to land instead of flying off.

Price: Don’t remember. I fired off a message to the guys in manufacturing, I’ll let you know if they have a price. We go through quite a few of these annually, so we have a bulk discount when buying them.

How: Magic, I guess. Also, I found a link to the ones we use: https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/clock-and-timing/components/atomic-clocks/embedded-atomic-oscillators/csac

When we prepare for deployment, they’re connected to a docking unit which provides a clock pulse derived from a GPS signal for high precision. Then the battery pack is attached, the subsea unit is assembled, and everything is deployed, usually via ROV. It’s important that it’s kept powered the entire time upon retrieval docking, as we can then calculate a linear drift value and correct for this in the recorded data.

UPDATE: We bought “Maaaaaaany thousands” of them in 2018, and we paid 1850 USD per chip. Come to think of it, I remember hearing claims back then that we’d bought 75% of the worlds supply.

Some work related trivia I’d like to share with you: My job involves deploying sensors on the seabed to record data. These sensors are battery powered, and rely on highly precise timekeeping to be correct. These devices are synchronized before deployment, and upon retrieval ~2 months later we want none or as little clock drift as possible.

Tumbleweed sounds

I’m glad you asked: we achieve this by using CSACs - Chip Scale Atomic Clocks. They are pretty much what the name Implies, and after synchronization it is able to keep the time much better than anything else. Normal clock drift upon retrieval is usually less than a millisecond, and that drift is due to (uninteresting factors not directly related to the CSAC itself)

CSACs cost a small fortune, but they’re the size of a matchbox and make it all possible. It’s amazing how small atomic clocks can be.