Root Access

1:10 AM

Well... time to set up a brand-new laptop. Fun ._.

1 hour later…

2:24 AM

The Ryzen 4000 chips do live up to their reputation. Opening 20 tabs at once? No problem.

And it took me this long to discover why the ThinkPad has such a mythical reputation. The whole experience is unlike any other laptop I've ever used.

Best laptop keyboard I've ever used. Period.

For reference:

Jul 22 at 21:14, by bwDraco

Malphas: Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen 1 AMD, Ryzen 7 PRO 4750U (8C/16T Renoir @ 1.7-4.1 GHz), 16 GB RAM, 512 GB SSD.

2:50 AM

...and WOW that's fast. Completed a feature update from 1909 to 2004 in well under ten minutes.

A: What is the 15-pin black port that old sound cards have?

3:35 AM

It's a midi/game port. Used to connect a MIDI device (like a keyboard) or joysticks. See here. Edit: According to Wikipedia it's mainly known as game port as Ramhound points out correctly.

GET OFF MY LAWN

@JourneymanGeek lol

It's been a long time since I've seen this port. Used to have a joystick that can plug into a Sound Blaster card and I didn't understand why back then...

@bwDraco meh

they suck compared to the classic sculpted ones

Not too sure why MIDI devices would use a port that was originally designed by IBM to support game controllers.

I recall my old game devices being serial

game controllers being midi..

well, at the time sound cards needed to support midi anyway, so reusing the protocol might have saved money?

@JourneymanGeek It's the other way around. IBM designed the port to support game controllers.

@JourneymanGeek Hmm. Good point.

3:51 AM

every cent, and slot counts

people who needed multimedia, more likely than not gamed

Hmm. So early Sound Blaster cards basically repurposed the connector to support MIDI in addition to game controllers. Interesting.

and sound blaster ended up being the 'defacto' standard

I don't think they really had anything serious after that

gparyani

The game port on the sound card is why Sound Blaster won over AdLib

That's one of those things that confused me 15, 20 years ago: why would a joystick plug into a sound card? Now it makes sense. Creative essentially extended the IBM game port to support MIDI.

I still find it odd that they would use a port intended for analog X/Y input devices (it was designed with arcade joysticks in mind) for a digital audio protocol.

It makes sense in context ;p

4:16 AM

(also sigh creative, they were the singaporean success story till they just ran out of ideas)

4:43 AM

Posted an answer but also voted to close as duplicate.

3 hours later…

Michael Frank

8:10 AM

@JourneymanGeek I have Creative speakers. Love them to bits!

trustedreviews.com/reviews/…

...welp. It's going viral.

HNQ time!

@MichaelFrank ah

but the old ones with the cambridge soundworks subwoofers were... woofier

got spun off

Michael Frank

I've had these ones for about 10 years.

Recently they've been surging in volume on occassion so I suspect they're on the way out.

8:32 AM

@JourneymanGeek We used to have that brand of speaker, too. Guess what I now use on Astaroth? A generic USB-powered pair of speakers that came with an old, cheap desktop PC.

That's easily the dodgiest part of a $5,000 desktop setup, come to think of it. And yet I've never found a good reason to replace it, even with, say, an inexpensive Logitech speaker set.

Which isn't quiiiiite the point 😁

It's more that they were a great, innovative company that kinda faded out

Yeah.

Bob

@JourneymanGeek ✂️🌏💡✂️🎸🔨🔨

Yes

8:49 AM

@Bob hey

did you ever break your visit streak?

Bob

@jokerdino I think it got accidentally broken last year :(

during a 4 day power outage when I forgot to check in

more recently, especially working from home, I haven't checked daily :(

Simon & Garfunkel - The Sound of Silence (from The Concert in Central Park)

that's good, now you are freeee

Bob

►

@Bob <3

gparyani

9:39 AM

theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/…

A: Why are months (e.g. December) used to notate a runway?

10:03 AM

@gparyani no surprise

there was a question about Excel messing with some stuff related to aviation

163

Very likely, whatever data source you're using has been mangled by Excel (or some other spreadsheet or data processing system that tries to convert everything that might be a date into a date format). 26-Aug is actually runway 26/08, 30-Dec is actually runway 30/12, etc. (See "How are runways nu...

4 hours later…

1:53 PM

> Oh no! Search is currently offline.

This is usually because we let the gerbils out for 10 seconds longer than we should have, or are actively improving our search results and needed to take things offline while we re-index this site. Hang tight and we'll return search to you as soon as possible.

5 hours later…