I started eating a lot of chickpeas recently. Buy them dried, boil them for a couple minutes them let them soak in the water for a few hours. Then either roast them in the oven or if I’m lazy, toss them in the microwave for like 5 minutes, then add some seasoning. I snack on them between meals, or also toss them into things like soup or curry.

Also if you want a different take on ramen, boil them until they are al dente, drain the water and then stir fry with some cheap veggies or whatever.

You know, you could just buy some and try it. It’s not expensive.

What do you mean? Did your phone already have damage to the screen, or they were making you preemptively pay in case the screen broke?

I was going to opt for a battery replacement, but I called the local store that does the replacement, and they told me that it’s common for the screen to break during the battery swap process. And if they break the screen, I would be on the hook for the cost to replace it, around $160. I don’t know how that is even legal in the first place, but it certainly turned me off from wanting to let them change my battery. And mailing the phone in for a battery swap would leave me without a phone for weeks…

I don’t believe I have ever cheated on an exam or big test, but there were a few cases in college where teachers would leave answers for homework or projects unsecured, and I did make use of it whenever I came across it.

One such case was in an introductory computer science course. We had a weekly lab session where the teaching assistant was giving us an overview of using the Unix systems at the university. At one point early on, he was teaching about file and folder permissions, and gave us all access to his personal folder. And… Then he forgot to lock the permissions back up. His folder was fully accessible for the entire semester, and he posted full solutions to every programming project there.

I remember another course where the professor would send us a link to the solutions to the homework problems, after he finished grading the homework. But I learned that I could just change the URL to access all of the future homework answers.

Well since I just program for a hobby, I am able to complete things to the point that they meet my own requirements. If I need error handling for something, I can just ask the LLM to add error handling, it typically works out quite well.

I consider myself a bad hobbyist programmer. I know a decent bit about programming, and I mainly create relatively simple things.

Before LLMs, I would spend weeks or months working on a small program, but with LLMs I can often complete it significantly faster.

Now, I don’t suppose I would consider myself to be a “vibe coder”, because I don’t expect the LLM to create the entire application for me, but I may let it generate a significant portion of code. I am generally coming up with the basic structure of the program and figuring out how it should work, then I might ask it to write individual functions, or pieces of functions. I review the code it gives me and see if it makes sense. It’s kind of like having an assistant helping me.

Programming languages are how we communicate with computers to tell them what to do. We have to learn to speak the computer’s language. But with an LLM, the computer has learned to speak our language. So now we can program in normal English, but it’s like going through a translator. You still have to be very specific about what the program needs to do, or it will just have to guess at what you wanted. And even when you are specific, something might get lost in translation. So I think the best way to avoid these issues is like I said, not expecting it to be able to make an entire program for you, but using it as an assistant to create little parts at a time.

It looks like I can go to a local repair shop to get the battery changed out. Anyone have experience with that option?

When I was a kid, it was just called ADD, attention deficit disorder. Then at some point they slipped the hyperactive in there, and it made everyone think that it’s just energetic kids. Then you got pushback in the media saying it’s just excusing people not wanting to discipline their kids. And that’s why I never even considered that I might have it until after I flunked out of college.

Fracturing support for a legacy format makes so much more sense than actually supporting a modern format like JXL, right?

I never really have more than one game at a time. Right now it’s Pokemon TCG Pocket.

I don’t know what it is, but those cleaning tablets will cause my machine to suds up so much that bubbles/water start pouring out of the exhaust and all over my floor. One of the first times it happened, all of the bubbles were screwing up a sensor and I couldn’t get the machine to work for a week. I thought it was broken, and was just about to buy a new one when I got the idea to try sucking everything dry with a shop vac.

How about water usage rates that penalize bulk consumers instead of giving them cheaper rates?

TMNT Turtles in Time on SNES. Its a fun game and kids can button mash, and turtles are still relevant today. Puzzle games like tetris can be good for using the brain. There were a ton of puzzle games in the snes era, like bust a move (puzzle bobble), yoshi’s cookie, puyo puyo (kirby’s avalanche), and many more.

I would mostly avoid NES because it looks really dated, aside from a handful of the real classics like Super Mario Bros 1 & 3.

I’ve had my eye on this for a bit, as the concept of it catches my interest. I got a little confused when I tried the demo though, so I’ve held off on it. I might give it a serious try if it ever comes out of early access.

It’s crazy how fast this thing crashed and burned. And it’s just got me thinking, it’s kind of nuts how nearly EVERYTHING around this time was failing. You had Sega of America pushing the 32X, there were these new consoles like the 3DO and the Atari Jaguar, and then even the Sega Saturn couldn’t catch a break in America. Nintendo’s virtual boy was a flop and the N64 kept getting delayed further and further. The fact that the Sony PlayStation seemed to catch on during this time actually seems like an anomaly when you look at everything else around it.

I like upscaling when it’s done well (some older iterations of dlss and fsr were not great compared to the current versions). If I have to lower my resolution to get a good frame rate then the image will already look blurry. Using upscaling to hit my monitors native resolution will generally look better. I could care less about raytracing because I don’t have a GPU strong enough to handle it.

The Internet of the 90s was such a simpler place. Better in many ways, worse in some. For instance, the Internet wasn’t so commercialized back then. Instead of a bunch of services, it was a bunch of nerds sharing information and having conversations. If you liked a tv show, you would search for websites about that show. Anyone could make their own website, so you would find tons of fan sites dedicated to each thing. Search engines didn’t provide you with information or answer questions, they just helped you sort through all the different websites, then you could look on those sites to find whatever information you were looking for. There was almost no video, it was all text and (small) images.

I’ve been using Vivaldi as my primary browser for years. My favorite feature of Vivaldi is its powerful sidebar. It’s a great browser, but because it’s based on chrome, ublock origin will eventually stop working on it. When that time comes, I’ll be switching to a Firefox based browser. I’ve been keeping my eye on floorp, but it’s not quite where I would like it to be yet.

Exactly this. Yoshi’s Story was a follow up to Yoshi’s Island, often considered one of the greatest 2d platformers of all time. I spent weeks if not months completing Yoshi’s Island. Then when Yoshi’s Story came out, I rented it and completed it over the weekend.