I’d be more than happy to sacrifice a distro I don’t care about like Ubuntu to the mainstream if it means Microsoft’s market cap gets a sizeable chunk taken out of it.

There’s actually no digital audio involved anywhere in this process. It’s all analog.

A magnetic tape cassette holds raw wave data of the sounds it records. Just like a vinyl record, except the groove is in the magnetic field instead of physically etched into the surface of the tape, and the needle is an electromagnet instead of, well, a needle.

An audio cable using a standard 3.5mm jack also transmits raw wave data. It has to, because the electromagnetic pulses in the cable are what directly drive the electromagnets in whatever speakers they’re hooked up to. If it’s coming out of a digital player, the player has to convert the signal on its own using an onboard digital-to-analog converter (a DAC).

The neat part is that since a tape deck read head is looking for an analog wave signal, and an analog wave signal is what an aux cable carries, the two are directly compatible with one another. If you actually crack one of these tape deck hacks open, you’ll find the whole thing is completely empty, save for the audio cable wires going directly to the write head that mimics the tape. Beyond that, there’s no conversion equipment, no circuit board, nothing. It’s a direct pass-through.

The body of the thing is nothing more than an elaborate way to trip all the mechanisms in the tape deck to trick it into thinking it’s holding a valid cassette, while simply holding the write head fixed in the proper spot.

I’m sure you already know all of this. I just think it’s really cool and I enjoy talking about it. Analog tech is amazing.

For anyone who was using K-9 wondering why Thunderbird looks no different, it’s because they aren’t different.

They build both apps from the exact same codebase. Only difference between the two are the default color scheme, the branding icons, and the text strings of the application’s name. It’s literally just a choice of which brand skin you prefer.

Which, honestly, kinda cool. A virtually zero-cost way to keep a few K-9 stans happy.

It’s also part of what makes FOSS niche.

why is there no replacement for x11 forwarding over ssh??

There kind of is. The project you’re looking for is waypipe.

Knowing how these things tend to go, I predict you’ll try to use it for your use case and it just won’t work for whatever stupid reason. But I successfully used it to tunnel an app from my Debian machine at home to a Windows machine under WSL.

The meme format implies she catfished you with the promise of “Netflix and chill” at her house only to pull a gun on you.

In particular, she wants you to review and merge that goddamn pull request she made to your open source project repo two months ago that finally fixes that one really annoying bug.

It’s speculated that the patent in question (or one of) is one that essentially protects the gameplay loop of Pokémon Legends Arceus.

https://ipforce.jp/patent-jp-P_B1-7545191

Running the first claim of the invention through Google Translate yields this massive run-on sentence description:

The computer causes a player character in a virtual space to take a stance to release a capture item when a first category group including a plurality of types of capture items for capturing a field character placed on a field in a virtual space is selected based on an operation input of pressing an operation button, and causes a player character in the virtual space to take a stance to release the capture item when a second category group including a plurality of types of combat characters that engage in combat is selected, and determines an aiming direction in the virtual space based on a directional input, and further selects the capture item included in the first category group when the first category group is selected, and the combat character included in the second category group when the second category group is selected, based on an operation input using an operation button different from the operation button , and causes the player character in the virtual space to take a stance to release the capture item when a first category group including a plurality of types of capture items for capturing a field character placed on a field in a virtual space is selected, and determines an aiming direction in the virtual space based on an operation input using an operation button different from the operation button, A game program which, based on an operation input of releasing the operation button pressed when having the player character perform an action, has the player character perform an action of releasing the selected capture item in the aiming direction if the capture item is selected, and has the player character perform an action of releasing the selected combat character in the aiming direction if the combat character is selected, and when the capture item is released and hits the field character, makes a capture success determination as to whether the capture is successful, and when the capture success determination is judged to be positive, sets the field character hit by the capture item to a state where it is owned by the player, and when the combat character is released to a location where it can fight with the field character, starts a fight on the field between the combat character and the field character.

Essentially, Nintendo has a patent on video games that involve throwing a capsule device at characters in a virtual space to capture them and initiate battle with them. In other words, they have a patent on the concept of Poké Balls (as they appear and function in Legends Arceus, specifically).

Palworld has “Pal Spheres”, which are basically just Poké Balls with barely legally distinct naming.

If this sounds like an unfairly broad thing for Nintendo to have a patent on, I’m not so sure I agree. It’s not like they’re trying to enforce a blanket patent on all creature collectors. Just the concept of characters physically throwing capsule devices at creatures.

If you think about it, that’s kind of the one thing that sets Pokémon apart from others in the genre. If there’s anything to be protected, that’s it. It’s literally what Pokémon is named after–you put the monster in your pocket, using the capsule you threw at it.

Palworld could have easily dodged this bullet. They claim they aren’t inspired by Pokémon, and that they’re instead inspired by Ark: Survival Evolved. Funny, then, that Ark doesn’t have throwable capsules, yet Palworld decided to add them. I’m not sure I buy their statement. And if this is indeed the patent being violated, I don’t think a court will buy it either.

I’m not trying to be a Pokémon apologist here. I want Palworld to succeed and give Pokémon a run for its money. But looking at the evidence, it’s clear to me Pocketpair flew a little too close to the sun here. And they’re kind of idiots for it.

I’m just surprised they aren’t getting nailed for the alleged blatant asset theft.

The other day I learned that you can just grep an unmounted filesystem device. It will read the entire disk sequentially like it’s one huuuuge file. And it will reveal everything on that disk… whether a file inode points to it or not.

Used it to recover data from a file I accidentally clobbered with an errant mv command. It’s not reliable, but when you delete a file, it’s usually not truly gone yet… With a little luck, as long as you know a unique snippet that was in it, you can find it again before the space gets something else written there. Don’t even need special recovery tools to do it, just use dd in a for loop to read the disc in chunks that fit in RAM, and grep -a for your data.

I mean, yeah, kind of. In the same way pilots fly planes out of a stubborn sense of pride for knowing what all the flight deck controls do.