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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: February 15th, 2024

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  • The basic concept seems to be floating out there, and I’ve bought many empty RP2040 boards from AE without issue, but if you’re determined to do this, maybe disconnect from any networks, back up your PC, and start with an expendable cartridge. :-)

    I don’t THINK a Pi Pico clone could send enough voltage back up into a board to fry a cart, but it’s your risk. 98% chance everything is fine, but you’re spending money on what should have a 100% chance of being fine.

    Or, accept the almost-inevitable and just grab ROMs of your carts. If you really want to experiment, maybe build the dumper itself as a DIY project. Buying someone else’s device to create files somebody already ripped twenty years ago doesn’t quite pull the right nostalgia or hobbyist levers for me, but we have to go where our nerdery takes us, and from that perspective, I understand.


  • Like I said, I didn’t do the actual paperwork, but it seemed intentionally thorough, maybe even verging on onerous, but not like they were trying to trick you. We did have to find every single birth or death or marriage certificate along the way, eventually landing on an actual Luxembourgish record matching the name and timeframe pretty closely, and because it was through a female line, she had to physically go to Luxembourg (she has trips to Amsterdam from time to time, so it wasn’t too bad). The whole process took a few months IIRC, and involved lots of emails, letters, and checks to various counties in Minnesota and North Dakota.


  • As an adopted person, I did 23andme and a couple others over a decade ago. With a lot of online resources and good advice and friendly DNA cousins (some of whom I’m still in contact with), I was able to triangulate my birth family. Assuming that rumors of a surprise cousin in Texas didn’t actually cause all the relatives who’ve tested since to do so, it would be way easier to track it down today than it was then, when 3rd-cousin-ish was as good as I had available.

    I might be eligible for a couple of passports from the paternal side (interesting family story), but it would require actually getting my obviously alcoholic and possibly mentally ill bio-father to acknowledge me and that he was never located to sign over any rights in the 70s. I’ve already got one dysfunctional dad, and while I’m very firmly convinced that 99.9% of adoptees should be allowed to who their birth family is, beyond that we have to deal with the same shit everybody else does, including people who want no-contact, so my motivation to follow this up has been limited.

    I was able to find enough straightforward records to help my wife and kiddo get Luxembourg citizenship. I did the research, and an immigration firm retained by her employer did the actual paperwork. I should be able to tag along with them if the shit hits the fan here in the States, which is nice. :-)



  • Most of them are not good examples of the fine arts. Shit, the average town would just buy one from travelling salesmen who intentionally sold mass produced statues that had easily modified insignia and could be sold on either side of the Mason-Dixon line. The one in this story was just a carved obelisk from the early 20th century, probably from a tombstone yard in northeast Georgia.

    If somebody ponied up for Auguste Rodin to do a Confederate statue, then okay fine let’s squirrel it away in the corner of a museum somewhere, maybe even from a lesser light like Charles Keck, but other than that you could adequately preserve the artistic and historical value of these things, even the ones of specific enslaving assholes, with a dozen examples in a storage unit somewhere, along with a flash drive holding 3D scans of the rest, and that’s presuming you actually got all the southern municipalities to agree to take them down.




  • He suggested that the company might experiment with paywalled subreddits as it looks to monetize new features. “I think the existing, altruistic, free version of Reddit will continue to exist and grow and thrive just the way it has,” Huffman said. “But now we will unlock the door for new use cases, new types of subreddits that can be built that may have exclusive content or private areas, things of that nature.”

    Frankly, it sounds like he wants to take on OnlyFans, or more prosaically, Patreon? I guess? I suppose as a platform to host paid interactions with people who think they have unique content and interesting takes, Reddit’s as good as any, but the upside seems limited here.


  • So I still hang out on reddit a bit, mostly for mechanical keyboards and sports stuff, and they are very clearly letting old.reddit, and therefore RES along with it, die on the vine. You have to pop over to new reddit to do certain administrative things, and you (or at least I) can only upload a single picture on a post, and you have to use the new interface to upload a gallery. Clicking on images now often takes you to a weird new-interface landing page instead of the image itself or a page with the old interface. I think they’re going to erode the functionality until people give up and then say, “whelp… nobody was using it! Time to pull the plug!”

    At which point I’m probably done. Then, Dystopia is almost the last iOS app standing but I don’t think they’re updating it much, so I’m probably out if/when they go too.

    I’ve sort of accepted as a middle aged man with middle aged friends and senior citizen relatives that being tracked across mainstream social media is a thing that will be in my life, so it’s not even ideological, really. Reddit is just a lot less pleasant to use on the new interfaces, with the new monetization mindset, and doesn’t have the “killer app” of my actual friends and family, so it needs to be a pleasant experience and community, and not feel like I’m navigating a bot-farm ad-soaked beatdown every time I use it.


  • I have mostly disengaged from participating on Reddit, but I still pop in for hobby and special-interest subs, which have been slow to really build traction on Lemmy.

    I only have one comment like that, but in checking the poster’s history, it just looks like they dived head-first into the fountain pen rabbit hole last year. I think in my case it might be a product of the Google deal and their promoting reddit in search queries by default. Pretty easy for a regular user to search “what fountain pen did the dr. cox actor have in Office space?” and forget to check the date before throwing a (likely correct) answer in there.