Woof.

They injected internet ads into search

They did? Like filesystem search? I don’t see that.

I just went full linux on my daily driver about a year ago after running a headless linux media server for a few years.

Can someone explain to me why Ubuntu is so terrible? Is it not difficult enough to use or something?

depending on the size of the secret, it helps to have people download it ahead of time.

Also, it acts as a time stamp proving that you knew the secret at a certain time if that’s useful.

Encrypt secret. Post it publicly. Configure a web server to email the private key to any number of addresses if you don’t log in every week.

That’s why my coffee shop hands out Gabriel’s Horn shaped cups. Bottomless, but finite volume. What a scam.

It beats shattering glass and John McClaneing everyone as soon as you find out they’re barefoot.

I feel like most adventure-style movie plots need to be run as a D&D campaign before final edit.

Fun fact: The term was originally strictly based on political alignment, not economic conditions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World

I once closed my account with BoA in person and they paid me out in cash. This was 2009.

I got a letter a few months later stating that they overpaid me and I owed them 19 cents.

I told them I had an FDIC notice that I no longer had an account with them and they could fuck off. They said that they’d “let it slide.”

Possibly. Might be marking some isolation or just a stylistic choice by the designer.

My other running theory is that (due to relative proximity to audio chip), they’re muting FETs for muting audio channels when connecting headphones/speakers to prevent speaker pop.

Here’s another idea. In that image, directly below these FETs you can see the little crab logo on the chip. That’s the audio driver. It’s possible these FETs are muting FETS for the analog audio channels. Basically they hold the audio lines down while you connect/disconnect your audio devices to prevent speaker pop.

Like this:

I’ve seen some designs that use two FETs per channel which could explain why there’s so many.

Can you link that note?

I think that’s usually the method in high power applications where heat dissipation is paramount. Each of these diodes is only rated for 210mA of drain current. From a BOM cost perspective, it’d be much cheaper to just buy one 5A FET rather than parallelizing a bunch of 0.21A FETs. That 5A FET would be in a package that could handle whatever heat it generates.

From the book “Packing for Mars” by Mary Roach:

In a memoir, astronaut Michael Collins relates a story of a physician back in the Apollo era who recommended regular masturbation on long missions, lest astronauts develop prostate infections. The flight surgeon for Collins’s moon mission “decided to ignore that advice,” and ignoring seems to have been the basic approach to the human sex drive ever since. It’s the same way at the Russian space agency. Cosmonaut Alexandr Laveikin told me he too had heard that lengthy abstinence could cause prostate infections, but that the space agency pretends the issue doesn’t exist. “It’s up to yourself how you will deal with it. But everybody is doing it, everybody understands. It’s nothing. My friends ask me, ‘how are you making sex in space?’ I say, ‘By hand!’” As for the logistics: “There are possibilities. And sometimes it happens automatically while you sleep. It’s natural.” John Charles told me he’d heard about the link between prostate health and “self-stim” --at NASA, there’s an abbreviation for everything-- but never heard any formal discussion, pro or con, of orbital masturbation.

Are those near a connector (maybe on the other side?)

Could be a bunch of ESD protection diodes which only come in to play if you wear socks on carpet and touch the connector terminals.

Can you provide the numbers listed on the parts? Usually just 3 numbers/letters.

Also, looking at the circuit traces, does it look like all three terminals are connected? Is one connected to the ground plane? (The copper that covers most of the board surface around the circuit traces).

Edit: looks like they’re 2N7002 MOSFETs

https://www.diodes.com/assets/Datasheets/ds11303.pdf

These act like a digital switch that can use a small voltage to toggle a larger current. Odd to have so many, you normally wouldn’t use a bunch in parallel instead of just a larger FET.

So they look like they’re all connected to the same traces?

I worked as a consultant at a product development firm. One of our clients had us making a kitchen appliance that would take a “pod” of some kind (like Keurig).

Their little ad video that they made before involving us had a little CG video showing the pod floating into the receiver and sliding down into the machine.

When we showed them the prototype, the first question we got is if the pod receiver thing was motorized.

Like…no. You push it down. Takes 1 second.

Anyway replacing a phone battery does not need to be automated.

Except the American response to this would be to be extra shitty to retail workers since customers were shitty to them during their tour.

Yeah, but raspberry handhelds are chonky at best.

Based on the dude’s hand placement, I was concerned for a bit.