Ty. Sorry it was a grumpy warning :(

From memory, it felt like the electrostatic discharge that used to happen whenever I was touching my car.

That’s likely a valid comparison. Some parts of the tube might give you the same style of event as static electricity discharge when you touch them. Other parts would give you something more though :D so please don’t take this as a generalisation.

Interestingly, the PC suffered no damage at all and didn’t blow its internal fuse, either.

Fuses are OK as fire prevention devices, but mostly useless as electrocution prevention. They blow based off power draw and time. Many human-electric interactions don’t actually draw that much power or last that long when compared to normal circuit power draws & timescales.

Thankfully, it must have been all volts and no amps so I was OK, even though I let out quite the yelp. 😁

Complete myth. Please don’t repeat this. It’s not even remotely close to a generalisation, it’s completely wrong and dangerous.

(Sorry, pet peeve of mine. Have had family members happy to play with mains wires but terrified to touch car batteries for fear of death)

100mA through someone can be harmless. 1mA through someone can be fatal. Lethal conditions occur under certain complex circumstances involving not just voltage/current, but frequency, exact waveforms, duration, contact points and the individual’s physical parameters (human skin resistance varies a LOT, it’s not an insignificant factor).

The most commonly encountered electrical hazards involve 50/60Hz 120/230V mains and hand/foot dermal contacts. This is a lethal combination that can cause heart fibrillation. Even 5mA or 100VAC can cause this (sometimes you will see lower numbers cited, “it depends”). Death can occur a day later, see immediate medical attention if you believe you have been shocked by mains wiring.

At very high frequencies our nervous system is not sensitive, so we can pass larger amounts of current or deal with higher voltages without much harm. I’ll still hedge this with “it depends”, you can get thermal burns (which if on the eyes includes blindness) and pathways through the body vary with contact points, changing the risks.

Static electricity discharges can be crazily high voltages and currents (many amps, sometimes hundreds of amps). Yet they are not a hazard.

The high voltages in your CRT will supply very high currents when applied to dermal contact points on the human body. This will likely induce involuntary muscle contraction. Prolonged contact could cause burns and unwanted chemical reactions to occur internally, but is unlikely to cause heart fibrillation because of the non-repeating DC nature.

I was young and did not have access to soldering irons. So I bridged the two pins with aluminium foil and sticky tape.

It would slowly peel off and my controller would suddenly stop working mid game. I couldn’t reboot the console because I couldn’t save (no VMUs). So I’d fix it live – I’d leave the screws out of the case, jiggle my fingers in there and fix it.

This was fine, worked for most of a year. Until I killed the console by accidentally touching the controller PCB to another PCB whilst doing this fix. I still have the corpse somewhere, to this day I still feel awful about it.

“I can tell you there’s people right throughout Yarra choking on their croissants this morning,” Cr Jolly told ABC Melbourne radio.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-03/melbourne-water-flood-mapping-yarra-darebin-council-outrage/105847310

Bugger!

Recently asked raspi foundation if they could do a sku with less ram for order quantity 1000. Answer was no.

IIRC the lowest skus with wifi and mmc for the CM4 & CM5 are 4gb & 8gb respectively. We only need 1gb of ram.

We were going to the CM4 to save 10usd/unit, at the cost of dramatically lower emmc write speed (slow factory programming times). I’ll have to check how much worse the price gap is now :D

Very much wishing for a competitor with reliable wifi drivers, upstream support and sim prices (or lower). Can’t wait for universal distro images that work on any sbc too ( continues dreaming )

PSA: Perfect dark (original n64) has a community-made PC port that’s beyond excellent.

https://github.com/fgsfdsfgs/perfect_dark

I hated the original because the low framerate gave me bad motion sickness. The PC port is like magic by comparison.

Read-only, or the ability to edit filenames & upload files?

Read only: as per other answers here, basically any HTTP server. The easiest one I know would be darkhttpd, because it requires no config files and can be run without root.

Read write: I like WFM https://github.com/tenox7/wfm

Absolutely amazing. Going to go for the offline port though, I don’t trust my save data to my browser.

N.B. Only worked in Chromium (not Firefox) for me. Could be due to addons though, not sure.

pungent oder of RTV gasket maker

Just if you’re interested: there are a tonne of different silicone chemistries.

Single part curing (no mixing needed, cure when exposed to air):

• Acetoxy (emit acetic acid)
• Alkoxy (emit methanol)
• Acetone
• Ketoxime (don’t know if this one smells)

Two-part curing (you have to mix the two components, then it starts setting):

• Condensation cure (tin catalyst) cheaper
• Addition cure (platinum catalyst) basically better in every way but more expensive

Yes it looks like it’s adjusting the port length. (In plain english: some speaker boxes have an intentional hole in them, if you adjust the length of the pathway that sound takes to exit the box through this hole then you adjust how bassy it sounds).

To add a hollow cavity into the plastic part would immensely complicate the design of the moulds (assuming you try and implement the cavity in the same style & orientation of what gluing that bit of wood in achieves). The plastic shells of this speaker look like they’ve been designed for two-part moulds, which is the cheapest and simplest way of designing a mould. Any internal cavities of the part would require bits of steel mould to be in the cavity during injection, those pieces then have to be removed somehow and that would be a nightmare. Two part moulds can just be clamped & separated over and over again without snagging on anything.

For the walls of a speaker to reflect sound they need to have a density that is very different to the air inside the chamber. As it turns out basically anything fulfills this criteria, even cardboard makes fine speakers (just don’t get it wet or poke holes in it). Plastic vs MDF wouldn’t matter here acoustically, both are fine.

Bits of particle board can easily be cut and glued by unskilled workers. For business reasons the injection moulding might be getting done at a different place to the final assembly, and the product manager who wants the speakers properly ported might only be in charge of the latter. IDK.

glue applied likely by a machine

I suspect this would be all human assembly. They’ll probably have motorised torque-limited screwdrivers and jigs to hold the parts on during assembly, but still human arms doing the work.

In particular: stuffing the white polyester wadding in would be a PITA for an automated assembly machine. Humans are tolerant of variation and bits of wadding blowing away, pre-programmed movement robots are not.

Every news website is covering it. I think I’ve spotted most of 10 articles around the place.

The law of well-marketed unreleased goods dictates that this vehicle is not going to meet any of the promises mentioned in the articles. I hope to be proven wrong, but just like video games: don’t pre-order, wait for it to come out and be reviewed.

I swear that I read that white lead oxide is water soluble, thus happily sticks to your fingers and then gets on your food. I must be misremembering.

Maybe it was something about the solid lead object turning into an (oxide) powder that can then be easily ported as tiny particles on greasy hands? Hearsay science and safety information from me today :)

The fun thing about Pb is it’s relatively safe in pure form. Unfortunately the oxides that appear on its surface are water soluble and love entering our bodies.

Just looked this up, apparently I’m completely wrong. Maybe I was thinking about lipid compatibility? Not sure now.

Welcome to security news theatre :(

I don’t think espressif would bother suing, these kind of misshapen claims get constantly made against popular projects all of the time. It’s just unusual to see so much coverage about this particular one.

Not so say that externally attackable vulnerabilities in an ESP32 don’t exist, they might. Bluetooth devices have an awful track record. But making them up doesn’t help the world.

Bleepingcomputer’s title and article are very misleading, the presentation did NOT reveal a backdoor into an ESP32. It looks like Bleepingcomputer completely misunderstood what was presented (EDIT: and tarlogic isn’t helping with the first sentence on their site).

Instead the presentation was about using an ESP32 as a tool to attack other devices. Additionally they discovered some undocumented commands that you can send from the ESP32 processor to the ESP32 radio peripheral that let you take control of it and potentially send some extra forms of traffic that could be useful. They did NOT present anything about the ESP32 bluetooth radio being externally attackable.

Another perspective that might help: imagine you have a cheap bluetooth chipset that is open source and well documented. That would give you more than what the presentation just found. Would Bleepingcomputer then be reporting it’s a backdoor threatening millions of devices?

It looks identical to me. Same size before clicking, same size after right clicking -> Open image in new tab.

All of the the surface normals are backwards. This means your shoe is inside-out; instead of being a solid shoe in a vacuum it’s a shoe-shaped-hole inside a solid universe.

By default blender renders all polys as double-sided so you mostly don’t notice (other than some lighting oddities near corners). Turn on backface culling if you want to check if your normals are the right way around or not.

I often end up with some of my polys backwards because of the way I extrude and join parts of my models. I distinctly remember a bug in Gmax (old free version of 3DSmax) where the mirror tool would create polygons with some special, broken property where their normals would be correct in the editor, but completely wrong when exported :( much time and hassle was lost to that.

it would be interesting to know if the hole is connected right through to the barb or not

I feel very uncomfortable with the thought of probing this thing with long metal rods whilst looking down the end.

maybe hint it to police

I guess I could try and send them the pics and ask them about this “suspicious object”. Hopefully it’s just a bong.

(I can’t quite see it being an arsenic cannon, but yeah I wasn’t planning on trusting my copper oxide assumption regardless xD)

I was going to reply with “you can’t use barbed fittings at high pressures”, but I looked it up and found some claiming 150psi (10 atmospheres). Huh. Perhaps this did start life as a hydraulic cylinder that has had some parts lopped off.

Not sure what the tube is filled with, but it looks like a lot of corrosion.

I don’t think it’s built up corrosion. The pipe is steel and corrodes to red/brown iron oxide, as visible around the circumference at the end. The green colour in the filling is not an iron oxide. It might be a copper oxide, or some dye in the white material.

Hmm. I admittedly don’t have experience here, but I guess that makes sense.

I’m not sure how you would attach an elbow to a barb fitting though. A rubber pipe is usually used on these (but that would then burn/melt).

Is plaster of paris usually used to make bongs? I’ve only really noticed plastic bottle ones in the bush. I guess plaster will survive burning things better than plastic, but it’s also porous.