• 11 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I’ve got an SV08. It’s not a perfect printer, but making a printer without the problems it has (e.g. the bed takes nearly an hour to settle after it’s reached temperature, so it needs a long preheat for all but the shortest prints) would require making it much more expensive (e.g. a thick aluminium or graphite bed that wouldn’t warp would add another 20% of the cost of the printer). That specific problem is sidestepped with the MK4S by simply having a much smaller build volume rather than because it’s higher-end and more expensive. I’ve not needed support from Sovol (yet?), so can’t comment on whether they’re still super slow like they supposedly were right after the SV08 launched.




  • So for a developer to release a game on the Game Boy without Nintendo knowing, they would have to commit copyright infringement.

    That’d be trademark infringement, not copyright infringement.

    They used this same tactic on the Switch. They claim the prod keys, which are needed for Switch emulators, are copyrighted.

    That’s not quite the same thing, and still isn’t because the keys are copyrighted. There’s Digital Rights Management software running on the Switch, and part of what it does is decrypt encrypted parts of games with the keys. Originally, Nintendo managed to keep the keys secret, but eventually people managed to extract them. The next line of defence is that under the DMCA (or equivalent law in countries with a trade deal with the US), it’s illegal to attempt to circumvent DRM, and as the keys are capable of doing that, they themselves might count as a DRM circumvention device, which would be illegal to own or share. It’s a legal grey area whether or not they’d really count - lots of companies claim that it’s illegal to have these so-called illegal numbers, but Wikipedia are confident enough that that’s not what the law really says that their Illegal Number page lists a bunch of them.

    This gets even more complicated when it’s specifically about emulators, as the DMCA (or equivalent) have a specific carve-out for interoperability, saying you’re allowed to ignore parts of the DMCA if it’s specifically for the goal of making computer software work with computer hardware it wasn’t originally intended to. For the relevant parts of the DMCA that aren’t related to DRM, there’s case law confirming that it’s okay. However, no emulator developers have ever actually been sued for making an emulator for a system with any DRM (e.g. the thing with Switch emulators several months ago was settled out of court, and the threat was to sue them for things like illegally sharing games between developers, when they could have each bought their own copy, so weren’t protected by the carve-out). That means that this is a grey area, too.

    If Nintendo wanted to shut down an emulator based on its use of their keys, they’d not only have to set a precedent that the keys really did count as a DRM circumvention device, but also that the interoperability carve-out didn’t apply to DRM circumvention devices. It would be a big, expensive case, and as there are well-funded organisations that rely on the precedent not being set against them in both directions, both sides would get interested third parties funding their legal fees. No one wants that, so Nintendo stick to claiming emulators are illegal on their website, not in court documents, and only go after emulator developers who’ve provably done a second illegal thing they can be punished for.




  • This isn’t really the same kind of bug. Those bugs made instructions emit the wrong answer, which is obviously really bad, and they’re really rare. The bugs in the article make instructions take different amounts of time depending on what else the CPU has done recently, which isn’t something anyone would notice except that by asking the kernel to do something and measuring the time to execute affected instructions, an attacker that only had usermode access could learn secrets that should only be available to the kernel.



  • I imagine getting a notification on their phone reminding them if they’ve not brushed their teeth by a set time might help forgetful people to remember to brush their teeth, and if it’s via Home Assistant, which is self-hosted, entirely local, and open-source, there’s no downside other than having to set it up in the first place.







  • Someone might have thought it was so obvious that it didn’t need stating and would just ruin the joke. Alternatively, someone who was somehow unaware of the song and assumed that would be the case for nearly everyone else might have overconfidently decided it was a stretch without looking at the first line of the song.


  • The tories cut funding from the department that decides whether asylum seekers have their claims granted or denied, so there’s a big backlog of people who can’t legally get a job to support themselves and can’t legally be deported, and feeding and housing them is expensive. The right wing press blames this not on the fact that they’re all in legal limbo until the backlog is dealt with, and not on the fact that decades of foreign policy mean that there are lots of people in danger unless they flee who have English as their only extra language, so would only be able to get a job after asylum was granted if they were in the UK, but instead on the myth that the government is required by things like the Human Rights Act to provide people a life of luxury if they come here and people are coming from safe places for a free multi-year holiday. Because humans are not rational, people believe the myth, and if the myth were true, it would obviously be a good idea to stop providing luxury hotel accommodation at great expense to the taxpayer.


  • Turning the dehumidifier on ten minutes early means there aren’t ten to twenty minutes where the shower’s running with no dehumidification where condensation is able to settle on all the walls unimpeded, and the extra condensation takes a couple of extra hours to dry out again. Regardless of whether my family try to turn off the dehumidifier prematurely (and I only mentioned that as why I’d originally set a hygrometer up to graph the humidity in the bathroom, not as an ongoing problem), if that happens several times a day when someone showers, that’s more than enough dampness for black mold to form.


  • I’ve got a textured PEI bed and when I’ve printed TPU, the adhesion has been perfect, i.e. good enough that the part wasn’t going to go anywhere unless I wanted it to, but still easy enough to remove when the print was done and the bed had cooled. I guess it could vary from filament brand to brand, so it’s possibly worth trying the same brand as I used, which was cheap Geeetech stuff. It’s £8 a roll, and I’ve used their cheap PLA for ages. I wouldn’t recommend their ABS+, though, as it seems to break down at the lowest temperature that gives reasonable layer adhesion.



  • I was going to share a graph from when I put a DHT20 hygrometer in my bathroom to prove to my family that the humidity was the cause of the mould and they should stop turning the dehumidifier off when its built-in hygrometer said it should be running, but unfortunately, it was long enough ago that Home Assistant decided I no longer need my one-every-ten-seconds readings and now only shows hourly readings, which aren’t enough to prove my point here. You’ll just have to take my word for it that when I did this test, I was surprised to find that although the humidity at the other end of the room started rising quickly after the shower was turned on, it peaked fifteen or twenty minutes after it was turned off again because diffusion without something like a fan or a draught moving the air around can be really slow.

    My bathroom’s a weird shape as it’s long and thin and has a weirdly high ceiling at one end, so it’s not going to have typical airflow, but it is a real bathroom that really exists, and I did have data in the past showing it dried out faster if I manually turned the dehumidifier to maximum (so it would run even if its hygrometer said not to) ten minutes before turning the shower on than if I did it immediately before turning the shower on. Whether I’m going to shower in ten minutes is something I can know but a hygrometer can’t. This isn’t even really related to whether the dehumifier is smart as mine isn’t and I can operate its switch as easily as I could operate a smart switch, and my shower isn’t electric, so there isn’t a switch I need to operate before using it that could be made to do two jobs