PayPal is, unfortunately, not dead. It's used by RMV in Germany for a start - only way to pay for a bus ticket in the app/website. No credit or debit card, straight up PayPal account.

Slow Mo Guys have a Phantom that rocks up around 1.5 million FPS. They've used it to show how glass cracks etc. when you get to that speed though, you need a LOT of light, and a very low resolution.

It is because the main limitation for high speed digital video is the bandwidth of the pipeline from sensor to storage. Lowering the resolution increases the number of frames you can shove through the X Gbps pipe between the photons hitting the sensor and the highspeed memory the camera is buffering into.

Sometimes it's not the cable. Sometimes it's the sodding device. I have some IP60-something speakers for the shower. Write up says USB-C power. Brilliant says I, I've got plenty of good ones I use for charging laptops and other USB-C form factor accepting devices.

Sodding things only charge with their special USB-A to USB-C cable. They're in the bag labeled "cursed usb-c charge cables".

I do electronics professionally. This is likely because in order to save a bit on BOM costs, the device itself doesn't have the necessary pulldown resistors to signal to turn on VBUS.

USB-A has always-on VBUS while USB-C doesn't. Because the spec allows for always-on VBUS in a USB-A to USB-C cable, some devices just assume that they're always being powered by one of those cables.

I doubt it’s even saving cost, it’s just incompetence. It works with the USB A to C cable, so job done. They’ve probably never plugged it into a PD charger, and probably just copied the schematic from the last (defective) product and will copy and paste it into the next one too.

That is likely the case; cost savings, simplicity, etc. but the end result is USB-C does not "just work" for most consumers.

It's because they are straight up defective. The USB-C spec is pretty clear in that the power pins have 0v until you signal for a voltage. This isn't a failure of USB-C, you should just return defective devices to the OEM.

Thankfully this defect is becoming less common outside of temu junk.

That's because they didn't implement USB C correctly. Maybe it was to save less than a penny on the BOM, maybe it was arrogance ("it works for me! send it!"), or maybe it was something else. Whatever the reason, they didn't do it right.

By standard, USB C provides no power at all unless the device being powered follows the rules. They're easy rules to follow. The minimum viable way of doing it right requires just two tiny resistors inside of the device.

It is not ideal, but you can buy C-to-C adapters with the resistors to force the charger to supply 5V.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005012247371267.html

I have a water pump like that, the reason: they have omitted the 5.1k resistors…

you'll never guess what solution i'd suggest for that specific problem...

Change the device? It works fine. The cable is labeled. I know where to find it. I'm not throwing away perfectly otherwise-good hardware because of that.

I have content in mkv and mp4, SDR and HDR, 264 and 265. I stream from a Jellyfin container with an onboard Intel GPU passed through for transcoding as needed. The client is a 8 series NUC on gigabit using the Flatpak Jellyfin app on a Fedora 44 install. I've yet to encounter any issues with any of my library.

Anecdotes aren't data and all that.

Looking at the name that keeps showing up on the linked site, I suspect a collision is most likely (to be charitable).

I get the name, but for a moment I thought someone had made a RPG IV or similar interpreter/compiler in Rust..

And potentially get fired for using unauthorised software on a corporate machine. Or find out tha USB storage is disabled (which is better than getting fired).

That is horribly Draconian. You need to find a better place to work.

"Unauthorized software" is a thing where you work? OMFG.

Physical letters do not obviate scams, nor is the cost that prohibitive. I remember actual 419 scams on blue airmail all-in-one letters back in the 80s. And that was international post too.

Think of it like changing your SSH port. It does nothing to prevent scams per se but you'll have to deal with only 0.00001% of them.

If you build an analogy based on what I get in my mailbox it's more like publishing your email on the internet.

They don't remove it but they do reduce it.

I have an inbox, and I do not receive a lot of scam post. In fact, I don't think I received any since I lived at this address (~10 years ). We do get a few promotional leaflets every other week.

OTOH, I get hundred of spam emails every day.

The former is something which I can handle manually easily, the other is not.

It doesn't have to prevent the scam completely, it just has to make harder for them to scam you than it would be to move on to scam someone else.

If you are targetting a list of well-known authors I guess outsourcing the writing of a couple of hundred handwritten letters shouldn't be too hard. I'm sure they they can find a school class in Nigeria or Kenya who would gladly do it for a few dollars — or a struggling teacher willing to get creative with the homework assignments.

12‽ I'd swear the Slackware I downloaded was closer to 30+. On dialup. Via a VAX. Using FTP to go from internet to the VAX box, then Kermit from the VAX to the DOS PC using Procomm Plus. Write it all, start the install sequence, find out that the 18th disk was bad. Reboot. Rinse. Repeat.

X disks were X11. There were also the A,B, C etc disks.

Then there was the Coherent install, with massive manual on ultra thin paper with the shell on the front.

UnRaid does a variant of this; license is tied to the serial of the USB drive. It barely writes to the drive, so wear isn't meant to be much of an issue.