They smell like plastic, metal, complex hydrocarbons, and death.

It’s likely CentOS 7.9, which was released in Nov. 2020 and shipped with kernel version 3.10.0-1160. It’s not completely ridiculous for a one year old POS systems to have a four year old OS. Design for those systems probably started a few years ago, when CentOS 7.9 was relatively recent. For an embedded system the bias would have been toward an established and mature OS, and CentOS 8.x was likely considered “too new” at the time they were speccing these systems. Remotely upgrading between major releases would not be advisable in an embedded system. The RHEL/CentOS in-place upgrade story is… not great. There was zero support for in-place upgrade until RHEL/CentOS 7, and it’s still considered “at your own risk” (source).

Oh for sure, those are a communal resource.

Because the toxins your body is reacting to are already in your bloodstream. It’ll take time for those to get metabolized by your liver, and how much or little you vomit won’t change how much work your liver has to do.

One of my grandfathers worked for a telephone company before he passed. That man was an absolute pack rat, he wouldn’t throw anything away. So naturally he had boxes and boxes of punch cards in this basement. I guess they were being thrown out when his employer upgraded to machines that didn’t need punch cards, so he snagged those to use as note paper. I will say, they were great for taking notes. Nice sturdy card stock, and the perfect dimensions for making a shopping list or the like.

He was a raging alcoholic who hid his illness from the medical professionals who examined him as part of his Super Size Me “experiment.” A lifetime of booze did way more damage than 30 days of McDs possibly could.

The plow. It allowed early river valley peoples to generate semi-reliable food surpluses, and those food surpluses triggered everything that came after. I can’t take credit for this argument, I first encountered it in this episode from the first season of Connections.

Guy Gavriel Kay. First book published in 1984, part of a trilogy that was Tolkien-esque, quite decent, but not exactly ground-breaking. He’s since gone on to something a little more unique, which he describes as “historical fiction with a quarter-turn to the fantastic.” Impeccably researched but set an alternate world that’s a close but not exact mirror of our own. This allows him to take a few small liberties with historical accuracy in service of telling a better story. Personally I think he really hit his stride in 1995 with The Lions of Al-Rassan, and almost everything he’s written since then has been exceptional.

MEC used to be the Canadian equivalent to REI. The “C” in MEC stood for “cooperative,” as in cooperative corporation. Members are supposed to be part-owners and have a say in how the business is run. Despite that, in 2020 the MEC board sold the company to a US firm without consulting the member-owners.

Indie game developers have been getting hit with chargebacks for years. To be clear, not every key on the resellers’ sites are illegitimate. There are lots of legitimate reasons to want to resell a key, for example a key for a game you’re not interested in that’s received as part of a Humble Bundle or something. However when someone uploads 1000 keys for a newly launched game, it’s highly unlikely that those are legit but the key reseller sites don’t ask any questions about where the keys come from. The resellers just want to sell the key and take their cut, and they don’t give a shit if it was purchased with a stolen credit card because the original key seller is the one left holding the bag when a chargeback occurs.

Hard cheeses are dense enough that the mold can only grow on the surface. If you cut off the moldy parts and discard them, you’re getting rid of the vast majority of the mold. There will likely be some spores on the rest of the cheese, but not enough to harm you.

Soft cheeses are much less dense, meaning that the mold can penetrate below the surface more easily. If you can see mold on top then it’s likely throughout the cheese, and thus it’s much less safe to eat.

Key resellers are really, truly awful. In many cases the keys are purchased from legitimate sites using stolen credit card numbers. The key resellers plead ignorance as to where the keys come from, but it’s an open secret at this point. If you don’t want to pay the Steam/Gog price, piracy is less awful because you won’t be fueling a criminal enterprise and there’s no chance your Steam/Gog account will get a stolen key revoked.

Credit card fraud and software keys actually ends up being paid for by the rest of us. Fraudulent transactions and chargebacks lead to higher merchant fees, and those costs end up getting passed on to legitimate purchasers.

It seems pretty poor, especially for 2023. This article from four years ago has TSMC touting an 80% yield rate on their new-at-the-time 5nm process. Still, the fact that Huawei is able to produce 7nm parts at all is something of a victory. Huawei is probably around five years behind TSMC at this point but may be able to close that gap over time.

To be honest, I didn’t either but I wanted to know where all these names come from. So I did some Googling and that’s what I found. Apologies if I’ve mangled anything, but I think I got the broad strokes right. Etymology (the study of the origin and evolution of words) is neat!

Essex comes from Old English Eastseaxan, literally “East Saxons”. In other words, this is the part of England that was invaded/settled by the Saxons and they divided their lands into east, south and west regions, plus a middle region (middle Saxons, modern-day Middlesex).

There’s no Norsex because at that time the lands to north of Saxon territory were held by the Angles. They also divided themselves into East Angles, South Angles, etc., but those names don’t seem to have survived into the modern day. Interestingly though, the Kingdom of East Anglia was divided into “North Folk” and “South Folk”, which is the origin of the modern-day names for Norfolk and Suffolk.

If you’ve heard of the Anglo-Saxons, yeah, that’s these guys, the Angles and the Saxons. The Angles came from parts of modern-day Denmark, the Saxons from parts of modern-day northern Germany. They shared a lot of common Germanic culture but were also rivals.

A fitness watch. Having a more accurate estimate of calories burned makes it easier to maintain a consistent calorie deficit every day. Down 20 pounds since Xmas!