The cheapst way is this: Don’t lie to your children. Take responsibility for your choices. Talk to your children and explain why an adult needs to make responsible choices.

Aka. Bop’n’Rumble for Commodore 64.

It wasn’t all bad. The gameplay was alright.

Blooming Christmas

Most people don’t get a chance to do those things. Wake up, commute while sending off kids, work dreadful shit, collect kids, shop, make dinner, relax15 minutes, pass out, repeat.

Except. bank holiday comes 6 times a year. Cheers.

No problem. Have fun.

I don’t know if there’s a community for this, but anyway, this is my “surf guitar”.:

It’s been a few years but it still looks like the day I made it.

The kit I used was a Harley Benton from Thomann.

It was all pretty straight forward. The kit was made to be assembled with a bolt on neck all predrilled, so it was basically just shaping the body and headstock and then paint and varnish.

I did look up some painting techniques, but I really just wanted to stain the wood, so I did that with a brush and then 2 coats of varnish. I had to sand the wood first to make it more open for staining instead of paint. If you want to paint or spray paint you should probably keep or make a base coat to avoid the wood absorbing the paint.

It was a cheap stratocaster-like kit, so I wasn’t too concerned with making mistakes, but I’ll admit that putting the saw into a guitar was a little daunting at first.

I used a multi-cutter for most of it to make very precise cuts. And lots and lots of sandpaper by hand with different grit sizes.

It only took a few evenings to do, so it is not difficult at all, but I guess it depends on how much you want to customize it.

Yes absolutely, I enjoyed it and might do it again sometime with a different kit.

I do have a lot of tools already so that wasn’t costly, only good practice, but it did take somewhat longer than I expected.

I wouldn’t attempt to make the neck and fretboard from scratch, so a kit with a good neck is a good starting point.

I saw a headline on some guitar magazine “These are the most over priced guitars currently”. Says a lot and it’s true.

There’s not much point in throwing money at a brand name anymore. Quality control is long gone and they all come straight out of a factory anyway. It’s alright though, because factory quality is decent, and with a little know-how you can easily make them play good.

My best guitar is a $100 kit-build. Acknowledging that I’d need to do a full setup on any guitar I figured I might as well paint and assemble it myself, because I’m not going to pay several hundreds just for a paint job and a logo.

I doubt that’s deliberate (it’s probably depending on some other task or shit that you don’t even intend to use), but it’s exactly the kind of bloat that turns people away from Windows.

Windows seems to work alright for my work pc, where I’m constantly logged into their cloud, newer switch users, logged in long enough daily to get all the updates and have IT to roll out stuff, so I hardly ever have issues there.

My personal computer is a different thing. I have several users, use it about once weekly, making it basically unbootable. As soon as I open the lid, Microsoft starts bugging me to do a shit load of things and download gigabytes of crap that Microsoft, and not I, needs me to do before I can even use it. More often than not I simply close the lid again.

It’s not unusual to meet people who don’t even have a pc these days. Most people can solve their daily stuff on any cell phone browser. I find it kinda amusing that Microsoft is pushing people that way.

Yes Android Auto is needlessly complex. I don’t think the parking sensor is the cause anyway.

Perhaps there are some options on the phone to disable screen takeover or pop-ups or something. Deleting all app permissions is my best guess.

There is no good fix. It’s a Google thing. People have tried using roots and OBD2 fixes, but there is no easy solution.

I don’t know the Spotify app that well, but it should be possible to scroll through songs on a playlist using controls on the steering wheel or voice control. Those methods shouldn’t trigger the scroll warning.

Alternatively, he could skip Android Auto and use Bluetooth instead if it’s only connected for the music. That’s what I do for other music apps and the steering wheel controls also work just fine that way too as long as I have prepared a playlist in advance.

11 is missing the hour hand in the miniatures.

It’s always a resistor. Planned obsolescence is basically putting a too small resistor somewhere. The parts they make for repair shops are usually better, so if you do take the time to swap a print, you will have a better appliance afterwards for a fraction of the cost of a new shitty machine.

Soldering the specific resistor can be done too, but for anyone who doesn’t have a stock of resistors and soldering tools/skill it’s usually a easier and just as cheap to get new print if they’re available.

The music doesn’t have to be completely synthesized… Most early computers would simply reuse the audio snippets as “samples”, and program the pitch and timing in a “tracker”

Listening to the Flappy Birds music, which I admit that I did, then all of the music could be done in a tracker, even if it might not have been originally. It’s a bit of a lost art form, but there are several kilobytes to save!

Personally, I have been considering making a HTML5 game, including the sunvox DLL, to make it really easy to put tiny yet advanced music files into a cross platform browsable game. Haven’t gotten around to it though…

What’s the size of the music/graphics/game code/stuff that is needed for any app to run on Android?

I believe (without knowing for sure) that you could make a similar game much smaller by “rendering” the music and some of the graphics.

Despite being a shitty president and an overall fool, he actually had a way with words. Remember 2017?

>Former President George W. Bush reportedly thought President Trump’s inauguration speech “was some weird shit.”

Perhaps someone could make a business of it then.

Chromebooks sold well enough. Google made $30 billion on that in 2023.

Anyone willing to put together a physical Linux machine, market and support it could take a chunk of that.

It would be nice if it was possible to simply go to a website, check off on the stuff you want and then get a full package.

I liked the idea of AV Linux, because it comes in a bundle of stuff that I need, but it also comes with a lot stuff that I don’t need, and I’m not sure the desktop is my choice. It also didn’t really work at the time I tried it.(Some years ago).

So… if I, a stupid user, could simply go to a website, check mark at the desktop, check off which office package, music apps, browser, etc.etc. and then get a download of that in one go where it’s all set-up and works, it would be a lot easier than having to go through the process of installing the OS and then installing/removing apps, and then making it work…

Like, let’s say I want a PC just for music creation, I should be able to download the the OS with the DAW of my choice, all the VSTis and potentially also the most common free sound banks. In one file.

If I wanted an office PC, I should be able to get the OS, the office suite of choice and all the misc. PDF tools, email client and whatnot of choice. All in one go.

Windows and macOS sort of came with everything before, but these days they’re just as annoying to set up as any Linux distribution. Linux as a whole could take advantage of that situation by offering a prepackaged but custom installation.

Of course it would also help if someone made a Linux installer for windows, so users didn’t have to use windows to create a bootable USB. I think this is the step that normal users hesitate on. I don’t know if it’s possible, but it ought to be possible from software to partion the disc and install dual boot or something.

Yes. Linux Mint works “straight out of the box”.

It comes with a preinstalled browser (Firefox), so if you only use your computer for online stuff, then you dont need to do anything at all. Just use it.

The only technical thing you might want to do is to enter the WiFi password and find the software manager to install any additional apps you need.If you can install apps on your phone, then you can also install apps on Linux Mint.

I actually found that it was a lot easier to install Mint than setting up a new Windows pc. The most difficult part was using a windows pc to download it and making a bootable USB stick. Your friend can help you with that or you can follow a guide.

I have had zero issues and I have never written a single command line. It just works.