There’s an unofficial client. It works really well. I mean, as well as this piece of shit software generally works.

https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux

Can you post a gear list?

• Hotair / Soldering station: Aoyue Int 986A
• Solder Sucker: Aoyue Int474A++
• Preheater: Aoyue Int853A Pro
• Solder: Sn62Pb36Ag2 (lowest melting point, hard to get because of regulations, but available on the Praud store from Poland for example)
• Flux: Kingbo RMA-218 (available on Aliexpress, the variant in syringes is very easy to apply)
• Convenience:
  • a brass wool sponge for removing the solder from the tip
  • a very long and thin drill bit if too much solder ever gets stuck inside the solder sucker (cleaning one of those out is a bitch)
  • tweezers

Have a lot of fun! Soldering get’s really easy if you have the right gear. Swapping out the crappy amazon solder with the good stuff from Praud made the biggest difference, imho. You can already solder a lot of stuff with a 30W soldering iron from the hobby store, but flux and solder are what’s really important.

There’s a lot of really cheap solder on amazon with way too high melting points. Sometimes the sellers just lie on their datasheet, I once fell for CFH fake solder which barely melted, even when I had my iron on overdrive. It wasn’t me, it was the crappy and fake product!

How difficult would you say reflowing one of the OG 60GB models is?

If you need to swap the RSX out, you’ll have no chance with a hot air station. You will need an infrared rework station. Reflowing the RSX is only a short-term solution, because the underfill of the chip itself has a defect. All 90nm RSX chips are bad.

There are people putting a 65nm (or 40nm) chip from the later models into the FAT PS3’s. This is called the “Frankenstein mod” and some repair shops in the US are providing that service. If you want to have a FAT lady that will last forever, I’d say this is the best solution.

I was really lucky, because I got my model going by swapping out the Tokin capacitors (but I’m aware this probably won’t last when the RSX finally gives up). The FAT PS3 board is very thick and sucks away a lot of the heat. I needed to put the board on the preheater and then used hotair combined with that to remove the caps.

Oh yeah, I also did that. ISP’s are enshittifying all over the world, mine here in Germany is doing this crap, too. They’re even a little more evil, because the first year is “free” and they bet on people forgetting about the fee after the first year.

(And also, they only send out the unlock code for your own router per snailmail letter. Dickheads.)

I got a hot air rework station with a soldering iron many years ago.

The things I’ve repaired with it are so numerous, I cannot even recount them all, but here are a few:

• an assortment of gaming controllers
• a ghetto blaster from the 1970’s
• a few gaming consoles (Xbox 360, PS3 “Fat Lady”)
• retro technology (at least two 3Dfx Voodoo’s and a rare Abit motherboard)
• a full-metal eBook Reader (Sony PRS-505) that will probably survive an atomic fallout
• a Panasonic broadcasting camera from the 1990’s (because it looked cool and I wanted it to work)
• a few LCD monitors

Even though some of that work was just replacing old capacitors, I have saved so much money by buying “broken” stuff and fixing it up. No regrets. Over the years, I paired the station with a hotplate and a solder sucker and now I could probably open up an electronics repair shop. But I mostly do these repairs for fun. Fixing things calms my mind and soothes my soul.

What was he supposed to do? He was out of mana!

Google doesn’t fucking work anymore.

True, but that is by choice. kagi.com has an agreement to use Google’s API directly and they have much better search results than Google itself.

The whole PDF file format is a mess. You can even exploit it and run Linux inside of it.

This reminds me of the sketch from Chris and Jack, where one person tries to outsmart a genie with the perfect wish and almost succeeds, but ultimately fails.

So over the top that it’s fun again. Throughout the movie, the snakes get progressively bigger until these MASSIVE snake-like schlongs get sucked out of the plane at the end. :D So unrealistic and ridiculous!

And of course, a snake had to bite into a nipple.

They wanted to make really funny and entertaining trash and they did.

Adobe products (Web is not the same)

Photoshop and Illustrator do work, but getting them to run is painful.

• you have to build a separate version of wine from source code and apply a patch to it
• it needs to be cracked (the licensing stuff does not work)
• it has to be installed on Windows and the files need to be copied manually (the installer doesn’t work)

I have done it and use it regularly, but it’s not that trivial.

But Linux is (mostly) not performant for gaming, at least not on Nvidia.

That’s true. If you really want to switch to Linux full-time, going with Nvidia is gonna be painful. Drivers have improved a lot over the last few years (especially on Wayland), but there are still so many small bugs and problems that add up and drive you crazy if you have to deal with them every day.

That’s why I sold my 3060. I had a 12GB model and for a period of a few months, the Nvidia drivers were just completely broken and I couldn’t even launch into a graphical interface (I guess they didn’t test that much VRAM because most models only had 8GB), so I had to go back to earlier (even buggier) builds. Even after they finally fixed that there were still constant graphical glitches and stuttering on Wayland with KDE…it worked, but it wasn’t fun.

Since I switched to an RX7800XT everything just works out of the box and I often get even better performance than on Windows. Just a few FPS here and there, but it’s still nice.

Nvidia doesn’t care. They do the bare minimum to make their cards somewhat work on Linux, but it’s not enough.

You can even combine them all and use Heroic Games Launcher.

You can also download a Windows 11 ISO and instead of using the official Microsoft tool, use Rufus to create a bootable USB stick. You can specify a local account to create in the tool.

That’s true, but there is a project called “ruffle” now, which is written in Rust and can play .swf files. So if you really want, you can still build Flash animations and share them online.

Ruffle also runs in browsers, thanks to wasm.

Oh yes, I miss mature characters in modern animes. I’m so tired of stupid Lolis 😭

80’s anime had believable characters that didn’t all look like they were 10-12 years old. Cyber City Oedo, Robot Carnival, Patlabor…great stuff.

Same here, I forced myself away from that platform. Took me a few weeks to get settled and find all the right communities, but it worked out well!

Ed Zitron’s gonna have a field day with this. OpenAI’s motto seems to be scaling “to infinity and beyond”. But what can you expect from a techbro CEO that takes Dyson spheres seriously.

That’s just so stupid. I can’t imagine Doctorow’s usual audience falling for this, though.

(Started reading it today and couldn’t put it away, it’s an amazing book, especially the chapter about technofeudalism. I bought my copy as a DRM-free .epub on thalia.de and it’s definitely the real one 😆.)

The Guardians of the Galaxy game did that, at least a little bit. The game seemingly ends, credits are rolling and then they slowly start to glitch out and some of the names are replaced with the name of the antagonist.

Then the credits crash out and a second bossfight starts. You can kinda see it coming, but it was still pretty cool for them to do that.