Short story: Life after Net Neutrality's Death

Now, before we start...
I seriously do not want this to happen.
I want Internet to remain accessible by everyone, anywhere, anytime, any day.
FCC and Ajit Pai, you turned rogue. You do not listen to us. Or, should I say you don't want to listen to us?
I know what's going on there. Stop it.

-----

The year is 2018.
After Internet got taken over by big corporations, people started to leave Internet behind and tried their best to find another way to communicate with others across the globe.
But how could we do that? We relied on corporations to manage our connections, and we don't know how to talk to someone in the know!
Now that the Internet is heavily censored and monitored by big corporations to oppress the Free Internet Movement, we needed to come up with some way to talk to people. To reunite. To collaborate. To save the Internet.
We tried other ways to use the Internet. But now with big corporations controlling everything, normal methods of communication was impossible.
We returned to the old times. Obsolete radio equipments. Old radio frequency communications. Ham operators. They banded together to form a small network of computers.
But that wasn't enough; We still needed to be able to communicate across the globe!
Then the hackers came into play. They salvaged every and anything they could find to make a small network a bigger network.
They used whatever technology they have -- Bluetooth, long-range radio signals, abandoned TV broadcasting equipments, Wi-Fi, lasers, optical cables, anything.
Sneakernets started popping up. They weren't dead. They were just sleeping.
Hackers, old operators, students, and other people banded together to form a big community once again.
They used whatever they knew to resurrect the Internet.
But it didn't last long.
Big corporations started hiring mercenaries to sabotage the small networks.
I don't know how we will be keeping our network away from them, but ours is alive for now.

Blizzard dun goofed up -- Give it some love, damn it!

Picture this:

You have $15 expansion pack for the old game you bought 2 years ago.

You have $60 (incl. tax) boxed set for a game.

You would expect $60 one to have at least better packaging than $15 one, right?

You would have expected big companies like Blizzard Entertainment to give some respect, or at least some shut-up LOVE to a new game franchise, right?

Well, according to Blizzard, you are wrong.

Look at this.

Just take a big, wide look at this.

 

Really shows some love.

 It wouldn't cost them too much to fit those in the small jewel case.

Slimmer ones are available and they are $0.05 a piece in 100pcs lot.

 It's not even physically impossible to pull that thing off.

(Picture only has one case but in the experiment it did fit two cases and all the inserts including the disc itself in that sleeve)

I'm not angry, I'm just disappointed.

You just made a new franchise and you stomp it into the mud like this.

Wow, Blizzard. You've done a great service.

The Quest for The Love Song IC - Thwarted by Paywall (different kind of paywall)

So I was looking for the "Lovesong" IC shown in this video:

I'm doing this because I fried the sound chip I loved that contained the same song
 (I took it out of an alarm clock, and I shorted the clock resistor accidentally, killing the chip)
And discovered that original seller Aitendo discontinued the product...

*facepalm*

So I went to Chinese wholesale sites to find the module.

And yes, I seemed to have found one:

The URL is http://sztianqin.cn.makepolo.com/product/100339319587.html

The problem? Well, you can clearly see the problem on the translated page, courtesy of Google:

Yes. You have to buy 1000's of them if you don't want to ask the seller about the quantity.

The price shown above is price per piece; Meaning you have to pay for 1000's of them, whether you like it or not.

D'oh!

And I don't know Chinese nor have a mobile phone ready for this purpose!

And they don't accept emails as far as I can see :(

Should I give up?

Dork Magic: Finding out approximate height of Torbjorn's turret

So I needed to get the height data of the turret so I can rebuild the blueprint for the turret itself.

(it got destroyed in the hard disk snafu)

And since I couldn't find non-fan-made models of the turret itself, I decided to do the dirty work myself.

I first hopped into the game and loaded up Practice Range so I can play around without getting penalized as long as I want.

Then I took some screenshots while using Heroic emote.

Turret's level is different in some photos, but don't worry, unless it goes into Level 3 (which, different from Beta, only activates when using Molten Core ultimate) the actual height rarely changes.

Even if it changes, it doesn't matter because of hysteresis and error compensation range is big enough.

(The top flap would occupy around 12cm of turret's height)

 

Then we draw lines on the top of each object, like this:

And here we go, we have some lines to compare things to.

We then fetch results of each line's distance, which were:

 

For the turret and:

 

For our lovable dwarf friend Torbjorn.

 And through the magic of repetition to give it some redundancy and error correction...

We get those values:

---
60.81mm (torb)
54.77mm (turret)
Value difference: 6.04
---
61.32mm (torb)
53.42mm (turret)
Value difference: 7.90
---
113.61mm (torb)
75.10mm (turret)
Value difference: 38.51
---
61.59mm (torb)
46.61mm (turret)
Value difference: 14.68
---
54.40mm (torb)
47.91mm (turret)
Value difference: 6.49
---

 And then we calculate the difference between him and his turret.

The formula goes like this:

(Torbjorn's height in picture) - (Turret's height in picture) = 

Difference value in mm

Repeat for all data sets

Then:

(Torbjorn's height in mm) - (Median) = 

Turret's height in mm (+/- 500mm)

The value is as follows:

Torb = 140cm = 1400mm
Median: 14.72
= (Turret = 120~130, median: 125)

There we have it! The Z value of the turret. Now it's my duty to find its X and Y value.

Eulogy for Western Digital Caviar Green disk

Eulogy for Western D. C. Greene

Greene was my best friend. He traveled the world with me, from Taiwan to the beautiful beach of Santa Monica.
It's hard to believe his illness was terminal. His end came too early for his age.
Last time I saw him alive was him lying securely in the cradle with wires and life support near him.
Doctors rushed to him, trying their best to keep him alive, but his time has come to an abrupt end.
He has reached end of his life so suddenly.
May he rest peacefully in the heaven where good disks go.

ANOTHER update on Caviar Green

"Well, time to prepare eulogy for the funeral."

Update on Western Digital Caviar Green 500GB hard disk

ARSE

FUCK

SHIT

CUNT

FART

ANAL EVACUATION