Take a look at yt-dlp. Despite it’s name, it can do a lot of web video and audio, not just YouTube.

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

I can read it, but for some reason I read it like a screenplay being read about some old-timey detective story.

It’s all fun and games until your computer turns into a black hole because there is too much information in too little of a volume.

You might want to look into using some form of parameterized queries.

NASA gave SpaceX a bunch of money because they were developing Starship. It’s this super powerful super versatile do all launch system and platform to do a lot of stuff. With NASA being required to use and fund private companies for part of what they do, they put out the call for a bunch of missions. SpaceX said they could do it with Starship and do it for cheap, much cheaper than any other company. They also have an amazing track record with the Falcon 9 and Dragon capsule. At the same time other companies are either startups with pretty much nothing but a good idea. Or the old garde which were used to getting a bunch of government money to do very basic shit for way too high of a price. ULA and Boeing seriously dropped the ball lately.

It’s easy to shit on Musk and his bullshit. But there are some really talented people working at SpaceX and a lot of the stuff they do has been impressive.

As far as Starship goes, for now it’s still a total pipe dream. Nowhere close to being what they promised it will be. But the same was said for Falcon and they pulled that one off (eventually) with the block 5 Falcon 9 being one of the most reliable rockets ever made.

I was very critical of the Starship booster. The whole we have a whole bunch of engines concept isn’t a good idea in my book. Sure if one of them fails, or even a couple, you can still do the mission. And each engine can be simpler, smaller and easier to build. And take advantage of scale to build them faster and cheaper. This is why the Soviets tried this concept with their Moon missions back in the day. However the issue is, you need to be able to detect issues and shut down engines fast enough. All the engines are close together and when things go wrong, so much energy is involved it usually leads to shit flying places it should not. This means a single engine going wrong has the potential of throwing pieces of itself at great speed into other engines, control systems or fuel tanks. And a whole lot of engines means a whole lot of points of failures. It also makes things like pipe and cable routing much more complex. Monitoring and controlling is much more complicated as well. So it isn’t all upsides, there are significant downsides also.

However their testflights have seem to have shown the engines to be reliable. The monitoring to shut down engines in time when issues are detected. And a whole lot less big booms than I was expecting. Before hand I thought the thing would just explode every time. So I have to admit, they might have figured it out. Now a couple of testflights doesn’t mean it’s reliable enough, but at least it works some of the time.

There is however also a lot of BS, as usual when Musk is involved. NASA has figured SpaceX isn’t going to deliver in time or within budget. The booster might work, but Starship is still very much a dream at this point. Some other companies have since received money for missions which earlier were claimed by SpaceX. And I believe there are multiple lawsuits going on, claiming SpaceX just under bid to deny the contract to its competitors with no expectation of delivering.

Starship was an important part of the now canceled Moon missions. But before it was canceled a lot of folk didn’t think what SpaceX promised was viable. Even if they had Starship working the way they said they would have, their plan was never going to work. It relied on launching a Starship to orbit and then have it be refueled by other Starships. But after calculating how much fuel the thing lost while waiting in orbit and how much a single Starship could provide after using most of the fuel to get itself to the other ship, it turned out best case scenario you’d need a dozen launches. And these would need to be back to back, so no refurbishment time. And this assumed the booster would be lost or at the very least land in the ocean, no returning to base. With more realistic scenarios there would need to be many more launches. And keep in mind the Starship to Starship fueling hasn’t been done before and is extremely difficult.

But as always people believed all of the BS Musk has been spouting. And to be fair SpaceX does have an impressive resume. So the NASA folk were stuck between a rock and a hard place. Deny SpaceX, even though they had the best papers and the best price? That’s a lawsuit waiting to happen. Or grant them the contract, knowing there is a good chance SpaceX isn’t going to deliver. But the same can be said for all the other companies, many of which only had concepts and not the track record like SpaceX. And we’ve all seen how good Boeing is doing right now, that crew needed a ride home provided by either the Russians or SpaceX, total embarrassment.

He will have the concepts of a plan in a couple of weeks. Literally any day now…

One thing to note, if you are using UEFI this is very unlikely to happen. It was designed from the start to have multiple boot options and Windows itself often has multiple entries. It is very rare for a Windows update to mess with any other boot options in UEFI.

You can just use an activation script. Even though technically Windows won’t be activated using the OEM license in a VM, the license is still present on the machine. So legally Windows is still licensed. To get around the thing not automatically activating, an activation script is an easy fix.

This is a good activation script:

https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts

Imagine gate keeping Linux, the irony…

Steam works absolutely perfectly on EndeavourOS. No tweaking or anything required, just install and run. It also runs just about any game I ever tried, with troubleshooting as easy as choosing a different version of Proton from the dropdown.

Please send flowers, I just died from cringe

“I try my best, but I’m not a perfect person” - Dr. Collier 2025

Right in the feels…

The annoying thing is, a lot of modern battery protection circuits will brick themselves once they read a too low battery voltage. So not only will they not charge anymore, they will never charge, even with new cells. It’s so dumb and meant to prevent 3rd party refurbished battery packs.

Yeah it’s so dumb, like we have amazing technology, yet the software is fucking terrible.

For example with most keyboard you can have a heat map of where you hit each button. So you can clearly see where the buttons should most comfortable be. However I’ve never seen any keyboard that could ever make use of that data to morph the shape of the buttons to my patterns. It seems so obvious, otherwise why collect that data?

Instead we keep making the same shitty keyboard over and over again. And big companies monitor all our keypresses because number must go up. And put dumb ass AI powered autocorrect that are trained on all data ever instead of my personal data. I swear that thing “corrects” the right word into the wrong word more often than the other way around.

Somehow touchscreens and keyboard have also gotten worse. I remember my old IPhone 4 I could type so fast without errors. And that screen was fucking tiny. Maybe I’m just too old but modern phones make my hands hurt and I still have errors all the damn time.

Nice

Tesla is also under investigation for fraud in the US. They have a wire fraud case running since last year. There is a new securities fraud case in New York. And the financial statements they’ve been reporting are under investigation.

It’s a good thing he’s investigating the fraud, since he has hands on experience with all kinds of fraud.

Betteridge strikes again

Well you’re always limited to what the distributors have selected for a certain region.

However you can get around this sometimes with so called “grey” import. That’s when you buy something meant for one region in another region, which happens a lot in Europe because the differences don’t really matter. For example something made for Germany is perfectly fine in the countries around Germany, they all use the same plugs, same regulations, the manual is often in every language anyways (plus who reads the manuals). But it can cause trouble when you need warranty as the manufacturer doesn’t like this, so they will refuse service. The EU has gotten on the ass of manufacturers to tell them to just service the customer, but it can be a hassle sometimes. In this case the reason for the different SKU has nothing to do with anything physical to the product, but instead the market it’s meant for. In some countries people are a bit richer and thus prices are higher, but smart people know you can just buy the German product from a shop in Germany and even with a bit more shipping it can still be cheaper. So sometimes it’s worth the effort.

This is also done for certain shops (for example Saturn/MediaMarkt in Europe) who get special SKUs just for them. These are often just the exact same SKU as available for the general market, but with a different number. They do this because a lot of countries have sites to compare prices at different shops. MediaMarkt had this strategy where they would heavily discount one model and market the shit out of that. This gave the public the idea MediaMarkt always had great deals. While in fact most models they sold were much more expensive than elsewhere. But nerds figured this out and created websites to compare prices between shops. So it would be obvious when the price was good at MediaMarkt and they would all buy that one, but when the price was higher they would know and not buy it. This destroyed the MediaMarkt strategy, so they made a deal with manufacturers to create different SKUs especially for them. This made it harder for the nerds to compare prices, as they used the SKUs to differentiate between different models.

For the different SKUs available in a region there are often shops available that sell them. Some shops select a certain amount of SKUs to a have a good selection from different manufacturers and have a simple selection for the customers. However other shops just sell everything the distributors have to offer. These often employ systems to automatically enrich and publish products as soon as the distributors lists them. With drop-shipping directly from the distributors, this gets even simpler. So you can recognize these shops as they have a lot of products and often don’t have great filter and search options.

Another excellent place is for example sites like Ebay, where you can find all sorts of products from all different regions. And they even have shops on there that buy stuff the distributor meant to sell, but for some reason (for example delays in shipping) couldn’t sell. Parties just buy up the entire stock and sell it through places like Ebay.

But in some cases, the manufacturer had some very weird SKUs that they could technically made, but nobody wanted them, so they never got made. This can lead to hobbyists to having easy modification options. For example a feature could be completely available on the PCB and even in the software, but the parts not populated because that SKUs didn’t include that feature. In that case it’s easy to just populate the parts and get the feature up and running.

In case you want something like 500 - 1000 parts (depending on the manufacturer and what kind of device it is, could be at least 5000 - 10000) you can often get the manufacturer to create a SKU especially for you. When this is one of the SKUs they initially planned but hadn’t selected, the costs isn’t even that high most of the times. But they can even make completely custom products as long as you are willing to buy enough volume.

The number advertised is not actually the name of the product, but the vendor code or manufacturer SKU.

I’ve had some experience in how these SKUs come to be for large brands. In a lot of cases the people developing the new models have like a whole list of monitors they could create. Out of these a selection is made for which they will create, which capabilities are good etc. This is done per region and even if the capabilities are exactly the same, it will get a different SKU for the different region. This is important because the labeling could be different, often different plugs and manuals are included. Sometimes different paperwork needs to be filed, so it’s important the SKU matches the region. From this list of product SKUs the manufacturer can create for a region local distributors choose which ones they think are good for their market. This can often be hard and different distributors can choose different SKUs (depending on the manufacturer). Out of this list of available SKUs in the channel the shops can select which ones they want to carry. Some shops just carry them all (especially when dropshipping), other shops carefully select which ones they like.

This leads the shops to have seemingly random SKUs and nonsense numbers. But that’s because those SKUs were figured out all the way back in step one. Those lists can be huge and all the numbers need to be unique. Normally there is some sort of internal structure used to generate the SKUs. But the end result is just a confusing mess of numbers.

When looking at for example distributor level at what they carry or what is offered, the numbers make a little more sense.

So it isn’t ideal, but there is reason to the madness.

OpenSCAD for life