Zero. Regrets. Outside of the rare errand where I need serious cargo capacity, or visiting family, cars are only for fun now.

As a non-"car person" once agreed with me: "Yep, I hate COMMUTING in a car. But I love DRIVING."

* Food Lion, 1100 stores

* Stop & Shop, 400 stores

* GIANT/MARTIN, ~190 stores

* Hannaford, ~160 stores

Websites are down at the very least. May affect ability to place online orders for pickup and delivery. Mobile apps are down. “In-app coupon” redemption is likely down.

US brand physical stores are open and selling to customers.

We felt a lot of it was… unnervingly believable in multiple aspects. As in, what parent mentioned.

I do not look forward to the “Seretech Decision” (https://shadowrun.fandom.com/wiki/Seretech_Decision), “Shiawase Decision” (https://shadowrun.fandom.com/wiki/Shiawase_Decision) or similar sorts of judicial rulings in the real world. True nightmare fuel.

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Somewhat… prescient, is the Shiawase Decision.

This was the result of what unfolded after regional electricity prices spiked (550%) after a corporation decided to take a lot of local power for itself.

After local opposition began forming, Shiawase Corporation made a false flag attack against itself to influence a future ruling where it could then defend itself similar to a sovereign nation in a foreign land. So full corporate “extraterritoriality”, to where maintaining its own regulated militia/defense force would be legally free and clear.

Apple computers tend to have excellent resale value, and Mac Minis/Studios have the least depreciation of them all. I understand the benefits to both taxes and cash flow, but boy is Apple winning big on those lease offers for Studios.

Homer reunites with his long lost brother, who runs car company Powell Motors. Homer is ultimately tasked by his brother with helping to design a car for the “average man” that ultimately bankrupts the company for being wildly overengineered and costing too much ($82,000 in 1991-money).

Here’s the car: https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/The_Homer

We also have 4.8 million that are part-time employed, but want full-time work. That’s up from 4.7 million last month, and up from 4.5 million in June 2025, and up further from 4.2 million in June 2024.

There’s also 6.0 million that want a job, but aren’t employed. This is the same as June 2025, but up by 800,000 since June 2024.

So if you take the U-3 number (what’s reported) then factor in the other two figures, you really have 10.5% that are unemployed, discouraged, or underemployed.

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The other question never answered is, “How many jobs are needed to create equilibrium?”, or where the employment rate remains stable. That’s NEVER talked about by media or the BLS, but it’s actually not difficult to get an approximate answer.

You’d want to look at population growth rates for 18-22 years ago (as those people would now be entering the workforce), multiply that by the labor force participation rate, and then divide as appropriate for the period. Typically, the US economy would need 140,000 - 145,000 new seasonally-adjusted jobs created every month to maintain a steady employment rate, given its historic and current population growth rates.

https://www.thedrive.com/news/how-flock-cameras-wrongly-trac...

A top-loading Famicom (Famicom AV, HVC-101) instead has the Multi-Out port similar to the SNES, N64 and GameCube. However, it doesn't support RGB out of the box, and needs to be modified.

You can modify a NES-101 for RGB output as well, the issue is for the NES-101 you also need to also add the Multi-Out port to replace the RF output.

Typically the NESRGB board is what most folks will add to support RGB output. Again, for an NES-101 you have to physically add the Multi-Out port as well.

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With a Multi-Out port you now have new options for suitably modified consoles to go from the Multi-Out to Mini-HDMI with something like the RAD2X which has a vastly simplified RetroTink multiplier/upscaler inline to give you a "plug-and-play" HDMI output that detects Composite, S-Video or RGB and outputs appropriately without any need to configure. That cable works across the Famicom AV, SNES/SFC, N64 and GameCube. It adds about 53 microseconds of latency, or ~1/315th of a frame.

However you can still do Multi-Out to Composite, Multi-Out to S-Video, or Multi-Out to RGB if you wish to use some other multiplier/scaler such as an OSSC or anything else you have.

This video by RetroRGB will go over things: https://youtu.be/O4HBvpRIwa4

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Long story short, you can have an amazing picture, with a simple HDMI adapter, on nearly any old console at this point. You have to either learn to solder, or you can pay someone to do it. There's a lot of options from simply buying an upscaler and plugging whatever you have in, to modifying for maximum image quality and/or ease-of-use.

Generally, I recommend most folks "keep it simple" or at least have the "easiest to use" option (in lieu of maximum quality) on hand. If you can take it out of storage, hook it up, and start playing within 2 minutes, generally that removes the friction you'd have and you'll actually play it. Flash carts are also a great "friction remover".

For those who like their old Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance, remember that the SNES had Super Game Boy/2, and the GameCube had the Game Boy Player (also supported GBA). There's a lot to be said for playing those handheld games on a TV, with a wireless Nintendo WaveBird controller.

Though for those chasing what's possible, those options exist too, but trade off that "pick-up-and-play" factor :)

I don’t believe you were intending to paint with a broad brush, but for others I’d like to explain where SNES game pricing was in more detail, as there was quite the range of prices depending on the game and when it was released.

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The plain Jane SNES game was $50 at US launch in late 1991. Normal-ish ROM size (4Mbit). This included later released first-party titles like Super Mario Kart (1992).

Prices went up with ROM size, and as there were higher supply costs starting in late 1993 and into 1994. So something like even LOZ: A Link to the Past was $60 (8Mbit ROM used, game a bit smaller). Mega Man X was $60 for the same reason. Final Fantasy II (IV) in the US was $65 at launch (again, 8Mbit ROM). Street Fighter II (16Mbit) was $70 in 1992.

Then there’s larger games still, with ROM prices going down then up. I believe Final Fantasy III (VI) was $75 USD at launch, but that was a 24Mbit ROM. Secret of Mana (16MBit) and Chrono Trigger (32MBit) were $80 at launch. Then you had Ogre Battle which I believe was $90, despite fitting within 12Mbit (8Mbit + 4Mbit).

Another reason for $70 prices were the SuperFX chip. Stunt Race FX was $70 in the US at launch because of that chip, even though it fit into an 8Mbit ROM. Yet Star Fox was $60 was the same hardware, but launched at $60 in 1993 whereas Stunt Race FX came out in 1994 where ROM prices are higher.

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So $50 - 90, with it more in the $50-60 range at launch, and then $60 being more common through the rest of the console’s lifecycle. Special and larger games were trending towards $70 later in the console lifecycle. Then you had the few crazy games (excluding games with accessories like Lethal Enforcers) in the $75 - 90 range.

Star Fox's development is an incredibly wild story where British teenagers argued what the SNES could do with bespoke hardware, and they ended up being shipped out to produce it because Nintendo felt they couldn't ever do it themselves. It all started with Argonaut's demo of what would eventually be released in Japan as "X". Entirely software-based 3D, on the original Game Boy.

There's actually a very humble quote by Miyamoto where he learned that someone can't just get better as a function of age and experience, after he clearly realized that these teenagers could produce something no one else in Nintendo ever had a hope of. Perhaps it's why the franchise has done so little -- Nintendo's just not in a remotely similar headspace the Argonaut lads were.

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Fun videos on the subject:

"The Teenagers Who Taught Nintendo How to Make Star Fox" - People Make Games, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=to4Ekb0kXiE

"The Making of Star Fox" - Strafefox, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDhNT2Qv-Mo

I built in February 2025, and my two 48GB DIMMs were $440. Last month I checked and they were $1800 if you could even find them still in stock.

For my workloads it was like getting 2 - 2.5 more CPU cores worth of performance, so it was worth it, since the CPU was already as beefy as it could be. It was a reasonable premium then. Today? I’m not sure the math would still math.

DACs will usually be even (slightly) lower power per port, and slightly lower latency[1] (we’re fighting over microseconds here!), with excellent durability. The tradeoff is for passive DACs you’re limited on range, cost is often higher, and they may need to be encoded for your interfaces. Moreover, the range is very limited.

Fiber (the cable) is immune to electrical noise, can run long distances, advances in wave division multiplexing extends the life of the fiber by changing what’s the fiber connects to. The downside is you pay slightly in latency for media interface changes (the electrical-to-optical conversions), the limits of bend radius of the cable to not break the cable or reduce bandwidth, and the relative complexity of field terminations compared to twisted pair. I’ve 25+ years experience with fiber, and trust me, it’s great.

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Outside of cost, both crush twisted pair like an ant. The power consumption per port is also far lower. However, this is only going to matter if you focus on limiting power consumption (not for cost, on principle), have very high-bandwidth applications where latency matters (I do!), and/or just want field experience with things other than twisted pair.

I use DAC and fiber for some things as I try to get every scrap of capability out of my hardware. For example, I have VERY low power (silent or near silent) hardware where I can push 5GB (so ~40Gbps) / sec storage. Not just sending it over the wire, but actually committing it to disk without buffering in RAM. So I have the capability of “PCIe 3.0/4.0 x4 NVMe” speeds across the network… from the (mostly silent) storage server, to anything else that can send or ingest the data that fast. Despite the storage server having very little flash (a few TB vs 100TB+ disk). That’s harder to do with twisted pair, or at least the power consumption of the network connectivity itself starts to add up for a few virtualization cluster nodes.

———-

Generally, “DAC in the rack, fiber to out back” is a reasonable approach. Though “fiber-only” works if you want to limit complexity!

[1] Fiber and DAC tend to trade places on latency every generation or so. It’s a very close race, but they crush twisted pair.

My high-end HEDT would now be +$2300 to build mostly due to memory and SSD pricing. 96GB of memory going from $430 -> $1800 is wild. One community member literally wouldn’t be able to buy their Mac Mini configuration anymore, plus the self-upgrade SSD would be price hiked.

Where I blanche most is my storage server running TrueNAS. Built it 3.5 years ago, future-proofing in mind. Strong SSD cache layer, plus two spare HDDs as spares. It wasn’t cheap then, but I think between disks, storage, ECC memory, etc. it’s +$7000 now to rebuild it again, +$9000-$10000 on last generation hardware.

They definitely do. I recommend GP check out PICO-8 which has some VERY real games on it like the original Celeste (by its original creators), Cattle Crisis, POOM, Combo Pool, Into Ruins, Dank Tomb, UFO Swamp Odyssey, Porklike, and much more. Most of which you can play on Itch.io for free in your browser.

I’ve been having a blast making a “real” and very full-featured PICO-8 game to serve as a “market fit” prototype — if a PICO-8 game on Itch gets meaningful attention, I’ve “found the fun” and therefore I should make “the full version” (non-PICO-8) for Steam, etc.

Video here (fun watch!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6_qbe26m9E

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Though I'll summarize what she played that was released on August 4th, 2025, of what she chose to buy:

* "The Last Mage" was a game produced very cheaply by apparently a lone gal (the videographer found the dev diary) that was a fan of K-pop, levered heavily on existing assets, to produce a campy idea as best she could.

* "You Suck at Football" levered existing "viral game" ideas like "Only Up". Very much someone's early attempts.

* "Velocity Racing 1000" was a racing game that appeared like someone's early attempts. Very wonky controls and physics.

* "Potato Cop" is a simple action game in an deliberately "amateur style", likely produced very quickly and cheaply. She had fun with it though.

* "Escape from Amazonia" is an horror game with a quirky plot premise that did elicit some actual screams. Again, produced very quickly and cheaply, but she had some fun with it.

* "Descent" was a horror game with some genuine attempts on the presentation side, and again elicited some screams. Some clear effort there. Someone was on to something with this one, and it's a shame they didn't refine it further.

* "Agu" is a crude, early access, challenging platformer. This won't go anywhere, but the videographer made the best of it and had some fun with the sheer difficulty of overcoming the physics.

* "Bee Simulator: The Hive" had some FANTASTIC presentation and assets. Localized for 14 languages. Great voiceover. Somewhat educational. It's apparently a re-release of a previous game which is why it has poor reviews. Some quirks and bugs, but some might really enjoy it.

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So are you really "competing" with 50 other games if you put out something extremely high quality and polished? No. You might be competing with 5... at most. If you put out a genuine banger and took the time to market it in advance, you should get noticed.

Steam's algorithms clearly are doing a good job and ensuring most of this stuff isn't getting much visibility outside of release. Though it's there to find if you deliberately look to unearth all of it.

Ferrari had only adopted radial tires in racing a decade earlier. I'm curious as to what deal they got with Goodyear at the time, as radial tires (including high performance versions) were already long ubiquitous in the United States by the time that commercial came out, which I believe was actually after the end of the 308's production run.

An oven thermometer is another one I’ll recommend, as the temperature the oven claims it’s at is a function of where the sensors are. It’s not uncommon for it to be consistently off by 5-6%, which can really matter if you want the best results. Again, about $7 can solve that one too.

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So I had many of the same concerns regarding Windows 11's nonsense when it came out, but I sat down, learned how to clean it up, and put a Creative Commons open source guide for others to follow. I knew many other reluctant friends who are senior devs at prolific companies in the tech space, and with my guide they seem to have no real remaining complaints.

It covers both the initial installation, as well as all my post-install recommendations. It eliminates I believe all the tracking, adware, suggestions, Cortana, feeding the Bing/ChatGPT machine, telemetry, etc. Absolutely nothing breaks. No need for a Microsoft account. It should be straightforward and to-the-click/keystroke.

https://github.com/GoofGarage/Win11Clean

If there’s any bugbears, please create an issue. I’ll be responding to them every few weeks, and I try to update the release every 3 months.

It absolutely does work if you disable UAC via Group Policy, but disabling UAC in my opinion is much a step too far as that loosens security in too many areas and would greatly increase Windows 11's attack surface.

I'll open an issue to investigate trying to identify the Group Policy setting to change to specifically re-enable this behavior without disabling UAC. Be advised that it'll be a few weeks as I'll be waiting until the January patch to drop (should be January 9th, 2024) for me to test prior to the January 2024 update to the guide.

I don’t disagree that it shouldn’t be necessary, though thankfully it’s a one time cost.