Tone chaser def the best here. Harbor freight (if op is USA) has shitty ones for like $10 that do the job fine.

If you can’t get one a multimeter in continuity mode with some long wire works if you’re tracing in one area. If it’s a huge area or across multiple rooms you can put low voltage on pins and use the meter to check for voltage on the other end. Make sure it’s not plugged in though

Instead of buying sheets of labels with numbers printed on for $12 you can get an actual label maker for like $15-$40 (or way more depending on how fancy you want to get)

Then you can label the wires with things like “living room cat5” instead of a cryptic “6” that you will forget the meaning of 3 years from now. If you spend a bit more (and maybe the cheap ones can do this, I dunno, I have a $40 one fwiw) you can get label refills that have heatshrink instead of labels. This is SO MUCH better because you can put it on the cable, shrink it, and it stays on forever. Unlike labels, which in my experience fall off when you pull them through walls (or just for no reason at all) 80% of the time. Downside is the heatshrink can’t go over big connectors so if it’s a cable you’re not terminating like hdmi it’s not as viable but for cat5/6 runs, coax, speaker wire, fiber, etc where you’re most likely terminating the cables yourself it’s the best. And even with big goofy hdmi cables you can still just get large heat shrink that has a good shrink ratio and write on it with a sharpie

I think so, I use a different one at least

at least then $80 for a controller would be somewhat justified. except they’ll probably make them $199 at that point

I have 2 GitHub accounts, one under a pseudonym and one under my real name. The pseudonym has probably 200+ repos and that is absolutely not a flex. Most of them are absolute garbage. Tutorials I expanded, projects I started and never fleshed out, documentation for stuff I meant to dive deep into (or sometimes actually did), etc. if a project actually moves along to a place I feel is respectable and worth showing off a bit I’ll clone it to the other account, which has like 10-15 repos maybe

That said I have no clue if this actually matters

There’s a Simpson’s episode about preppers where they assume the big bad thing happens and fuck off to their bunkers, stuff happens, and they eventually come back to town. When they come back everyone is happy and doing fine and Marge says something like “things were okay after the first few hours. We all worked together and made it work. It was like all the mean, angry, and resentful parts of the town had just disappeared!”

What’s with modern webcomics only posting to social media and nowhere else unless someone reposts it? I want an easy to browse gallery. If your comic is only available via instagram/twitter then I won’t read your comic

A school district spends $180,000 (hyperbole, I don’t know actual numbers) of taxpayer money deploying this system between the actual hardware costs, maintenance costs to install the hardware, it costs to implement it into their network, and probably an ongoing contact with this dummy’s company. Maybe only for support but with the way things are now I’m sure they built this app to phone home to their servers (introducing a huge potential security risk over simply running it locally on the schools existing network infrastructure in a docker or something), calling it “cloud based”, and charging the district 1k/month to run the devices the district now owns and should be able to operate without the company. The company then talks about how they’ll back up records and safeguard data so you don’t have to worry about that (that it dept you pay is pointless!)

Three months after deployment it turns out the sensors can be tripped by many things not related to vaping, maybe increases in heat, mouthwash breath, etc. the false positives are due to a hardware flaw and cannot be fixed with a patch. Feel free to upgrade to sensor version 2.0, now with improved accuracy! (read: the problem still exists but isn’t as bad). Only another 40k to buy the new hardware, rip out the old hardware (which is now worthless), install the new stuff, and configure the software for everything (again, maintenance and IT costs)

9 months after deployment the company is doing poorly because their product is stupid and only a few idiots actually bought it (way to go idiot). There’s concerns because they sent a new Eula that outlines data sharing policies. They are potentially finding ways to harvest the data they agreed to safely store to try and create a new revenue stream to right their sinking ship. District counsel says fighting the Eula change will be expensive and there’s not much precedent for it, plus they state they will anonymize data before sharing so it’s not a ferpa violation, technically. It feels scummy but you can’t do anything about it. You also don’t really trust them to only sell anonymized data but you can’t prove they aren’t crossing that line so whatever, I guess

15 months after deployment they get hacked because they’ve run out of vc cash, never could get an actual profit stream going (turns out they’re spending 750,000/yr on salaries for 5 people and they’re all kitted out with sick work computers for what is basically coding a web app, but I digress). security of their servers was one of the budgetary constraints they chose to make to right the ship (but had to keep the $1800 office chairs and the 15-20k/mo rent loft they use as an office in a hcol area). The contract says this may happen and they’re not responsible unless there’s gross negligence on their part, which you can’t prove, and that they do some bare minimum reactionary shit after the fact to mitigate damage. So they’re legally blameless and now you get to notify your community their children’s data was leaked to god knows who, whoops

22 months after the fact they go out of business officially. You get a form email about the company’s journey and the difficult decision they had to make to stop fucking around on a dumb project that sucks because no dumbass vc will give them fun bucks anymore to keep playing tech bro billionaire. All the sensors stop working because they require a connection to the servers, which they shut off immediately without a sunset period. You’re reminded every day when you log in to the schools admin panel and get 350 “sensor not connected” error messages and your students bitch about the “sensor not connected: server not available” error pop up showing up on their classroom console. It takes IT a few days to remove their shit from the network and that costs you even more money in wasting your IT staff time when they should be fixing the broken computers in the computer lab or whatever.

Now your school has a bunch of weird boxes on the wall. Sometimes people ask you about them and you go “oh those don’t do anything” and remember that they cost taxpayers in your community tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars and wasted hundreds of hours of your supports staffs time that they could’ve been using to improve the school

But then you scroll on instagram and see there’s this new thing that will detect when kids are bullying each other. You just have to put a camera in each classroom. It’s okay, it won’t record. It will just use the power of AI and machine learning. You’re sold right there and the cycle starts again

“Besides a bunch of snacks they have no snacks”

She is kind of a shithead tbf and fwiw it’s more like she’s the only person who is willing to do it. granted cracking denuvo is something that is extremely difficult and only a small subset of people can do but it’s not like she’s literally the only person on the planet who can. There was that guy who would just release the yearly update of football manager, for one.

It’s far more likely the people who have that skill set just don’t really want to bother with cracking videogames and the potential legal issues that come with distributing them online.

I hate it when people say shit like this so authoritatively. Like this is some conjecture at best. It’s a baby. No one knows why a baby does this. Someone assumed that and some other people said oh yeah that makes sense.

Imo impossible meat is superior to beyond although nutritionally it’s a mixed bag. It introduces a decent amount of carbs (9g per 4oz) and has over 5x the sodium of beef. But it also has a bit of fiber and a either comparable or more vitamin/mineral content than beef. Protein is comparable to 80% ground with 20% less caloric content

Beyond is similar.

They’re both basically vegetable proteins with binders and fats and some flavorings. The big game changer flavoring is leghemoglobin which both use. It’s a protein isolated from soy that is very similar to certain enzymes from bovine muscle. Impossible got the fda to approve it in 2019 and it was challenged; there are some concerns on whether it is safe to eat. I’m not super well read on the issue but from what I’ve perused the issue is one of a lack of long term testing and not of any direct concern.

The textural difference between the two is because beyond uses isolated pea protein, which gives it a texture that’s a bit chunkier and imo more sausage like, and impossible uses soy protein, which imo is more like a cheap burger patty you’d get at McDonald’s.

The fats are typical fats like coconut oil or sunflower oil to recreate the fatty part of beef and this is the current weakness of the products imo. Coconut oil is used because it tends to stay solidified at room temp so when you’re making patties it feels like there are chunks of beef fat. In practice this is weird because they are far too hard and aren’t dispersed enough throughout the product; I believe this is why these fake meats tend to stick to the pan much easier than actual burgers cooked in a skillet.

The binders are big scary words like methylcellulose which is also a source of fiber and can be used as a laxative so people latch onto that and freak out. But it’s only used as a binder to help it hold everything together here so it’s like a tiny amount that just provides a bit of fiber that you probably desperately need if you’re having burgers for dinner. Fun fact: Certain preparations of methylcellulose (a4c) turn into gels when heated so you can use them to make hot ice cream! It’s pretty weird to eat, like a normal ice cream base that solidifies when you put it into boiling water

The other ingredients are stuff like beet juice for coloring

Final fun fact: technically impossible meat is not vegan because animal testing was done during its development.

Thanks for reading my unprompted essay on the composition of modern vegan meat substitutes. This was brought to you by my failed interest in becoming a food scientist. Also you may note I don’t really discuss how they compare to meat and that’s because I don’t eat meat which by law I am required to mention in all posts about food