The Communication Cube

[kuru]

I was about to order a few small things from Aliexpress when I learned about the EU's latest bullshit regulation concerning import fees from non-EU states. And this time it's not something mildly infuriating like tethered bottle caps.

I had items for about 10 € selected and on top of that came a fee of over 9 €. Turns out you have to pay 3 € for each class of item. Getting 100 pieces of the same kind will also cost those 3 €. But get different ones and you pay that fee for each of them. This is insane.

I despise those farts in Brussels.

 

[TeDaDeS]

I was about to order a few small things from Aliexpress when I learned about the EU's latest bullshit regulation concerning import fees from non-EU states. And this time it's not something mildly infuriating like tethered bottle caps.

I had items for about 10 € selected and on top of that came a fee of over 9 €. Turns out you have to pay 3 € for each class of item. Getting 100 pieces of the same kind will also cost those 3 €. But get different ones and you pay that fee for each of them. This is insane.

I despise those farts in Brussels.

I think the idea was to remove the overhead of the local post offices, and shops buying in bulk are easier to regulate so they can remove harmful/toxic products. But, for consumers getting stuff for cheap it's not much fun.

 

[Null]

I found this text to audiobook tool earlier today and decided to give it a try.

Steps:
Download a text file of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Run it through https://perchance.org/text-cleaner
Re-add the following text to the end of the book because the text cleaner tool deleted it

D. K.

THE END.

Current Step -> Wait for a long time

I'll add a link to the audio file when it's eventually created.

Edit: https://drop.infini.fr/r/V0CKpFrXJk#NYjFD4YMfjwysy+ZsOerksLDg6iTSncntnKLOAWHES0=

 

[kuru]

I think the idea was to remove the overhead of the local post offices, and shops buying in bulk are easier to regulate so they can remove harmful/toxic products. But, for consumers getting stuff for cheap it's not much fun.

Yes customs have a lot more to do thanks to shein and temu booming. And apparently it's supposed to be only a temporary measure until sometime in 2028. Then you'll be charged a percentage based on item category. Electronics will be around 12 % IIRC which is acceptable. I think it was clothing items which will get the highest surcharge. I'm still mad I have to pay double for small electronic items that I literally can't get anywhere else.

 

[kuru]

Very much looking forward to this printer

 

[TeDaDeS]

Very much looking forward to this printer

While I usually don't print anything, if I would this would be a nice printer.

 

[pyrat]

Not ready yet, but promising:

Openprinter

Finally, an open hardware printer you can actually understand, repair, and upgrade

www.crowdsupply.com

Very much looking forward to this printer

Yep, the idea is lovely. I wish them success. It's almost a year since @ElPoco sent it here and I've only seen one update, that IIRC said something about dithering and printing algorithms being harder than they thought.
Oh, wait!. There's a recent update I hadn't seen. And a survey. Argh! IT's in Google Forms
Let's see how it all ends.

Post automatically merged: Sep 19, 2026

For some AI it seems it is enough to frame humans to vote what the AI wants, they don't need to send robots to poll stations.

Well, I guess it make sense it an LLM can mess with intelligence reports and almost cause an US attack on a Chinese ship because of hallucinated nuclear components transport, it doesn't even need to win elections. .

 

[kuru]

The Dragon Q6A is already quite fast, but this thing flies.

Tried it in the office using my laptop power supply. Now I'm at home and learn that my powerful usb-c brick is 5V only, but this requires 12V. I'm a dumbass and now I have to wait until I get a new power supply.

Edit: Running it off a 45 W charger I got from the local super market works just fine. This is the first single board computer I have that will drive an HDMI display at more than 60 Hz: 1440 p at 100 Hz works just fine. It's only weird the gnome display settings won't allow more than 60 fps at most of the lower resolutions. Also supports HDR. Neat.
Been playing Risen using hangover-wine and an older version of dxvk libraries at 720p with maxed out textures, with game FPS between 30 and 100 depending on the scene.

 

[Null]

https://redlib.catsarch.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1wyphc3/10_f1_cars_suddenly_limited_to_30_kmh_because_of/

 

[Null]

Man discovers his parents’ coffee machine used 1TB of data in 10 days - Dexerto

The man said they discovered that their parents’ coffee maker had generated far more traffic than they expected.

web.archive.org

 

[Null]

Raspberry Pi puts digital handcuffs on RAM upgrades — Free Software Foundation — Working together for free software

 

[TeDaDeS]

Xbox 360 Softmod available: https://github.com/grimdoomer/Xbox360PeerPressure

 

[TeDaDeS]

Made my first build for the Steam Frame today. You can install the Steam Devkit Client (via Steam) and deploy your game from you dev-pc to the Steam Frame, handy. On the Steam Frame it will show up in your game library as Devkit game.
The build is actually just using the Android OpenXR build via Lepton, so porting your VR game from Android (Quest/Pico) to Steam Frame is relatively easy. From not knowing where to start to running the first build cost me 1 hour or so.

 

[netcat]

mister pi batch 4 pre-orders are open: https://retroremake.co/pages/store

 

[kuru]

^ Darnit, gotta keep my spending in check.

A pro pos, use great software without spending a dime. I guess most of us have read about this already. Bunch of Adobe and Microsoft apps remade, free and open source. Already tried a few of them on ARM. There's installers for everything and even web versions.

ArtCraft — Controllable AI for Artists

ArtCraft is the open-source desktop app for generating AI video and images — built for artists who want real control.

getartcraft.com

 

[TeDaDeS]

I ran my first benchmark on my first CPU design, currently running on an FPGA. It's performance isn't impressive yet, only 664,000 ALU operations per second where I hoped for a 1-on-1 instruction per clock (Currently 50MHz). I think it might be the instruction fetch or branching overhead costing too much. I'll have to investigate this at a later date. But, you have to start somewhere. This won't replace any commercial microcontrollers soon, first it's won't exceed their speed and features and creating real silicon is expensive. But the topic of using an FPGA on a replacement board option for the Pyra could be interesting. Especially to match exact cores of the systems we emulate. But it also would allow us to play with our own CPU designs in real hardware.