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There's quite a few clocks available that get their time over the air from the NIST WWVB radio station[0]. They usually have a little switch on the back if your area does/doesn't observe daylight savings.

[0] - https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/time-di...


Right, but more specifically they are most often used for scanning stuff like air-band and VHF/UHF two-way radio traffic. Nowadays with a lot of public safety being digital P25 (requiring more expensive scanners) and online streams being so easily available, there's not a lot of reasons to buy a scanner unless you're really passionate about it.



That's due to the DOCSIS standard for cable modems. They specced out more channels for downstream than upstream because of the limited bandwidth of copper and consumer priorities. With fiber there's an order of magnitude more bandwidth available, so the uneven split is much less (if at all?) common with the big backhaul lines between datacenters. For consumer fiber you'll usually get symmetric but for the most part it doesn't make sense as the vast majority of consumers just don't make use of their upstream bandwidth.


You'd be suprised, the shear amount of black box vendor nonsense out there borders on astronomical. Weird telco stuff, old cisco hardware, BMCs in servers, it would mean gutting probably millions of dollars of equiment. It's stupid, but throwing the baby out with the bathwater over openssh won't make anyone happy.


Some day that stuff is going to unexpectedly break and cause more problems. There are two choices; pain now when you have a chance to plan, or more pain later when you’re forced to react.


You can unlock the bootloader of the 2018 Fire HD 8 if you force it into download mode by opening it up and shorting the CLK test point to ground. Older tablets don't need to be opened up, it's all just software. Everything after that though has been unable to have the bootloader unlocked.


Ignorant Q: Could one ostensibly replace the ROM? Surely there has to be some Chinese company that can get you a custom ROM built and replace it on the device?

EDIT: Yes, I meant physically de-solder/replace of the ROM - is that a nightmare?

What if you could find the economics of having people ship you their devices and either donating (to schools (NOT UNIVERSITY SLURPS)) or paying for their device to be up-ROM'd or e-cycled?

(My first job as a freshman in Highschool was desoldering ROMs and soldering new ROM chips into the boards of Amigas and Apple ][e's -- I had tons of these new ROMs on a strip and in tubes - but I never had any use for them... I with I had kept them.)

((Also, just to let you know the difficulty level - replacing a ROM chip on an Apple ][e etc was as simple as receiving an instruction set:

"Desolder the red guys. Resolder with these green guys."

That was the extent of my knowledge to ROMs in ][Es

I had no Idea at the time what I was doing.


The (boot)ROM is on-die, within the CPU, there's no way to replace it.

You can potentially replace the OS image (confusingly, often referred to as a "ROM") on the flash storage, but unless the bootloader agrees to boot it (either due to it being signed correctly, or due to the bootloader being unlocked) you're SOL.


Probably not, most devices have the first stage boot loader on read only memory that is locked using an e-fuse. You would need to physically modify the device to change it.

FWIW, I had an older Fire tablet that I had loaded Android onto and it wasn’t great. It would crash randomly and the battery life was awful. These days I have a newer Fire tablet. It’s a few years old now but I still use it all the time for reading e-books from the library, and I have a few Android apps loaded onto it that I use for working on my car and they all work fine. In other words, there’s not really any reason to reflash them, the stock OS is fine.


Controllers that use hall effect sensor sticks last much longer than the conventional potentiometer sticks. The pot sticks are subject to physical wear while the hall effect sticks are not because there is no contact.

There's some guides on aftermarket modifications of controllers to convert them to hall effect sensors, as well as 3rd party controllers made with hall effect sticks. If you want something to use on PC and/or switch the KingKong 2[1] from GuliKit is pretty good.

[1] - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09QJN8ZD9


Has there been a console that uses hall effect sensors in first party controllers in the past 15 years?


No. The last "mainstream" console to use hall effect sticks in the first party controller was the Dreamcast, and that was in 1999.


Gasoline is absolutely not that dangerous, at least relative to the risk involved every time one drives a car. For igniting gasoline fumes, a spark is almost always necessary. Realistically speaking, a lit cigarette has a better chance of setting a nearby trash can on fire than igniting the gasoline fumes. If a person were to spark a lighter to light a cigarette that'd be a different story.

https://www.pennlive.com/midstate/2010/03/gas-pump_fire_that...

https://content.nfpa.org/-/media/Project/Storefront/Catalog/...


MicroG is an option, it's an open source implementation of a good portion of play services, though not everything "just works". But for the bare minimum like functional push notifications, location services, etc it's not half bad. There exists a fork[1] of lineage with MicroG installed from the get-go, otherwise installing it can be a little painful.

[1] - https://lineage.microg.org/


That's funny, there exists a similar issue with the LG G7 that a friend of mine ran into several years ago. The fingerprint sensor on his phone just straight-up completely stopped working, and subsequent OS updates did nothing to fix it. At first we assumed it was hardware failure, and he was ready to send it to a repair shop. While investigating it I saw a comment somewhere that it had something to do with the light sensor, and after holding my thumb over it for 10 seconds it "magically" started working again after 4 months of being completely non-functional.


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