I own a Yamaha PSR E403. This series is a lower end class of synthetizer/arranger keyboards targeted towards novice players. Mine also has an identical UI to the one presented here. I wonder if the hack would work on it as well, being a similar model.

My better keyboard is a Yamaha CP88 which is a lot more modern and has updatable firmware. I poked a bit with the update package using binwalk and as far as I could tell it’s not encrypted, and runs some version of QNX. My hacking skills aren’t as good, but I wonder if that one has similar exploits.

The difference between 2nd and 3rd candidates is 2000 votes. There were 9 million votes in total. That’s insanely close. There is widespread fear that during the recount some votes will be nullified, and some will be changed in some god forsaken villages, resulting in an overturn (which will result in a re-election according to the constitution).

Candidate #1 is a pro russian fascist. #2 is progressive pro-european. #3 is just very corrupt and made a lot of people angry. If #1 goes against #2 in the second round, #2 has a decent chance of winning. #1 against #3 would be really bad, like having to choose between hitler and trump.

That’s a decent salary for Eastern Europe. In Ukraine, the median salary is below $500/mo. Just look at the map, $2000/mo puts you above average for all the countries in Eastern and Central Europe.

Onedrive is pretty ok, other than being annoying. A company I worked for was acquired by another company that had their own cloud storage product. After the acquisition, they forced us to migrate from onedrive to their product. It was so bad… Files would constantly corrupt and disappear, the speed was terrible, trying to share files didn’t work half the time, when sharing folders the people you shared with wouldn’t see all the files in the folder. They also limited our storage from 1TB to 25GB making it pretty useless for storing builds of our product or trying to share VMs.

And the worst part is that they also closed our SMB network share to force us to use that piece of shit.

After that experience, I will never complain about Onedrive again.

Low end phones aren’t that bad, if you are willing to make some sacrifices, like an uglier screen, worse camera.

For example, the Samsung Galaxy A05

A full working computer, more powerful than what we used to go to the moon, and using less power than a light bulb.

It can take many forms, like smartphones, SBCs or older PCs/laptops.

The tape head is basically a small and really sensitive electromagnet. Magnetized tape creates small disturbances in the magnetic signal. Amplify those disturbances and you get sound. Similar to an antenna, but only works in close proximity.

This also works in reverse. Feed an audio signal through the electromagnet, and the electromagnet will create the disturbances in whatever is next to it. You can do this to record to a tape, or you can do this to pass sound to another tape head, which is how these aux cassettes work.

You can build one yourself really easily. Just take the tape head from a broken player and solder to an aux cable. Take a cassette, remove the tape, and put the tape head in the middle portion so it comes into contact with the player tape head.

Also the patent office needs to employ actual specialists and reject the bullshit patents, like rounded rectangles.

Amazon is on my shit list and will not buy any products from them ever again. They are one of the worst monopolist mega corporations. They treat their employees like slaves, are anti-repair, anti-consumer.

I gifted an older Kindle to my sister, and the screen broke (out of warranty). I contacted Amazon about it, and they basically said they don’t make replacement parts and don’t service the kindles, they can only give me a small discount for buying a new one.

I looked up a guide on doing it myself, and even if I find a replacement screen, it’s really difficult. The screen is glued with a strong adhesive. The entire device looks very cheaply built and deliberately made really difficult to repair.

Which is why I will never buy a modern console. Once the company making them shutdowns the servers, the hardware will be useless. Unlike retro consoles that use physical media, which are highly sought after today.

Just like AAA game studios, movie studios don’t want to take risks, so they go with productions they consider “safe”: aim for the lowest common denominator, play into nostalgia, don’t make anyone upset by touching subjects like politics, religion. And you end up with the garbage they are making right now.

Also, the movie industry is struggling because of many reasons. Movies are getting too expensive, the safe formulas big studios relied on aren’t working anymore, customer habits are changing with people going less to movie theaters.

At the same time, just like with video games, the indie world is in a golden age. You can get amazing cameras and equipment for quite a small budget. What free software like Blender can achieve is amazing. And learning is easier than ever, there are so many free educational resources online.

That’s why recycling goes after reduce and reuse.

After ~20-30 years, rubber gaskets and seals and cable insulation start failing. Plastic becomes brittle, especially if exposed to the sun. How do they solve this problem?

Tesla’s decision to only use cameras and no lidar will bite them in the ass.