Silly idea: computer vision for classtoom rollcall. Take a photo and it generates a list of absences.

I think there would be more sympathy if Cloudflare pointed to a specific limit breached and proposed ways to get into compliance at their current price plan.

“Service XYZ is now consuming 500% of expected quota. Shut it down or we need to get you on a bigger plan.” is actionable and meaningful, and feels a little less like a shakedown.

I’m sick of “unlimited” services that really mean “there’s a limit but we aren’t going to say what it is.” By that standard, freaking mobile telecoms are far more transparent and good-faith players!

Perhaps this also represents a failing in Cloudflare’s product matrix. Everyone loves the “contact sales for a bespoke enterprise plan” model, but you should be creating a clear road to it, and faux-unlimited isn’t it. Not everyone needs $random_enterprise_feature, so there’s value in a disclosed quota and pay-as-you-scale approach: the customer should be eager to reach out to your sales team because the enterprise plan should offer better value than off-the-rack options at high scale.

This is the firmware I’ve been working on. Basically I wrote it because at the time (early 2023) there wasn’t a “good” keyboard firmware like QMK or ZMK for the CH32V305. Now it supports keyboards, joysticks, and a rudimentary pointing device made out of a PS2-style analogue stick.

https://gitlab.com/hakfoo1/ch32v-keyboard/-/tree/fightstick?ref_type=heads

That branch has the mapping I used. Note this firmware has a keyboard-centric assumption that switches are wired as a matrix (between two sense lines), even if that matrix is 1x24, rather than just grounding a sense line individually.

The stick portion was one of those “Pandora Box” devices that was built into a cabinet and pre-wired to a crappy Android TV box.

I bought it because I figured it was probably cheaper than cutting a decent looking cabinet and buying the buttons off AliExpress. That also meant it came with a predefined cable harness to fit the Android box. In the hopes of making it tidy, and reversible, I ordered a little throwaway PCB that accepted the existing 40-pin plug and bridged it to a nanoCH32V305 breakout board. Of course, I made a design mistake, so the PCB had bodge wires, so not much was saved.

If you’re starting from scratch, you could direct-wire to the MCU breakout board.

I’m thinking it might be my 2.5G router when it drops. Or worst case, maybe retire the Atom I’m using for a NAS.

I’ve been using some much smaller CH32V305 based keyboard controllers for a while, recently built a fightstick aroubd the platform. Now if only I fidn’t suck at joystick games, having grown up on gamepads.

There’s a case to be made for dueling what is essentially a post-scarcity socialist Federation against the embodiment of capitalism-as-cult.

Conversely, the Borg are in a way aspirational-- growing and assimilating knowledge and improvements seems a bit higher of a goal, but their presentation comes off ham-fisted.

I feel like there’s a missing explanation of why “assimilating the diversity” of a civilization needs to be a total stripmine rather than taking a few (potentially willing) representatives and regularly coming back in case anything new evolved, like binge-watching a civilization every few years. The stripmining aspect seems necessary to make them recognizabily villianous-- the enemy of sacred individuality rather than just data hoarders whose homelabs turned into giant cubes.

It does feel like Latinum is very much a MacGuffin for undermining a huge amount of “we have virtually infinite free energy and can replicate anything we need” worldbuilding; they needed a way to make 24th century capitalism seem remotely plausible.

Not really. Their menu is just permutations of seven ingredients. So only finite diversity and combinations.

Modern DOS 8x16. I like the nostalgic look and boxiness.

The “Packard Bell” jokes are also right there if you want to tickle a large number of '90s kids.

As a savvy investor, I’m holding on to my sandwich-based platfotm.

The Orville did it, with comical effect as the (obvious analogue to) Klingons end up requesting hundreds of cigarettes from their replicator.