I’d recommend reading this if you are interested in why making assumptions when designing a system is a bad idea (but often necessary): https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood

Especially the one on names: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ And the one on time: http://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-time

I’ve bought a lot of stuff from AliExpress in the past 10 years. Including some $10.000+ purchases. There have been problems, but overal I’m happy enough with the whole thing.

I feel everyone is trying their best to make it all work, but in the end it’s pretty complex to get something from the other side of the world to your home. Plus the language barrier can be a thing, where nobody in the chain really speaks any English. Usually the people at AliExpress, the seller and the actual people shipping the goods are pretty far apart from each other (China is a big country) and don’t always communicate the best.

Now there are of course a lot of scammers, just like on sites like Ebay and Amazon. AliExpress really does do their best to ban the scammers and prevent them from coming back, but it’s like fighting a flood with a broom and doesn’t do much. Recognizing the scammers can be pretty hard sometimes. The trick I’ve used is to either rely on small communities of people interested in the same thing recommending a shop or simply talking to the seller. If the seller is happy to talk to you and willing to do just about anything you ask, it’s probably a scam. If they are kind of grumpy and say this is what we do take it or leave it, you’ve got a proper seller on your hands. Especially with large equipment as I’ve bought, the seller wants to talk shop about the machines all day, but if you have any special requests regarding shipping or customs, it’s a no go. They will also happily provide you a quote for a fully custom machine if you ask, with actual good prices for what it is, but still very expensive.

If something does go wrong with your order, don’t count on AliExpress doing anything. They are just the platform provider and don’t know you or your order. They aren’t involved in any way and handle millions of orders a day. Just use the tools they provide to talk to the seller, they will often happily help you and every time my shipment got lost, they refunded or sent another. If a part broke in shipment, they shipped me a replacement. And just because the product wasn’t what you thought it was or the shipment got lost in transit or there was something else wrong, doesn’t mean the seller is a scammer. Don’t report them as one, as for small shops this can cause problems and for the larger established shops AliExpress simply ignores the reports. Usually the seller does their best to get you your stuff, but when sending something from one side of the globe to the other, shit happens. International tracking has gotten so much better the past couple of years, so it’s easier to see where it went wrong.

AliExpress has also gotten very good with customs, they present you a price which is based on what you are going to pay. No hidden fees that get applied later in the process. They discount the product in the shopping cart with an indication of what you have to pay for customs handling and import fees. In the past this used to be a problem, where the price was too good to be true, only to turn out to be exactly that. But these days they are very good.

So if you have patience, do your homework and be careful out there, AliExpress can be a great source for products. If you want to be a Karen and shout at someone for not delivering the crap you don’t need within 24 hours, please just go to Amazon.

One thing to note: There is an environmental impact to buying directly from China and there’s no guarantee the products weren’t made by slaves in poor working conditions without mind for safety or the environment. So don’t go buying small crap you can get anywhere from there. Buy locally where possible and if you do order make it something big or buy a larger shipment. But this isn’t really an AliExpress thing, this applies to sites like Ebay as well as other big Chinese shops.

Dude lays on a bed for three weeks as Troi freaks out.

Oh I see why they shut down the Super Mario Maker 1 servers, money is getting tight at Nintendo.

Agreed, large spools are too much if you want to play around with all the colors. I have a box of old filament, each spool in plastic with a dry packet and the whole box with a couple of bags of drying stuff and a good seal on the top. But after getting a spool out to use recently (spool about 2 year old) and it printed like shit. I tried putting it in a dryer, but it didn’t help. So I tried more of these spools and they almost all seem to have gone bad.

Such a shame, I should have bought smaller spools, but they are harder to get and often more expensive.

Huh? Dell makes monitors that don’t support VESA mounts?

I’m 99% sure this monitor has a the ability for a VESA mount. The specs you linked say it has. According to Dell they even sell the thing without a stand, that wouldn’t make sense if it didn’t have another way to mount it.

The manual explains the VESA mount: https://dl.dell.com/manuals/all-products/esuprt_display_projector/esuprt_display/dell-p2417h-monitor_user’s_guide_en-us.pdf

Old Doc Soong has a spreadsheet on his computer with exact specs on Data’s cum. How much protein, flavor, moisture, production capacity, flow capacity, pressure specs, the list goes on. I wonder how he tested all of that? Working alone in his lab. They did call him Often Wrong Soong, so it was probably a long road of trial and error.

I don’t know this exact meter, but I had a little optical sensor on my meter for years. There was a dial that rotated once per a given volume, it had a black part and a white part. This way a single led and light detector could measure exact revolutions and be able to read out the value. This way it didn’t have to read the numbers, which is much harder and can’t measure small increments very well.

My meter got replaced with a smart kind years ago, so now I simply have a port that can be read out directly with way more information. But my janky led and light detector thing worked very well for years. Since this was years ago it ran a very simple PIC micro, nothing like a full fledged ESP platform.

Not a chance, power supplies contain capacitors that don’t do well at lower temperatures. Even special kinds don’t survive long at those temperatures. You would need to build an isolated enclosure and include a heater and heat management system. This is usually done with multiple layers, so the inside where the electronics is can be maintained at a constant uniform temperature. Moisture is also an issue, so you’d have to deal with that. All that takes up a lot of power, which will cut into the batteries.

Batteries are a bad choice for something like that. Led lights are super efficient, but when we’re talking about something like a couple of strings around a house it’s a lot of power. Everyone who has to keep their car (or if you don’t have a huge garage their car battery) inside during winter knows that kind of cold kills batteries. So I would recommend powering it from the grid. Something like an outdoor outlet would do fine.

Much easier would be to just have everything inside and only have a single cable with 24 - 48 volt (depending on the setup) for power and some (or one) control wires. These kinds of wires aren’t that expensive and easy to run. With good water proof connectors it’s easy to plug in and wire up. They aren’t very thick, so only a small hole is needed. Usually they connect to wire terminals on the inside, so the hole only has to be big enough for the wire.

I think you can get kits for this kind of thing, which makes it easy to setup and get running. Just a pain in the neck to step on a ladder and securely mount it to the roof.

If you have the power supply and controllers and such inside, the leds outside wouldn’t be a problem.

The inertial dampeners have issues all the time tho, but instead of everyone getting turned into red mist against a surface instantly it just causes them to sway a little and the camera to shake.

Star Trek going woke again, who would seriously allow women to wear clothes, let alone earn profit. Disgusting!

A thing to remember is there are a lot of people and I mean a LOT in the TNG universe. Energy is also cheap and abundant. With replicators basic needs are also filled easily. This means that with hard problems, even if it’s super niche and only a tiny fraction of the population is interested, has the right skillset etc, you could have thousands if not millions working on a single hard problem.

This would mean if something can be done, chances are there is someone who figures out how to do it and how to do it at scale.

Now the question of ethics is another thing, if you could replicate a sapient creature, would it be ethical to do so? But we have some in universe examples of this not seeming to be an issue for most folk.

So I agree they dropped the ball, replicating a “soul” (for lack of a better word) shouldn’t have been possible. They opened up a big can of worms and hoped people would not think about it too hard.

I think Quark is supposed to be the break-out character, always commenting on the weird HOO MANS.

Well she spilled her drink on the captain and later whilst working on an airlock there was a freak malfunction causing her to get spaced. These two events may or may not have been connected, but that’s why we never saw her again.

State of the art ship, goes to shit because of cheese, smort engineers take days to figure it out… The future!

Agreed, one of the best episodes of the series and Trek as a whole.

The only weak point is how they went back to Talax like it was nothing. Sure they had a vote about it, but it wasn’t a big deal. But the impression I got is that they were high tailing it to Earth and were well on their way.

Unless they were really lucky and Talax was somehow on route to Earth it would basically mean going back to the beginning and starting over. This would be a huge fucking deal and no matter how much people love Neelix and want to do the right thing, adding this much extra time going back to the start would be a tough choice. Then when it didn’t pan out, I would be fucking pissed. Like what the hell Janeway, maybe not trust every rando you come across and take a super long detour because of something they say? But it’s shrugged off like it was no big deal.

This juxtaposition is something Voyager struggles with the entire series. Many of the creators have stated to that affect. They want to make it seem like Voyager is super far from home, but not that far it would simply be impossible for them to get back. But at the same time, just having the ship at high warp all the time, only stopping at gas giants to refuel would be super boring. They also may have people going stir crazy, but the holodeck could help with that. Especially since at the in universe stated speeds Voyager could reach, they would get home faster than stated. In terms of budget and writing, it would become a huge challenge to have new species all the time. They want to have established characters and story arcs. If Voyager would just zoom through everything that’s hard to do.

Especially with the Kazon this became a huge issue. They were presented as almost barbarian, with little resources. Yet somehow a super fast ship was in their territory for months. Ships were even somehow able to outpace Voyager, with the same characters showing up at multiple points in the journey. Were all the Kazons lined up in a long string with Voyager flying along it? Or was Voyager flying in circles? It makes no sense.

This whole space is huge but also really small when the plot demands it is a weak point of the show and that episode. But otherwise it’s a great story.

You’ve hit on a good point there, Guinan always felt to me like a deus ex machina in the stories. It feels like when the writers don’t know how to resolve something, they just have a character go to Guinan and resolve whatever it is they were struggling with.

It also feels like they really didn’t know what to do with the character. Whoopie’s availability didn’t help with that, since she had only a very limited shooting time. Sometimes they made it seem like Picard and her go way back, but then she didn’t play any significant role as far as we know. And there were plenty of times where they would have been far apart for super long. They also want to make her an enigma, not really knowing her age or limits, with vague hints to her father and Q exclaiming she has powers. But nothing ever comes of this. And if Picard and her go way back, surely he would know about some of this stuff? But he never does it seems like.

Her whole back story is full of holes and the character makes no sense. But that’s common with Star Trek characters.

It feels like throwaway lines that get tossed around to make the character feel more than it is, but it’s completely hollow and ultimately comes to nothing.

It’s a shame, because I like the idea of Guinan, but story wise the character simply wasn’t very good and not utilized very well.

I don’t think the whole show was a holodeck program? It actually happened and Riker simply ran a holodeck program based on those events. Still a pretty dumb way to end the show, but I don’t think it invalidates the previous 4 seasons.

Yeah Tom was a real good dad, leaving his worm kids on that planet forever.