“I’M AS MAD AS HELL AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!”

Vodafone has a hotspot service here in Germany. All of their cable routers have a second wifi network everyone can use (unless you opt out).

When they introduced it, it had a big flaw: They stored the MAC address of your device in their database as authorized, but never deleted it.

Hypothetically speaking, you could pay for a month, cancel the service and then browse for over a year until they noticed you and kicked you out. 😆

But I would never do that, of course.

That’s true, but I found parts like the bottom chassis, display assembly and keyboard on Aliexpress. They probably have the joystick modules too.

The only thing I couldn’t find were the actual rubber thumbsticks, which might become a problem in the future when they wear out. GPD promised to sell them individually a while ago, but as of yet, they haven’t done so.

When gaming, I hold the device in both hands, just as they depict in their marketing material:

When I’m on location and I have it sitting on the desk, I use the left joystick for scrolling and the right for moving the mouse, it works really well and I don’t have to grip it (I configured AntiMicroX on Linux to translate the inbuilt Xbox controller to mouse movements).

It also has a builtin mouse mode, but you have to press the right trigger to speed up the mouse, so it’s very unconvenient when you’re not holding the device in your hands.

It is really well made. I had to take the whole machine apart to put in a QWERTZ keyboard and almost everything is easily replaceable and maintainable. The frame feels as sturdy as a typical Macbook chassis, the joystick elements are screwed in and can be swapped quickly, the motherboard and cooling system are also well assembled.

The only thing I hated is that they glued the power button onto the backlight foil of the keyboard. I don’t know what they were thinking, but glueing a flimsy flextape onto a flimsy foil is a horrible decision. Granted, most people probably never change their keyboard (but they didn’t have the 64GB model with German layout back when I bought it).

It’s around ~48°C under my regular coding workload (Chrome, Firefox, Slack and phpStorm opened with a video playing). It’s basically unhearable under these conditions, with the fan running on the lowest speed.

The max temperature it gets to is ~83°C, which it will reach fairly quick when playing demanding games like Cyberpunk and the device gets a little warm, but not annoyingly hot then. Yes, it’s a little thicc boii, but that works for its benefit because the thickness comes from the big heatpipe, fan and cooler.

Disclaimer: I put a PTM7950 pad onto the CPU and it greatly benefits from it. Temps with regular paste are worse - I definitely reached temps in the 90s before (but it was not throttling).

It’s proprietary I think, you can buy it as an accessory and put it in yourself or get the machine with it already builtin.

Tigole is doing the same.

GPD Win Max 2. I love this little thing so much. ~8-10 hours of battery life, up to 64GB RAM, 16-core Ryzen on the newest model, 2K display. It’s only 10 inches and it can run Cyberpunk with raytracing. It also has two slots for SSD’s and an optional LTE module.

The sticks are hall effect sensors, so there’s no drift (looking at you, Nintendo). The keyboard is backlit and feels way too satisfying for something this small. (I actually like typing on it)

On the backside of the device, you can slide out two metal covers and place them on top of the thumbsticks, hiding them and making the device look more professional.

I once took this to a customer doing a training session and dropped the line “This thing is more powerful than all the computers in this room” and it was probably true.

It redirects to “Rectal administration” on Wikipedia, so yeah…I’m also not clicking on that one for “further” research. :D

Disney’s “The Black Hole”. It came from a time just after Walt Disney had died and they were still figuring out their shit.

So they made an extremely dark SciFi flick with a cute robot that appeals to children which is such a weird combination, but I liked it a lot. I can’t even say why.

The U.S.S. Cygnus looks fucking badass, too. One of the best ship designs in a SciFi movie, change my mind.

The printer probably talks to hplip, which is available on Linux, but not on MacOS.

Stop right there criminal scum!

I hated Elon Musk from pretty much the moment he showed up as the “darling awkward little geek bro”.

When they hyped him up in the first Iron Man movie as some super-intelligent philanthropist I really started to hate that guy.

Wow, I watched that on opening night and there were like three people in the whole room. I don’t remember much about it, but what really bugged me was the whole start of the film. A spaceship that is designed to travel fully automatically and immediately fails when there’s a small asteroid field in its path? Absolute BS.

I watched Star Trek, Pokemon, Gargoyles and Dino Adventure Jurassic Tripper - all of those ran on TV here, which was awesome.
Apart from that, I probably read four to five books every week and I even won a reading contest at the local library one time. They loved me so much there, they just gave me books sometimes to keep for myself. (That’s how I discovered “The Day of the Triffids”, and it’s glorious.)

I was extremely into that whole “Native American” thing and read all kinds of fiction about it. I loved the Winnetou movies to death and I must’ve read the whole works of Karl May. That was definitely cringe and a lot of people made fun of me because of that. I still think they’re pretty well written books, but not unproblematic, of course.

Apart from that, I tinkered a lot with electronics and got pretty good at soldering and semi-good at fixing circuits. When I was seven years old, my dad bought a computer and I learned how to work with DOS, Win95 and Linux. I definitely was a weird kid and I didn’t have many friends (still don’t), but I enjoyed my childhood regardless of that, because my parents supported all of my endeavours.

I listened to rave and techno music, which was very unusual here in North Germany. None of the radio stations played it, but we had cable radio so I was able to listen to it and fall in love with it. Needless to say, a young teenager listening to Scooter screaming “HOW MUCH IS THE FISH?” just increased the level of teasing from my classmates. But fuck them, it was great music to dance to!

Nowadays I work as a coder in a small advertising agency, so I guess my childhood prepared me pretty well for my adulthood. Overcoming social anxiety was hard, though. I only achieved that in my late 20s. Turns out that growing up as an only child in a small village messes with your head a little bit.

Edit: Oh, and I was hardcore against alcohol, for some stupid reason. I never drank anything and when my friends went to a party and had a good time, I was an ass about it afterwards. For some reason I wanted everyone to be as abstinent as me, lol. Nowadays I drink occasionally and I enjoy it, I don’t know what was up with me back then.

This guy probably starred in the same movie a lot more:

Yes that’s the one, with the drunk guy. The episode is so over the top, I love it.

The scene where all of those underdeveloped people come on board the Enterprise with their animals and one woman is shouting throughout the whole deck. Patrick Stewart lost it at this point, turns away from the camera and starts to laugh uncontrollably. But they kept the camera rolling and the scene turned out great!

Edit: It’s S02E18 “Up the Long Ladder”

Went to my very first concert this year, actually (Porter Robinson). It was awesome (was in the front row, too!). Now I’m hooked and I already booked tickets for two other ones this year. 🥰

The reason why I never went to any concert in my life was a mixture of having too much social anxiety and not enough money. Tackled both of these problems, but it took me a while.