Things are this are why I am so glad for European crash safety regulations. Even an adult getting hit by an F150 must feel like getting hit by a brick wall.

Just wait until you find out we use miles per gallon for fuel consumption but sell fuel with litres.

Oh goodness, this is reminding me of the SUV/truck hellscape most manufacturers are trying to push nowadays. Even my inner car guy hates those with a burning passion, as it killed so many cool cars.

Most of the delivery services here in the UK even in places with big roads use bicycles, mopeds, or at most a small hatchback car. They can easily fit through that city.

Ah, it’s LibreOffice Fontwork on my modern Linux desktop, just screenshotted and comically compressed to look that bad. I did genuinely consider installing my copy of Word 2003 on WINE to make this though, because classic Microsoft Word WordArt is funny as hell.

Do you think it might be worth finding some sort of proxy shipping service that can buy in another country and send it over? I’ve used a few when buying stuff from Japan to ship over here in the UK, and have found them to be pretty useful. Worst comes to worst, you could always try (insert somewhat shady Chinese marketplace of choice here, there’s a bunch) and hope you get a good battery.

Oh my

this is beautiful, and I hate it

If you need a replacement, there’s official Steam Deck batteries now available on the iFixit store. It is a bit difficult to remove, but it’s worth it to extend the life of your Deck.

Holy shit that is a blast from the past.

This is the sort of thing that leads to compression artifacts so bad even just black and white text looks like a snowstorm. It’s almost impressive, in a way.

The special sauce of the Deck isn’t really what it’s running (it’s just Arch with some extra Steam stuff on top), it’s more that it’s something you can just buy and use without even thinking twice about anything - a more console like experience. To get a Linux handheld with that kind of performance before, you would have to go through all kinds of hoops and trouble to get it working (a lot of people aren’t ready to reinstall the OS on a device they just bought), plus a lot of games just would not work well. Deck gave pressure on game makers to ensure Proton compatibility at launch, as it gives them an established market who would appreciate it.

Can definitely agree on the Fire Emblem. Me? Hundreds of hours? Never!

Microsoft are likely going to keep on trying anyway, Deck is too big of a threat to their Windows gaming monopoly for them to ignore it. Just look at how they managed to get so many Windows handheld models out of the door seemingly minutes after the Deck released with its Linux based SteamOS. Their worst nightmare is people having a viable alternative to their platforms.

Fair enough. Steam sales are a pathway to deals some consider unnatural, or so the saying goes. Especially with things like Humble Bundle.

People around me have a different sort of take. Most of them have big powerful desktops already, and Deck doesn’t really appeal to them, so they all ended up buying Switch 1s eventually for the exclusives and portable use, and will likely follow with Switch 2. Deck is still amazing value though, considering it’s a full Linux PC you can take anywhere and use how you wish.

I take that you might be interested in my little shitposting community !okbuddyborders@feddit.uk if you want more Ace Combat memes.

Ah, I should have made that more clear in the meme. Both NVIDIA and ATI messed up in this era, bad. Sony’s efforts with the Cell are always so fascinating - so much potential is in that (just look at the late PS3 era games), but they just could not get it to the point of supplanting the GPU.

If it’s a reflow, your PS3 is running on borrowed time. A reflow heats up the chip enough that parts of it expand enough to make the GPU work again temporarily (the solder bumps on the bottom of the silicon attaching it to the interposer line up their cracks again), but eventually you’ll be back to square one. The real fix is to replace the 90nm GPU with a later 65 or 45nm variant that has the fixed design (search up “PS3 frankenstein mod” for more). There is thermal paste both under and above the IHS - the one under for taking the heat from the silicon up to the IHS, then the top layer for taking it to the heatsink. Here’s an image of a delidded RSX and Cell to show (apologies for the quality, was the best one I could easily find).

PS3s did cook themselves, but not to the extent of the 360.

It is funny to see how there are probably so many misdiagnosed 360s out there with bad power supplies that have been subjected to being bolt modded (shudder) or something. It doesn’t help that the three red lights just mean “general hardware fault” without doing the button combination to get further information. I guess at least more helpful than the PS3, whose diagnostics were only made available recently due to a key being cracked.

Your description of the Starlet is more accurate, yes. However, its heat output consequently caused some of the issues with the ATI designed parts of the Hollywood, as it exacerbated the thermal issues the 90nm variants had, and that a better designed chip would have been able to handle.

The PS3’s IHS was not the problem. There was decent contact and heat transfer, maybe not as perfect as it could have been (there’s thermal paste instead of it being soldered into place, which is why a delid and relid is fairly essential if you have a working 90nm PS3 due to aging thermal paste), but definitely not big enough of a problem for a properly designed chip to cook itself at the operating temperatures of the PS3 (75-80 temperature target on the RSX on an early variant at full load). The Cell B.E. next to the RSX that uses more power (consequently outputs more heat) has a similar setup for its IHS, but IBM did not make the same design mistakes as NVIDIA, and so we see very few reports of the CPU cooking itself even in those early PS3s.