FOR YEAR IN RANGE(88):
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“Who’s this clown?”

I’m fond of it for two reasons: calls them a clown and implies that they aren’t even a memorable one.

Hurricane.

Winds were so strong I could hear the house creaking as it was passing over. Stripped the shingles off my roof to where it was raining in the bedrooms. Ceilings collapsed because the insulation and drywall became waterlogged. I got hit on the head from that because I was trying to pull stuff out of the master bedroom before everything got waterlogged. Fortunately, drywall was soft enough where it didn’t cause a concussion. Tree fell on my home. Another lucky break because it was only leaning on it and didn’t cause any structural damage.

Next day rode around on my bike to see the extent of the damage. Shingles everywhere. Some with the roofing nails still attached, and some were embedded into the siding of various homes. All wooden privacy fences knocked down, destroyed. A few of the slats were broken up to the point where they looked like crude wooden spears. A bunch of duplexes had their fire alarms constantly beeping. Not because there was a fire, but because they were running on battery power instead of mains power (really stupid design).

Saw one home were it was a two story but became a one story. Roof completely collapsed in. 2nd floor walls mostly gone. Inside I could see a tangled mess of the family’s furniture and the wooden support structure.

For the 2nd worse home I saw, the wind had pushed in where the garage door used to be and ripped off the roof from the inside. About 2/3rds of the trust structure was exposed to the elements. That one hit me in the feels because I had just met that family the week before.

Venturing out further, most of the power poles were knocked and the power lines and transformers were laying in the streets. All the stop lights were dead, obviously from the lack of power. Most survived the winds though. Most of the trees, if there weren’t knocked over, had their leaves stripped off. Stop signs, they were gone. The wind shook them back and forth so much that the metal became fatigued and snapped them off by the base. Saw the same thing with a tractor trailer. Looked like Godzilla snapped it in half, all from the wind and metal fatigue.

Over the next couple of days, it was a constant wailing of ambulances. They were evacuating patients out of the hospitals.

That was definitely an experience, living in a half destroyed home for a year rebuilding and dealing with an insurance company that was ill equipped to handle the influx of claims.

You’re not wrong, but this is a press release from a university about research. They’re not going to dig into methodology when they want to toot their own horn.

Reading the abstract and introduction (full article is pay walled), it was a pilot study using EEG. Normally similar studies have participants self report using a survey. Sample size was 60 people which seems reasonable given they had to hook up each person to an EEG. Demographics are a bit skewed based on gender and age, but as a pilot, that probably isn’t that big of a deal.

I’m not seeing anything egregious, and it was published in a peer reviewed journal. I would treat this as a single data point and wait for other researchers to replicated it and prod at the methodology more.

Obligatory: you can improve your Windows experience by installing Linux.

Non snarky comment: you can disable driver craplets from auto-installing using group policy or the registry.

run gpedit.msc
Computer Configuration
> Administrative Templates
  > System
    > Device Installation

Prevent automatic download of applications associated with device metadata
= Enabled

That will set the following registry key:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Device Metadata]
"PreventDeviceMetadataFromNetwork"=dword:00000001

Lemmy hugged the site to death, but archive.org has some snapshots.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260517182405/https://corsirosenthalfoundation.org/instructions/

Given the current price of RAM and SSDs, I don’t see how a $200 laptop is even viable to sell. Unless it is barely scraping by on specs or comes loaded with craplets and spyware.

Just doing a quick search, all I’m seeing is stuff in the $350 range with 4 or 8 GB of RAM. I’m not familiar with the genre of games you play, but I don’t think they would run well on that. Or run at all. Haven’t even looked at the gpu or cpu specs.

I would try to find something used and compare specs against the min and recommended hardware requirements for the games you play.