Utah regional is over. Our final match was lost horribly due to our two alliance teams breaking down on the field, while the rival alliance surrounded our robots and kept it from moving anywhere outside of a small area filled with boxes.

Here's to the Idaho regional competition faring better.

The mobo I ordered a fe days ago arrived...

Dead on arrival. Plugged it in following the manual instructions, made sure I used a PSU that wasn't going to fry the thing...

Magic smoke right when I fired it up. Complete with sizzling and popping noise. The VRM for the chipset AND the CPU fried on first boot, even when I was using a PSU that I knew for a fact worked well with hardware from the time period of the mobo.

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We may be in 35th place from bad alliances holding us back, but we just handed one of the top teams their first loss of the day.

I'ma be fixing a floppy drive in it!

I maek educashunal vidyas.

yeet

Yes, that really is how Pony-Me began. Obviously it didn't stay that way for long if you've read the epilogue.

But still.

If Youtube drops the video to 144p and still takes upwards of 10 seconds every so often to buffer, then that's a problem.

My Surface RT was working well and I as bulldozing through the updates, and I even managed to properly log onto Fimfiction.

The problem?

Turns out that Microsoft just barely released a botched update at the end of January that's been bricking Surface devices all across the board. Guess what just happened to my own?

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If you've been keeping up with these blogs for the past year or two, you'd know that I occasionally pull out and work on my oldest and first ever computer.

Why?

Because I get too bored too easily, and I'd like to see the day when I end up bottlenecking the heck out of the system by stuffing a cutting-edge GPU into the case shared by the measly Pentium-133.

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I just knew that "installer" had something up its sleeve.

It all started with noticing that a file I downloaded had a .exe extension rather than the .jar that I expected. Coming from a rather shady download website, I suspected something was up when bringing up the file properties showed that the supposed pixel art generator jarfile was actually a "downloader".

What did I do about it?

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I've never owned enthusiast hardware as well-known and recognized as what I'm bidding on right now. I've got the winning bid at the moment, and I will protect it.

Though if it gets too high, I've got a backup board I'm watching that uses a different chipset (and really isn't as well-known or documented).

Yes, I'm aware that Windows RT sucks like crap and that people have been trying to install Linux on the Surface RT since 2013. But for my purposes of being a replacement for the Android tablet with a nonfunctioning touch screen that I've been using as a cheap writing device, it should work out nicely. As for the "lightly-used" part, it's so lightly used that I'm now going through installing every update since 2014 for this thing. Unfortunately though, I know very well that I'll be forced to use

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I'ma just use the current date. Makes it easier on me.

Why don't phone manufacturers include radio apps on their phones anymore? My old phone, an HTC Inspire 4G/Desire HD, comes with a built-in FM radio app, and it was made back when Android 2.3 was the latest and greatest. Even now, I still have yet to see another phone with an FM radio app preinstalled.

Every day I cringe a little more as I think about where humanity's headed with what's currently going on in this world.

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though you can pay more if you want 👀 👉👈

Help me be a little less broke while I'm in college!

RIP Pendar2. Your server was what introduced me to Minecraft all those years ago.

Emenbee Realms continues as a memorial.

OUR TEAM ALLIANCE WON THE 5TH QUALIFICATION ROUND BY 1 POINT.

WOO! TEAM 4598!

This Saturday marks the kickoff event of the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC), and the reveal of this year's game topic.

It's also the beginning of build season.

Prepare for another flood of blogs once the competitions begin.

We were literally one part away from finishing the robot for this Saturday's AMES competition, but then what happens?

Turns out nobody bothered to look at the datasheets for the two motors used for the ball launcher, and we ended up pushing 40 amps through a motor designed to start at 1.8 amps , with around 12 amps at tops.

Commence magical purple smoke of death and two fried motors.

It only took a doubled amount of time of working on it as well as lifting heavy metal parts everywhere, but the robot is fixed up and ready for the competition tomorrow.

As for now, my feet hurt. Badly.