There are cheap USB<->PATA/SATA or USB<->NVME adapters out there that usually also come with 120v AC -> 3/5/12v DC PATA/SATA power supplies (and if the SATA SSDs only need 5v then some adapters might work with USB alone).
I use them for working with old unmounted hard drives or for cloning drives for family members before swapping them. But they would probably work for just supplying power too?
The one I use the most is an 18 year old Rosewill RCW-608.
I don't know if the firmware/controller would do what it needs to do with only power connected. I wonder if there's some way to use SMART value tracking to tell? Like if power on hours increments surely the controller was doing the things it needs to do?
I think requiring notification would be better than automatically pausing (or maybe let people choose?)
My elderly parents have a cheap voip landline that they never use but keep for peace of mind. It'd be unideal if that got automatically "paused" and then it didn't work the one time they tried to use it to call 911.
Sure, the scenario would mean their cell phones are not working, or they're suffering from some cognitive issue, so it's unlikely -- but still plausible.
That's a good example. In that case though I'd say that every month the voip line is providing a service. Something like a Netflix subscription that you haven't logged into for 6 months is more unequivocally providing no value.
Mandatory monthly notifications about charges seem better though and wouldn't lead to weird perverse incentives. (Like Netflix spamming your email with auto-login links so if you click one they can claim you did use their service)
I don't fully agree with the 1 and 2 dichotomy. For example, before matchmaking-based games became so popular a lot of our competitive games were on dedicated servers.
On dedicated servers we had a self-policing community with a smaller pool of more regular players and cheaters were less of an issue. Sure, some innocents got banned and less blatant cheaters slipped through but the main issue of cheaters is when they destroy fun for everyone else.
So, for example, with the modern matchmaking systems they could do person verification instead of machine verification. Such as how some South Korean games require a resident registration number to play.
Then when people get banned (or probably better, shadowbanned/low priority queued) by player reports or weaker anti-cheat they can't easily ban evade. But of course then there is the issue of incentivizing identity theft.
And I don't think giving a gaming company my PII is any better than giving them root on my machine. But that seems more like an implementation issue.
> For example, before matchmaking-based games became so popular a lot of our competitive games were on dedicated servers.
I still had a lot of problems with cheaters during this time. And when the admins aren't on you're still then at the whims of cheaters until you go find some other playground to play in.
And then on top of that you have the challenge of actually finding good servers to go join a game with similarly skilled players, especially when trying to play with a group of friends together. Trying to get all your friends on to the same team just for the server to auto-balance you again because the server has no concept of parties sucked. Finding a good server with the right mods or maps you're looking for, trying to join right when a round started, etc was always quite a mess.
Matchmaking services have a lot of extremely desirable features for a lot of gamers.
Except most anti-cheats started on dedicated servers because it turns out most people are not interested in policing other players.
Punkbuster was developed for Team Fortress Classic, even getting officially added to Quake 3 Arena. BattleEye for Battlefield games. EasyAntiCheat for Counter-Strike. I even remember Starcraft 1 ICCUP 3rd party servers having an anti-cheat they called 'anti-hack'.
You can still see this today with modern dedicated servers in CS2: Face-It and ESEA have additional anti-cheat, not less. Even modded 3rd party server FiveM for GTAV has their own anti-cheat called adhesive.
I would argue a lot of the early anti-cheat was just as much about giving admins and communities better tools to police themselves as it was about automated cheat detection.
Like here's 2006 Punkbuster for Battlefield 2 (BEye might have been made for BF:V but Punkbuster was what I remember being used by servers). [1]
It automatically kicked on cheat detection but it didn't ban. It provided logs for admins to use for bans. It provided a way for admins to give community players the power to kick. It provided a player GUID based on CD key. It provided an online identity verification/registration system (though I don't remember anyone using this). It let admins take screenshots of players' screens.
> So, for example, with the modern matchmaking systems they could do person verification instead of machine verification. Such as how some South Korean games require a resident registration number to play.
If you think the hate for anti-cheat is bad, just wait until you see the hate for identity verification.
I'm actually rather blown away that you would even suggest it.
Cursory searching says in 2020 they created a new production line in Wisconsin and moved it to 3M Aberdeen.[1][2]
If you look on Google street view dates for the Aberdeen factory and compare 2019 to 2023 it had a big expansion that's still there.
The other major 3M PPE factory, 3M Valley, was expanded in 2024. [3]
Edit: For the curious, Honeywell did fire their pandemic mask factory workers, closed a pandemic mask factory, and then exited the PPE business entirely. [4][5][6]
Thanks for calling me out. You're right, it wasn't 3M. (Why do I feel like an LLM writing that. Anyway...)
Yeah so 3M got kinda fucked, Honeywell got a little bit fucked, but it was the med/small timers that got turbo fucked, but they're smaller names that noone recognizes unless we're on similar rabbit hole adventures. Places like Patriot Medical Devices or Cleveland Veteran Business Solutions are descriptive names vs, say, HomTex or Halcyon Shades, but names aside, some people, in true American fashion, saw a problem, built a company, and then a factory. Hired employees, and then had to fire them all and fold, because globalization. Meanwhile Jared Kushner walks free.
Per AA's 10-K, in 2024 87% of American Airlines employees were represented by a union[1]. So according to that source it sounds like the people who were fired were union members that didn't pay their dues.
They could surely have paid their dues and left the union and kept their jobs (or could have never joined the union to begin with).
So looks like you're right but there's also some weird language technicality for "closed shop" where it's really a "union shop".
Per the APFA contract[1] employees are forced to join the union within 60 days of assignment as a flight attendant. This is technically considered a union shop (not a closed shop) because it doesn't require people to be union members before being hired.
Under the Taft-Hartley Act a lot of states (and in some situations, court decisions) have made this illegal[2] via right-to-work laws but airlines are covered under the Railway Labor Act (45 U.S.C. § 152)[3] which allows it (upheld by the US Supreme Court in Railway Employes' Department v. Hanson, 351 U.S. 225)[4] .
So, I was wrong and the employees had no choice but continue to be union members and pay dues or be fired because of airline-specific labor law.
In Windows 10 I have shortcuts pinned to my taskbar that are just
> ...firefox.exe" -P "profilename"
and then `taskbar.grouping.useprofile true` so only windows from the same profile are grouped together and some custom recolored Firefox icons for those pinned shortcuts and custom per-profile userChrome.css styling (#TabsToolbar background-color) for easy visual differentiation of a window's profile.
For Windows 10, no scripting is needed. Just the initial GUI profile setup.
I haven't messed with Firefox's PWA feature/taskbar-tabs[1] but it seems like under the hood it's just using shortcuts so you're probably looking for -taskbar-tab
This redditor looks like he's doing close to what you're asking with the caveat of needing an entry in taskbartabs.json to use -taskbar-tab (and maybe Windows OS only) [2]
I don't think it's completely chromeless but you can probably hide everything via custom CSS:
ctrl+shift+i (dev tools) -> f1 (settings)
check advanced settings:
enable browser chrome and add-on debugging
enable remote debugging
ctrl+shift+alt+i (browser dev tools)
Find element IDs or class names and try out CSS rules to your heart's content.
Set toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets = true and put your changes in Firefox/Profiles/$profilename/chrome/userChrome.css.
Remember to turn off the advanced settings when you're done.
For Win 10, I set this up a while ago so my memory is a bit fuzzy but the key was the `taskbar.grouping.useprofile true` setting. I think after that's set Firefox and Windows did some AUMID shenanigans on profile launch.
I just made a new profile as a test and this is what I did:
...firefox.exe" -P -> create a new profile (ie. "newprofilename")
about:config set `taskbar.grouping.useprofile = true` (when I originally did this for many profiles I believe I copied prefs.js that already had it set)
close and reopen that profile instance. I used ...firefox.exe" -P "newprofilename" but any method of launching the profile should work. It should now be in a separate taskbar group.
Pin that new group to taskbar. Also modify its shortcut target to add -P "newprofilename"
Now you're done.
Normally I also renamed the pinned shortcut to something sane and then I changed the icon. I took the normal Firefox icon (I think w/ GIMP) and just messed with the colors via saturation or something so it was easy to tell the difference. I remember changing the shortcut icon had some headache but I sadly didn't write notes.
Also, I didn't set grouping.useprofile on all my profiles, just the profiles I wanted separately pinned on my taskbar. My default profile is pinned normally without grouping.useprofile set.
>from terminal [opening URLs in instances using profile paths] works exactly as expected regardless of how many profile instances are currently running or their state.
That's interesting. It didn't work a couple of years ago, perhaps it's been fixed.
I use them for working with old unmounted hard drives or for cloning drives for family members before swapping them. But they would probably work for just supplying power too?
The one I use the most is an 18 year old Rosewill RCW-608.
I don't know if the firmware/controller would do what it needs to do with only power connected. I wonder if there's some way to use SMART value tracking to tell? Like if power on hours increments surely the controller was doing the things it needs to do?