BTW, I know I'm being overdramatic by saying that replies are telling me I "got it wrong", but when I say "don't quote me on it" and a *bunch* of comments have already added lots of context, I wonder why people continue to post the same type of replies over and over again.
The first one or two replies feel like "hey here's some useful additional information." But the next several that say nearly the same thing? Those hit different.
Update: several of you have said the same thing in response to this. Namely, that you don't know each other is talking because of the way Mastodon/ActivityPub is federating replies. That's a good point and doesn't change the perception of the OP.
Maybe that contributes to folks feeling dogpiled on this platform? Sounds like a bug that needs some level of working out.
(I am not asking for opinions here on whether this is feasible)
So I have a shirt that I sell which has been gaining traction on the merch store recently. You may have noticed it, the shirt has color names written on it:
white-orange orange white-green blue white-blue green white-brown brown
A few folks have asked me "what does this mean", not getting the joke. So, I'll explain it!
This is a glamour shot of a cat-6 twisted pair cable, which we (somewhat lazily) call "Ethernet cable", cut open. Chances are pretty high that you have at least one of these somewhere in your network, if only between your router and modem.
Here you can see the inside of the cable: four pairs of twisted wires, in addition to a plastic backing (which I think helps avoid breakage by reducing the bend radius, but don't quote me on that).
Now, here's a close-up of that cable, specifically the twisted pair that's green. Note that the white wire isn't completely white, it's white with a green stripe on it!
So now, after digging out some passthrough connectors to really demonstrate this, I've (somewhat hastily) begun the process of terminating that sliced cable, thus turning it into something that can be used in the network.
So why is this important? Well, standards for one. That's why so many folks have learned a "right way" to do it, and some will be upset if you do it *differently* than they're anticipating. And for good reason as unexpectedly terminating a cable in different ways on each end can result in headaches.
But, why not just pair the colors off? Why doesn't solid-green come *after* white-green? Why is blue there instead?
Now, I'm not a network historian, but here's how I was taught.
Earlier registered jack connections had two wires. For the sake of understanding let's call them "the two blue wires" (but they weren't always blue, this is a simplification).
When two more wires were added to the mix (let's call them "the two green wires" even though they weren't always green), they were added to either side for ✨compatibility reasons✨.
Contracts required it, so standards were built around it.
Anywho, the order of colors in the standard is hard for some folks to memorize, so I made a shirt with it. It's also nerdy and the most popular shirt in my merch store.
Lumacode is a project that uses FPGA-based modification boards created by the legendary C0pperdragon. In this case, it slots in between the VIC chip (video chip) and its socket on the VIC-20.
It then outputs a signal which another upscaler (in my case, an RGBtoHDMI on a Raspberry Pi) can use to generate *pixel perfect* video from the original chips. No emulation.
I make dorky YouTube/PeerTube videos about Linux and vintage tech, and occasionally write about stuff. I'm also a geeky musician and used to be a COBOL dev. Pronouns are she/her.Proudly supported by viewers like you via Patreon and Ko-Fi. Thank you for your consideration!Mutes/blocks rude folks and reply guys. No offense, just not interested.(This is my new account, I used to post at @vkc.)