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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • I haven’t found one yet. I think anyone who could offer the same would inevitability end up using the same slimy tactics as Amazon.

    When I can, I wait and bundle purchases together in order to save on shipping costs. Almost nowhere can match the 1-2 day shipping on Amazon, but it’s rare that I actually need anything so fast.

    Some of my go-to choices:

    • If it’s some cheap product that Amazon sells 10,000 different versions of from brands with unpronounceable names, I usually can get it on AliExpress for cheaper. The tradeoff is waiting longer.
    • For consumer electronics, I’ll look on B&H, BestBuy, Microcenter
    • For PC components, although I dislike newegg, I consider them less bad then Amazon
    • Books I order from my local store and pick them up in person
    • Electronic components, microcontrollers, etc I look at Mouser, Digikey, SeeedStudio, Adafruit, Sparkfun, and others
    • EBay is low on my list, because sometimes the seller is just drop-shipping you a product straight from Amazon and charging you more for it

  • Not quite. The bullying comes in a few forms:

    • Removing the “buy now” button from the product page, making users click through multiple steps to complete a purchase. Per the video, suppliers who had this happen to them saw 80% drop in sales.
    • Amazon automatically lowers its price, but then charges the supplier a fee on each item sold to make up for the difference in margin.
    • Amazon marks the product page with a big red badge saying “high price”, discouraging users from buying the product.

    Since the suppliers often need Amazon more than Amazon needs them, the net result is that they comply.





  • Can I leave all my drives connected, plug in a seperate SSD through USB, boot into Nobara live and install on that drive without it affecting my mint install?

    Yes. Just double-check every part of the install process so you don’t write to the wrong device.

    Also, if I do that will it put the EFI file on the seperate SSD?

    Probably yes (depends on the options you pick during the install process). The external drive will get its own boot partition with appropriate EFI files. Then to boot from it, you would select the external drive in your UEFI.

    I use rEFInd as my EFI bootloader: It lets me chain load other boot options (external drives) without touching my motherboard UEFI settings. I leave it installed to my main boot partition, but it scans for other bootable partitions at startup. Then it auto-populates a selector list of my main install, or whatever other external devices are plugged in. It can chain load GRUB, other EFI bootloaders, Windows, etc from these devices, so you don’t have to worry about compatibility with whatever bootloader the OS expects to use.





  • Vivado is software for designing hardware on an FPGA. AMD bought out Xilinx, one of the big FPGA manufacturers, a few years back. FPGAs are basically programmable digital circuits: you configure a series of internal logic gates to represent the function of a circuit with memory, data busses, registers, gates, etc. In this fashion, an FPGA could be programmed to function like a CPU, a radio, a video encoder, or nearly any other piece of digital hardware. Very useful for hobbyists and prototyping.

    The thing with FPGA software is that there are no open source alternatives. FPGAs have so many complicated blobs and signing keys and proprietary IP blocks that your only choice is to use the manufacturer’s offering.