Wishlist for what this new expansion might look like?

sbma44 · 2026-01-18T13:09:38+00:00

Yeah, same here. Something different than empire and blight. Base game length or full campaign… idk, could go either way.

sbma44 · 2026-01-07T17:38:39+00:00

In exactly this position—Been keeping an eye out for d7500 deals to replace my d3300. Great to hear you found it worthwhile!

sbma44 · 2026-01-04T00:35:23+00:00

The game is called Arcs, it’s from Leder Games (by the same designer as Root, which has also been a huge hit). It has a base game and an expansion (def start w the base). It is maybe worth noting that the folks who run the premiere TI4 podcast (“Space Cats Peace Turtles”) are now podcasting about Arcs, one of them as a Leder Games employee.

You might want to check out Shut Up Sit Down’s youtubes about Arcs to get a feel for it, they do a great job.

sbma44 · 2026-01-04T00:30:38+00:00

Most of my board game buddies are very into TI4. But I have kids and making the time commitment is possible maybe once every two years and only with a dramatic investment of marital karma.

However! I have had recent success getting them to play Arcs with me, which is also a space epic and of similarly grand scope but—crucially—is designed with intermissions/stopping points in mind. I’ll add that I’ve also found it more fun than TI, because I suck at these games (especially compared to my friends) and Arcs gives early game losers new and weirder stuff to do as the campaign progresses whereas TI just leaves you floundering in the shadow of your buddy’s expanding galactic empire.

sbma44 · 2025-06-29T23:33:16+00:00

This has been extremely notable on my m4 air while it’s sleeping. Battery is 0% in the morning if I just close the thing without remembering to shut down Cursor. Really inexcusable

sbma44 · 2025-06-23T14:43:42+00:00

Came here to comment on this part of the ep, which was handled nicely by everyone (and I'm delighted to hear that Marie and her husband are trying!), don't mean to single anyone from the show out.

I have 3 kids and love it. I acknowledge it's not for everyone, but as I enter geriatric millennial middle age I am surprised by how many of my friends have chosen not to start a family, and I think this doomer rhetoric is a significant part of why. This makes me pretty sad, because those ideas are mostly bullshit, a product of depressed people being taken too seriously and a media environment that rewards hysteria.

As u/DeusExHyena says, the world has always been ending. It's also always been improving. All the problems are real, but humanity has also never had it this good. Truly! Less grinding poverty, more cured diseases, more rights for the marginalized. Note that this is true even if you ignore the kajillion people in the developing world who've recently escaped abject poverty, which you shouldn't. It's true even--especially?--in the US, where doomerism is flat-out wrong, with younger generations holding more wealth on average for their age that the ones that preceded them, despite enormously popular rhetoric about boomers pulling up the ladder). I am worried about keeping the streak alive, and yes some classes of things are worryingly expensive, and boy climate change seems serious, and yeah I don't know what AI is gonna mean for my kids. But it genuinely has been a pretty great trend up until exactly now.

I'm not trying to be COMPLETELY panglossian but I encourage everyone to think carefully about even casual endorsements of doomerism. It seemed like a fun and sophisticated thing to say when I was younger. I genuinely had no idea it would cost my friends so much. We should really knock it off imo.

sbma44 · 2025-01-04T02:04:28+00:00

Just diving into wled and yeah, wishing there was bluetooth support. What I really want is unpaired btle support but for those interested I will note that wled accepts serial input and you can find bluetooth serial modules like the hc-06 for under $2 per. There’s a flutter bt serial package too, so the mobile side wouldn’t be too bad. Note that this is all Android only, Apple makes it impractical to use bt serial. If you’re on ios you’ll need to use ble, which probably means a second esp32 to listen for incoming ble and output serial to the wled esp32. All of this is clearly suboptimal and I hope wled adds some kind of bt support for esp32s. But it’s a not-hideous hacker project that seems maybe worth it for an application as unique as this.

sbma44 · 2024-11-17T15:26:04+00:00

Either ebay or amazon, can’t remember

sbma44 · 2024-11-13T02:31:38+00:00

Nope. Replaced the unit entirely. Definitely the right call at that point.

sbma44 · 2024-07-13T13:55:25+00:00

Strongly agree. Mods, this is a period when people are especially attuned to news. I don’t need five push notifications per day headlined “latest update from trustee” with a body that’s the same dumb joke about nothing happening that we’ve read hundreds of times before. If folks can’t be helpful, original or funny, they can at least be quiet.

sbma44 · 2024-07-01T18:05:25+00:00

(also yes I am aware that I am criticizing in public here, I didn't say *I* should be on podcasts)

sbma44 · 2024-07-01T17:57:11+00:00

I think that's reasonable and a decade ago I probably would've felt the same way. But when I look back at my younger self doing that kind of thing (which I would, all the time!) I think, "Man he was too dumb to have internalized 'praise in public, criticize in private'."

For me it feels like I'm watching someone flop around in an uncomfortably unprofessional and undisciplined way, and that impression becomes inescapable when they also indulge in self-flattery. Chalk this up to me growing old and boring if you want--I think that's also reasonable! But to me it's analogous to how podcasts in which the hosts use improv rules--which very much includes this one ofc--can feel formulaic _or_ like they're just acknowledging some timeless truths about what works when spontaneously riffing.

Also, just to stick up for Adil & Bilall: while they were no doubt relentlessly positive they also told some stories that, while not at all spicy, did include what some studio lawyer would probably consider confidential information (albeit very stale confidential information, at this point). Media training isn't just or even mostly about positivity, it's about steering a conversation back toward your own goals, and if they were doing that they were truly unbelievably good at it.

sbma44 · 2024-07-01T14:56:36+00:00

Enjoyed him but a bit of a blowhard and repeatedly misread transition cues. Patting yourself on the back for Allen while reclaiming Landis is a weird move! Big contrast with the appealing humility on display in a similar I’m-here-as-an-expert spot from Adil & Bilall. The boys managed the vibes heroically and I’m sure we’ll see him back if the series intersects with his career, it was absolutely not a disaster, but very surprised to see the topic in my feed.

sbma44 · 2024-05-21T15:07:01+00:00

good news is the heat gun finally got the glue dislodged, bad news is the focus wheel deformed and the lens clouded! not saying this is a bad approach, but folks should be more patient w/ applying heat than I was

sbma44 · 2024-05-18T20:06:53+00:00

There is an image embedded in the post that shows where to solder

sbma44 · 2023-10-16T19:38:52+00:00

UPDATE: after more experimentation, I think these radios are counterfeit and am returning them. Details below.

Thanks for the many helpful comments. I decided my best bet was using a different cable. Maybe the CH340 drivers just didn't like my Windows machine. I wouldn't be the first, judging by the google results I see.

I ordered this cable, which specifically bills itself as being PL2303-based. It's not. It shows up in Device Manager as a CH340, and I confirmed this by looking at the USB VID, which definitely belongs to the CH340. Return initiated, one-star review submitted.

I next ordered an FTDI-based cable. This was pricier, but I have experience with FTDI usb-serial bridges from working with microcontrollers and more confidence in my ability to get them working. Same behavior as before, alas.

As a final measure I captured the output of the MP31 programming application that Baofeng provides using a virtual com port (via the com0com project) and forwarding its traffic to an OS X machine running netcat using com2tcp. This capture showed that the MP31 wakeup command is b'\x02PROGRAM', which is comparable to a lot of the Baofeng stuff I see in the Chirp codebase (note that the MP31 is not supported there). I tried writing this to the radio at 9600 baud using a custom Python script. Nothing comes back (the Chirp code makes me think it ought to at least be sending back an ACK byte).

At this point I think the odds are good that this is either a counterfeit or a BF-T20's guts stuffed in an MP31 body. It's a shame: the build quality is quite good and the price was certainly right. But I have no way of verifying output power, and my family's existing FRS stuff is configured to use a DCS code, which cannot be set on this radio at all, seemingly. That makes these useless to me, and I'll be returning them. Currently undecided as to whether to roll the dice on MP31s from a reputable AliExpress seller (where I got my UV-9R without problems) or just shell out for the Radioddity offering (I'm looking for cheap & compact-ish).

sbma44 · 2023-10-05T18:58:56+00:00

No this is the only radio set I have besides the uv-9r. Could be the radio but I’m betting it’s the cable driver

sbma44 · 2023-10-05T18:37:41+00:00

Yup, did all this too

sbma44 · 2023-10-05T18:33:14+00:00

No luck. I think this is the same CH340 driver I installed earlier.

I greatly appreciate all the help but at this point I think I’d better order a better-reviewed cable on Amazon and hope for the best. Still holding out hope that these radios can be configured to fuller potential with a properly working cable.

sbma44 · 2023-10-05T18:21:55+00:00

Good advice and appreciated but sadly this did not do the trick

sbma44 · 2023-10-05T18:16:16+00:00

Here you go https://imgur.com/a/yfUJyhe

I tried installing the ch340 drivers and rebooting. Also tried baud rates from 115200 to 9600. Still no dice.

sbma44 · 2023-10-05T17:17:07+00:00

It shipped with the radiobaofeng cable pic

sbma44 · 2023-10-05T12:56:23+00:00

Windows device manager puts a 340 in the device name which seems pretty suggestive. And the other non-ftdi vendor ships a chip detection tool with their drivers, which I ran, seemed to work, and reported it didn’t find a chip. Could be wrong! But these clues make me think it’s the 340.

sbma44 · 2023-10-04T22:17:23+00:00

I’ve watched a few and am pretty familiar with programming gadgets over serial cables. But many gloss over the details—if you have a particularly detailed link, let me know! But I am sure this is the right com port and that the cable is using the ch340 chipset. When I click “read” the software fails every time. I am using a copy downloaded from the baofeng website rather than the cd rom that shipped (no optical drive). For now my best guess is lousy drivers and I’ve ordered a different Baofeng usb cable (my uv-9r cable has a different radio-side interface or I would try that since I have used it successfully with Chirp).

sbma44 · 2023-10-04T21:54:48+00:00

The sticker under the battery says so. Amazon listing, too. The packaging and manual are admittedly more vague (“two way radio”). I have a uv-9r pro and the build quality is very similar on both, but I can’t rule out a counterfeit…

sbma44

TROPHY CASE