“Fixed that for you.”

Close but no cigar on that Genesis/Megadrive controller, there.

The original Atari VCS/2600 had 128 bytes of RAM. It is astonishing what programmers were eventually able to achieve on it with basically nothing. Although additional memory could be included on cartridges, and many games did so. Or had to do so, I imagine.

Unlike hard drives and SSDs which as you have observed are incessantly manufactured in powers-of-ten mega/giga/terabytes but marketed as if they were powers-of-two mebi/gibi/tebibytes, a RAM chip’s capacity is absolutely, definitely, 100% down to the individual bit precisely the capacity at which it is rated in powers-of-two megabytes. Due to the way that memory is accessed there is no other way and it cannot be fudged. (The exception is ECC RAM which typically has an extra bit per byte to hold the parity data, but this is not accessible to the user so that’s moot.)

There is a small bite of your memory space taken out for Memtestx86 to reside in, which is necessary in order for it to run. Your BIOS probably has some portion of memory reserved as well, either for peripheral memory mapping or for use as video memory, or similar.

There is probably also some rounding going on in the total capacity that Memtestx86 reports.

Venezuela is also larger than Texas, at 352,140 square miles per Wikipedia vs. 268,596. That’ll make Texans really pissed.

In the immortal words of Daniel Rutter (again): If nothing else, backups are necessary because at some point in your life you will confidently instruct your computer to destroy your data.

The RF 100-400, and the RF 200-800.

I have a pair of Vortex Diamondback 8x42s, the DB-214. They’re well outside of your budget but I can attest to the optical quality. Their cheapest 10x28 model TRI-1028 lists for $130 USD to might just slide in under the wire for you if you can find a pair.

I wouldn’t bother, personally. I have the Canon 1.4x and the 2x, and the 2x in particular is worthless. It adds so much aberration to the image that there is no advantage in quality versus just cropping the un-extended image and blowing it up. But above and beyond that the equivalent of three full stops of light loss means that you stand a good chance of not being able to make the shot at all.

So you can basically forget about taking pictures of birds with it around sunrise or sunset, or on cloudy days, or under any kind of tree cover. It’s a good thing birds never show up in any of those conditions…

So I gave up on it.

Physical exclusion is probably the way. Birds don’t really have a sense of smell so I’d highly doubt any essential oil gimcrackery would actually work. You can’t deter them with spicy stuff either, because that’s like trying to deter a fat man with a perimeter of hamburgers. (Peppers evolved to be spicy because mammals care but birds specifically don’t, and the peppers want birds to eat them and spread the seeds.)

Use nets, put your stuff in one of those mini greenhouses, something like that.

The second one is quite nice.

I never have luck with jays, either. It’s like they know I’m pointing a camera at them.

You’re like the gym bro reincarnation of Haruhi Suzumiya.

I learned the cop knock early on in my delivery career. People ask why I didn’t use the bell. Because more than half the time the bell doesn’t work, that’s why. I don’t have all night to stand out here looking stupid. Hitting your door with my baton did, though, didn’t it? Plus if you’re going to bust out of here running your mouth with some dumb shit, I’m already holding my baton.

I wouldn’t do it hard enough to leave a dent in the door except with people I really disliked.

I never had the occasion to whack a customer, regardless of how richly some of them may have deserved it. But people lurking around the vicinity who were stupid enough to believe they were the first person to think of jumping the pizza man from behind at the door were a different story.

That’s fine if you have a mouse that isn’t shite. I have a coworker who also does this, in his case via having the cursor speed jacked up as far as it’ll go in Control Panel. But the crap mouse he has on his PC means that the cursor now moves several pixels per sample. It’s impossible to move it one pixel at a time, which means some very small UI elements in inexpertly coded programs (like, just to name one example, our inventory control software) are smaller than the minimum movement distance and you can’t place the cursor on them to click them.

He seems to spend most of his day on reddit, though, so this apparently has not impacted his productivity much. Meanwhile, if I use his machine I just become Captain Keyboard Shortcut in self-defense.

They are not. They’re architecturally very, very similar but there are some small differences between the Japanese and US machines.

Some of this was very deliberate on Nintendo’s part. The pin count on the Famicom cartridges vs. NES ones is different, and the Famicom lacks the infamous 10NES lockout chip which was present in the US models and their cartridges. Famicom game piracy was rampant in Asia prior to the US NES release, and Nintendo didn’t want that to play out again in the West. The NES was made incompatible out of the box with Famicom carts not just to prevent imported Japanese Famicom games from being played on it, but also to prevent the myriad of bootlegs available from being played on it as well.

This is before getting into the expanded capabilities provided by the Famicom Disk System, which we never got in the West. Fun fact: The expansion port is still there, on the bottom of your NES beneath that little hatch cover, but it was never officially used for anything. That was probably its originally intended purpose, though, since the piggyback cartridge strategy used by the top loading Famicom would have been quite tricky on the front loading NES and its gimcrack faux VCR mechanism.

There is some more rambling to this effect in the now ancient post of mine here, including a showing off of the adapter in my Exitebike cart. As the story goes, for the US launch of the NES Nintendo could not produce enough game cartridges fast enough so their solution was to take existing stock of Japanese carts and bung them in cheap but official Famicom-to-NES adapters complete with a lockout chip on each, and package them all up in a US style cartridge which has a ton of extra room inside to begin with. Notably, if you’ve ever wondered when you were a kid why your Exitebike game pretends to have a save function, and where it’s trying to save to, there’s your answer: A Famicom tape recorder, which is a peripheral we never got in the US. But the game ROM is actually the Japanese version on a Japanese cart, in an adapter.

But if you’re a dedicated enough nut, you can take that adapter out of your old Exitebike or Gyromite or whatever cart, and stick any Japanese Famicom (or pirate) cartridge in it, and mostly they’ll just work with some minor limitations. The NES, for example, lacks the ability to accept the extra sound channel input that Famicom cartridges could provide via add-on chips.

I dunno about misprints, but I’ve got a five screw Excitebike as well as a five screw Gyromite that are Japanese Famicom cartridges inside the shell with a Famicom to NES adapter. This was an actual official thing, and was how some very early titles were distributed at first.

While we’re talking rarity, I also have a copy of Fantasia for the Genesis which is naturally the only cartridge in my entire collection that won’t boot no matter what I do to it. I use it as a cartridge slot dust excluder these days.

I’ve never met anyone who got rid of any classic video game stuff who didn’t regret it. The moral of the story is, don’t. This is why I have an entertainment center full of stupid old consoles and three bookshelves full of games for all kinds of systems.

A few systems I traded in over the years to fund newer consoles when I was young and didn’t know any better. I got all of them back, though, and in most cases before they became trendy enough again for the used prices to skyrocket.

It is definitely some manner of cormorant.

Or constructive dismissal.

“We’ll make all those expensive whiners quit, and then they won’t get unemployment benefits. Don’t worry, we’ll replace their positions with AI. It’ll totally work. Honk honk.”

535nm for most/all of my greens.

I do have one of the old 1000mw Wicked Laser blues as well, however, which I think is 445nm.

Oh yeah. And my engraver is 100 watts of infrared (1084nm?), not milliwatts, although the range is probably a bit crap for this sort of thing and it’s not exactly concealable. You’d also want to pack rather a long extension cord.

And the Power Base Converter. I don’t think that will pass through the 32x, though. I’ll have to dig mine out and try it some time.