So for all of us who grew up watching Yugioh back in the day has anyone tried Yugioh Master duel?  It's a free to play Online TCG version of the classic card game.

@darth Apple ??? Is MENTIONME no longer installed? Or a bug?

lg Tc4me

Greetings! Zalost here with another tutorial!  This one is going to be a quite long and will cover several topics so I'm going to put an index here to link different subjects together.

*********************
INDEX
Wire Basics, Calculations, Charts.
Wire Splicing Methods and Practices.
Making Plugs and Connectors.
Constructing an RJ45/RJ11 cable.
Advanced connectors and specialty tools.
*********************

To start with what are cables?  well usually a cable is a strand of material, usually not made of fabric but woven much like rope and generally stronger.  Examples include steel cabling (as seen on suspension bridges), Electrical cabling (our topic of today), Network cabling (specific variant of the previous), etc.

Some key things to remember about electrical cabling specifically are the following.  The thicker the cabling the lower the gauge and the less resistance it has and the farther power can travel before losing some of it's overall power at the other end.  Why is Cable a lower gauge despite being thicker/larger?  Because the gauge actually refers to the number of times it was run through a machine to make it that size.

This used to be somewhat like a pasta maker but these days it's a kind of steel roller/press.  You start out with a metal rod, usually copper, and you feed it into a machine that squeezes and stretches it into a smaller longer size, rinse and repeat. 


There's also two different kinds of cable, bundled strand and solid core.  Bonded strand is what is typically used and makes very flexible cables, think of it like a copper rope that's been twisted together to make a thicker cable.  Solid core however is more common in scenarios where flexibility is less important such as the wiring in your house where its lower resistance matters over the distances in your walls.


As an example of wire gauges here are 3 wires, listed as 14, 10, and 4 gauge wire from smallest to largest.


Notice the stands in each one, all 3 are examples of stranded wire.  Be wary of fraying when working with these as it can make it so you have to cut and strip your wire all over again.

When working with wire something else you have to keep in mind is amperage.  Usually the lower the gauge the more amperage it can handle over a longer distance.  I use the following chart as a reference.


It doesn't cover stuff outside of what you would most likely be working with such as 00 or even 000 gauge wire which is more like what you'd see in power lines and power relay stations.

As for what gauge to use, you can use that chart and it's great if you're working with 12 volt but what if you want to use more voltage or need a specific wattage at the end?

Well you can use the following formulas to work that out.

Watts = Amps times Volts
Amps = watts divided by volts

So for example let's say you want to power a 15 watt bulb on a 120 volt circuit.  what gauge of wire would you use?

Well you would divide 120 by 15 which comes out to 8 amps.

Using the chart above you could run that for about 10 to 12 feet on 12 gauge wire, or over 20 feet using 10 gauge wire.

For a full reference chart of electrical calculations you can use this.


Your voltage divided by the watts your getting at the other end will actually tell you your resistance on a wire so if you're only getting 10 watts then your getting 12 ohms of resistance, meaning you're only able to get 10 amps of power that distance even if you're putting in 15 watts.

It sorta goes back and forth but the key thing is you want to make sure your wire gauge can handle the watts, amps, and volts you're feeding it or your Resistance will create loss and you won't get as much on the on the other end.  The easiest way to fix this is to just use a bigger wire and it doesn't hurt to do so outside of cost and of course a higher conductivity.  I usually put a fuse in circuit just in case but usually using 10 gauge in place of 12 should be fine since the difference isn't that much and your motor/bulb/etc will only pull as much as it needs usually.

Conversely when you under size your wires you end up not being able to provide enough amps/watts to your device and making it under perform.  If your wire is too small it'll have too much resistance and just burn through... this is actually how the filament on an incandescent light bulb works.  it's a high resistance thin wire that's heating up enough to emit light and eventually burns through.

Anyway that should cover the basics of wires, wire gauge, and how to figure out what kind and size you need for a project.

Stay tuned for more because we're going to cover a lot of topics from how to actually splice wires to making your own connectors and the use for things like bus bars and terminals.

I have some money invested currently, and am trying to build it up. It's been a bit of a weird year to try to invest since the stock market has been in a bear market for several months (really, about a year). Lately I've still been investing in certain companies that I think will do well in a recession, and have been investing in apps like Acorns as well (where they can invest roundups into bonds and popular ETFs automatically). 

Do you invest or use any investment apps? What is your strategy for 2023?

Despite its name, Tesla’s so-called “Full Self-Driving” software doesn’t actually make Teslas capable of fully driving themselves. If that sounds like false advertising to you, you’re not the only one. And yet, Tesla is still allowed to use that term and recently decided that anyone with $15,000 to burn would be allowed access to the software. But as dangerous as it can be to use in perfect driving conditions, a new video shows how incredibly dangerous it can be to use in the snow.



https://jalopnik.com/video-shows-teslas-...1849945338

CoffeeZilla is a popular youtuber who investigates scams and shady practices from other creators, criminals, scammers, and large companies (he recently even managed to get SBF to accidentally admit to fraud in a long phone call interview, which is now on YouTube). 

Recently, CoffeeZilla investigated Logan Paul for a cryptocurrency rug pull (a common type of scam on DeFi where the owner of the token pumps up the price and leads people to believe that the coin will be successful long term, only to sell a significant amount of their holdings when the price is up and to crash the price of the token.) What was interesting in this case was that the token was not publicly available when Logan Paul and the development team started purchasing their tokens, which meant that they could buy them at an extremely low price before anyone else was able to know that the token existed. This pretty much guaranteed that they were going to make a lot of money when the price went up, provided they didn't manage to sabotage themselves in the process (which, since they apparently hired criminals to do the development process, didn't quite work out as planned). 





What's really cringeworthy, however, is Logan Paul's reaction. It's pretty much entirely ad-hominem, attempting to attack CoffeeZilla's credibility while not actually debunking any of the allegations whatsoever. Furthermore, him admitting that "NFTs are just pictures" and that he "hired criminals to do the development process" isn't really a good look for him, especially since he spent so much time pumping up his NFTs as being more than this and was attempting to pass off the blame for the project's failures despite being the one responsible for it (hiring criminals doesn't exactly make YOU look better). 



I have mixed views about Logan Paul. I want to see him succeed and always like a good comeback story, but I have a feeling this controversy is probably going to be a bit harder to get rid of than he thinks. If he apologized and said "look, we hired criminals, we weren't aware that this was going to happen this way and we are sorry," the community might have been more forgiving (still not a good look, he should have known better, but it wouldn't have dug him into a deeper hole as he's doing now). But attacking CoffeeZilla publicly and then threatening baseless legal action isn't a particularly good look for him, and it's going to be something that's hard to backtrack for him.

Apparently, Reddit is absolutely roasting him for this too.

What are your thoughts?

The Facebook group Meta must pay a fine of 390 million euros for the use of personal data. The decision goes back to three complaints from 2018.

“Instead of a yes/no option for personalized ads, they simply moved the opt-in clause to the terms and conditions. This is not only unfair, but clearly illegal. We don’t know of any other company that has tried to ignore the General Data Protection Regulation in such an arrogant way,” says Max Schrems, founder of data protection NGO noyb.

In concrete terms, the Facebook group Meta, which also owns the social network Instagram and the messaging service WhatsApp, used personal data to display personalized advertisements.
https://todaytimeslive.com/economy/192668.html

I've spent a lot of time writing songs over the years. The melodies and the instrumental parts usually come to me in bursts of inspiration and evolve as I'm recording the different parts, but lyrics are different in that I'll sit down and work on them for a few hours at a time. Sometimes there's writers block, and that can be a big challenge, especially when writing more poetic works. 

Over the past few years, I started purposefully writing more of my lyrics on days when I'm much more sleep deprived. I've noticed that it tends to reduce my inhibitions and I tend to be less critical of what I'm writing, which allows more creative lyrics and ideas to flow. I do, of course, have to revise them later, but sometimes the initial drafting process comes together much more easily. 

When do you find that you're the most creative? Have you ever tried writing through more tiredness than usual as a means of boosting creativity in your ideas?

Personally, VS Code remains my "daily driver" - but I did install Geany for the times that I want something Notepad++-like. Geany is nice because it's much more lightweight for editing files that aren't a part of a project (such as a quick config change, or to draft something that is about to be copy/pasted onto a server). 

What code editors do you use, and why?

https://blog.mybb.com/2023/01/03/mybb-1-...e-release/