Spyke

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venting·A place to express your frustrationbyonlooker

I hate being asked to convert PDFs

It happens all the frickin' time. Someone wants to convert a PDF file to Word. Fine, we have tools for that, but depending on the quality of the PDF, the resulting text may contain some errors or just complete gibberish. But then you find out that they had the original Word file all along. I hate that so much.

And now today happens! But this time it's different. Someone wants to convert a PDF... to an Excel file. Are you fucking kidding me right now? I have an urge to run down the office with a megaphone screaming "WE DO NOT EDIT PDF FILES! WE MAKE PDFS WHEN WE'RE DONE EDITING THE DOCUMENT!".

Our department keeps refusing conversions from PDFs to other formats, because the conversion is not always accurate or reliable, so we direct our users to the tools we have available for this sort of thing, while clearly pointing out the downsides of the conversion process and explicitly stating that ensuring the accuracy of the conversion is the responsibility of said user, not our department. Because, inevitably, the software WILL make some mistakes. Os become zeroes, 5 becomes the letter S and don't even get me started on the whole capital i, lower l and number 1 situation.

And despite all of this, despite all the warnings and examples of failings in the past, nobody seems to get through their hollow skulls that they should avoid editing and converting PDFs just because of how much of a pain in the ass it is! Ugh.

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gaming·Gamingbyonlooker

List of every game trailer from The Triple-i Initiative

For those unaware, The Triple-i Initiative is a group of indie studios whose purpose is to highlight fan-favorite games and hype up established indie classics as well as new IPs.

So, without further ado, here are the trailers. Names in bold are new releases, the rest are updates to existing games:

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[RMA] What is this lump on my friend's CPU?

EDIT: We decided not to pursue further diagnosis, because we wouldn’t know what the hell we’re doing anyway, and decided to start the RMA process instead. It might not even be the reason why the PC won’t turn on, but I’m not comfortable with putting that CPU back into his PC again. Once we get a replacement, we’ll see what happens. If it’s still busted, we’ll just take it to a local shop. Thank you everyone for your for your suggestions and insight, they are very much appreciated.

My friend called me to take a look at his PC that wouldn’t turn on. Upon inspecting his CPU, I noticed a silver bump at the bottom. I’ve never seen this. Can anyone tell me what it is?

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asklemmy·Asklemmybyonlooker

Where did this HAARP nonsense I keep hearing about come from?

So, I heard several people now mention HAARP as the cause for all the natural disasters that have been happening lately. And here I thought the cause was rampant pollution and global warming!

But seriously, I'm looking at the HAARP page on wikipedia and it seems to be an array for studying the ionosphere? How in the hell do you go from "we're using this to see what's happening way up there in the sky" to "this causes tornadoes"? Who even started this garbage?

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