First, let’s consider that up until fairly recently in human society, writing has been the domain of the wealthy and not entirely accessible to everyone. The rich could write whatever they want or patronize those who could write what they wanted for them. The rarity - relative to the greatest developments of proliferation being chiefly the printing press and recently the internet - of written works, demanded that anything someone bothered to put into physical written form must have considerable innate value to someone. If they didn’t, nobody would have bothered with the effort or expense.

I no longer have access to the reference for a citation and am having trouble digging it up, but I saw (probably on a blog about AI) some figures recently describing the amount of written “material” produced by humanity on a daily basis (or some other comically short time) in 2023 being comparable to the amount produced in the ~five thousand preceding years since the written word is thought to have been invented.

With as much “writing” being produced, most of it being spam or low-effort shitposting, the signal to noise ratio is unbelievably high. Regardless of the profundity of the thought being born and described, the chance of having anything written today - randomly on the internet - recognized for its quality is infinitesimally small.

I believe that there IS a fantastic amount of truly remarkable writing being done every day all over the internet. Nearly all of it will be retained on some form of media basically forever, even until the media is woefully obsolete / destroyed / the heat death of the universe. Most of it will never be set upon by human eyes again after this weekend.

Today, like hundreds of years ago, what rises to the surface does so due to commercial pressures. If you are awesome and impress a publisher with deep pockets, your words could be preserved in a form that will be read in 2434. Of course, it will have to continue to be impressive long after most of the books selected by Oprah’s Book Club.

Hey, @AvaddonLFC

I’m sure that the buyer can be expected to pay for shipping, but at the end of the day for any buyer the “price” is inclusive of all fees, and for the seller the “profit” is minus expenses. So if it’s cheaper to ship using eBay’s discount, that means the buyer pays more or the seller makes less.

In the end it’s probably worth it for the peace of mind, though. I’ve personally never been screwed on a big ticket item and I don’t mind selling stuff for under $100 on ebay. If I lose, it’s lost, right? My feelings about eBay so far are that I’m selling there as much for altruistic reasons… I don’t want the material to be landfill, someone can get a deal (I do it all the time), and I’d like to recoup some cash as well to spend on hobbies. The couple times I’ve been hassled and lost money on ebay, it totaled less that $50.

I’d be super upset if I got screwed for several hundred.

Apparently they are using discord now, and I might give it a shot. Might not be a bad idea to link that in the sidebar here.

I wonder if it’s worth the extra cost to ship. Will have to investigate more.

That sucks.

Better they don’t pay at all than they do, you ship, they complain, then return you an empty box or a broken card for a full refund.

Yes. If you are a buyer and you submit INAD, you can say anything you want and ebay will side with you. 100% of the time. Even if you lie. And if they initially don’t, just keep it up and they will. Then, when you “return” the empty box to the seller, there’s nothing they can do about it.

There are stories all over ebay about it. And I’m not a big seller btw, I’m just a dude who sells odd stuff to pay for new stuff. When I get screwed, which I occasionally do, it hurts because every time it feels personal unlike if it were my job.

You and I are VERY similar in that way. I was literally shopping for new parts last night for a whole new PC since this is effectively a motherboard problem.

With a decent sleep behind me, I got back at it today and flashed every BIOS from my manufacturer, backward from the newest, until I arrived at one that didn’t have the GPU issue which I thought was caused by the moth. It turns out that it was not, in the end, the bug’s fault.

Having started on Friday morning with the very first manufacturer BIOS, which shipped with the board, I knew that it worked in a stable fashion but was missing a key feature for my new hardware. By the time I found one that once and truly didn’t exhibit the issue that was crashing my GPU, I was back to the 3rd BIOS release and now I think we are at “stable.”

The board in question, in case anyone finds this on a search engine, is the Gigabyte Aorus Z690 Ultra DDR4, and the shipped bios is version F3. My video card is a Gigabyte RTX 3060Ti, and the bug causing hard locks / crashes is present in every BIOS from F20 and upward. Version F6 has another issue I didn’t bother to diagnose that was causing instability for unknown reasons. F8, however, works just as well as F3 so far, though I want the rest of the weekend to test. So far none of the F20 series issues are in the journal though, so I think that’s where the issue was introduced.

And for Gigabyte haters, I feel you, but it’s a SFF build and I needed a mITX Z690 board and a 3060Ti that was short enough to fit in a NF200 case built at the peak of the GPU shortage which only made things more complicated. My options were serendipitously limited to that manufacturer. :)

I’ve been in IT a long time and building PCs for longer, but my debugging skills degrade in direct proportion to how frustrated I am by the problem. That usually starts off very high and gets higher as obvious things get checked off the list.

Evidently I still have some kind of problem, because the GPU just fell off the bus again… but I haven’t had any frame rate issues in the last hour, so I think it’s a coincident problem and maybe not related to the moth. I did just update a BIOS, so I dunno. Too late to worry about it tonight.

Not sure whether I’m more tickled by the fact that the pieces had names or that you looked at the manual :)

Frying the jungle chip can be a little scary I guess :)

In my area, sets go for the same price - unless you change up your search terms. If you look for “CRT” or “retro gaming TV” they are all super expensive. People have got wise to what we’re using them for, and being out of production they are commoditized.

But, I found if I look for “old tv” or “old tube television”, or use search terms that don’t betray the use case and instead reflect what the seller wants to get rid of, I get different results and some are practically free - as they should be.

No different I guess from how looking for “old rusty knife” will get you different results from “vintage bushcraft high carbon blade” but you might turn up aces.

Maybe you aren’t looking for reassurance, but if you have the experience AND a schematic / story with pictures from someone who had done the work on your exact model, you shouldn’t have a problem.

I have personally never touched the inside of a TV and I RGB modded two of them, one after the other, with different mainboards and both of them were fine. The second one was neater work. And even if you ruin one, it’s not like they’re impossible to get pretty cheap if you wait around.

I’ll be happy to help you locate the documents you need, if you want to give it a shot. If you’d rather be self-sufficient, start here and go down the rabbit hole. MarkOZLAD has probably written a schematic on loose leaf paper or otherwise, or someone on that forum has, as well as verbally described the steps for VERY MANY common CRT boards particularly in the Sony Trinitron line, but not exclusively. The 8-bit guy also has a video on it, but it leaves out a lot of important detail you’ll get from posts on that forum.

This is the first rig I modded, a Sony kv-20s90.

If you choose to go down this road, my research does not recommend SCART. Too many deviations from the standard in cabling on the market, and many opportunities to screw something up either before or AFTER you’ve successfully completed the work. Also if you’re not in Europe, there’s not much benefit in using SCART… and even if you are, I’d recommend BNC connectors to RGBs instead, and if you for some reason need SCART, you can buy a SCART to BNC cable already made that will probably help you avoid any weird cable issues that can fry your rig.