As it turns out, I did not use my big camera to capture a picture of the hawk that was in my back yard. Not for lack of trying, mind you. Fully charged battery, check. Bird lens, check. I grabbed my memory card out of my card reader and went to slam it into my camera, and. Uh. It wouldn’t go in.

Instead I took an exceptionally lousy picture through my landing room window which is not terribly clean at the best of times, and through the screen, with my phone.

I have no idea where the lock switch for that card is. I can tell you exactly where that busted off piece of plastic was: Inside my camera’s card slot, trapped by the pins at the bottom of the socket. Hence why I could not get this card or indeed any card to go in far enough to lock, let alone connect. No amount of shaking, tapping, or smacking would dislodge it. I had to retrieve my pair of exceptionally tiny tweezers which naturally were in the garage, which meant going out the back door, which meant scaring off the hawk.

In other news, a direct replacement for this thing now costs three times more than what I originally paid for it, because of course it does.

Gods damned Rampocalypse.

While I wait for my replacement to show up, the largest spare I have on hand that’s not already gainfully employed in some other device is apparently a 128 meg one from who knows when. Some time around the turn of the millennium, I’m sure. In case you were wondering, my R10 reckons can fit twenty six full quality exposures onto this card. It’s like I’m back to running around with a roll of film.

Needless to say this has rather cramped my style for the last couple of days.

  • NaibofTabr@infosec.pubEnglish
    1·
    3 days ago

    I feel like stealing sand would be more of an issue of opportunity and greed rather than any sort of necessity.

    Right, so that’s why I included the Wikipedia links:

    The average price of a tonne of sand imported to Singapore increased from US$3 in 1995 to US$190 in 2005.

    Because up to 300 million m3 of sand was being smuggled out of Indonesia every year the country was losing about US$450 million a year due to the illegal sand mining activity in the Riau Islands province.

    Sand theft feeds the illegal sand trade, a black market estimated to be worth between $200B and $350B a year.

    This isn’t just opportunism, it is massive international organized crime on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars. Chinese ships with dredging equipment don’t just show up at beaches in Indonesia because they were out for a jaunt.

    Silicon is rocks and dirt, higher base purity is quartz, it’s almost everything you walk on regularly and it makes up the vast majority of solid material in the earth’s crust, though technically oxygen is the most abundant element.

    Sure, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is ease of use, not prevalence in the environment. Chip fabricators generally aren’t operating rock crushing industries. They need input material that is already finely ground and nearly pure. The closer the collected raw material is to that, the cheaper it is to use. If the material has to be extracted from larger stones, that increases the cost over dredging up beach sand.

    Do some reading before you draw conclusions.

    • FiniteBanjo@feddit.onlineEnglish
      11·
      3 days ago

      I fail to see how that argues against it being opportunism? Because of the sudden price increase from 1995 to 2005?

      Sure, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is ease of use, not prevalence in the environment. Chip fabricators generally aren’t operating rock crushing industries.

      And it was still more profitable to transport 300 Million Tons illegally than it was to operate said rock crushing industries: opportunity and greed.