Ask Lemmy

“No gimmicks! No tricks! You don’t pay … ‘till 1996!”

— ad for a furniture store when I was growing up

6922251 x 8 = 55378008

My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas was the mnemonic when Pluto was still a planet. I suppose not totally obsolete but I find myself ending at "nine" instead of something you'd serve beginning with N.

I can recite the names of the Books of the New Testament in the bible by heart. I'm not even Christian.

The password to reach Mike Tyson / Mr dream in Punch-Out! is 007-373-5963. Burned into my brain.

Boolprop testingcheatsenabled true/false

Testingcheatsenabled true

And finally testingcheats true

The entire shortening of the Sims cheat codes.

Also motherlode.

RRTANGENTABACUS

I know it primarily as a cheat code in Star Wars pod racer on N64, but I've seen it in other games too, and even referenced in different non-gaming contexts. I still don't really know what it means.

When I was a kid I remembered it as "RR-Tan-Genta-Bacus". It wasn't until decades later I realised it is real words "tangent", "abacus".

IDKFA & IDDQD and off you go. Lots of childhood memories.

If you put as your name grm3110 in NBA jam you can play as death

Adjusting a carburetor.

I was never really good at it, I never actually went through with selling my soul to Satan to gain true knowledge of that black art.

4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42

Morse code. Did a science project back in middle school with wires, buzzers and tappers on a board. Then I taught it to my boy scout troop for a badge. Then lost some of it before joining the army in communications (as well as a ton of other outdated means of communication) and then in Iraq, me and another commo guy wired up our rooms for it so we could talk shit about our leadership even if they were in the room. Anyways, after working with it that many times over a stretched out time frame, I'll never forget that. Or the phonetic alphabet.

Donkey kong country on SNES

B A R R A L on the save game selection menu

Morrowind on the original Xbox came with cheat codes. Put the cursor over the health, magicka, or fatigue bar, enter the codes with the black and white buttons then hold A until the bar fills. If you close the menu before you let go of A, it will continue to refill constantly until you open your menu again.

Health: B, W, B, B, B, A

Magicka: B, W, W, B, W, A

Fatigue: B, B, W, W, B, A

You could actually use the magicka code for all 3, but I liked that there were 3 different codes.

UUDDLRLRBA

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To tell the age of any horse Inspect the lower jaw of course; The six front teeth the tale will tell, And every doubt and fear dispel.

Two middle nippers you behold Before the colt is two weeks old; Before eight weeks two more will come Eight months: the corners cut the gum.

At two the middle "Nippers" drop: At three the second pair can't stop; When four years old the third pair goes, At five a full new set he shows.

The deep black spots will pass from view At six years from the middle two; The second pair at seven years; At eight the spot each corner clears.

From the middle "Nippers" upper jaw At nine the black spots will withdraw. The second pair at ten are bright; Eleven finds the corners light.

As time goes on the horsemen know The oval teeth three-sided grow; Then longer get - project before - Till twenty, when they know no more."

My ICQ number; various employee numbers and alarm codes long since changed from previous jobs; procedures and rules from those jobs; all kinds of cheat codes from games that I no longer play or own; various old computer protocols, port names/numbers, etc. that no longer matter; and I'm sure more stuff (and some other stuff that, living in Japan, isn't relevant to anyone here).

Iddqd

Rosebud

in GTA 2, naming your player "GOURANGA" activates the cheat code mode. "IAMDAVEJ" gives you all guns.

in half-life 2, typing ent_fire !picker in the console makes the thing you are looking at catch fire. it's also the base command for a lot of other things; if you're looking at a door and add "unlock" to the command, the door will open.

when stacking firewood, always put the pieces with the bark facing up. that way, rain can't get the wood wet, and the logs dry quicker.

paper maps fold long side first.

the modern graphical interface of the personal computer was developed by Xerox and plagiarized by Steve jobs after he got a factory tour in 1972, but he missed the most important part of the computer that he saw: it was fully networked using what we today call Ethernet.

3.14159265359 (ok the last 9 is actually an 8 but it's followed by a 9 so I round up).

Not exactly obsolete, but there's no reason for anyone to memorize that many digits of Pi except for trivia. Number of times it has come up in trivia: 0.

The "Turbo" button on a 486 PC was actually a CPU clock speed limiter. It was necessary to play older games who had a hardcoded framerate that depended on clock cycles, because they would otherwise run too fast.
But for marketing reasons, IBM labelled the toggle as "turbo" instead of a speed limiter.

Back when wr used parallel IDE, most motherboards only had two IDE connections. Each connection could support two devices, a master and a slave. If you had a hard drive and a CD-ROM, it was best to put them on separate channels. This is because only one device could talk at a time, and the slower CD-ROM would block the faster hard drive from operating. If you had to put them on the same channel, then the hard drive should be the master so it gets priority.

Then there's scsi. My family wasn't rich enough to have scsi shit when I was growing up, but I do know a few things. On paper, it's very simple; give each device a unique ID on the bus, and then attach terminator blocks at each end. I'm also aware that, in practice, this description is a cruel joke.