All the more reason to live IMO. After the decline of the existing system is the potential for something better to replace it but only if we have people willing to do it.

What magical company do you work in that gives you UEFI access on your work computer? Mine’s so locked down.

True, but I’d wager a lot more people have uses for a multi meter than an oscilloscope. If you’re interested in DIY electronics by all means get an oscilloscope (since you probably already have a multimeter in that case), but if you just need a basic tool for when you occasionally venture into the arcane world of electricity (checking a battery, checking if an outlet is live, checking if a fuse is good, checking if something’s shorted, etc) then the $10-15 Aliexpress multimeter is enough. In fact an oscilloscope is less useful to most people because it only detects waveforms (and by extension voltage in general) but not resistance or current among other metrics (unless you get one of those cool combination multimeter osciliacopes).

A multimeter

Do I keep my language skills?

Then have a normal childhood with normal social interactions in Canada instead of the awkward immigrant who can barely speak. Also potentially get diagnosed with autism as a kid because I kind suspect of the language barrier masked some of the symptoms.

I mean, if you make your “belief” known to that person, yeah you’re an asshole.

I’m one of those people but I keep it inside my brain and let the anxiety of being perceived as an awkward fool chip away at my sanity.

Weird, Deepseek runs on a little mini PC.

Just use an enum lol

Honestly that fits what I use it for then. I’ve got into debates with my family about not changing the filter when the pitcher tells us to and doing it only when we taste the chlorine in the tap water (since the only reason I didn’t want it in there was because I didn’t like the taste). I always just saw it as a way to make the water taste better but they think there’s a health benefit and that it filters out more than just chlorine.

Can we keep the robot uprising looking like HAL and not Terminator? Please? It’s bad enough to die when the robots conquer Earth but I have to die while looking at creepy uncanny valley humanoids?

Username checks out

More satisfying and gives me a little more motivation to see the tasks I’ve already done.

I sort of suspect that the wiring is in a diagram somewhere

That’s called a schematic and not only are those not public, they’re closely guarded trade secrets that companies will spend a lot of resources to prevent from leaking to the public.

Also, just because a schematic says the switch is connected a certain way doesn’t mean that’s actually how it’s connected. The only way to prove how the switch works is to inspect the traces in the PCB, which is very difficult to do especially without destroying it. Modern computers have multi layer PCBs that you’d basically need to peel apart to see the inner traces.

If feminist just means I think women deserve the exact same rights as men, and same with any other gender, then yes I’m a feminist.

If feminist means a woman advocate who strives to push more female perspectives in a world dominated by male ones, well I’m a cis man so by definition I can’t do that. If I want to support that, and I do, the best thing I can do is stop talking and listen.

What I learned from covid is a lot of US states had laws criminalizing wearing any kind of mask in public because it’s considered “suspicious” or “threatening” or something, and most states are now reinstating those laws post covid.

Like what the actual fuck?

Framework laptops have a little physical switch to turn off the camera / mic when you don’t want them.

Unfortunately even this is not that comforting because we don’t know how the switch is implemented. Is it actually in series with the microphone data lines? Power lines? Ideally both but you’ll never know. It could even just be a software GPIO switch (gonna bet Amazon Echos with their microphone switches are implemented like that) and unless you have the knowledge to check the PCB you’ll always have that lingering suspicion.

Expedition Society theme from Pokemon Super Mystery Dungeon. Has some commie marching song vibes.

My Todo app is a Markdown file because I can cross stuff out.

Also, when Chinese covid lockdowns were perceived as too restrictive and went on for too long, Chinese citizens in many different cities started protesting. Did the evil commie government (A) reenact the Tiananmen Square massacre to silence all opposition or (B) listen to the people and actually drop most of the restrictions? Bet most westoids will pick the wrong answer.

So, is there an easier way to completely disable the microphone?

First take it apart and determine what form factor the microphone is.

Is it a through hole microphone with two pins that are soldered to the underside like this? If so it’s best to desolder it to prevent damaging the PCB. Use a soldering iron to heat up the pins and pull it out with pliers from the other side. If you don’t have a soldering iron and don’t want to buy one, I’ve also seen people using side cutters to cut off the solder joints and loosening the component enough for it to be pulled out through brute force without breaking the circuit board. If you can’t or don’t want to do either of those and don’t mind risking the device, you could just yank it out with pliers like you’re an old timey dentist pulling teeth, and hope that the pins break before the board does, might also help to twist it back and fourth repeatedly until the metal gets fatigued and break.

It might also be a surface mount microphone that, as the name suggests, is only soldered to the surface of the PCB. Might look something like this. These are pretty challenging for most people to desolder especially if it’s close to other components, but they’re small enough that the solder pads don’t need a lot of force to break, so if you can get a good grip with pliers you should be able to just rip it off. Twist it until you feel the solder joints snap and then pull straight up. It doesn’t really matter if you rip the pad off the circuit board since you don’t plan on soldering anything else to it. But what you do need to be careful of is if you peel off more of the copper traces than just the pad, which can damage other components. If you do want to desolder it, touch the soldering iron to the metal casing which should hopefully heat up the entire component enough to melt all the solder joints, then pull it off with pliers. Just be careful not to touch any nearby components with the soldering iron.

Failing all those, you could also take a screwdriver or awl, put the pointy end on the microphone, and hammer it a few times to cave the metal casing in and hopefully crush the audio sensing parts. This will probably destroy the microphone, but less certain than removing it.

I’ve also heard recommendations about grounding the microphone connections after removal for extra privacy, mainly to prevent the traces from picking up EM waves, but I don’t know how to reliably do that without breaking stuff so can’t give any advice.

Does putting tape over it completely mute it?

No. Speech is surprisingly robust from an audio perspective and it’s entirely possible for audio not recognizable to humans as speech to still be decoded by speech recognition AI. The thing is even if this works 90% of the time and makes the audio completely unusable, you can never prove if your case is in that 10% where there’s juuust enough information for AI to detect. You also can’t easily hear the actual output of the microphone so for all you know it might be fully intelligible and just muffled. If you’re concerned about privacy to the point where you’re asking how to remove a microphone, I doubt you’ll accept that 10% chance anyway and removing the microphone entirely will save you a lot of anxiety.