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Mildly Interesting @lemmy.world

JimVanDeventer @lemmy.world

2mo ago

This arcade stick uses the forbidden type A to type A cable

47 comments

As long as it's not male-to-male electrical extension cord.
- Just another list in a long line of gay exclusion.
  
  Really this would only be useful in a FMMF bi foursome
- A local electronics shop around here is selling one of those as a joke. Except it has a male plug on one end and a 220 volt dryer plug on the other.
- You know, I never thought about this. Presumably it would just blow a fuse or trip the breaker, right?
  
  People want them to conveniently power their house during an outage. Plug one end into a generator, the other into a random socket, and poof! You have power (so long as your house isn’t drawing more than whatever breaker you’re plugged into)
  Problem is unless you turned off the whole-house-breaker, you are now feeding electricity back upstream into the grid. This is very bad. The friendly linemen who are working to get your power back on can’t de-energize the lines they’re trying to fix and will have a hell of a time working out which house is causing the problem.
  
  The cable itself won't do any damage. The problem is, what ppl do with it. Also if you plug it into a socket, you get a super secure not dangerous at all live wire to touch on the other side.

I assume you mean male to male? Female to male type A is a simple extension.
- Technically USB A male-to-female extension cables are also forbidden, at least in terms of USB 1/1.1/2.0 and were never supposed to exist. That's not to say that they didn't, because they certainly do, and sometimes even manage to work in the process. But the original USB spec specifically envisaged that a passive extension cable should never be available to the consumer, probably for the simple reason that the maximum allowable cable length was 5 meters with no ifs, ands, or buts. And USB 3.x is only 3 meters. If allowed, people would inevitably daisy-chain so many cables together that their connected device would stop working, and then whine at the manufacturer/retailer/Microsoft about it being "defective," so this was nipped in the bud in advance.
  All that said, I have nevertheless accumulated about 20 of the damn things over the years in varying lengths and levels of quality. I have violated the official cable length spec with impunity and more often than not gotten away with it, albeit usually only for low-demand devices like keyboards.
  
  I had one at work that was some 15m long between a pc and a barcode scanner, in a really noisy environment with 3ph inverters and motors etc. Worked like a charm
  
  If it's a Universal serial bus why should connecting things over long distances be banned?

I have one of these 8bitdo sticks. It performs well, but more importantly, it's compact compared to other fighting sticks with similar hardware. That borderline proprietary cable gives me the heebie-jeebies.

Are you sure? A bunch of arcade sticks use a USB A port to plug in an official controller and bypass some chekcs for console support. I assume you actually own this and it came with a male A to male A cable in the box? As in you're not accidentally plugging in a USB A cable going to your computer in the port meant to plug in either a console controller or a bypass dongle?
I am, to be clear, asking for a friend and was never super confused about why my brand new leverless controller wasn't working, myself.
- I have a keyboard like this, yes it came with the cable (same A male plug each end) and yes it's used as a USB device.

I have a Type A to Type A cable. It came with a simplified music player for dementia patients that I set up for my elderly aunt. No idea why they chose to do it that way.
- So that you can be frustrated trying to plug in both ends.
- What's this music player called? I've been scouring the internet for years looking for a simple spotify enabled "boom box" that doesn't require you to use a phone to operate. Seems like such a simple product that seemingly doesn't exist.
  
  Found it. It's the Simple Music Player from https://www.dementiamusic.co.uk/.
  
  I’ll try to find the info. It’s been almost 10 years since I set it up. Not even sure who has it now, it’s gone from my aunt to another relative in the meantime.

I have a flashlight that does the same for its charging port. It's also capable of being used as a power bank by plugging another device's cable into that same port. I'm not entirely sure just how much protection circuitry is behind this and I haven't cared enough to subject it to anything heavy duty.

Those pcie x1 to x16 adapters also use one.
- Oh man I forgot about these from my mining days! Do people use these for actual pcie expansions? I've never needed more than most mid to high end motherboards offer
  
  I did it once with a mid atx that had only two slots but needed a card to boot and I wanted to put a networking card in the full sized slot so used one of these for the graphics card.
- These are so bad for it, it's not even USB.
  
  The blue cable is actually a USB cable but being used for pcie

Meh, I have at least two hdd enclosures that use that cable.
Standards don't mean that much when the hardware manufacturer just doesn't care
- Entirely likely they figured a cable with Type A on both ends would be a cheap "proprietary" cable.

God I hate those

I had a cheapo KVM that came with that A-to-A arrangement

The (apparently discontinued) 8bitdo N30 Arcade Stick. I have a Mayflash F300 Elite with the same form factor (including the forbidden port).

Id love it if more things did tbh. A controller really doesnt need the bandwidth of a proper usb type c cable, and type A would be much more securely attached (physically) to something that moves around IMO.
- In what way is type A more secure physically than type B?
  
  I always forget type B even exists tbh. But type A has more friction in my experience

47 comments