IcedRaktajino

I came across some articles about how people are upcycling a specific cryptocurrency mining single-board computer and decided to pick one up myself and put together a rig. The board is the AMD BC-250 which is similar to the APU in the PS5.

I've been out of the gaming scene since the Xbox 360 and never could justify the expense of building a gaming rig, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to build something decent for under $200. This thing rocks and can play my entire catalog of Steam games, many of which I bought on sale and worried later about having a PC that could actually run them.

Specs

• CPU: 6x AMD Zen 2 cores @ ~3.5GHz (actually has 8 cores/16 threads, but I haven't yet unlocked the other 2)
• GPU: 24 RDNA2 Compute Units with 1536 shaders. Actually has 40 compute units, and you can unlock the remaining ones pretty easily. The PS5 has, I believe, 36 CUs active.
• Memory: 16GB GDDR6 shared memory
• TDP: 220W (50W idle - 235W max load)
• OS Support: Linux only (no Windows GPU drivers)

I/O

• 2x USB 3.0 (A only)
• 2x USB 2.0
• 1x RJ-45 gigabit ethernet
• 1x DisplayPort output
• 2x buttons. One is power and the other seems to be reset

Cost and Parts

• BC-250 APU - $125 (sadly they've jumped in price again and are now $165)
• 300W 12v PSU - $35
• 500 GB NVMe SSD - $0 since I already had a few spare ones on hand
• 120mm Fan - $17 for a 3-pack
• 8-pin PCIe power cable - $3 (to connect from the PSU to the APU)

Total cost: $180 though would have been closer to $250 if didn't already have an SSD on hand. Price also doesn't include the filament I used to print the case as I already had that as well. I didn't check the exact usage, but expect to use the better part of a 1 kg roll on the print. It used about half a roll of red and half a roll of black in my case.

A few optional components added to the build that I already had in my parts bin:

• Game controller (you can use a Xbox or PS4 controller if you add a USB bluetooth adapter)
• USB Hub
• USB Wifi adapter (it's only got wired ethernet onboard)
• Passive DP to HDMI cable (to connect to my HDMI-only TV)

Depending on the parts you have on hand, you could still potentially build this for $200 or less even after the price hike of the boards.

I'm running Bazzite on it and booting directly into Steam Big Picture. Works great!

Resources

• Building a Budget Steam Machine with the ASRock BC-250, a Variant of the PS5 APU
• AMD BC-250 Documentation
• GPU Governor Guidance
• Modified BIOS to Enable GPU Memory Split
• Case Model
• Power Supply - Any decent 300+ watt one will do, but this is what I bought to fit the case I found
• AMD BC-250 eBay Listings - I paid $125 but they're sadly $165 and up now

View of the Guts

Note: These aren't mine and are from the Printables model page as I neglected to take photos as I went, and it's kind of a pain to disassemble this because of the way it goes together. I also modded the heatsink and cut off the little ridges since it was originally made for rack cooling and didn't cool well with just a fan on top.

Yes, you paid for 2 day shipping and that's what they use, but they don't tell you about the nearly week-long handling time.

A great 20-minute interview with the DSN Operations Supervisor at Canberra. Talks about the 70m, 8,000 ton antenna and how it operates.

A little bittersweet, but he mentions the DSN communicating with the Mars MAVEN orbiter which was recently declared a loss.

Video

I'm doing a large print, and about 1/4 of the way through, I started hearing this horrible, intermittent noise. Sounds very close to nails on a chalkboard. Naturally I assume something is starting to wear out (belt, roller, motor, etc) or there's some parts rubbing together that shouldn't.

The print seems to be going along fine, though, so I let it be until I couldn't stand it anymore.

Finally sat down and watched it, and the culprit is the extruder fan blowing into the large, hollow tree support bases which was acting like a whistle. lol.

I've only been 3D printing for a little over a year, and this is the largest print I've ever done so far, so if this is normal, it caught me totally off guard.

Github: https://github.com/oozebot/preFlight

Interested in taking some wild new 3D printing features for a test drive? preFlight is free and open source slicer that brings a host of processing improvements as well as fascinating new features and interesting twists on old ones. There are almost too many to list, so here are a few that caught our eye. Cross-sectional view of Interlocking Perimeters, which increases Z-strength. Unlike brick layers, layer height stays constant.

Want to mix and match different support types on the same object? No problem. How about use Nip & Tuck seams to better hide where layers start and stop? You can emboss images directly onto print surfaces with a real-time preview and use smart bridging for counter-bored holes. We particularly like the ability to preview a sliced object from the side instead of just by layer. That’s not all, either.

Those features alone are pretty intriguing, but there’s one in particular that is particularly relevant to creating stronger parts. Interlocking Perimeters increases layer bonding to increase object strength. Unlike brick layers, which staggers layers vertically, interlocking perimeters plays with spacing and compression to increase bonding in the Z axis while keeping layer heights constant. This is possible thanks in part to the greater control offered by Athena, the new perimeter generator.

There are plenty more features — like a full Python runtime embedded directly into the slicing pipeline, and a host of export pathways — so check out the GitHub repository for added detail and let us know in the comments if you give it a try.

Laugh track if you're unfamiliar with the term.

After TGG, I started on "Empty Nest" since it was a spin off and I vaguely remember it as kind of background noise from my childhood. Ended up pausing that to check out "Hot in Cleveland" after someone mentioned to me it was basically a modern version of TGG.

It's not a 1:1 remake, and possibly not what the showrunners were originally going for, but there are a lot of overlaps in the premises:

1. Four women over 50 (with the exception of Jane Leeves in season 1 who was 49 at the time) living in the same house as roommates/friends/heterosexual life partners.
2. Lots of talking around the kitchen table
3. Betty White (who basically plays the Sophia in this version)
4. The characters are roughly analogous to their unofficial TGG counterparts:
   • Elka (Betty White): Basically Sophia who knows how to use the internet. Imagine Sophia but as a Twitter troll.
   • Joy (Jane Leeves): The sharp-witted, sarcastic "straight man" acting as the Dorothy
   • Victoria (Wendie Malick): The fading starlet / soap opera actress taking up the reins as the Blanche of the group. She also has a lot of echoes of Nina Van Horn from "Just Shoot Me" (also played by Malick)
   • Melanie (Valerie Bertinelli): The bubbly/naive "mom" type acting as the Rose. This is probably the weakest comparison, but it's definitely there.
5. Several episodes are pseudo clip shows where they're sitting around the table telling stories with the episode being made up of those flashbacks (a frequent framing device used in TGG)
6. There's a few behind-the-scenes episodes that were part of the actual broadcast which take the place of TGG's clip shows.
7. Lots of plots revolve around the interaction/combination of the 4 familiar character types.

It's also a bit of a running "Frasier" reunion since Leeves and Malick were both cast members. "Frasier" alums I've noticed so far are Peri Gilpen (Roz), John Mahoney (Martin), Millicent Martin (Gertrude Moon), Tom McGowan (Kenny), and Jean Smart (Lana "PUT YOUR BROTHER ON THE PHONE!" Gardner).

If you liked TGG and haven't seen this, I can confirm it's accurate to call it a spiritual successor and recommend checking it out.

Edits:

1. Elga -> Elka. I misheard the character's name and misspelled it.

A new Linux zero-day exploit, named Dirty Frag, allows local attackers to gain root privileges on most major Linux distributions with a single command.

Security researcher Hyunwoo Kim, who disclosed it earlier today and published a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit, says this local privilege escalation was introduced roughly nine years ago in the Linux kernel's algif_aead cryptographic algorithm interface.

Dirty Frag works by chaining two separate kernel flaws, the xfrm-ESP Page-Cache Write vulnerability and the RxRPC Page-Cache Write vulnerability, to modify protected system files in memory without authorization and achieve privilege escalation.

Also, while Dirty Frag belongs to the same class as the Dirty Pipe and Copy Fail Linux vulnerabilities, it exploits the fragment field of a different kernel data structure.

"As with the previous Copy Fail vulnerability, Dirty Frag likewise allows immediate root privilege escalation on all major distributions, and it chains two separate vulnerabilities," Kim said.

"Dirty Frag is a case that extends the bug class to which Dirty Pipe and Copy Fail belong. Because it is a deterministic logic bug that does not depend on a timing window, no race condition is required, the kernel does not panic when the exploit fails, and the success rate is very high."

This kernel privilege escalation affects a wide range of Linux distros, including Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS Stream, AlmaLinux, openSUSE Tumbleweed, and Fedora, which have not yet received patches.

​Kim released complete Dirty Frag documentation and a PoC exploit with distribution maintainers' agreement after an embargo on full public disclosure was broken on May 7, 2026, when an unrelated third party independently published the exploit.

"Because the embargo has currently been broken, no patch or CVE exists. After consultation with the maintainers on linux-distros@vs.openwall.org and at their request, this Dirty Frag document is being published," Kim said.

To secure systems against attacks, Linux users can use the following command to remove the vulnerable esp4, esp6, and rxrpc kernel modules (however, it's important to note that this will break IPsec VPNs and AFS distributed network file systems):

sh -c "printf 'install esp4 /bin/false\ninstall esp6 /bin/false\ninstall rxrpc /bin/false\n' > /etc/modprobe.d/dirtyfrag.conf; rmmod esp4 esp6 rxrpc 2>/dev/null; true"

I was searching by "Most comments" and came across this 3 year old post in c/AskLemmy. It's been 3 years since that post, so I thought a follow-up would be interesting.

Original "Ask" Post: https://lemmy.world/post/1044707

Lemmyverse/Instance-Agnostic Post link: https://lemmyverse.link/lemmy.world/post/1044707