dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

Progenitor of the Weird Knife Wednesday feature column. Is “column” the right word? Anyway, apparently I also coined the Very Specific Object nomenclature now sporadically used in the 3D printing community. Yeah, that was me. This must be how Cory Doctorow feels all the time these days.

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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • Well, two things about that.

    One, the L1 Lagrange point between the Earth and Sun is further out than the orbit of the moon. Even without doing any math, just a cursory observation of how shadows work will illustrate that, given that the moon itself can just barely cover the disc of the sun from where it is, any such object placed there would need to have a diameter larger than that of the moon in order to completely block the sun’s light. Or some appreciable and nontrivial fraction of the diameter of the moon if you only want to block part of the sun’s light. Lofting something that massive up there and more importantly keeping it there given that it’d also be well within the gravitational influence of the moon would be quite the challenge. (“Quite the challenge,” by the way, is rocket scientist talk for, “This is complete science fiction, and whoever suggested it is insane.”)

    Point two is that the Deep Space Climate Observatory is currently already parked there.



  • That’s the real deal, right here.

    The SNES vs. Genesis war from the 1990s never really ended. The banners being flown have changed over the years but the battles are pretty much the same. Me personally, what with having the luxury of being a perfectly responsible fully grown adult — that’s what it says on my driver’s license, anyway — I have at least one example of pretty much every console from the Atari VCS up to the PS3.

    My beef with consoles now is that they’re all, with the exception of the Switch and its sequel, just watered down PC hardware anyway. That’s really not interesting, and I already have a PC. And by and large my PC plays what I tell it to, not what Sony and Microsoft and for fuck’s sake not what Nintendo try to dictate at me. Thus, for modern games I play on PC.

    As far as insufferable computer users go, that all started with Doom. Doom was the killer app of the 90s and every console maker at the time either wished theirs could run Doom but it couldn’t, or barely managed it and the experience was dogshit. Before that, it was the opposite: PC games and their developers fervently wished they could match the capabilities of the game consoles of their era, which all had specialized hardware specifically designed for the types of things games from that time did. It’s probably no coincidence that id software’s formative outing started with John Carmack and Tom Hall’s Dangerous Dave In Copyright Infringement, which as dumb as it sounds was genuinely showing off at the time in that they managed to make a bog standard PC pull off a platformer with smooth(ish) scrolling, which is something the NES can do in its sleep.


  • Another in a long line of messing with user interface things on updates, without any prior warning to the user. And if you even get a changelog at all on the update prompt it’s always just vague bullshit like, “Bug fixes and usability improvements,” without explaining what those “improvements” are supposed to be.

    In unrelated news, the last major update on my Moto G changed the incoming call screen from swipe up to answer, swipe down to reject to swipe left to answer, swipe right to reject. What is this, fucking Tinder now? And don’t come at me about the “gesture” setting in the dialer app options, either. Yes, I am aware of it. The only options listed there are now “horizontal swipe” and “single tap to answer.” Why any rational individual would want to inflict the hell that is the latter option on themselves is unknown to me.

    This kind of horseshit is why boomers and old people are terrified of updates and drive us IT nerds up the wall by perpetually ignoring and dismissing them. Because when you change the user interface choices people are used to behind their backs and without warning, as far as they’re concerned you just broke their device.

    Cut it out.






  • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.worldtoxkcd@lemmy.worldxkcd #3159: Continents
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    22 days ago

    And we gained a pretty damn good idea during World War 2 and the Cold War when we were trying to map parts of the ocean floor for submarine warfare purposes, and discovered the mid ocean fault points. Especially the true extent of the Mariana Trench, Mid-Atlantic Ridge which is spang in the middle of the Atlantic between the jigsaw puzzle coastlines of Africa and South America.

    Needless to say we weren’t to keen to blab to our enemies just how much we knew about the seafloor, and neither were they. What with submarine warfare being a Big Deal in the Cold War, and all.

    Edit to add some additional detail now that I’m not pecking on my phone: Alfred Wegener proposed his almost-modern theory of continental drift in 1912, as well as the hypothesis of Pangea, the prehistoric supercontinent from the time when all the current major landmasses were together. You’re right that there was not a solid explanation for the mechanism by which this proposed action ought to occur. But even by the 1940s scientists were proposing that continental drift happened by way of the continents floating on convection currents of magma underneath and predicted there would be expansion joints in between them in the middle of the oceans.


  • Consider the IoT Enterprise LTSC builds. These come premade from Microsoft with less bloat (or none, in the case of the Win10 IoT version), and don’t shove the consumer features down your throat on every update because they’re designed for mission critical embedded applications.

    I have 10 IoT LTSC running on most of our machines at work because a significant chunk of our hardware is not Windows 11 “ready” and we use many vendor-specific things that don’t work in Linux or Wine, and I use 11 IoT LTSC at home (locked to 23H2 so my Mixed Reality VR headset remains working!) without incident.

    http://massgrave.dev/

    Without either of the above restrictions if I were you I would shop for a new mouse.




  • Every rain fly on pretty much every modern tent has multiple zippers. Full coverage flies (flys?) are now the norm and these require some way to open them in order to let you in and out of the tent, which is inevitably a zipper. Even before this in the canvas tent era, closures may have been done with buttons rather than zippers but the opening points still had fold-over flaps to keep rainwater out, similar in construction to the ones on your pants.

    I’ve only ever owned one tent in my life that did not have a full coverage fly and thus did not require any hardware on the fly itself. It still had folded over gusset flaps on it in various places, and that tent was also crap and was not designed to withstand weather.

    If you are making your own “fly” out of a tarp or similar, that’s different.



  • Yes, I imagine it would have to be externally connected not only for anyone to even bother to mess with it, but for it to even work with most computers. On my board the NVME slots are underneath a removable heat spreader plate which is itself underneath the area where the GPU overhangs its slot. There’s no way this would fit, and even if it did it’d require significant disassembly every time you wanted to touch it.

    I imagine the majority of M.2 form factor SSDs are in space constrained locations where doing anything other than gluing a couple of millimeters thick heatsink to them is out of the question, and oftentimes not even that.

    Yikes forever, on multiple fronts with this thing.


  • The coffee grinders hung on at several of the grocery stores near me, but got relocated to behind one of the checkout counters. They hung on there for a number of years but finally these got removed as well, along with the option to buy coffee beans loose and by weight. The majority of shoppers probably just bought pre-ground. For what it’s worth, myself and my parents were the only people I ever saw buying whole beans or using the grinders, over the span of decades.

    One of the froofy high end grocery stores near me does still offer bulk beans (along with their other bulk products like dried fruit, lentils, trail mix, etc.) but there are no grinders in the store. They probably assume anyone who’s enough of a coffee nut these days would rather grind their own beans at home, and they’re probably right.