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.
Lawnchair for me as well.
Back in the good old days Nova was actually one of the three apps I paid for. Can’t say as I’m pleased about things with Nova going down the way they did, but I can’t say as I’m too surprised, either. (The other two in case anyone cares are Torque and Alpine Quest.)
Because it made that noise.
External USB ones are free in boxes of Frosted Flakes these days.
I have a genuine honest to goodness 5.25" bay mounted Blu Ray burner in my tower right now. Hey, you never friggin’ know. It comes in handy every once in a while. There’s a machine in my basement with an LS-120, a Zip drive, and a 5.25" floppy drive in it that all still work. Occasionally I still find myself needing to get some monumentally important ancient file off of some kind of floppy disk or other for somebody.
Iran’s leadership is still solely comprised of repressive religious authoritarian buttmunches. There are no good guys in this war, only two bad guys and a bunch of Iranian civilians standing in the crossfire. Remember that their own people were already staging mass protests against the Iranian government before this all started, during which Iran’s own government admits to killing 3,117 people (probably more in reality) while “cracking down.”
Do you drive around with no license plate on your car, too?
That only lists 18 states…
My own state requires it despite that list implying they don’t. Thus I really don’t think that chart is completely accurate. If you have ANY warning lights on your dash at inspection you will be failed here.
By “aren’t hard to remove” you actually mean requires dismounting the tire from the rim, remounting it, and then balacing it. This is far beyond the capabilities not to mention equipment of the typical layperson. Plus, your state is likely to conveniently fail your car on its next inspection for a nonfunctioning TPMS system, same as your check engine light.
If you’re going to go the distance anyway, get your tire shop to mount aftermarket Autel sensors in your rims. Using the readily available diagnostic tool, you can occasionally reprogram those (wirelessly!) with a set of random IDs and then also program your car to use them. You’ll be a lot tougher to track if your signature is different every week.
I’m not about to do this just yet, but I do have the tool for more mundane purposes and I only paid around $200 for it several years ago.
It’s on the tip of my tongue. Starts with an M?
When computers were just a teletype attached to a mainframe?
Only if you want to have the black and green version of Toy instead of the white and blue version, at this rate. Barring a handful of exclusives everything gets released on PS5 and Xbox now and maybe also a watered down port on the Switch/2. The current Xbox and Playstation are so architecturally similar to each other that they may as well be the same machine with the only difference being which asshole is at the helm, and for either of them you may as well have a PC.
Random aside to rant about consumer OCR.
Recently for my work I had to do some OCR stuff to get some numbers out of a document that the vendor in their infinite wisdom refused to provide in an editable/selectable form. I.e. they just slapped a .jpeg onto a page and saved it as a .pdf. (This is a separate thing that infuriates me.)
Anyway, what I’m actually here to complain about is the baffling phenomenon that every single piece of OCR software I tried ranging from open source to trials of commercial programs, to the thingy that came with one of our all-in-one printer/scanners, and everything in between is that it’s somehow still exactly as crap as the lousy OCR programs we were all struggling with in the late '90s.
I have absolutely no idea how this facet of technology in particular has utterly and categorically failed to make any forward progress whatsoever in literal decades. I’ve personally worked on machine vision driven pick-and-place machines capable of accurately determining the orientation of densely printed cosmetics tubes, among other items, and placing them all face up in a box several times per second. Yet somehow the latest and greatest OCR transcription algorithms still can’t tell a 5 from a 6 or ye gods forbid an S, or an L from a J, or an M from a collection of back and forward slashes, all despite being handed crisp high contrast seriffed text that’s at least 60 pixels high.
Given the incredibly low bar for performance here given that apparently every single programmer involved just walked away circa about 2001, I can’t imagine that the current slop generation machines fare any better…
You don’t have to read the release notes. It literally puts it front and center in your face the first time you launch it after this update is applied.
What you described as impossible to find is how basically every security DVR system has worked for decades. I have two Lorex branded boxes at work and a Night Owl one at home, and neither of them require anyone’s “cloud.”
They’re remotely accessible via your browser or a smartphone app although, yes, you do need to know your public facing IP address and poke the appropriate hole in your firewall for it.
Every X seconds is pretty generous. My Subaru only seems to poll the sensors every few minutes, and only when the wheel speed is above 35 MPH or so, at least via what I’ve observed with my diagnostic tool. The sensors are battery powered and I suspect the low refresh rate is a deliberate gambit to conserve battery life.
You are correct on the ID point, though. They can contain up to 16 hexidecimal digits as far as I’ve seen, and while there doesn’t seem to be any mechanism for truly enforcing uniqueness the chances of an ID collision are so low that you may as well consider it impossible. Some aftermarket sensors can be wirelessly reprogrammed with an arbitrary ID, though, which may be of marginal utility for the truly paranoid. (My diagnostic tool can do this, too. The intended use case is cloning the ID from an OEM sensor for a car whose TPMS relearn procedure is more trouble than it’s worth.)
Regardless of your vehicle’s polling frequency, most sensors can be woken up any time by a specific radio pulse, which my diagnostic tool can also do, and the range is surprisingly long. Just my car’s own BMS where the receiver is (above the rear left wheel well) can pick up the sensors in my snow tire rims even when said rims are sitting in their storage rack inside my garage, about three car lengths away.
Some of them certainly are. You can also get air rifles with built in “moderators” (i.e. suppressors) that are surprisingly quiet. Precharged pneumatic air rifles can be very powerful and also extremely accurate. I have a relatively cheap Hatsan that can, provided I’m using pellets that it likes, repeatably put pellets through the same hole in my target from as far away as I can get from it in my yard (probably about 20 yards) and do so about 30 times in succession before I have to pump it back up again. Its built in moderator makes it quiet enough at the muzzle that the sound of the hammer hitting the gas valve is actually louder than the report from firing.
Watch out: Researching this type of thing may send you tumbling down the rabbit hole of big bore air rifles and entice you to spend a lot of money. Don’t say I didn’t warn you…
So in other words, what else is new?
The danger if this passes isn’t that someone will be able to successfully implement some manner of system for identifying gun parts which will, apparently, rely on pixie dust and magic. In reality this will effectively prohibit 3D printer sales in California entirely because compliance is literally impossible. And it’ll and give overreaching cops and prosecutors yet another nonsense charge they can arbitrarily slap people with over “circumventing” this mystical technology which does not in fact exist if they, ye gods forbid, build their own printer.
It’s the same horseshit rationale as the spent casing “microstamping” fantasy that legislators have been salivating about for decades. It doesn’t work, it’ll never work, but that’s not going to stop them from wishing it does and therefore turning it into a defacto ban.
Keep in mind, California also has the precedent of their infamous approved handguns list, which notoriously does things like arbitrarily declaring that the black version of some model of gun is legal, but possession of the stainless version of the exact same gun is a felony. We’re not dealing with people in possession of any type of rationality, here.
Prusa or Qidi. Avoid Bambu.
How many other games from 2011 just got re-re-re-released on the Switch 2 for a full $60, though?
Poorly. According to a random Wikipedia query, commodity lithium ion is ~270 Wh per kilogram. So this is around 20% of that, according to the above.
“Excellent” may be in comparison to other byzantine specialty battery chemistries, but lithium ion remains resolutely enthroned.
Correct. They only care about this stuff because they don’t want anyone to use it on them.
If you don’t believe me, just note how basically every single weapons ban written in the US magically has an exception for law enforcement carved into it. So… We (not me, but all you Californian people) can’t have, say, a butterfly knife but for some reason the cops can? What do they need it for that we don’t, exactly?