I await with interest the first serious accusation that I’m a bot. A very well armed bot, perhaps. I certainly type some strange things, but you guys have probably seen my hands too many times.

Unless my hands are also AI generated. Hmm.

I’ve already garnered the achievement of having several people on one of the Discord servers I hang around on of treating me as if I’m literally a penguin. Nobody’s yet come up with a credible explanation of how I’d be able to type. (Including, surprisingly, the obvious hunt and peck gag that presents itself.)

I have bids turned off on eBay for this reason. The only thing you ever get is low ball offers. Yes, I know you can set a lowerbound limit.

Now that I have bids turned off, or if someone wants to underbid the setpoint, that makes the lowballers message me instead. Usually with an insulting poorly spelled paragraph attached, or some sob story. Or both. But since they messaged you, that means you can block them. So, goodbye.

I’m assuming glass printer beds are supposed to be tempered, and just an FYI for you or anyone else attempting the hardware store or score-it-yourself method, the glass you wind up with will not be tempered and will also have exceedingly sharp edges and corners. If you have access to a belt sander with a suitably fine belt you can at least round off the sharp bits.

Untempered glass probably won’t deal with thermal loading very well, either. It might work, and it’ll be cheap, but prepare for disappointment.

Some of this may depend on your client. If you do a triple dash by itself on its own line:

You get a horizontal rule in most clients, including the default web UI and all of the major browser based clients I’ve tried.

My attorney has advised me to make no statements whatsoever regarding the applicability of the Lumintop Thor Mini I just bought the other week, which outputs a mere 250 lumens but does so in a narrow cone that’s got, to my reckoning, a divergence of only about four or five degrees.

I’ll have to do some measuring later, but at rear-windshield-to-asshole distance it’ll only throw a spot that’s probably about a foot wide, delivering maximum fuck you with a minimum of collateral damage.

Including this very platform.

Lemmy will automatically render a double dash – as an en dash, and a triple dash — as an em dash.

I usually just type alt + 0151, though, because I’m a nerd.

some folks just want to feel some kind of power because they feel powerless and they just need a wake-up call.

This is, like, the perfect summation of the human condition. Probably an awful lot of it, anyway.

That works. Also, back when I delivered pizza I kept a rather large LED flashlight in my cupholder all the time, ostensibly for spotting mailboxes and house numbers. (This was back in the day when having a powerful LED flashlight was a big deal, not like nowadays when you can get 3 for $10 on Amazon or whatever.) Pointing it out the back window usually got the point across when asshats felt the need to sit three feet off my back bumper and shine their high beams at me.

Slotted is the way to go. I’ve messed with a lot of drive types on 3D printed screws and I always come back to slotted, because it’s the most resistant to being reamed out. Phillips, Torx, Roberson (square), and especially Allen (hex) really don’t work very well when printed in plastic.

Only nine states have outlawed red light cameras. Your “many” statement you made earlier is, in fact, just “some.”

The sixth amendment challenge has been proposed several times, but very few of the actual rulings I can find contained anyone successfully using this as an argument. One for instance is The People v. Khaled in California where the camera operators were not available for cross-examination. All the state has to do is provide their witnesses and the sixth challenge goes out the window.

Insofar as red light camera schemes have been declared unconstitutional in state courts, this is most often because the scheme in question exceeded the authority granted to cities and municipalities, which tried to go over the heads of their superseding states. You can call this a win since they were indeed declared “unconstitutional,” but not for the reason you specified. The US Supreme Court has also been silent on the sixth amendment argument.

So, fixed that for you.

That’s not how it works. I had to fight a ticket from one of these once.

An invalid ticket, for the record. I was innocent and I could prove it with dash cam footage. I did not run the red light, but as usual everybody acts like accusation is the same as guilt and you know how that song and dance goes.

First, those cameras are almost never operated by the state or the police. They’re run by a private company which is under some kind of contract with your state or municipality. You’ll find this is why racking up tickets from red light cameras usually can’t put points on your license.

Anyway, you will face your accuser in court if you challenge the ticket. That person will be some lackey from the company that owns the cameras, whose job it is to show up to court. Theoretically this person was also supposed to have reviewed the evidence related to the incident in question, and this is what lets them get around that pesky constitutional requirement you mentioned. In my state the requirement is that two pictures must be shown, a before and after, positively depicting the vehicle in question crossing into the intersection. In my case the second picture was mysteriously absent from the ticket, which of course the state still treated as “valid” until I challenged it. This despite the conspicuous empty square on the printout they mailed me where that photo was supposed to be. The twerp from the camera company tried several tactics (unsuccessfully) to weasel out of producing the second picture until the judge forced him to. To no one’s surprise whatsoever, it showed my car exactly in the same spot as the first picture and my ticket was dismissed.

I still had to take a day off of work to contest it, though, and the private entity knowingly lied and attempted to slap me with a fraudulent ticket knowing full well they would never actually be punished for doing so. And they weren’t.

The guy whose case was right after mine on the docket was disputing a similarly bogus ticket, which he showed me. He was a big black dude with a Harley I saw parked outside. The “damning” photo evidence printed on his ticket showed a skinny white guy in a wife beater on a crotch rocket. I have to imagine he won his case as well, but I did not stick around to find out.

So the system is indeed still bullshit, but not in the way people expect.

That’s because practically nobody here drives a car with a manual transmission, and the reason for those in Europe is (or originally was) to give drivers notice when they need to get back into gear.

A knock-on consequence of this is that nobody in the US knows how to drive, they just point the wheel vaguely in some direction and mash the skinny pedal. If they don’t get the result they wanted, they stomp on the pedal harder. You ought to watch chucklefucks try to drive in the snow, especially those with SUVs and muscle cars with rear wheel drive. People treat the throttle as if it’s the “make the car go in the direction I’m looking button” and the rest of us know that’s not how it works.

Whenever this comes up I’m obligated to mention that the illustration comes from Dougal Dixon’s Man After Man. It is chock-a-block full of these kinds of illustrations from Philip Hood and as soon as you get to the future phase in part 2, all of them are just as batshit as this one. It’s gold.

The last time I had to do this I pulled a rapier, actually. Although in my defense, the guy behind me jumped out with a tire iron first. It was purest happenstance that I had the thing in my back seat at the time but damned if the look on his face wasn’t worth it.

I’ve recounted this tale before. I have to wonder how that guy tells people his side of that story…

It’s not only natural, it’s a good idea. Especially if you are crossing a large road.

I ride a motorcycle more often than not (see user name) and it’s vital to ensure that the cross traffic is actually stopping when their light is red. You aren’t “protected” because your light is green, and there’s nothing physically stopping any asshole blowing the light and ramming into the side of you, probably without slowing down in the slightest first. That’s because they’re also staring at their phone. I can’t even go a week anymore without watching some moron sail straight through a red light right in front of me such that if I hadn’t spotted them first they would have run me over. And it’s happening more and more often as drivers are more distracted than ever before. A couple of years ago I’d only see this sort of thing once every few months.

And I absolutely would not be able to resist labeling these as:

• English, U
• English, No U

Wow, the actual English flag, not the Union Jack?

I imagine that would trip up quite a few people even though there is a cheeky aspect of technical correctness to it.

melt ceramic

If you’re melting crockery in your microwave, I assure you whatever it is you’re using is not ceramic. Even the earthenware stuff that cheap coffee mugs are made out of has to be heated to upwards of 1000° C just as part of its hardening process, never mind melting.

You can absolutely get silica gel beads hot enough in a microwave to melt and deform plastic containers, though, including those faux stoneware textured ones. Beware if what you have is not actually Pyrex or ceramic.

I cook the shit out of my silica gel beads in the microwave in an old ceramic pie dish I have no other use for. There isn’t a mark on it. Although I will say, you probably want to microwave your beads gently anyway because at high power levels the moisture flash boils out of them fast enough to cause them to split and shatter, or occasionally leap out of the dish like popcorn.

I have a Dell Axim X50v in a box somewhere. I imagine the battery is toast and I’ll probably have to keep it in its cradle to remain powered. It was a hell of a machine for it’s day.

I went through a succession Windows CE/PocketPC machines back in the day, starting with a Casio Cassiopeia E-115, then an Audiovox Maestro which was a rebadged Toshiba, then an HP iPAQ 2215, and finally the Axim.

The displays on the Maestro and the Axim were really something, and I wish someone would bring these back for a modern smartphone. They were rotten at color accuracy, but both had transflective displays that were fully readable even in direct sunlight. The Axim X50v also had a full 480x640 screen resolution which blew the first few iPhones out of the water on pixel density and even gave the iPhone 4 a run for its money. “Retina” display, my ass.

I had a Microdrive bunged into the CompactFlash slot on my Axim which was… several gigabytes, I don’t remember how many. I kept it packed with MP3’s, and I had a custom wallpaper with a white-on-chartreuse silhouette of a pacifier on it with the legend, “All 10,000 Songs On Your iPod Suck.”

But then the entire PDA market got swallowed in one gulp by smartphones.

I’ll bet you a shiny penny that’s what it is. The backend recompresses things to some other format, probably a low bitrate JPEG, in order to save space and/or in case some joker uploads a 90 megabyte uncompressed TIFF image to use as a profile pic, or something.