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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  • materially supporting state violence

    Dingdingdingdingding.

    Here’s the winner, right here. Fascist fucks want to go around pretending that only billy clubs and bullets and bombs count as “violence.” Inflicting mass starvation on people, withholding medical care, stealing workers’ wages they depend upon to survive, and brutalizing minorities and marginalized groups (oftentimes with actual up front physical attacks) is “just doing business.”

    So news flash to the chucklefucks: That’s not how it works. State sponsored violence is still violence, and so it follows the oppressed have a right to defend themselves. It sure sucks when the shoe is on the other foot, don’t it?

    But it turns out there’s an easy way to defend yourself from that sort of thing. All you have to do is not be an evil and hateful fuck whose policies and actions threaten the lives of others and their right to exist.











  • Psychology aside, when I was a wee waddler working my first retail job, my boss told me that the reason they priced items ending in 99 cents specifically at his store was because the change from a dollar left over was a shortcut to telling the cashier how many items had been rung up. “Rung up” itself being very apt in this case, because when he started his business back in the Lower Cretaceous period, they used mechanical cash registers that went ding and everything, but didn’t have fancy electronic readouts of the running total and items registered so far. If the customer handed you seven items you knew that the pennies end of the change if you rounded up to a dollar should be $XX.93, and you could use that to tell handily if you missed anything or double-rung something.

    It seems that the prospect of “losing” a penny in the sense of making a $1 item 99 cents instead was probably a better proposition versus having cashiers let un-rung items walk out the door all the time.




  • Here’s another vote for the X-Max 3. Mine has been quite solid.

    If anyone is interested in multi color support, though, it seems that the Qidi “Box” filament changer deal will never be made compatible with the Max series, and will only work with the new/current Plus 4. There is at least one third party solution for this in the CoPrint ChromaSet thingy, but this engenders some pretty significant compromises and also locks you into using their nozzles, in addition to reducing the print volume significantly which kind of defeats the purpose of the X-Max 3.


  • I think Windows 2000 was the high water mark. Compared to the NT based operating systems, the 9x versions were pretty rinky-dink in retrospect and not terribly reliable. 2000 was the best truly modern Windows that supported all the stuff we expect: NTFS, real user accounts, actual security, group policy management, the modern disk management utility that’s still in use today, the management console, native USB support (including 2.0 as of Service Pack 4), native ACPI hibernation support without reliance on janky vendor bullshit, etc.

    Yeah, USB support. Everyone forgets that Windows 95 didn’t support USB at all out of the box and 98 barely accomplished it. 95 required the “OSR2 USB Supplement,” and 98 didn’t even support mass storage devices without third party drivers until the “SE” second edition. Those days really were that terrible.

    XP was where the bloat really started setting in, but since XP was basically 2000 with extra shit duct taped to it you could still do all the same stuff with it vis-a-vis gaming and DirectX support, and by and large it could still use the same hardware drivers as XP even if vendors didn’t bother to officially support it.


  • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldIt used to be fun
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    20 days ago

    I did alright with mine. I figure a modern one would have modern hardware in it. People forget how dire the performance on the first couple of iPhone generations was, too. The N900’s contemporary was the iPhone 3GS, I think, which was an objectively terrible device in every metric except sales.

    Oh, and the N900’s inbuilt phone dialer was also kind of ass. But I found its performance more than acceptable, and it could run full fat Firefox including the Flash plugin, which was still a big deal at the time, whereas its competitors could barely render a web page.




  • This would become quite a thorny constitutional issue very quickly. The 14th amendment explicitly specifies that one state can’t try to prosecute someone for something done in another state that was legal there but is illegal here. This has further been interpreted to mean that interstate travel as a whole is a protected right, and any form of checkpoint or other hassle-station on a border between states would surely also be a 4th amendment violation.

    That’s not to say some idiot won’t try it eventually, especially given the current political climate, but up until now it’s not done as a matter of course.

    A state neighboring mine got in big time hot water a decade or so ago for stationing their own cops in our state and tailing people out of liquor store parking lots with the aim of harassing them over the minutiae of the differences in liquor laws between the two. Obviously that didn’t fly, because that state does not have jurisdiction here which means they have no grounds for a stop or search. Likewise, entering another state is not legal grounds for a stop and search unless that state’s law enforcement already has some manner of articulable probable cause.