dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

https://www.harborfreight.com/momentary-power-foot-switch-57199.html

I have one of these on my big “real” table saw as well, because the location of its power switch is deeply inconvenient.

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.

But it’s still fun to shake the jar and watch 'em fight!

And if you go anywhere with your shiny new flash drive, also carry a floppy disk around with you with the damn driver on it. Because you can’t trust anyone else’s computer to already have it installed.

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.

Counter offer: Be a huge nerd and hang out on Lemmy instead.

You’ll probably be scraped by AI bots anyway, but we have penguins and Star Trek memes. And knives.

Related:

“When will [task] be done?”

When I told you it would be done.

“But why isn’t it done now?”

Because it’s not when I told you it would be done yet.

“Well, you need to hurry up and do it faster, because we need it right away.”

Great! But you standing here arguing with me about it is now actively preventing me from getting it done. It will be done when it’s done, which will now be about 20 minutes later than it would have been before you came over here and started shooting your mouth off about it.

If I had a dime for every time I’ve had this conversation with middle management in my various careers, I’d at least be able to afford a Taco Bell combo meal by now.

Especially since VBA can make calls to the Windows API directly and through that avenue do all kinds of funky things to your system.

This is totally expected and also absolutely peanuts compared to Intel, who once released a processor that managed to perform floating point long division incorrectly in fascinating (if you’re the right type of nerd) and subtle ways. Hands up everyone who remembers that debacle!

Nobody? Just me?

Anyway, I totally had — and probably still have, somewhere — one of the affected chips. You could check if yours was one of the flawed ones literally by using the Windows calculator.

Sure, until they start spying on you in real time through your school issue comptuer’s webcam. (Or listening via its microphones, or snooping your wi-fi traffic with preinstalled malware, or…)

Anyway, the asshats even try to snoop on students’ social media activity outside of school and not done on school hardware.

From TFA:

The research team identified 14 companies actively marketing online surveillance services frequently beyond school-issued devices and outside of school premises, raising concerns about privacy, equity and oversight.

Emphasis mine.

Strings for stringed instruments were at one point traditionally made out of “catgut,” which is animal intestinal material. Though to my knowledge, pretty much never actually from cats.

Lord Vetinari, the supreme ruler of Ankh-Morpork, rather liked music.

People wondered what sort of music would appeal to such a man. Highly formalized chamber music, possibly, or thunder-and-lightning opera scores.

In fact the kind of music he really liked was the kind that never got played. It ruined music, in his opinion, to torment it by involving it on dried skins, bits of dead cat, and lumps of metal hammered into wires and tubes. It ought to stay written down, on the page, in rows of little dots and crotchets all neatly caught between lines. Only there was it pure. It was when people started doing things with it that the rot set in. Much better to sit quietly in a room and read the sheets, with nothing between yourself and the mind of the composer but a scribble of ink. Having it played by sweaty fat men and people with hair in their ears and spit dribbling out of the end of their oboe… well, the idea made him shudder. Although not much, because he never did anything to extremes.

Separately, Microsoft warns that Windows 11 version 23H2 will reach end of support on November 11, 2025.

I.e., the one that still supports WMR virtual reality headsets and hasn’t had the functionality for those artificially pulled.

https://mrdoob.com/lab/javascript/effects/solitaire/

You can disable Edge if you don’t want people launching it… “accidentally.” There are a myriad of ways. Most recently I’ve used Edge Blocker, which does what it says on the label. Note that this will cause the opening of any file types associated with Edge by default to silently fail if you don’t reassign them to some other program.

The install Firefox and uBlock origin. Unless your parents deliberately go out of their way to download and install Chrome (and depending how heavy-handed you want to get you could even prevent this by busting them down to a limited user account) they won’t have any choice but to use the correct browser installed on their system. That is to say, the only one.

OP hit the nail on the head. This is once again shifting the blame (and guilt) onto individuals who even collectively have fuck-all impact on the problem in question.

The worst of it is, some people will believe this shit.

I still use the “y u no [whatever]” guy pretty frequently. That one has some legs.

It was redundant anyway, since it was just bookmarks with extra steps. But you can sync bookmarks between devices with Firefox anyway and you’ve been able to for years, so I have no idea why they kept it around other than to use it as a vehicle to push ads (because it seemed like roughly 25% of the “articles” it suggested to you were actually ads). I can’t say as I’m too sad to see it go.

Fakespot could arguably have been useful on paper, but I have to admit I never used it because I treat most online reviews as if they’re bullshit anyway.

In response to the DOJ’s assertion, Apple confirmed for the first time that it at one point considered Android support for the Apple Watch. After a three-year investigation, Apple says that it determined an Apple Watch with Android support wasn’t doable because of technical limitations. As such, it scrapped the idea.

Yeah, bullshit.

Somehow Garmin, Samsung, HTC, Huawei, Pebble (RIP), Fossil, Moto/Lenovo, etc. managed to do it just fine.

Rather than technical reasons, rather I suspect the real reasons were financial and ideological, i.e. it would would conflict with Apple’s brand-wide pathos of vendor lock-in, and would mean the maximum amount of capital would not extracted from the rubes as a portion of it might – shock, horror – go to one of their competitors, Google or Samsung.