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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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • You can absolutely configure Windows to open folders – and all other shortcuts – with a single click, and IIRC one of the knocks against Windows ME was that this was the default option. And it was godawful, along with the “click” noise it made on navigation. (I think it was WinME. I’ve probably suppressed the memory, and rightly so.)

    But the long and short of it is if you want consistency between your UI’s in that regard you can indeed have it.





  • I can:

    • Accomplish damn near anything from a command line
    • Write machine code
    • Remember a fairly broad swath of special character altcodes without looking them up
    • Disassemble damn near any computer or other machine, and stand a good chance of putting it back together

    But also:

    • Use modern programming languages, including object oriented paradigms
    • Actually read what is on my screen and comprehend it, including error messages
    • Understand and operate any arbitrary interface without having to have it explained to me by rote

    Behold my mixture of skills, and tremble.


  • This is absolutely by design, and it is so users can be provided the absolute minimum of Privacy-ishtm, but also explicitly so that management can easily verify if a stall is occupied in case any poors/junkies are camping out in there.

    It’s also so that public bathroom facilities can be spray-down, and you can wedge a brush in the gaps easily without there being crevices for mold/mildew and other… substances… to remain in.







  • Key word being deliberately. I predict the majorty of people who wind up with either of those ghastly things did so because they were all that was available, easily filched from the supply closet, or it’s all their parents would give them because they are above all else cheap.

    I have probably handled and used hundreds of the damn things in my life but I have never once spent a single penny on any of them; they were without exception foisted off on me by circumstance, not intentionally sought out.

    I was a Staedtler nerd in school anyway, any time I was not allowed to use a fountain pen.







  • Well, one source I found with a cursory search indicates that California spent about $15.1 billion, with a B, on its police in 2023. So I can think of a good place to start.

    Anyway, I was following on to the above poster’s observation that electricity is already heavily taxed in CA. Just, none of that cash is allocated towards transportation (or at least in any significant manner insofar as I’m aware) I imagine because historically transportation and power consumption have not been intrinsically linked as they would become if electric vehicles become ubiquitous.

    California already has the highest electricity rates in the country by a significant margin, and now they’re also doing stuff like this, which makes you wonder just what the hell they expect to be doing with all that surcharge money if it’s not modernizing their power distribution and soon-to-be electrically driven transportation infrastructure. In fact, incentivizing a switch to electric infrastructure including vehicles was supposed to be one of the stated intentions of that scheme, although it’s dubious if things will actually shake out that way in reality.

    One thing’s for sure, the more they can structure their scheme so that it works via even collective contribution rather than making it appear to specifically punish individual drivers/owners, the much less pushback they’re going to get on it.