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.
Oh, there are vanishingly few hardware vendors I hate with a greater burning passion than Sony. Over the span of literal decades, Sony has consistently and systematically found so many ways to piss me off that I will never give them another red cent so long as I live. I will happily pay slightly more money for a slightly inferior version of whatever gadget from somebody else rather than deal with Sony’s bullshit.
In very select circumstances, possibly. I got a refund check from DHS/CBP/whoever a while back for some random thing I imported (which turned out to come from Germany, which I only discovered after I bought it…) for which I got tariffed personally. I presume after that particular tariff was retracted and/or struck down.
For the vast majority of consumers buying stuff off the shelf from retailers and vendors who jacked their prices up to compensate for said tariffs, no. Absolutely not. I predict said prices will remain jacked up for the foreseeable future as well, since retailer pricing policies are completely opaque to the consumer, and also notoriously ratchet-like — they tend to only move in one direction.
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.
As usual, this is thoroughly documented to a perhaps ridiculous degree on the Transformers Wiki:
https://tfwiki.net/wiki/Transformation#Onomatopoeia
There is an official answer to this question. It’s Transformers; of course there is an official answer to this particular question. Actually, there are several. Jury’s out on which of these interpretations in particular have caused the franchise to be Ruined Forever, but surely at least one of them has.
They don’t have a copy of every single Bitlocker key. They do have a copy of your Bitlocker key if you are dumb enough to allow it to sync with your Microsoft account, you know, “for convenience.”
Don’t use a Microsoft account with Windows, even if you are forced to use Windows.
I’ve noticed the drive-by accounts that immediately delete themselves afterwards lately. I was wondering what was up with that.
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.
Fun with QR codes! Two things are on the top of my mind today.
My boss loves QR codes. He wants to put a QR code on every single publication we print, for any reason, or often for no reason. To this day, he does not understand that QR codes are not magic, and all they contain is a link. I can’t make the QR code “do” this, that, and the third thing he wants; I have to program our web site to do whatever it is. When he is explaining what he wants, he is inevitably tracing his fingers around in the air making a box shape, as if this means anything.
His latest brainwave was trying to make me put QR codes on internet banner ads. Which are displayed on the viewer’s screen. ~90% of which are viewing on their mobile device to begin with. I had to explain to him using small easily understandable words that you cannot make a phone take a picture of itself. (Yes, I left the topic of screenshots out of it.) The fact that the banner ad is not only inherently clickable but being clickable is really rather the entire point, and this click directs the user to anywhere we want – say, the same place as his mythical QR code – did not sink in for him.
He also doesn’t get that merely generating the pixels of the QR code does not automatically create the landing page and all of its content. He also doesn’t grok that, to the nearest decimal place, nobody scans the fucking things on our literature anyway. Like I don’t track that kind of thing.
But I have a theory as to why, now. Thing the second is that just today I had a customer tell me, “I won’t scan them QR code things because I saw on the news they’re all controlled by the Chinese government.” (Our quotes have a QR code at the top you can use to view the products therein on our web site without having to type anything. It’s practically the only genuinely useful thing we do with them.) I had to demonstrate to him right there and then that the QR code is literally just a block of text, and you can see every single damn fool character in it before you visit whatever link it is if you feel like it and/or don’t trust it. Our QR codes clearly just go to our web site, with a ?products=[list] tacked on to the end of the URL.
I am positive he didn’t get it.
I’m positive my boss still doesn’t get it, either.
Whatever, it all pays the same.
It’s easy: The input side is the high voltage socket, and the output side is an abyssal cable squid nightmare that sprays out into 128 individual male type C plugs, each on the end of about a 6" long pigtail. By the time you’re done plugging all of them in, your vehicle is charged.