Does it? I’m aware of, but do not personally get, the humiliation kink.

It’s a Borzoi. Narrow dog with a white coat and a hose nose.

Every now and again you’ll see a Tomb Raider cosplayer who has stuffed a box up her shirt and it’ll never not be funny.

That tracks.

How? I get about three blocks.

I’ve looked into Meshtastic, I have a pair of nodes. I am solidly not impressed.

I live in a wooded area, I can shout farther than the range of these nodes. It’s hilariously pathetic. Yes I know people who live on mountaintops can hear the gods themselves on this thing but in the forest the RF spectrum ends at 300MHz. The U in UHF stands for USELESS. So unless you’re in the room with someone else who has a node, the experience of using it is turning on MQTT and only making contacts that way. Which means you’ve bought a badly made low power radio to connect your phone to itself.

The software is pretty bad, too. It’s got a lot of the standard FOSS defects, there’s a LOT of features that are about 1/3 of the way implemented and the feature set is different from platform to platform. On the Android app, you can “reply” to someone else’s message, almost like conversation threading. On the web UI, that feature isn’t supported so the message just comes through with less context. There’s emoji reactions! On the mobile app, you can see someone has reacted with an emoji to your message. There’s no way to see who, because if you tap on the emoji you’ll respond with the same emoji, so the identity of your contact will just be a mystery forever. On the web UI, reactions aren’t a thing, and it looks like someone posts a message with a single emoji in it. So you can tell who posted it, but without the context as to why.

There’s a range test function that sets a node to kind of an automatic beacon, so you can take another for a walk or drive and see just how truly pathetic the range is, and your mobile node will store its GPS coordinates…forever. They made it able to store it as a file but did not provide the ability to erase it.

There’s like five ways of interfacing with the microcontroller’s GPIO or serial bus to attach external hardware, each more convoluted and limiting than the last. Oh, and if you want to do some like remote telemetry or control across the mesh, I hope you like spamming everybody, because even though it has the concept of private channels, you’re not allowed to use any of them. Almost all automated messaging is forced into the Primary channel.

The only thing I can see that recommends Meshtastic over Meshcore or Reticulum is it’s relatively easy to get two nodes talking to each other on Meshtastic, you’ve just got to make sure like 40 settings match on two devices.

short answer, no.

Long answer, LoRa is a very low bandwidth digital scheme. It can BARELY do SMS-like text messaging. Audio, especially in real time, is way out of the question. There are devices sold as more or less complete Meshtastic nodes with their own built-in UI, one of which looks quite a bit like an old Blackberry, but it’s not exactly kid friendly.

What’s a drag king act? A woman in a tuxedo singing Sinatra songs?

I remember when 7 expansion slots was pretty normal. Of course, one would be your video card, one would be a graphics accelerator, one would be a sound card, one would be a modem, one would be an Ethernet NIC, and one would be a SCSI adapter. now a lot of that shit is either obsolete or built right into the motherboard.

The Box Bra, by Croft.

There was an early episode of House where a clinic segment had a white chick in hemp clothing bring her baby in for a runny nose, proudly proclaimed that they “weren’t vaccinating.” House goes on about baby coffins. I did not see that issue slop so hard to the right.

A template or jig, yeah. If I’ve got more than one part to make, especially if they need to match in some substantial way, I set up a stop of some kind.

At some point I may attempt to build a project to a scored storey stick rather than to measurements, but on the other hand I may not.

My family got a brand new Pentium 3 computer that came with Windows ME. Part of the install/setup/onboarding process of this OS was connecting to the internet via its dialup modem. My father’s work was our ISP, it was a local number. We left the area code field blank, put in the 7 digit phone number, and the software wouldn’t accept that. The software required the area code field to be filled in. We filled it in, and it pumped the modem noises through to the speakers, where we heard “doo Daa DEEE It is not necessary to dial the area code for a local call. Please hang up and dial the phone number without the area code.”

ENGINEERING!

In the United States, absolutely none of them do.

The US did not create new area codes for cell phones. I kinda wonder if it would have ever worked. There are only like 800 of them available to the whole nation. 000-199 are not usable; neither an area code or an exchange can start with a leading 0 or 1. And certain round numbers and easy to remember area codes like 200, 211, 300, 311 etc. are reserved. 411 for example is the infromation service, 911 is the emergency number. Fun fact: cell phones are required to be able to dial 911 even if they don’t have a plan or number associated to them. If you dial 911 from a disconnected cell phone, the system will randomly assign that phone a number with a 911 area code.

Even though you can carry a phone elsewhere with you, they are still “area codes.” If you get a new cell phone, it will be assigned an area code for the area you purchased it in. People have moved around and kept their familiar numbers, which is what this XKCD comic is referring to.

The next three digits are the “exchange,” which once upon a time was also routable. Everyone in the same town or neighborhood might have the same exchange, so at one point you really only had to remember 4 digits for a particular phone number, because you knew what exchange and area they were in. Especially with cell phones it’s pretty much 10 random digits.

The fun one is a nautical mile. Which is 6076.12 feet. How’d we get there? A nautical mile is equal to a minute of latitude, which happens to be just a bit bigger but on the order of magnitude of most “miles” to include the US statute mile.

I’ve banged on about this at length before. I prefer woodworking in inches because I have to divide by 3 and 4 a lot more often than divide by 5. It turns out that the fractional inch system evolved alongside woodworking for a very long time and it solves a lot of the problems woodworkers actually face…as long as you’re not a European scraping in the dirt for something to feel superior about.

The first time I ever took a non-pressurized aircraft to 10,000 feet was an interesting experience. I noticed myself breathing…not heavier, that feels like the wrong word, because I had the opposite problem to “heavy.” I needed to breathe noticeably deeper and faster just sitting still at the controls of the plane doing maybe slightly more work than typing this sentence. Somebody from a lower area going up to Denver (about half the altitude I flew to that day) to play a sport has an elevated chance of Not A Good Day.

“High. You put the stove on high.”

My dearest Tokenring,