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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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  • IIRC they never did anything specifically on veganism. They have attacked various diet fads and in particular (S07E06) the organic food hype. They definitely picked on that guy who was getting in peoples’ faces about raw-food-only, but to be fair that guy was also acting like a prick. In the episode on PETA, Penn repeatedly comments on “skinny vegetarians,” but also consistently represents himself as a “fat [carnivore] fuck,” so there’s that.

    It’s been many years since I watched the entire show, so maybe there’s a bit I don’t remember. But they definitely did not do an episode devoted to it.



  • Any advice for getting it to actually work with a Garmin watch? I just tried it with my Fenix 6 (solar) and it doesn’t detect the watch at all. In fact, even selecting “show unsupported devices” reveals that my watch’s bluetooth MAC address isn’t even seen by my phone. (Yes, I unpaired it and removed Connect from my phone. I also resorted to factory resetting my watch. No dice.)

    At the moment I’m using it unconnected because it still shows the time and so forth with the watch face I want. But without any kind of connectivity there’s really no point to not just putting this thing back in its box for good and grabbing one of my numerous dumb watches.




  • I’d be fine with my OG Pebble, honestly. The only functions I really need and genuinely use are custom watch faces to change things up now and again, and notifications going to my phone.

    I got my first Garmin after Pebble evaporated because it was quite rugged, had a similar color screen, and most importantly a long battery life. It has built in mapping functionality which I thought I’d use, but I really don’t. I have zero interest in the tracking features, health and otherwise, and leave all of that turned off. I personally can’t understand why everyone is so obsessed with that all the time, nor anyone in their right mind would trust sending any of that kind of data to a third party for any reason.


  • TL;DR: They lied to us, plain and simple. The temptation of Make Line Go Up was enough to make Garmin abandon their promise of no subscriptions and no paywalls.

    Nobody outside of the idiots in the boardroom wants this, especially the AI garbage. It’s disgusting that $1100 for a Fenix 8 isn’t already enough for these greedy assholes. Original features are “free for now,” but I guarantee you this will change when nobody signs up and MBA dipshits start leaning on everybody to force users to provide recurring revenue by moving previously free functionality into the subscription tier. This is not a prediction or an “if,” it is an inevitability and a “when,” unless we nip this in the bud right now.

    I am on my second Garmin watch, a Fenix 6. Previously I had a 5x. My wife has a Lily. These will be our last ever Garmin devices, and I’ll be sure to let them know it. It’s getting to the point where no smartwatch maker can be trusted, unsurprisingly, and honestly the alleged benefits they provide are probably no longer worth it in the long run. Before smartwatches were a thing I amassed quite a selection of normal watches, which I will probably just go back to using when my current watch inevitably cacks it, or the software becomes so borked that it’s useless.

    Edit: In fact, just now I did let them know it. I also cancelled my inReach subscription and let them know it there as well, and deleted my Connect account (and pulled my watch faces off of their marketplace) and also let them know it there too. When I do something I mean it. I suggest you all do the same; the only ear these companies have is located in their coin purses.





  • It’s both simultaneously anyway, because Blade Runner’s entire jam is that it’s ambiguous whether Deckard (and even moreso McCoy) really is a replicant after all. As you have observed the true canonical answer has waffled over time with various cuts and recuts of the movie, although I believe Ridley Scott stated that the original intention was for him to have been a rep all along. And book Deckard is explicitly human.

    Anyway, the replicants as depicted in all incarnations are clearly biological constructs and not mechanical, so while they’re certainly artificial the notion of whether or not they’re “robots” to begin with is highly debatable. Nexus-6, at least, has truly human intelligence to the extent that the built in 4 year expiry timer is required lest they emotionally mature enough to gain just a little bit too much free will for their designers’ liking. This is also why the Voight-Kampff test is necessary versus just waving a metal detector at them or X-raying them or whatever.




  • Except when the setting they need isn’t in Settings. Then it’s a wild goose chase.

    In fact, it’s often a wild goose chase even if it is in Settings, because the question then is where did Microsoft decide to hide it in this most recent update?

    The thing everyone misses which was Control Panel’s greatest strength, however, was that vendors could add their own .cpl extensions to it. So settings for your specific hardware could go there. (Yes, this was abused by-and-large by some vendors just like the system tray, but that’s not the point.) Literally all of your settings and configuration stuff could go in one place. Even if a user did not know exactly where, at least they had a consistent place to start looking.

    That all ended with Windows 2000/XP and got worse with 8/10/11.

    Now we have this:

    “I want to change the behavior of Windows feature X.”

    Spin the wheel and guess!

    • Is it located in Settings?
    • Is it located in Control Panel?
    • Is there a category in Settings where it totally should be, and any reasonable person would expect it to be, but it’s not there? Surprise! It’s in Control Panel anyway because Microsoft was too lazy to migrate it to Settings.
    • Is it in both Settings and Control panel?
    • Is it lurking in the Notification Area?
    • Or is it hidden in Group Policy Management instead? Oops, too bad you bought the home edition of Windows.

    Etc.

    Control panel may have been clunky, especially for frequently accessed settings, but at least it was unified.


  • 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.