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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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • Part of the problem with stainless steel is that it’s not a singular material. It’s an entire galaxy of alloys with a huge range of properties, and some are more corrosion resistant than others. It is certainly possible to concoct some alloy that is for all intents and purposes absolutely rustproof but it’s unlikely to have the other mechanical properties you need for whatever it is you’re doing.

    If you’re looking at any object (probably a knife, or maybe a sink or faucet fixture) that simply declares itself “stainless steel” but the manufacturer refuses to admit which alloy even if you press them in a vise, that does indeed usually mean you’re looking at some junk. Low chromium and low nickel stainless alloys are the least corrosion resistant but all other things being equal are also typically the easiest to cut, machine, stamp, or otherwise work into shape.






  • Knives (key chain knife that looks like a key, pocket knife with fold out locking blade that has interchangeable blades with box cutters)

    I have several of the former from various eras. They seem to be universally crap, which is disappointing. Some states (California leaps to mind) also have laws against knives that are disguised look like other things. This is objectively stupid, but it’s how it is.

    For the latter, might I suggest this or this? Just sayin’, as they say.





  • Task Manager is launched by the listener in winlogon if you use the Ctrl + Shift + Esc method though, right? I’m pretty sure you can still launch Task Manager, and from there attempt to relauch Explorer, even if Explorer is borked or not running. You’d just have to know how to do that and that you can.

    That’s what I always do when Explorer’s ears inexplicably catch fire and I’m either too lazy or too naively hopeful to reboot.

    For anyone following along at home, Windows Explorer is also responsible for displaying the start menu/taskbar. In the example in the article there’s something else funky going on inside Explorer, though, because the taskbar and even the desktop icons are all there, it’s just not rendering correctly. (Explorer is also responsible for showing all of your desktop icons.)


  • I generally upvote stuff to reward engagement and effort. Anything I pass by that looks like a creative work someone is putting forth themselves I’ll upvote. Also pretty much any response to anything I post or comment on. Often times comments I respond to as well.

    I only downvote utter bullshit, i.e. people spouting things that are categorically not true, or bad faith arguments, or just people being argumentative in general when there’s no reason to be so.

    I don’t give enough of a flying fuck if we hypothetically disagree, only if your position is so odious that it is in fact literally objectively wrong or intentionally misleading.

    Or utterly useless bots that no one asked for. I’ll downvote those, too, but I haven’t seen too many of them anymore in the corners that I regularly haunt.


  • Well, fuck. Just at this exact second you’ve taught me that I’ve been doing that the hard way for ages, by actually going to the project’s github page.

    Anyway, another shout out for yt-dlp regardless. I get a giggle every time I see one of those sporadic news articles involving the music recording industry still whinging about piracy. Er, the record labels themselves pathologically post every single track ever recorded to Youtube to rake in that ad revenue, and it’s all free for the taking. If you decide you’d like to be proud owner of any of them forever you can just hit it with the ol’ yt-dlp -x.

    I am continually amazed at the number of non-Youtube sources that yt-dlp Just Works with as well. It seems any video content posted online that you’d like to gaff can be handily vacuumed up with it, regardless of the site operator’s desperate attempts to prevent you from doing so.


  • I’ve never retrobrighted anything because I always had a hunch this would be the case. It turns out I was vindicated. We all know full well that oxygenation is one of the things that deteriorates many materials, including embrittling plastics, and what you’re doing with this stuff is literally just oxygenating the shit out of your plastic in order to bleach it.

    For stuff that I’ve really cared about de-yellowing, I’ve always just cleaned it thoroughly and painted over it. This has the added bonus of the paint being an additional protective layer rather than a destructive chemical reaction inflicted on the material itself. Sure, it sucks that you also paint over any logos printed on it or whatever, but you can recreate those with stickers if you really care. I figure that if anybody can’t identify what an NES or Dreamcast or something is shaped like, even without the logos on it, they’re probably not invited to any more of my parties anyway.






  • There are several things you could do in that regard, I’m sure. Configure your services to listen only on weird ports, disable ICMP pings, jigger your scripts to return timeouts instead of error messages… Many of which might make your own life difficult, as well.

    All of these are also completely counterproductive if you want your hosted service, whatever it is, to be accessible to others. Or maybe not, if you don’t. The point is, the bots don’t have to find every single web service and site with 100% accuracy. The hackers only have to get lucky once and stumble their way into e.g. someone’s unsecured web host where they can push more malware, or a pile of files they can encrypt and demand a ransom, or personal information they can steal, or content they can scrape with their dumb AI, or whatever. But they can keep on trying until the sun burns out basically for free, and you have to stay lucky and under the radar forever.

    In my case just to name an example I kind of need my site to be accessible to the public at large if I want to, er, actually make any sales.



  • Almost certainly. There are only 4,294,967,296 possible IPv4 addresses, i.e. 4.3ish billion, which sounds like a lot but in computer terms really isn’t. You can scan them in parallel, and if you’re an advanced script kiddie you could even exclude ranges that you know belong to unexciting organizations like Google and Microsoft, which are probably not worth spending your time messing with.

    If you had a botnet of 8,000 or so devices and employed a probably unrealistically generous timeout of 15 seconds, i.e. four attempts per minute per device, you could scan the entire IPv4 range in just a hair over 93 days and that’s before excluding any known pointless address blocks. If you only spent a second on each ping you could do it in about six days.

    For the sake of argument, cybercriminals are already operating botnets with upwards of 100,000 compromised machines doing their bidding. That bidding could well be (and probably is) probing random web servers for vulnerabilities. The largest confirmed botnet was the 911 S5 which contained about 19 million devices.