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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  • That won’t save you anymore. My boss bought a smallish smart TV in contravention of my explicit instructions for use as a CCTV monitor because it was “cheap.” It nags you on power up with a popup whining about not being able to access the internet, and if you don’t feed it your Wifi password it will subsequently display that same popup every 30 minutes or so requiring you to dismiss it again. And again. And again. Apparently the play is to just annoy you into caving and letting it access your network.

    Instead I packed it up and returned it. Fuck that.










  • Douglas Adams, apparently ever prescient, was on top of this long before the rest of us. This is from The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul, which I will remind you was published in 1988 and in the foreword says it was typeset on a Macintosh II:

    There was a pay phone in one of the dark corners where waiters slouched moodily at one another. Dirk threaded his way through them, wondering whom it was they reminded him of, and eventually deciding it was the small crowd of naked men standing around behind the Holy Family in Michelangelo’s picture of the same name, for no more apparent reason than Michelangelo rather liked them.

    He telephoned an acquaintance of his called Nobby Paxton, or so he claimed, who worked the darker side of the domestic appliance supply business. Dirk came straight to the point.

    “Dobby, I deed a fridge.” (At this point in the book, Dirk has recently been punched in the face and is talking funny due to a broken nose.)

    “Dirk, I been saving one against the day you’d ask me.”

    Dirk found this highly unlikely.

    “Only I wand a good fridge, you thee, Dobby.”

    “This is the best, Dirk. Japanese. Microprocessor-controlled.”

    “What would a microprothehtor be doing in a fridge, Dobby?”

    “Keeping itself cool, Dirk. I’ll get the lads to bring it round right away. I need to get it off the premises pretty sharpish for reasons I won’t trouble you with.”

    “I apprethiade thid, Dobby,” said Dirk. “Problem id, I’m not home at preddent.”

    “Gaining access to houses in the absence of their owners is only one of the panoply of skills with which my lads are blessed. Let me know if you find anything missing afterwards, by the way.”