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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  • They’re all functionally interchangeable as far as I can tell, but only conceptually and not in the sense that your batteries will fit all the different machines because the manufacturers have seen to it that it doesn’t work this way (because fuck you, that’s why).

    If your machine is dying in minutes the issue is probably that the battery is roached, not the machine. Lithium-whatever batteries do not last forever, and generally the ones in outdoor equipment are not charged or stored with much care, or in ideal temperature conditions, etc.

    The secret is to just buy Chinese knockoff off-brand batteries. “But,” all the oldheads will cry, “Those are Chinese garbage!”

    Yes, they are. But so are the “OEM” batteries. The only real difference is the audacity of the markup; you may as well pay what they’re actually worth rather than what your local big box store thinks people ought to believe they’re worth. Before you throw away your weedwhacker, get a knockoff battery pack from Aliexpress or Amazon or whatever and give it a shot. Worst case you’re out thirty bucks, but the gamble is probably better than buying a whole new weedwhacker.

    I have all Ryobi crap, for the most part, because that’s where I got roped in initially and that way I only have to stock one kind of battery. I have two genuine batteries that came with my stuff, but all the rest are knockoffs. The knockoffs are everything the genuine batteries are, but 1/6 of the cost. Actually, due to the perpetual slow march of battery tech improvements, one of my knockoffs is legitimately a noticeably higher capacity than my oldest genuine Ryobi batteries were even when they were brand new.




  • Wireless optical mice are basically given away free in boxes of Frosted Flakes these days. Is there really any pressing need to “fix” this one in particular via some roundabout method? Like, do you have some sentimental attachment to it, or something? I don’t think you’re likely to succeed, there. Notwithstanding that the sensors you’d need to buy would be significantly more expensive than a new mouse, but then as you’ve observed you’d also have to hack up a way to make your operating system treat your new sensors as a mouse input, and also preserve the click inputs from the separate remaining carcass of the mouse.

    Really, just replace it. Any nerd should have a whole box of the things. I do; hell, I could just give you one.

    The next time you paint a mouse take it apart first. The upper shell is typically quite easy to remove with just a couple of screws and then you can paint it separately from all the electronics to avoid destroying any of the functional parts.




  • You can absolutely configure Windows to open folders – and all other shortcuts – with a single click, and IIRC one of the knocks against Windows ME was that this was the default option. And it was godawful, along with the “click” noise it made on navigation. (I think it was WinME. I’ve probably suppressed the memory, and rightly so.)

    But the long and short of it is if you want consistency between your UI’s in that regard you can indeed have it.





  • I can:

    • Accomplish damn near anything from a command line
    • Write machine code
    • Remember a fairly broad swath of special character altcodes without looking them up
    • Disassemble damn near any computer or other machine, and stand a good chance of putting it back together

    But also:

    • Use modern programming languages, including object oriented paradigms
    • Actually read what is on my screen and comprehend it, including error messages
    • Understand and operate any arbitrary interface without having to have it explained to me by rote

    Behold my mixture of skills, and tremble.


  • This is absolutely by design, and it is so users can be provided the absolute minimum of Privacy-ishtm, but also explicitly so that management can easily verify if a stall is occupied in case any poors/junkies are camping out in there.

    It’s also so that public bathroom facilities can be spray-down, and you can wedge a brush in the gaps easily without there being crevices for mold/mildew and other… substances… to remain in.




  • Yes, and also different patches of air are different densities because of temperature, or humidity, and they’re neither even nor consistent nor still. Convection makes the atmosphere bubble, wind makes it shear, and all the rest of it. The air itself acts as a lens, and a very inconsistent and unpredictable one at that.