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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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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • Regardless of whatever it did or however it did it, the way Pocket was suddenly shoved in everyone’s faces by default definitely left a bad taste in a lot of mouths (including mine) and everybody just considered it more unasked-for adware. Especially since in its default configuration about a quarter of what it serves you is indeed flat out ads, when most of us are using Firefox with uBlock or similar specifically not to see ads.

    Pocket provided a feature I suspect few people actually used, and in the process had an obnoxious presentation that a lot of people actively disliked. Add me to the list of people who won’t be sad to see it go.

    I want my browser developer developing browsers, not other ancillary side projects and certainly not “curating content” or whatever the fuck.

    I would not be at all surprised to learn that Pocket costs Mozilla a nontrivial amount of money and manpower to maintain, what with doing all that curation and all, and provides them bupkis in return.












  • I will add another bullet point to the list above, specifically regarding cutting boards. Poly cutting boards are also acceptable and primarily what I use. However, if I see you using a glass cutting board or a plate as a cutting board, or chopping directly on your granite countertop, I am afraid I am going to have to hurt you.

    I am, as you can imagine, the default knife sharpener within the circle of my family and friends. However for quite some years I would not sharpen any knives for my sister anymore because she refused stop using her stupid 1980s glass cutting boards. (I believe they were probably actually intended to be serving trays, but good luck making people understand that.) She kept complaining that my sharpening was “no good” because her knives dulled so quickly.

    I was eventually able to coordinate with my brother in law who was also sick of it, and we located all of the glass boardlike objects in the house and surreptitiously threw them away.


  • It doesn’t help them save on material since the knife is ground from an originally flat slab of steel. The amount of material they remove from that bar is irrelevant to their materials cost, although it does add a bit of machine work.

    The scallops in the blade are effective at preventing some foods from sticking only if you are using a long slicing motion. When chopping down from above they accomplish nothing.




  • I kind of get the thing about the map even without seeing the world design of the new game, because even Borderlands 1-3 (especially 3) already had a lot of vertical aspects to many of their maps. The prevalence of paths looping over other paths, hills, tunnels, holes, inexplicably impassable ditches dividing the map, and generally the entire path to anywhere being designed like the queue at an amusement park ride made using the 2D minimap to actually navigate anywhere basically impossible. (And the main full screen map wasn’t much better.) Showing your local terrain, such as it even did, was not really very helpful because even if you tried to use it to proceed in a straight line to your target you would inevitably find yourself blocked by an invisible wall surrounding waist high pile of rubble, and that the actual way to get there required looping all the way around the map anticlockwise, with nine switchbacks, four gates, and a one-way cliff jump in between.

    At the end of the day it’s a fancy radar only useful to help you snout out nearby enemies, especially in the ever-so-many instances where your current mission objective outright requires you to find where each and every one of those stupid red diamonds is hiding so you can murder them all to proceed.

    So I hope there is at least still a local enemy radar. They need to either make their map usable and 3D (like e.g. Doom 2016 did) or fix their level pathing so it’s not like a tornado just tore through the spaghetti factory.


  • This is the truth. I have a coworker who is into scooters and he was complaining about the NIMBY, ban-everything mindset currently pervading the entire electric scooter discussion.

    I had to point out that the exact same arguments and whining currently being aimed at scooter riders – e.g., “they’re running up and down the sidewalk/ignoring red lights/weaving around traffic/‘zooming’ up my street/scaring my dog/wilting my rhododendrons/etc.” – are word for word the same arguments that were being directed against kids on (largely BMX) bicycles 30 years ago. Verbatim.

    Now that there’s a hot new thing to screech about, suddenly pedal bicycles are automatically wholesome clean safe fun for the whole family.

    In a further 30 years when jet powered pogo sticks or whatever the hell are the new fad, no one will complain about scooters, which will by then be normalized, and the cycle will start all over.

    Also: You can do a wheelie all day long on a pedal bike, too. I sure as shit did when I was a teenager.



  • At least you didn’t try to open the bleed valve via the righty-loosey technique my neighbor tried on his near-new N series Elantra the other week. Snapped that sumbitch clean off. Bailing him out of that one was fun.

    Bikes are dead easy to bleed; you don’t need any kit. You should be able to reach the bleeder nipple and the lever yourself without outside assistance which is all I’ve ever needed. Unless this is on the rear brake of a 'Busa with a 27 foot long swingarm installed on it or something. Pro tip: Loosely put the cap on the reservoir when you pump it, otherwise the master cylinder (especially for the front) tends to act like one of them ornamental fountains.

    Hose that brake fluid off of everything right away because it’ll eat the finish off of just about anything that’s not bare metal. You probably also want to make sure both the piston and its bore are real clean before you put them back together.