Okay, but I would totally wield the forkchaku.

Especially since the majority of computer users worldwide now no longer use a PC to do their computing. The average consumer now uses Windows only at work. Their personal device, whatever it is, runs Android or is some manner of iDevice, two platforms which have thoroughly eaten Microsoft’s lunch.

It’s too bad for Microsoft that their mobile platform – Windows Mobile, er, I mean Windows 8 RT, er, actually it was Pocket PC, um, no wait, it was Windows CE, et. cetera – all bombed so spectacularly, and the most recent one mere moments before Google took over the world.

I imagine Microsoft is no longer eyeing private users as a cash cow except purely as advertising targets.

It’s only a matter of time before some brilliant dipshit over there manages to envision Windows as a subscription service aimed solely at businesses, and the days of Windows as a standalone OS will be over.

In light of the above, then, I hereby propose that squirrels get renamed to “treegulls.”

The original Legend of Zelda. I still have it on cartridge and every once in a while I’ll just steamroll the entire game and whoop Ganon’s ass. I can usually do it in about 4 hours.

I don’t use any glitches or speedrun optimizations, I just know where everything is and what order to do things in.

I liked the 2013 Johnny Depp Lone Ranger movie. Apparently nobody else did, though.

Goose!

One of the things I learned as a wee waddler on my path to being a fully-fledged computer nerd (that was two bird puns in one sentence, I don’t know if you noticed) was that keeping a spare power supply or two around is always a good idea.

A blown power supply can bring your day’s Unreal Tournament matches productivity to a halt instantly, and inevitably on a Sunday when all the stores are closed, too. To make matters more interesting, a partially failed power supply can cause all manner of strange and otherwise undiagnosable mystery issues. E.g. you’re telling me two of your hard drives, your RAM, and your video card all started acting flaky at once? More likely is your PSU’s +12v rail is wonky, or something. Swap in a known good one and see. A power supply is also the first in line of all your PC components that can be killed by external forces, e.g. dirty power or nearby lightning strikes, or maybe your dad just deciding to plug his 1970s vintage arc welder into the same circuit in the house, etc.

To this day I have a generic 750w PSU sealed in its shrink wrap on the parts shelf in my basement, because you never know when it’ll get you or someone you know out of a jam. And eventually it probably will.

That’s remotely possible, and I would be inclined to agree if the circumstances around this weren’t so fishy to begin with.

E.g. why is the police report heavily redacted? Why has the suspect not been named? This is highly unusual, and suggests there’s something more going on. I’d doubt very highly the grand jury were given the full picture.

It’s pretty much a done deal that we’ll never know more. Someone is making an effort to bury this.

Highly unlikely. Even in bumpus old corners of Texas, the state is absolutely obsessed with doing anything to take away any citizen’s gun rights and will do so by nailing them with some kind of felony, and a negligent discharge scenario that results in somebody getting killed in normal circumstances would definitely qualify.

People in Texas may love their guns, but the cops in Texas are the same as cops everywhere and if they had their way nobody would have the guns except them.

This points to me that someone involved in law enforcement, someone involved with the government, or someone with very high level connections and/or a lot of money was the one responsible for this and that’s why it was swept under the carpet. If it were just a regular Joe there’s no way.

Before anyone gets too excited, this still requires sintering to finish your part, i.e. it has to be baked to a metal-fusing temperature in a special purpose kiln that is so expensive that it’ll require a mortgage to buy one, or you’ll have to send all of your parts away to get processed and wait for them to get sent back.

The headline here is that this stuff requires less postprocessing in that regard, but it is still absolutely not for hobbyists or home printers.

Yes indeed. Stick a pigment ink in your fountain pen and you’ll discover what one difference is real quick.

That decent percent is in fact roughly 60%, in my industry. At least according to what my vendor reps tell me.

Only 4 in 10 people even bother to attempt to do their rebates. The manufacturers love that, because it allows them to put a giant "$2000 OFF!!! ^{viamailinrebate}" on their marketing literature and that gets eyeballs on the ad and feet in the door, but they know damn well they won’t actually have to pay out on the majority of those promos and in fact they don’t even budget with the expectation that they will.

Amazon stuff sometimes arrives. For instance, it’s going on 7 months by now I think and they still haven’t found my camera.

This is the sad reality of every company everywhere trying to turn their delivery operation into a “gig” position. Amazon does it, too. Their delivery contractors-who-are-totally-not-employees steal valuable items from deliveries all the time.

Anyway, you are certain to win your chargeback. Banks side with their cardholders more often than not, and Best Buy is going to have to provide proof positive that you received your item. “We handed it off to Doordash and then washed our hands of it” is not going to cut the mustard, there.

(We have to deal with chargebacks in my business, too. Defending ourselves is a pain in the ass because we have to provide indisputable documentation that the client’s order was fulfilled. The issuing bank always starts from the default position of their cardholder being a saint and all retail businesses automatically being scammers. A small subset of people will fraudulently dispute a charge for a big ticket purchase just because they feel this is a way to weasel out of paying for it, and usually they’ve been emboldened by the fact that they’ve tried it before and gotten away with it.)

I believe that could be a blue snow goose. I could be wrong, but they have similar overall coloration and they do occasionally hang out with other geese.

Wikipedia says it’s rare for them to travel alongside Canada geese, though.

It could also be a Canada goose with some weird mutant coloration, or which has been heavily henpecked at some point.

That sure is a chart.

This chart, boss?

She’s not even a furry…

I also use a cheap tripod, and also a remote release. Just an inexpensive off-brand wired one. Not having to touch the camera does a lot for vibration induced blur.

My subjects generally have the decency to hold still, so any amount of time spent fiddling with the focus start point or fighting with the camera’s user interface is not an issue.

I do a lot of focus stacking.

Like, a lot. These days basically every one of the, erm, still life objects pictures that I post (okay, okay, knives) are stacked. The closer you get to your subject the shallower your depth of field becomes, and even with a pinhole aperture it’s often impossible to get all of an object into focus in one go.

I will say this about that: I do all of my stacking outboard, not in my camera. That’s because my Canon R10’s inbuilt focus stacking (and bracketing) is profoundly stupid in both the way it produces results and how you have to operate it. I can deal with the clunky bracketing interface because I can set it up once and I leave it on all the time, or at least all the time I’m taking object photos.

But if you don’t perfectly appease the camera’s built in algorithm and ensure that all of your frames have at least something with sharp enough contrast on it for the camera to decide it’s “in focus,” it throws a hissy fit and produces an error message, and deletes the entire stack of photos it already took. You can’t specify the range to bracket through in any real world units, only in arbitrary steps of “less” or “more,” and then you get to guess how many steps the camera should do. You don’t get to try again with the images or a subset of the images it’s already taken. Ye gods forbid you undershoot – not all of your object will be in focus, so do it again, stupid – or overshoot – hissy fit error message, see above. You don’t get to tune which shots are included in the stack and which aren’t, and it makes dumb compositing decisions that tend to result in putting hazy, fuzzy clouds around edges that should otherwise have been in focus and doesn’t deal with reflective objects in any meaningful capacity at all.

The best way I’ve seen it implemented from a UI perspective is how Open Camera on Android does it, which allows you to set a specific focus depth for the start and end of your stack, and then you specify how many photos to take in the middle. It evenly divides the automatic focus adjustments between that range. You get a preview of each focus depth as you mess with the sliders, so you can ensure that the range is actually where you want it without having to guess. This is fast, easy, and intuitive, and you don’t have to dig through any submenus to make it do what you want.

So what I do instead with my R10 is take an absurd number of shots with tiny steps, and deliberately both under- and over-shoot the focus range, typically from an inch or so in front of my subject all the way out to infinity. I use Helicon Focus on my PC which seems to give me the best results with a minimum of having to fight the user interface, and I simply discard the shots that are outside of usable range. Using this method you can also intentionally exclude images that actually were in focus but you’d still like not to be in your final picture, while still maintaining a greater depth of field than any single photograph could have provided. Helicon seems to do a pretty decent job of not making this look natural and not like an uncanny Blender rendering, or something.

The bad news is that Helicon is not cheap. The good news is, you can always fly your Jolly Roger and lay your hands on a copy of it anyway.

I tend to upvote any display of anyone’s creative pursuit if I happen to scroll by it. Even if it’s not something I’m into. The marker-on-photo-paper guy whose name escapes me, people’s photographs in any of the photography related communities, any of the ink doodles, hand made stuff, or comics posted by their original creators.

We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. The average piece of junk is more meaningful than our criticism designating it so.