• 0 Posts
  • 401 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

help-circle
  • In order to keep printers working properly they require regular blood sacrifices, tears are also acceptable. Most printers get these by accident as people clear paper jams, refill ink or toner cartridges, etc. Some printers clearly behave and perform better long term than others. More complexity (colors, 2 sided printing, large format, etc.) usually correlates to a larger thirst for blood/stress/anxiety. Remember Colin Robinson, the psychic vampire from “What We Do in the Shadows”? I’m pretty sure his spirit animal would be a color inkjet printer/scanner combo from late 90’s.




  • Does your Dubai chocolate hate have to do with the arguments made in this opinion article, which basically boils down to the popularity of foods and culture being exploited as propaganda, obscuring atrocities committed by authoritarian regimes? If so, that was not at all clear from your post. (I’m still unclear what the ethnicity of the chef has to do with anything.) Any cultural artifact or pastiche is free game for the propaganda machines of the powerful and elite. But those same associations are a double edged sword, hanging a lantern on the same atrocities the regime wishes to obscure. In the end, I feel it is more productive to embrace the fad, eat the chocolate (sourced as ethically as possible), and exploit the popularity as an opportunity to illuminate rather than add to the hate.

    Dubai chocolate is really one ethically questionable imperialist exploitation food wrapped around another. The metaphor is delicious. So is the chocolate. Let’s eat and discuss instead of hating it.

    I hate hate. Retail is hell. That was a great episode. Archer is the best captain. I actually grew to like the theme song a bit. I’m out. Mic drop.





  • The 1900s would still only be like 1909 at the latest. You’ve got too much precision and called out the wrong decade. This floppy form factor was invented in 1981, peaked in popularity and was replaced by CDs by 2000. Spanning 2 decades in the late twentieth (20th) century, not the late 1900s. See the difference in the number of digits? That difference in the number of stated digits is significant.






  • It was happening long before TMNT. Transformers, He-man, Teddy Ruxbin, Gummie Bears, She-ra, Care Bears, etc. I’m no expert on which was the first, but I’m sure that the kids that watched it would be too old to really get into TMNT once that IP hit the market. TMNT wasn’t even really inspired by toys, the comic was first, they just heavy exploited the toy market later. Shows like Care Bears and transformers were created specifically to sell toys as opposed to designing toys to sell a show.



  • I’d like to see ideas like this make a comeback, hopefully with some modifications this time around to protect our privacy and resist corporate exploitation.

    We used to use del.icio.us and other variants to do exactly this before browsers had profiles. Back then, its primary draw was that you could take your bookmarks with you anywhere to any machine (this being before that function was baked into browsers and before web browsers could be carried in your pocket). The secondary effect was that you’d share and tag those websites with your own categories/descriptors, thus crowdsourcing a new version of the old web’s link directories using Web 2.0. You could browse through symantic tag clouds to discover new things. Del.icio.us was for websites, but people were tagging and logging all of their favorite stuff and sharing it online so that like minded strangers could filled the gaps in their cultural awareness. We tagged our books with librarything. We tagged recipes with recipe thing. Audioscrobbler (later known as last.fm) logged our music listening to automate the tagging, not by direct symantic tagging, but by relational/temporal coincidence. If other people that listened to a lot of the stuff you listened to and they also listened to some other stuff you didn’t, those became recommendations for you. That kind of relational algorithm would survive the slow death of Web2.0 to become the backbone of recommendation services like Spotify and probably even TikTok.





  • After reviewing your post again, I don’t recommend the cart I go on about below. Anything heavy and stable enough to support multiple monitors, is not going to be easy to wheel out of the way. And any wall, ceiling, or pole mounted monitor arms will be massive and expensive. Anything with wheels all around is going to be less stable than fat man on a tiny skateboard. Any little imbalance will send the whole thing to the ground. I’d probably just use a few of those portable (and lightweight) extra laptop screens.

    I made a rolling server cart out of an IKEA BEKVÄM. The shelves were spaced just enough to fit my printer on one shelf, the UPS and network gear on another, and the server (in an htpc style case) on top. It’s heavy, with the heaviest part (the UPS) taking the bottom shelf. True, it only has 2 wheels, but it’s built like a tank and rolls around easy enough without feeling like it’s going to fall apart. The cart spends most of its time tucked in a corner, but the wheels make it easier to pull out to work on the various things connected to it. A monitor currently only sits on top, but given the weight of the UPS on the bottom shelf, I would not be afraid to mount some simple monitor arms that don’t extend too much.

    Side note: Trackball mice work a lot better where mouse pads fear to tread like couches, laps, chairs, even standing. I use a mouse all day for CAD work so these things have made it worth the adjustment from standard mouse: it being in the same place on my desk every time, being able to relax my arm and shoulder while moving the mouse across 3 monitors, and being able to use my laptop in the field from the seat of a vehicle. I have a Logitech Ergo with Bluetooth and a dongle (several actually), one at each desk or couch and one in my work bag.