Why it was made: “Commemorative.” They apparently stamped that decal on three different models of otherwise ordinary mainline matchbox cars. They paint matchbox cars at all to make them special; “I got a red one.” “I’ll trade you my blue corvette and my yellow and purple flames chevelle for your Halley’s comet firebird.”

Who would buy it: Collectors, because “commemorative.” And apparently parents/loved ones of children, because it’s a toy car. I take it you had fun playing with it as a kid? If so, I’d say it did its job. Those little comet decals seem to have helped form strong memories of it.

That, and they’ve done the best job at sabotaging the public’s ability to understand the spec in the first place.

Okay, so you know the trope in spy movies where the launch codes or the diamonds or whatever are at the end of a hallway full of lasers, and the protagonist has to do some cool flip moves (if male) or some slinky contortions (if female) to get around the lasers?

I made that as an arcade game with an Arduino. Some red laser pointer diodes, some photosensors, a few lights, bells and whistles, a fog machine, a few big ol buttons, and you’ve got spy laser hallway. It had a separate “break as many lasers as you can” mode as well, played like a combination of DDR and whack-a-mole.

The second coolest thing I ever programmed was probably the GPS MP3 player. A farmer wanted to add an automatic soundtrack to his Halloween hayride, like when the drove through the spooky graveyard it played ghost noises, it would play music for longer stretches on the road. I used a Raspberry Pi with a GPS HAT and wrote up a script in Python that would compare the actual position with a set of coordinates stored in a text file, and if one matched, it would play an associated mp3 file. The effect was kind of lost because the audio was coming from the vehicle itself, but it’s a hay ride, it’s supposed to be kind of lame. The bedsheet ghosts said woo as you drove past, I’m in the special effects industry, dad.

I have already heard things like “unalive” defended as youth slang rather than Orwellian doublespeak.

Windows 11’s TPM requirements.

I recently built a brand new computer for my uncle. He was running a 3rd gen Core i7 machine running Windows 7. I get a call that it won’t boot. I do manage to get it booted, the SMART data shows the hard drive is on its last eyebrows, and anyway he’s running an OS that’s three generations out of date.

I’m a big Linux user, I’ve got my aunt running Linux Mint. My uncle is such a dunce at computers I don’t think I can do that, because he lacks the vocabulary to tell me what he wants his computer to do. “I might use it for business.” In his line of work that could mean anything from going to quickbooks.com to needing some piece of Windows-only shitware. So “Get a .exe from somewhere” had to remain intact.

For everything he actually does with that computer, that old 3rd gen i7 was fine. Replace the hard disk with a SATA SSD, maybe replace the weird 2-4-2-4 some but not all of it is dual channel 12GB of RAM with two 8 GB sticks of DDR3 and let it roll…except no currently supported version of WIndows runs on this computer.

For a large number of people, computers became objectively fast enough in 2015. That’s about when SSDs became standard equipment, fixing any hardware reason for “damn this thing is slow” even out of midrange consumer hardware. Gamers, home labbers and AI startups need more power, the rest of the world doesn’t. And that was a problem for Microsoft.

That was Hale-Bopp not Halley’s comet.

It’s last pass was in 1986.

🎶 I don’t wanna clooose my eyeeees 🎶

I do shop at Best Buy, usually for computer parts and accessories. Because my local alternatives for computer hardware and peripherals, AV gear etc. are Wal-Mart and maybe our increasingly pathetic Staples. Or Amazon. Best Buy is literally the only place within 20 miles to buy a GPU in a brick and mortar store.

I don’t watch TV ads though. Is this chick a spokesman?

Mario analogy. In Super Mario games, a green mushroom gives you an extra life, a chance to start over from a point in the past. A red mushroom makes Mario bigger, allowing him to survive some damage that would have killed him. Also in many games it makes him able to do things he can’t when small. RAID arrays often run faster than individual disks would.

It’s not an extra life, it’s another health point. Red mushroom, not green mushroom.

I also have a Synology NAS. It’s okay. I got a mid-range two-bay one. I could be happier with it. Also, I heard that they’re going toward requiring their brand hard drives, so I’m not buying another one.

Now, when that containership a few years ago wrecked and containers full of BMW motorcycles washed ashore…

You know what the problem with USB-C is? In 2010 or so, you could have a fistful of unique USB cables, A-B, A-MiniB, A-MicroB, 3A-3B, 3A-Micro3B, A-Lightning, they’re all different, but you can look at the cable and tell exactly what it does. Most of them are identical in capabilities but have physically different plugs, and the two USB 3 cables are also identical in capabilities but with different client side plugs. ALL of them will plug in and work in the same host-side port.

With USB-C, I can have a fistful of visually similar cables, with drastically different capabilities, and I have no way of telling them apart. The USB consortium has been inconsistent with their branding, it has been applied even more inconsistently or even fraudulently by manufacturers, and there’s no way to inspect the cable’s features without trying it to see if it works.

One actual reason I can think of is they haven’t passed customs inspections. There’s a reason they ask you if you have any fruit or vegetables when crossing national borders, or even some state borders in the US: To prevent the spread of invasive pests. All there need to be is some Brazilian Screaming Mites on those bananas and no plants will ever grow on the island of Britain again.

I’d say Alec of Technology Connections has increased in quality. Started good and got better.

This is the LockPickingLawyer, and today we have a-

lock spontaneously performs an impression of the bluesmobile at Daley Plaza

…in any case, that’s all I have for you today…

You will sometimes hear older pilots refer to a magnetic compass as a “whiskey compass.” Magnetic compasses are usually filled with some liquid to dampen it so it’s ever possible to read; an air-filled compass never stops swinging back and forth. Water would be the obvious choice, but then you’ll have an algae filled compass.

Legend has it that the US Navy in World War II used ethanol to fill the compasses. And then the planes would come back with empty compasses because the navy pilots drank it. So they switched to kerosene. And then the marines drank it.

The oldest single player game I keep going back to is Super Mario World on the SNES, Copyright 1990.

I will occasionally play games older than that, but the SNES is where my actual nostalgia begins.

Ahoy. video game documentarian. Makes 1 or 2 very high quality videos a year and has done so for years.