Fun fact: Bell peppers are tasty.

Something something they’re technically “amber” not “yellow”?

Probably, I was always taught that the # was just a reminder you were logged in as root, and I’m a Bash boy, I don’t know diddly squat about zsh.

if logged in as root, wouldn’t thebprompt be a # instead of a $?

I think this might be shopped.

the shoe event horizon.

No, you just get a bill that some European governments couldn’t afford.

Mine actually doesn’t.

If I am elected president, anyone who has ever claimed to be “building a better future for our children” will have their mouths smashed off with a rifle butt.

I think they still do that with Thunderbolt.

Hilarious idea: Wi-fi antenna dummy loads.

It might be my pickup truck.

It might be my toilet. Every moving part in the thing can be bought at every hardware store in town.

My washing machine is pretty good, it’s a Kenmore 80 series, it’ll probably outlast me.

As far as I know those days have never arrived.

In the 1980’s you’d buy a computer and the diskette drive would eat disks, the tape drive would fail to load because the volume was turned up too loud, or the software was just badly written by an amateur and it would kill multiple people with high doses of radiation..

In the 1990’s the gaming computer as we know it today took shape, but you just go ahead and put one together. Install a graphics accelerator card or a sound card in Windows 3.1 or DOS. Go ahead. Windows 98, featuring USB Plug And Play! It just works!

It’s the year 2000! nothing bad will happen! Windows XP is so much better with so many new features, granted about half of your old Win9x software isn’t going to work because this is basically NT Home Edition. It’s the 21st century, computers are always online and have basically no built-in security. What could go wrong?

It’s 2010, and it seems these smart phones are here to stay. No problem, we’ll just rebuild the entire internet for tiny, vertical displays and release an entire generation of Windows as a touch-first UI. Nothing’s gonna go wrong.

It’s 2020, so put your mask on! Between a containership jackknifing across the Suez canal, traffic jams at ports because covid, impending political bullshit, and the rising trend of using AI to “write” software and said AI’s insatiable thirst for hardware meaning entire brands of computer parts are shutting down, maybe you should just go to the store, buy a stick of sidewalk chalk for $17 and just play a goddamn game of hopscotch instead.

One of my neighbors is The_Booty_Warrior. My hypothesis is that’s the pear-shaped Army chick that lives across the street, but it might be the balding middle aged family man two doors down.

Sally Ride married a man. What’s your point?

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.