dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

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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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldWho remembers this?
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    13 days ago

    This is exactly the thing.

    Whatever the dress may be in reality, the photo of it that was circulated was either exposed or twiddled with such that the pixels it’s made of are indeed slightly bluish grey trending towards white (i.e. above 50% grey) and tanish browny gold.

    That is absolutely not up for debate. Those are the color values of those pixels, end of discussion.

    Edit to add: This entire debacle is a fascinating case of people either failing to or refusing to separate the concept of a physical object versus its very inaccurate representation. The photograph of the object is not the object: ce n’est pas une robe.

    The people going around in this thread and elsewhere putting people down and calling them “stupid” or whatever else only because they know that the physical dress itself is black and blue based on external information are studiously ignoring the fact that this is not what the photograph of it shows. That’s because the photograph is extremely cooked and is not an accurate depiction. The debate only exists at all if one party or the other does not have the complete set of information, and at this point in history now that this stupid meme has been driven into the ground quite thoroughly I should hope that all of us do.

    It’s true that our brains can and will interpret false color data based on either context or surrounding contrast, and it’s possible that somebody deliberately messed with the original image to amplify this effect in the first place. But the fact remains that arguing about what the dress is versus how it’s been inaccurately depicted is stupid, and anyone still trying that at this late stage is probably doing so in bad faith.


  • I’ve never seen naptha (i.e. Zippo lighter fluid) do anything to any painted or finished surface, nor any of the plastics I’ve ever tired it on. I’ve been using the stuff in that context for decades, to the extent that I literally purchase it by the gallon. (I also use it in my lighters, because painter’s naptha is like 2% of the cost per volume of brand name Zippo fluid despite being the same stuff.)

    WD-40 contains nonvolatile oils that will leave a difficult to clean off residue behind and if you use it on anything porous it will soak in and possibly stain the surface while being functionally impossible to remove without using yet more solvents. For that reason it’s not really a great way to get stickers off of things, especially things that you’d like to remain non-greasy or may need to stick something to again at some point in the future (paint, tape, etc.).

    Naptha will evaporate entirely on its own given enough time, and you can even use it on paper and printed surfaces (excluding inkjet printed things, in my experience, which it will smear) with no harm done after it fully dries.


  • I personally do not trust ISP provided routers to be secure and up to date, nor free of purposefully built in back doors for either tech support or surveillance purposes (or both). You can expect patches and updates on those somewhere on the timescale between late and never.

    Therefore I always put those straight into bridge mode and serve my network with my own router, which I can trust and control. Bad actors (or David from the ISP help desk) may be able to have their way with my ISP router, but all that will let them do is talk to my own router, which will then summarily invite them to fuck off.

    Likewise, I would not be keen on using an ISP provided router’s inbuilt VPN capability, which is probably limited to plain old PTPP – it has been on all of the examples I’ve touched so far – and thus should not be treated as secure.

    You can configure an OpenWRT based router to act as an L2TP/IPSec gateway to provide VPN access on your network without the need for any additional hardware. It’s kind of a faff at the moment and requires manually installing packages and editing config files, but it can be done.




  • The rub with this design is that the length of the sides of the little squares is not an even integer division of the length of the sides of the big square, though.

    Doing it the naive way, i.e. keeping all the edges parallel, you can only fit 16. However it’s trivial to fit 17 in there without it looking like a warehouse accident, like so:

    Or, a slightly easier to follow rendering:

    This may correlate with #17 on your linked list, but I was not rigorous with the math. (I.e. I just traced this off of the screenshot.)

    I’m positive I’ve seen this as a 3D printed puzzle somewhere at some point…


  • Pretty much all of those are characters from franchises that quickly jumped to consoles, or had the intention of multiplatform releases from the very start. I’m not sure any of them are very fitting.

    So on that note, the least nonsensical mascot for PC gaming in particular I can think of is that dwarf, whoever he is, from the box art of World of Warcraft. Or possibly the orc from the alternate version. WoW is earth-shatteringly popular and has basically defined the entire private lives of a depressing number of people, not to mention it’s the sole and singular thing even non-gamers think of when you mention MMORPGs. And it has only appeared on home computers. Never consoles. Other Warcraft properties have, but not WoW.


  • Define “long.” I disagree with the Doomguy proposal explicitly, because Doom appeared on the Sega 32x in November of 1994 which was barely a year after the initial PC release. One of the defining aspects of gaming in the mid '90s was the monumentally cynical gold rush of trying to cram Doom onto any damn fool console as fast as possible, in a vain attempt to capture part of the lightning and make those sales. And until the Playstation and arguably the N64, every attempt failed spectacularly in various ways.

    The definitive Doom experience remaining locked to the PC for those few years was absolutely not for a lack of trying. Every greedy video game exec on the planet wanted Doom on their system. id themselves assisted with several of these ports in various ways and they had absolutely no intention of leaving Doom only on PC, either, if they could help it.



  • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldNow good
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    25 days ago

    I’d doubt this is anything approaching universal, but where I am there definitely were three digit signs in the early aughts, which now appear to have all been replaced with two digit ones. I don’t know if this was for cost purposes or the proposed “high score” reason.

    There was one right in front of the police station in the town I lived in back in the day, which was a full dot matrix display and didn’t even have discrete digit slots. It could display other messages if it wasn’t in speed readout mode. I passed it at about a buck twenty one night and discovered that it topped out at 99. It’s the first one I recall seeing that didn’t have a third digit, but then they became the norm pretty shortly thereafter.

    The ones that are popping up like mushrooms around here now fit within the footprint of a normal speed limit sign and they have a dual color LED matrix that flashes a frowny face at you if you’re 0.01 MPH over the specified speed…