That would be a cabin that dates to the mid-1800s now preserved as a museum.

I’ll take a slight tangent to this topic and talk about FOSS software I’ve recently had to give up that I really really miss: Autokey. Autokey is a rough equivalent to AutoHotKey on Windows, it can do anything from on the fly text replacement (type teh and it will correct to the, or type *date and it fills in today’s date) right up to firing whole Python scripts. it doesn’t work on Wayland (apparently there are security features that prevent it from working the same way it does on X11?), and I’ve yet to find a replacement for it that does.

Jackdaws

So this has bothered me since I was a teenager.

In Empire Strikes Back, Yoda talked like this: “Put the cart before the horse, I have.” And he mostly did it while he was pretending to be a dingus early on to test Luke’s patience. Some actual movie quotes: “I cannot teach him. The boy has not patience.” “No. Do, or do not. There is no try.” “Judge me by my size, do you?”

In the prequel trilogy, it’s like Lucas bought into the meme that Yoda talks funny, so all of a sudden Yoda talks like this “Before the horse, the cart, I have put.” “Around the survivors, a perimeter, create!”

Anyway.

This

I had a Logitech MX Ergo mouse that allegedly had horizontal scrolling. The wheel could tilt left and right which clicked like a button, and the screen would scroll very very slightly to the side. Worst trackball I’ve ever had.

Just before they stopped making PCs, I saw an IBM computer with a mouse that had one of their Thinkpad clits instead of a scroll wheel. So a proper XY input. I think a blackberry ball would work too.

You know what always weirds me out:

The knife is a technology. It was invented by a person. And that person was not the same species as us. The knife has been around longer than Homo Sapiens.

I’ve commented on this before, but it reminds me of the mortise and tenon joint. The oldest intact wooden structure on Earth is held together with mortise and tenon joints. The man who built it never wrote his name down, because writing hadn’t been invented yet. He never rode a horse, because animal husbandry hadn’t been invented yet. He used stone tools, because copper smelting hadn’t been invented yet. In the present day, Festool sells a tool to make mortises called the Domino which they still hold a patent on. We’re still actively developing this technology which has been with us slightly longer than civilization has.

There are some records which are “threaded” backwards, in that you start at the center and work out rather than start at the edge and work in. This is not standard, automatic turntables might not be able to handle this, but the reason they do this is because of the effect above. You can get greater dynamic range near the outside of the disc, and you probably want greater dynamic range near the end of the recording as the music reaches a climax. Consider Ravel’s Bolero, which is one long crescendo.

The USB port on my phone is getting a bit tired and doesn’t properly hang onto a USB cable anymore, so I’m mostly charging it wirelessly now. Which in some circumstances can be a bit of a problem but the phone still works.

I’ve built two computers now that have never run Windows.

under my brutal dictatorship, laptop power buttons may not be a key on the keyboard. It must be a separate button elsewhere on the chassis.

The motherboard header should be a standard pinout to make it possible to make a solid connector. That should be part of the ATX standard.

The cable from the case…the PC I just built has no reset switch, the power button light is controlled by the case’s built-in RGB controller, there’s no hard drive access light because it’s the distant space year 2024…turns out the only thing plugged into that header on my machine is the power switch itself.

Having an electronics hobby, having played with Raspberry Pis and Arduinos and such, building things like 3D printers, I’m used to dealing with those little 0.1 inch DuPont connectors, everyone else has a fit about them but they’re not that bad.

She probably made you pay for her meal anyway.

I’ve noticed this on zip top food packaging; it’s as if the zipper is a separate piece of plastic that is very weakly glued to the bag itself and it doesn’t extend to the outer lips where you pull it open, so you end up separating one side of the bag from the zipper.

Brian Brushwood once referred to the reverse of the USD $1 bill as “a ticket to the illuminati show.”

Fun fact: The Great Seal of the United States of America has a front and a back just like a coin. The eagle with the shield and the olive branch and the arrows is the front, the All Seeing Pyramid is the back. And while the Obverse of the Great Seal is used quite a lot, the only prominent use of the reverse is on the $1 bill.

Red/green colorblindness is a thing. I would suggest a flashing lamp for charging and a steady light for charged.

Keep the roof watertight, keep the toilet flushing, keep oil in the engines, keep gas in the tanks, keep at least a week of food in the pantry. Literally nothing else on this earth matters if you don’t have these five things done.

Engine room of an Iowa-class battleship. This is an oil-burning steam-powered ship. Men would stand at the burners, directly controlling them. Watches were 4 hours long. The room was a constant 140F. You wouldn’t last long if you didn’t stand directly under the outlet of a forced air ventilation duct. Right in the middle of the compartment within easy reach is a coffee pot.

It’s like motion controls. Nintendo came out with the Wii, motion controls were a huge goddamn fad for a few years, and now 2 of the 3 main console manufacturers put a gyro in their controllers which might be used for fine aiming control and that’s about it.

I would draw the line at shareholders.

You may use my software free of charge if you are a student, hobbyist, hobbyist with income, side hustler, sole proprietorship, LLC, S-Corp, non-profit, partnership, or other owner-operator type business.

Corporations with investors or shareholders will pay recurring licensing fees. Your shareholders may not profit from my work unless I profit from it more than they do. If you can afford a three inch thick mahogany conference table you can afford to pay for your software.