What, like how Obsidian made a better Fallout 3 than Fallout 3 with New Vegas?

Luckily for me at least, like so many of us dweebs here, I drive my TV with a little media center PC anyway. So I couldn’t care less which of their services they disable. The more the merrier, as far as I’m concerned. The real annoying part is that these don’t work (presumably), but you still can’t remove the icons from the thing’s home screen.

Not only that but my old LG smart TV (47LM8600, I think manufactured in 2012) has literal suicide timers in its built in apps. Mine has never been connected to any network and yet it mysteriously informed me after approximately three years of ownership that all of its player apps such as Youtube, Hulu, Netflix, etc. would stop working because they were “no longer supported,” all of them within the time frame of the same couple of weeks. It knew this somehow, apparently via magic, or quantum fluctuations, or psychic brain waves. Without internet connectivity.

Obviously I don’t use any of those features so I didn’t give a rat’s ass and I still don’t. But I still find that deeply suspicious.

Compact disc, compact casettes, eight track, even reel-to-reel tape are also all DRM free physical media formats for the same type of content, too. And yet, there is no CD renaissance happening. Nobody is making daily posts of their cassette deck showing off the album art on the tape case propped against their stereo.

Maybe in another 10 or 20 years there will indeed be a CD renaissance, if it becomes retro enough to be fashionable. It’s already happening with video games (says the turkey with two entire bookcases full of old cartridges and disks).

If somebody likes vinyl records I’m certainly not going to stop them. Even if they like them for spurious reasons.

Just like shooting your photos on film, running your amp on tubes, or traipsing through the woods in the dark with an incandescent bulb flashlight, music on vinyl in this age is just hipsterism. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, if that’s what you’re into, and this is coming from someone who nearly exclusively writes with a fountain pen because of hipsterism (an opinion that did not make me popular on the fountain pen community recently). But at minimum people who do it ought to be honest about it.

Retro is cool and people want to feel cool by being retro and/or bucking the mainstream. Being “better” somehow doesn’t enter into it, and claiming otherwise is inherently disingenuous.

History is littered with formats that were contemporary to LP records that people don’t go all starry eyed over, other than occasionally for historical interest. Compact cassettes and eight tracks leap to mind.

Ah, yes. A CB750 Four. I un-basketed a basket case one of those for somebody once.

Near as we can figure this one sat untouched for 21 years before its owner brought it to me to get it running. There was a registration sticker on it from 1997, and I worked on it in 2018. (I took these pictures back when I only owned three motorcycles. Imagine that.)

As usual for this sort of thing I think there’s some nuance to it. I like an old bike mainly for one big reason: Simplicity.

For the most part, anyway. I’d much rather have a single cylinder or maybe a twin to keep running. If I don’t have to work on another quad carb again anytime soon, that’ll be fine by me.

Per the video, I disagree with most of that malarkey about “only” old bikes connect you to the riding experience and so on and so forth. Any motorcycle should do that if you’re doing it properly, no matter how modern it is. I imagine younger riders are eschewing classic bikes for the same reason younger riders eschew classic cars: They have no connection to them from their youth, because their youth is now, not then. It’s tough to have nostalgia for a decade you weren’t a part of.

The oldest bike I personally own at the moment is my Shadow, which is a 2000. That suits me fine. It’s carbureted, quite easy to work on, and contains no finicky or expensive electronics. The only electronic thing on it is the CDI, which is a $40 commodity part from China. There are few things in this world less rare than a Honda Shadow, so I don’t foresee the availability of aftermarket replacement parts drying up any time soon. If you have some other screwball model or, ye gods forbid, some vintage thing that wasn’t originally sold in this country, well. I can’t help you with that.

Meanwhile if you put a couple of solar panels on your roof without filling out nineteen different forms in triplicate, providing a notarized drawing by a licensed architectural firm, paying $2000 in fees plus enduring the eleven month processing time, your local code authority will put a lien on your property and send a SWAT team to your house.

I’m going to go ahead and point out that this was literally the original intent of the NFA: It was implicitly to disarm black folks, with the expectation that rich white people would be able to afford to remain armed. It was also meant to apply to all concealable firearms in general, i.e. pistols, which is why there is so much malarkey in there around short barrelled rifles and shotguns and so forth.

Raymond Chen’s oft-reformatted and revived blog, The Old New Thing, contains the occasional fascinating peek behind the curtain at just why Windows it the way it is sometimes.

Sceptre U435CV-UMRD. One of the new non-portable “dumb” TVs left on the market. It’s just a TV. It tunes to digital channels, or it takes whatever you feed its inputs and puts the picture on the screen. That’s it. It’s a 43" so close to but slightly below your size target. They do a 50" and a 65" version as well.

You’re going to call out !knives@sopuli.xyz and not !pocketknife@lemmy.world? Hey, now.

We are committed to getting people to spend money on dumb shit over here.

A populace full of well-fed, financially secure, educated and literate, and medically cared for people is significantly less likely to go around shooting each other than the clusterfuck we’ve got going on now. Violence, gun related or otherwise, doesn’t just happen in a vacuum.

Please don’t, the plastic will almost certainly break after just 1 shot.

Citation needed.

The answer is probably yes. If a bird sees a bunch of other songbird sized birds around an area it’s an indicator that not only there is a food source nearby, but also that the location is likely safe(ish) from predators. Both of these factors are rather important to hummingbirds. And other birds, too.

That’s what I’m working on right now!

Given that the majority of motorcycle crashes are single vehicle incidents, you can drastically reduce or even eliminate your potential for becoming said meat crayon by not riding like an idiot. Protective gear is also a must for situations beyond tootling around the inner city at ~25 MPH, which seems to be the majority of southeast Asian riding, for instance.

Your second biggest risk is being hit by some blissninny in their massive SUV, either rear ending you at a stop or blithely turning left (or right, depending on your country) across your lane of travel right in front of you. These possibilities are mitigated by everyone else being on a bike, too.

Do the same, not least of which because I drive stick and otherwise I’d have an even more massive left leg. If you make me keep clutching in for no reason I will give you such a kicking. And believe me, if I kick you you’ll stay kicked.

It makes people behind you get super pissed off sometimes, though, which is hilarious to watch. I suppose they honestly believe that trying to crawl up the tailpipe of the car in front of them will make the other half a million cars in front magically go faster somehow, or something.

Yeah, I have no idea what’s up with that. The first time I didn’t think anything of it, the second time I thought it was an odd fluke, the third time I was looking at it quite askance, and the fourth time was with a spool of red ABS rather than PLA which did the same damn thing despite three other spools of other colors from not only the same brand but even the same package (it was a 4x250g sampler pack) behaving more or less correctly. And that made me mighty suspicious.

It’s still usable if you handle it carefully, but the end of the filament tends to snap off in storage or during handling, i.e. when loading and unloading it from the printer. Cooking it in the filament dryer doesn’t seem to result in much of a change on that front, either. I have no idea how this affects the final mechanical properties of the printed part, but I’ll bet you a dime it won’t be a positive impact.

Yes. If I absolutely must use a fiber filled material, I prefer glass fiber rather than carbon. A fiber fill in your filament reduces shrink and warping and increases rigidity, and makes some tough-to-use polymers more printable such as Nylon. However, the above is correct in that it reduces tensile strength and especially layer adhesion strength, i.e. tensile strength along your Z axis. (Plus, carbon fiber fills basically always limit your color selections to black, black, and black.)

If you need mechanical strength of some type or another, it’s almost always a better idea to use a non-filled filament in a more suitable material and work on modifying your printer or getting a better printer that’s capable of printing that material. I can do straight polycarbonate in my machine with a pretty high degree of success (other than very small parts, I’m finding) so in all honesty I don’t have much use for fiber filled filaments anyway.

You can do this on mobile but the developer console lives on a PC in that case anyway and you connect to it over the network or possibly USB (?). I forget. Anyway, it’s a pain in the ass to do on your phone.