Back in the beforetimes I had a fairly long commute to work, I pretty much had to rely on what I could carry with me, so I had a rather significant EDC which included several tools, utilities, comforts, conveniences and PPE between my pants pockets and my laptop bag. Now I don’t even carry a Leatherman with me and when I do leave the house it’s just keys-wallet-phone.

Software developers are uniquely arrogant in their belief that they have a right to choose when the workers of entire industries or sometimes everyone in the world needs to re-train on the tools they use to do their jobs.

I’m a woodworker. Imagine if I walked into the shop one day to find my table saw replaced with one of those mutant sliding table European things because the manufacturer pushed an update. “We’ve replaced your tool with one that conforms to recently adopted industry norms, buzzwords and trendy design patterns we in the table saw industry have been peer pressuring each other into adopting. You may proceed to suckle upon our genitals in gratitude and worship.”

Meanwhile I’m losing money because the tool I rely on to run my business no longer functions how I was trained to use it. I have to tell my customers that their orders aren’t getting filled because I was visited by the saw fairy and instead of building their furniture for them I have to read manuals, learn how to safely use this thing, find where all the controls went, and then remake all the jigs and tooling I relied on for production and hopefully I can get back to doing actual work before they change it again according to their needs and not mine, on their schedule and not mine.

That’s what it’s like using software in the age of nightly updates or worse cloud-based solutions. You never know when your tools will change out from under you mid-project.

I’ve seen Gnome spiffed up to a level of polish I’d expect from an Apple commercial. I hate using it, but some folks get it looking nice.

I am currently in my like 90th run of Subnautica. I’m doing an “All Cuddlefish, no native food, save the Sunbeam” run.

“Do you like whiskey?”

“I don’t think so; the mocha lavender thai peanut aqua velva bourbon I tried wasn’t great.”

If it’s a brewpub or similar, I tend to go for darker beers. And since the “All Craft Beers Are IPAs Now Act Of 2018” was signed into law I have just stopped going to brewpubs entirely.

If you’re going to open a bottle or can for me it’s probably going to be cider, though I notice the ciders that bars tend to stock are trending in an acidic and heartburn inducing direction so I don’t walk in there as often anymore.

I’ll order a neat bourbon unless it’s hot/I’ve been working hard then I’ll order a whiskey and coke.

If you want to get into cocktails, I can think of a couple ways in.

1. White Russians. Pleasant sipping cocktail if a little heavy because of the cream.

2. Crown and coke. Crown Royal is technically a whiskey. Many of its fans don’t identify it as such, and neither do many whiskey fans. A shot of crown stirred into a glass of cola will present as a glass of cola with a little bit of an interesting flavor added. From there you can graduate to bourbon and coke, Jim Beam or Jack Daniels are common enough and pair well with cola. If you survive this long, maybe try this experiment: order a whiskey and cola, and then a rum and cola, find the differences in those flavors.

If you’re up to those shenanigans, maybe try going to a bar on a Tuesday afternoon when it’s a little slower, talk to the bartender tell them you’re wanting to explore cocktails and see if they’ll mix you smaller portions of a couple drinks like that, so you can test A and B. You would be amazed what that can do to open up your palette. If I handed you one glass of neat scotch, it might as well be a goblet of gasoline. If I hand you two glasses of different whiskies you’ll find some flavor in there.

Each time I tell this story, I try to make it shorter and more terse.

Circa 2012 or 2013 I bought a Raspberry Pi as part of my ham radio hobby. With that I learned a little bit of Python and Bash, learned to type sudo etc, and kinda liked what I saw. Meanwhile, my Win 7 laptop died right as I was going back to school, so I bought a new laptop. This new laptop had two problems: 1. it came with Windows 8.1 and 2. it was a lemon. For most of the first semester going back to school I had no reliable laptop. The only modern supported computer I had was that Raspberry Pi. And for most of a semester that’s what I did school assignments and email on until I finally bullied Dell into replacing that lemon Inspiron they sold me outright.

So by the time I got a reliable x86 laptop in hand, Linux felt more normal to me than Win 8.1 did. So I fully switched.

That was 10 years ago now, and for the last decade I’ve heard Windows users do nothing but piss and moan about the new holes Microsoft has found to fuck them in.

It’s fun fucking with boomers by calling 24 years ago “the turn of the century.”

guillotines are renaissance era.

I use multiple workspaces for different workflows. CAD software, reference material, etc. on one workspace, email, Slack, Trello etc. open on another.

Including end zones, an American football field is precisely 360 feet long and 160 feet wide, or approximately 110m x 50m. The area is 1.32 acres.

It’s precisely defined so I’m okay with it being used as an area of length or area, especially since virtually all Americans have personal experience with football fields, having at the very least been required to run four laps of the quarter-mile track you usually find wrapped around one.

Oh man “extensibility” in FreeCAD. The documentation is non-existent, is the main problem. It’s just about impossible to understand how anything works, it’s like trying to figure out how to run a battleship by turning cranks and seeing what they do.

Amazon certainly helped.

The stagnation of several anchor stores like Sears also helped. Sears was in serious decline well before Amazon became a major player in the market.

A jpeg image is designed to hold any photograph. It can potentially display millions of colors, and needs to contain that data for possibly millions of pixels of on-screen data. Jpeg image compression does save some space compared to a bitmap which is literally 3 bytes of color data for every pixel in the image, but there’s only so optimized it can get before it can’t be used to store any possible photograph.

The image above is 500x321 pixels with 32-bit ARGB color; so each pixel not only has independent red, green and blue data, but also 8 bits of transparency data.

Super Mario Bros runs on the Nintendo Entertainment System, which has a working resolution of 256 x240 pixels. It has the capability of displaying 25 colors on screen simultaneously out of a total possible palette of 54 usable colors. It draws the background and foreground layers as “tiles” so you can store whole tiles in memory and then repeat them, and then on top of that it can draw hardware sprites which is how things that move more on screen like Mario, enemies etc. are made.

Things like the animations of the question mark blocks which seem to shine or blink a bit, that’s done by cycling the colors that the sprite is being drawn with. Big Mario and Fire Mario are the same sprite but color swapped. The bushes and the clouds are the same shape, but different colors. The super mushroom and power mushroom are the same sprite but different colors. The underworld levels are just different colors on the same sprites as the overworld.

The sound chip on the NES is very simple, it has five voice polyphony and can make two square waves, one triangle wave, one hiss-like noise, and one PCM sample sound (not used to my knowledge in SMB1; it’s how the steel drum sounds in the SMB3 sound track were made) and so what is stored on the cartridge for audio is more like sheet music than recorded sound. An mp3 file of the Ground Theme would also likely be larger than the entire game.

SMB1 is also just…a VERY primitive game. It cannot scroll vertically (SMB2, the one that’s Doki Doki Panic in Japan, it can scroll vertically OR horizontally but not both at the same time; SMB3 could do both at the same time as showcased by the raccoon tail powerup, but it required a RAM expansion built into the cartridge) It can’t go backwards because it doesn’t record the state of objects that have scrolled off the screen. It has no save system or even a password system.

Finally, the game was made in 6502 assembly with the specific hardware of the NES in mind; which saves a lot of resources compared to all the abstractions needed for higher level languages and their abstractions.

Also is this an AI making a dumb blonde joke?

Having a pool doesn’t make it easier to hang dong, just marginally more plausible.

The oldest functioning system I have is an Atari 2600. it was originally my mother’s.

Transcript of me examining this picture:

"Okay, face looks okay, jacket makes sense, let’s look at the hands. Looks like four fingers on her left hand there, the right hand, thumb’s a little screwy, is that a stick or is she part tarsier? Something’s kind of screwy there. Boots look about right, there’s even a pretty decent depth of field on the sho-THE FIRE IS IN THE TENT.

It is my understanding that OUTATIME from Back to the Future is or was one too many characters for a California license plate.