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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  • As somewhat of a retro '90’s-2000’s electronics collecting nerd, this stuff is the bane of my existence.

    It seems like in the early 2000’s there were only three types of finishes applied to electronics products:

    • TPE “soft touch” coatings that turn into snot after a few years (many game console controllers, binoculars and other optics, some portable tape/CD players, etc.)
    • Crappy metallized silver paint that starts flaking off immediately (basically every digital camera ever made from 1999-2006, and quite a few computer input devices)
    • White or Bondi Blue plastic under a clear acrylic layer trying to ape an early iMac or iPod, which gets dirt trapped between the layers and then turns yellow (the Nintendo 3DS Lite, innumerable computer mice, USB hubs, and knockoff MP3 players)

    You just can’t win.


  • There might be something to this. I went and checked just now, prompted by a your comment, and I found a handful (like, six) comments from ages ago on reddit that did not get torched when I did my mass edit-and-delete, somehow. I found these mostly because some punters found them and necroposted on those threads, so I have notifications regarding them.

    I found a few more and deleted those by hand, too. Most of them were from the same sub, so that sub was probably locked when I did my mass delete.








  • Reddit could try not being such a toxic environment to people and maybe they wouldn’t do stuff like this. In this case given that the comment was from 3 years ago, the reason is most likely not because of the API scandal or AI scrapes or reddit going public, but rather some mod or other user was a persistent grade-A asshole to this poster, or started harassing them, or any of innumerable other possible toxic things, and they decided to just take their ball and go home.

    I too torched all of my comments on reddit when I left, including the informative ones about niche subjects, and I’m not sorry about it.




  • These are smaller plugs than the figure-eight cords you’re thinking of that plug into old boomboxes, Playstations, etc. They’re DC voltage, not AC.

    The WTF here is not that the manufacturer changed the connector slightly, it’s that they were too cheap to include the AC-to-DC converter part of it like they did on their older models, so OP has to buy a USB wall wart to power the stupid thing. The fact that he can’t use the old charger with the new shaver is just an irritating side effect.



  • Remember that for state governments, “Highway” is a term of art that does not necessarily mean “elevated controlled access high speed multilane thoroughfare with on and off ramps” but usually more along the lines of, “anything paved, but not dirt.” And the cops parrot this to make themselves sound like they’re very officious and totally not useless doughnut-eaters, and then news outlets follow suit.

    For example, my state’s laws consistently use the word “highway” to refer to all paved roads that are under the purview of the state (i.e. not private roads, county roads, or municipal roads), even if they’re not wide enough to have a center stripe. Then what we’d think of as a highway I believe is referred to as a “controlled access freeway.”

    Here is the location in question. This is definitely a Stroad, and it is certainly not a freeway. Stroads are well known to be hostile to pedestrians and cyclists. It also appears to have non-separated bike lines, i.e. some asshole just came by and painted bike icons on the existing shoulder, calling it job done.


  • It is trivial to kit-build an e-bike that will do this. Hell, I have one myself, constructed out of a Warp DS2 frame.

    But the difference is, I also have an M endorsement and I treat my monster bicycle as a motorcycle. The law doesn’t – that’s actually impossible in my state, so my bike falls in between a registrable motor vehicle and a bicycle. It also has turn signals, a car horn, a headlight, and working brake lights. But I also don’t ride it like a dickhead, and that includes paths set aside for non-fire-breathing bicycles, sidewalks, etc.