It sounded like a Spitfire
As I was leaving the office today, there was a nondescript gray car about to pull out of a parking spot in front of me. I think it’s the one in the picture, but not so shiny. I can’t tell you how ordinary it looked. If you told me it was a Kia Sportage I’d believe it.
Then he turned the key and it had the most extraordinary engine sound. I waited for him to pull away so I could see the make and folks…it was a Lambo!
Tragic. Expensive cars don’t look it any more.
As an exercise, I’ve been tempted for years to photoshop pictures of the front and back ends of a bunch of cars with the badge covered and see if anyone could correctly rank them by value. But that would be a lot of work and I’m super lazy.
Have a good weekend!
January 26, 2024 — 5:38 pm
Comments: 6
Last one, I swear
Furbies are beloved of hackers and soft toy makers and have appeared with all sorts of modifications and customizations. Of all the variations the one with most staying power forsomedamnreason is the long Furby.
An Etsy search of “long furby” calls up horrors beyond the imagination (I kind of like the All Seeing Lemon, though).
A lot of custom Furbies are made preferentially with non-working toys, so even broken they maintain value.
The picture is not of three long Furbies, though. It’s a three-headed long Furby. Making of here. The same guy made a much more interesting 44-Furby organ.
Okay, that’s it. Everybody say goodbye to Toh-loo Kah.
January 25, 2024 — 5:42 pm
Comments: 4
Furbish: the language of gibberish
It’s not gibberish, actually. It’s not much of a language, but there was an attempt at meaningful grammar. The original Furby had a vocabulary of 42 words, expanded in later versions. Yes, there were later versions, including one that came out in 2023.
They had 24 possible names, which were also meaningful phrases in Furbish, chosen randomly at startup. Toh-loo Kah is one of the most common. It means Like Me, which is a little needy, bud.
A new Furby speaks entirely in Furbish, which slowly switches to English (or one of six other languages) over time. The marketing implied that it learned your language by listening to you. This caused the NSA to ban Furbies from the workplace for a while, for fear it could record.
In truth, the microphone is so weak as to be nearly pointless. If you clap your hands next to it, the thing might say “big sound!” – and that’s about it. Hardly seems worth the expense of putting one in.
So how does it slowly switch languages? That seems oddly sophisticated to me, to start with one set of programmed sounds and gradually shift to a different one. I don’t understand how data is stored and manipulated on a circuit board. It seems likely to me that the words swap in a fixed order and fixed schedule.
The Wikipedia article says it would use phrases more often if you petted it when it said them. That seems a little too sophisticated to me, too.
Can confirm the one I got spoke mostly English when it arrived, but switched back to Furbish after a hard reset. It also forgot its original name, but I could never quite make that out anyway.
It’s got a little battery in it that recharges from fresh batteries, so it doesn’t forget what it’s “learned” after a battery change. I assume this is the root cause of some of the creepy Furby stories of them doing something without the batteries in.
Seriously, plug “creepy Furby stories” into YouTube.
January 24, 2024 — 6:50 pm
Comments: 2
There’s more than one way to skin a Furby
Of course I took Toh-loo Kah apart. Because of course I did.
I watched a ton of Furby skinning and disassembly videos. It’s surprising how many manufacturing differences there are between examples. Mine had a quirk where the microphone wouldn’t detach from the case. Meaning I couldn’t take the case all the way off unless I wanted a soldering job (no). Which means it wasn’t very photogenic. Which means I stole a frame out of someone else’s YouTube for the photo.
I hope he feels suitably recompensed by a link to his channel (don’t worry. It’s not a Furby channel. It’s mostly engine repair).
The innards are pretty complicated. Behind the eyes, there’s a series of vertical gears that drive the moving parts – the eyes, ears, beak and…I guess you’d call it the waist. All of these are set to slip easily without stressing gear teeth, because they knew kids are going to mess with all those joints. The movements track the speech appropriately. (I say this because Fake Furbies often don’t. Yes, there were fake Furbies).
Beneath that, a small motor drives the gears, tucked behind the speaker. You can just see the motor turn without completely disassembling. On the left side, the microphone. On the right, the tilt sensor (I couldn’t find it, though).
The white button under his thumb is a touch control the mechanism responds to. The speaker is behind that. There is another button on the back that elicits different responses. The tongue is also a sensor.
I counted three circuit boards, one large one that formed the base and two small ones wired to it vertically.
Oh, and the triangular thing between its eyes is an infra-red sensor. This enables two Furbies to talk to each other. Supposedly, you can trigger it with the TV remote, but I didn’t have any luck. Our TV remote is shit, though.
I gently q-tipped the innards, washed the skin and put it back together again. I didn’t break it all the way down – that would be too much like work.
On the whole, it’s both complicated and delicate. It’s amazing how many of them are still working after 26 years.
January 23, 2024 — 6:11 pm
Comments: 5
His name is Toh-loo Kah
I secretly wanted a Furby when they came out in 1998, but I was a grown-ass 38-year-old woman and forebore. Also, they went from the original $30 to hundreds on the gray market because supply couldn’t keep up with the demand that Christmas.
This model was made 1998 to 2001 and there were ultimately 40 million sold, so there are still quite a few kicking about.
This is an original ’98 version (they got more colorful and decorated as time went on).I paid £19.99 on Ebay for what was described as a non-working original model. I had intended to take it apart for fun. I was almost disappointed to discover it works fine.
Well, except it suffers from a common glitch called me sleep again: immediately after waking up, it says the magic words and goes back to sleep again. There are various ways to shake him out off it, but the bug will always come back. Something like 20% of the ones that still work have this glitch.
One site says it has to do with the tilt sensor – a little metal ball in a cage – getting gummy and dirty. The Furby thinks it’s fallen over, so me sleep again would be a perfectly reasonable response. Would also explain why turning it upside down and shaking it makes it better for a while.
Well, I’ve had fun. I’ll keep waking it up until I catch Uncle B tip-toeing into the room with a hammer.
January 22, 2024 — 6:58 pm
Comments: 5
Twitter thinks I’m hate speeching vampires
I’m in Twitter jail. Boo. You know what I said? “Hillary won’t give up until we bury her at the crossroads with a stake through her heart.”
Twelve hours. I keep forgetting and trying to interact with people. Stupid algorithm.
Also, I’m right. Calling it. Hillary will get herself on the ballot.
See you back here tomorrow for the Dead Pool!
January 18, 2024 — 6:33 pm
Comments: 9
It should be easy enough to check…
This is the Midsummer Tree in Worthing. Folklore has maintained for centuries – or at least since the early 19th C – that on Midsummer’s Eve, skeletons rise up and dance around it. It almost got cut down in 2006, but a passing resident saw them hacking on it and got a campaign together.
They’ve been gathering around it ever since, and nary a skeleton.
Short one, but in order to post, I have to get at least one hand out from under the throw blanket. We’re having a cold snap at the moment. The ice on the chickenwater was 2″ deep this morning – I had to go in and boil the kettle to free them up.
We don’t get many of these, but when we do, I don’t recommend holing up in a wattle-and-daub house. Wait’ll Uncle B gets the fire built up and we’ll be alright.
January 16, 2024 — 8:27 pm
Comments: 9
Well, I laughed
Going through some old books in the work library today and I ran across a novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. I guarantee you know this guy, whether you know you know him or not. He was the originator of many a familiar phrase, like “pursuit of the almighty dollar”, “the pen is mightier than the sword”, “dweller on the threshold” and “the great unwashed” (I pinched all those off his Wikipedia page).
He’s also the guy who famously opened a novel with the words “it was a dark and stormy night.” In all fairness to the guy, it wasn’t yet a cliché in 1830.
You may or may not know that he inspired an annual competition – the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest – which challenges contestants “to write an atrocious opening sentence to the worst novel never written.” This year’s winner was chosen from 6,000 entries. Are you ready?
She was a beautiful woman; more specifically she was the kind of beautiful woman who had an hourlong skincare routine that made her look either ethereal or like a glazed donut, depending on how attracted to her you were.
Some of the others are pretty funny, too. Check ’em out – and have a good weekend!
January 12, 2024 — 7:22 pm
Comments: 10
You are not ready for this story
I had frequent earaches as a child. Miserable things. My father had them, too. He loved to explain what they did for earaches in his day, pre-antibiotics: they’d take a scalpel and puncture the eardrum to release pressure (otherwise they feared the infection would break inward, into the brain). They did that to him multiple times.
It was his favorite “walking five miles uphill barefoot in the snow to school” story.
Years later, as a teenager, he was practicing for the statewide cornet championships. He was at that point, he said, the third highest ranking cornet player in Tennessee. He said he was a master of triple tonguing. Anyhoo, you can see where this is going: his poor scarred eardrum exploded during practice (I’d like to think during a particularly enthusiastic triple tonguing session). Thus ended his dream of being…the second or first cornet, I guess.
Many years later, he had a surgical eardrum replacement. A tympanoplasty (technically a myringoplasty, since it was just the eardrum). They took a little piece of one of his veins and scraped it really thin and stuck it in his ear. These days it’s done with microscopes, but this would have been about 1966, so they probably did it with rocks or something.
I remember seeing him in the hospital with an enormous head bandage that made him look like a spaceman.
He got some hearing back, but he was pretty deaf and could never get on with hearing aids. This was unfortunate for my stepmother as he loved to make music and believed himself to be a great talent, but could only hear the loud instruments. Bagpipes. Banjos. French horn.
I’m not going anywhere with this story. I just wanted to talk about my father’s ear. Mine is a little better today, I think.
January 11, 2024 — 7:47 pm
Comments: 5
It’s the oddest sensation
For the second time this year, I woke up a couple of days ago with one ear completely blocked. The first time around, over-the-counter ear drops sorted it out in a couple of days. This time, I’m not having much luck.
In fact, the first round of eardrops made it worse.
Now, two or three days in, the weirdest thing is happening. I have maybe 10% hearing in my left ear, so my brain has decided all sounds are coming from my right. Uncle B turned on the radio in the kitchen and I heard music come out of the livingroom.
It’s freaking me out, y’all.
Now, I know my audience. I’m sure at least one of you coots has lost more hearing in one ear than the other. Is this just how it works?
January 10, 2024 — 7:41 pm
Comments: 15