The old card with the new card in his arms
By gum, that’s a big-ass video card. It fit in the case, just. For an awful moment, I thought I didn’t have the right power connector — the old one had two banks of six pins, and this one had a bank of six and a bank of eight — but I found that my old power supply had an extra two pin connector zip-tied to the cable for just such an eventuality.
‘Scuse me, I’m off to play the Witcher Wild Hunt, with that last bit of new DLC.
Oh, by the way, I haven’t disabled the rating system, it’s just not working somehow. I started to hunt down the problem and fix it, but I’m kind of torn. On the one hand, I really liked being able to rate comments, but on the other hand I didn’t think this particular widget was very good. Sometimes I had to refresh the page before my vote would take, and the rating thingie popped up at unwanted times sometimes.
Did y’all have problems with it, too?
July 13, 2016 — 7:04 pm
Comments: 9
Well, there’s one
As you guys may have gathered, I am absolutely fascinated with the idea of 3D printing technologies without having the faintest fucking idea what I could do with it.
I was chatting to someone in my electric bicycle forum (yeah, I get around, baby!) who makes his own bike motors, very substantially using parts he 3D prints. When I expressed some skepticism that PLA would be strong enough to do useful work, he said the material is strong under compression and weak under tension and he designs part thicknesses accordingly. Yes, I saw a picture of his motor in action (it’s a friction motor that works by directly driving the front tire).
Later that night, I sat straight up in bed (I did, too — I’m not kidding) when it occurred to me that I could print *・°☆.。banjo components:*・°☆.。. Like, bridges and armrests and ornamental headstocks and shit. I didn’t think PLA would be very impressive tonally, but then I discovered people are printing wild-ass electric guitars. In nylon, I think. How do they sound? I DON’T CARE!
And today this Kickstarter campaign hit my inbox: you download a free cellphone app and scan your feet and they 3D print custom insoles to match. I am unclear whether they offer the shoes, as well but I DON’T CARE!
We live in wondrous times, my friends.
February 29, 2016 — 10:28 pm
Comments: 17
It’s a toy that makes toys
Any of you gadget hounds fallen for the 3D printer yet? I keep getting flyers at work for a £500 model and a £1,000 model. A little poking around and it looks like the consumer/hobbyist versions are in the $100 to $2,000 range.
Like laser printers, I gather the manufacturer makes their money off the ‘ink’ — in this case, a plastic filament that looks like fat fishing line whereof this grade of 3D ‘print’ is made.
I must say, the arty prints from this class of printer look pretty jaggy and crude to me, but I have no way of knowing if that’s the printer, the model or a user-selectable switch of some kind. I get the impression you can make useful things if you try.
This is a pretty interesting overview of one man’s first year with a 3D printer. FYI, the printer he’s using is around $500. A reel of filament for it is about thirty bucks.
You may recall, I love love LOVE me some 3D modeling. It’s only a matter of time. Just not, perhaps, any time soon.
January 11, 2016 — 11:30 pm
Comments: 12
Huh. Not immortal after all
Richard Sapper, mastermind of the first IBM Thinkpad, croaked on New Year’s Eve. I had one of these and loved it to bits. Mine was the classic and bestselling — I think it was the T43 — and it was bombproof.
Reading the obit, I might have knowed he was a German working in Italy. You can see both those influences in the Thinkpad.
Well, the early Thinkpads, anyway. Uncle B paid a flippin’ fortune for one of the last models, and it was a dog.
January 6, 2016 — 11:04 pm
Comments: 11
Okay, I’m in. Now what?
Up to now, I’ve been carrying around the dumbest of dumb phones. It’ll make calls, it’ll just send text messages, and that’s it. I didn’t think I wanted a smart phone, but I did want a better phone. The sound quality on this one is crap, and I have a hard enough time understanding these people and their silly accents as it is.
Well, Sandy Claws brought me a proper Motorola Android phone. And I love it. It’s like my beloved Android tablet, but smaller and with a phone stuck on it.
Only. Only…I think my devices are ganging up on me. Colluding. Plotting.
I have two tablets, a Kindle, a computer, (Uncle B’s computer) and now this. And between them, they know the books I’m reading, the websites I go to, my allergies, my bank balance, my bra size, my taste in movies and, to within about fifty feet, where I’m sitting right this minute. And they’re starting to share. And it’s giving me the jimm-jamms.
Like today, I signed up for a new forum account using my computer (CG Society is back in business, if you know the story) and when I called it up on my phone, it already knew my username and password.
I don’t remember telling it it could do that. I don’t really like where this is going.
So, what about you? Phone: smart or dumb? Doing anything to protect your privacy?
December 29, 2015 — 10:11 pm
Comments: 29
Last flight of the Vulcan
Well, not the last flight — there are several more on the calendar for 2015 — but this is the last in our range for the last operational year of the last airworthy Vulcan.
Or B.2 XH558, “The Spirit of Great Britain”, to give her proper name.
You want to talk airplane porn? Check out the picture (one of Uncle B’s). This was when she swooped overhead, turned her belly toward us and slowly opened the bomb bay. Hussy.
And we had a brief display of Red Arrows (there was a longer display on Sunday, but we couldn’t do both days) and a tribute to the Battle of Britain and acres of booths. Soldier of Fortune was there, and lots of people with the terribly mutilated antique guns that are legal for sale here.
The shop that impressed me most was full of rusty bits of junk from the Somme. Although they also had a whole bunch of rusty German helmets that had been found in a Danish lake in 2015, no explanation given.
The one that impressed me next most was the nice German couple selling real Nazi memorabilia. It’s illegal to sell that stuff in Germany, but I guess love finds a way.
I didn’t buy nothing. Not even a Nazi table setting.
August 18, 2015 — 10:16 pm
Comments: 13
I’m back. I think.
In case you missed it, yesterday’s routine Windows update totally boogered my computer. It booted, looked normal, but none of the icons worked. Eventually, it would throw up a series of error messages and fall right over.
“No problem,” thinks the intrepid weasel, “I’ll just do a system restore.” There were no previous states to restore to.
See, it’s supposed to do a little backup file before it installs updates, so you can step back if there’s a problem. I worked out later why it hasn’t been (all these years, apparently): backups were somehow allocated 0% disk space. Thanks for the error message, Bill.
So I had to sort it the old fashioned way, with a hammer and brute ignorance. I’m not absolutely convinced everything is totally back to normal, but I can run Photoshop and a video game at the same time, so it’s got to be good enough.
Meanwhile, tomorrow’s Dead Pool was never in any doubt. I got internets in all kinds of places these days. See y’all back here tomorrow, 6WBT.
April 10, 2014 — 8:44 pm
Comments: 15
Chilly in here
I got that email from LinkedIn again today. You know, that monthly “people you may know” email.
I signed up for LinkedIn when it was pretty new and felt obligatory. And perfunctory. Honestly, to this day, I have no idea what you’re supposed to DO with it. The last time I signed in was maybe…seven, eight years ago? I was a whole ‘nother person then, profile-wise.
So. Thing is, that “people you may know” email is always people I *do* know. And people LinkedIn has no business knowing that I know. Okay, one is a former boss at my corporate gig in the States. But the rest? No idea.
They keep recommending Uncle B to me, for example. There is no business based reason they would connect his name to mine. I’m cautious about real names and the internet. Maybe they…bought some data off FaceBook? It’s the only place I can think of that his name and mine appear together.
One recommendation is — I suspect, from the name — the granddaughter of a close friend of my parents. From, like, forty years ago. LinkedIn makes similar astonishing connections for Uncle B, too — and he keeps a WAY lower internet profile than me (deletes his cookies several times a day, he just told me. Imagine!).
So if a useless Web app like LinkedIn can scratch up enough data to make such obscure connections, what can a powerful data mining operation do? What would happen if somebody mashed together your supermarket loyalty card data and your medical history? What if somebody had all of it — credit cards, bank statements, social media, phone records, the lot — the hardware to store it and the software to sift through it?
I’m just a nobody. No reason anybody would be interested in anything I’m up to. Until and unless I tried to do something interesting, like run for office.
I read too much science fiction as a kid. This stuff is scaring me juiceless.
June 27, 2013 — 11:40 pm
Comments: 31
So, we got buzzed by this thing on Saturday
Last airworthy Vulcan bomber. After the Trooping of the Colour, where members of the armed forces drop by to wish Her Maj a happy birthday, this little number (XH558 to his friends) zoomed down to Hastings and then up the coast and right over our heads.
It was billed as the last flight of the Vulcan, but engineers have since found a way to strengthen the part of the structure they were worried about. So, not the last, but it doesn’t have a whole lot of juice left.
Not RAF. It’s in private hands. It was built in 1960 (like me!), decommissioned in the Nineties and bought by a private family, in unflyable condition. Since restored entirely by private donations. First flight after restoration: 2007. It takes eye-watering money and volunteer work to keep this thing going, so it stands a real tribute to the love Brits have for their feats of engineering.
It was a beautiful thing. It circled over our heads for a while and then took off up the coast with a roar like the last judgment, the kind of sound you feel in your breastbone.
Oh, the poor sheep.
June 17, 2013 — 10:30 pm
Comments: 35
If only there was a way to narrow the search down a little
I know, I know…we’ve known forever the spooks were data-mining. But not on this scale. If nothing else, I didn’t think private companies would cooperate with the government so happily. If nothing else, the technology wasn’t there to store and sift the sheer volume of data. Not until recently.
To hear Jim Sensenbrenner tell it, if the Feds were interested in somebody, they were supposed to get a warrant for his phone records (he wrote the Patriot Act, he should know). What they did instead was get a warrant for everybody’s records, so the records would be around in case they get interested in somebody later.
I have no words.
How carefully the higher ups have explained to us that no-one is listening in on phone conversations. Maybe, but the metadata is plenty bad enough. No, it is not okay for the government to know who’s calling a shrink or a clap clinic. I remind you, leaking shit is Obama’s signature move. In future, all of our candidates may have to be Mormons – nobody else is clean enough.
And for all that technological hoo-ha, they missed the Tsarnaev brothers – and Major Hasan – who should have rung more alarm bells than Quasimodo. I guess two hundred billion data points a month isn’t the same things as intelligence.
On a happier note, if you lose somebody’s phone number, you can file an FOIA request.
June 10, 2013 — 8:35 pm
Comments: 35