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.
But if they omit the symbol entirely, they save 0.003 cents per unit, but they will continue to charge the same inflated retail price for it and all their cult members will cover for them by gushing about how sleek the “minimalist” design is.
We’re not calling it that anymore. It’s been rebranded to “SuperDuper Speed USB ]|[” now. Note that this is a different standard than the previous “SuperDuper Speed USB 3,” and under no circumstances should you call it “SuperDuper Speed USB 3.0,” because there was never any such spec and pedantic nerds will climb up your nose in the comments if you ever utter it.
Fucking magnets. Saved you a click.
(Magnetic clothing buttons have already been invented. Repeatedly. You can buy 20 for six bucks on Amazon.)
Renaming it in Explorer does actually rename the file if all you change is the case (in current Windows, at least, see the pedantry below), but whatever mechanism Explorer uses to determine “has this file’s name changed” is apparently case insensitive. So it won’t refresh the file list. I imagine this is yet another one of those damn fool Windows 95 holdovers, or something.
You don’t have to do any multiple-renaming jiggery pokery. Just press F5 to refresh that Explorer window and magically then it’ll show you that the file’s name was indeed changed all along.
IKR?
Cheaters who cheat rather than learn don’t learn. More on this shocking development at 11.
If the US government bitching was enough to get the flight simulator easter egg removed from Excel (allegedly), I can’t imagine a similar stern glare from the Pentagon would not cause Recall to magically turn out to be uninstallable after all. At least from any US government owned computers originally so equipped.
Anyway, isn’t this only going to roll out on “Copilot” compatible PC’s with the requisite AI acceleration chips in them? I would be furthermore immensely surprised if it could not be locked out in Group Policy for corporate customers.
Nah, loot it for the magnets at least. Frisbee the platters, save the chassis for the scrap bucket (it’s solid aluminum).
And they had to work so hard to cook the books to make it look like it lost money on it so they didn’t have to pay out their cast and crew, too. Won’t anyone think of the poor executives!?!?
It’s possible just at the outside that one of the Waymo autonomous taxis could pull it off, but they rely on that giant sensor lump on the roof so you’d have nowhere to put your boat…
That, and every time I see video from one somehow the inbuilt cameras on a Tesla produce worse picture quality than a $30 Amazon dashcam. And why do they tint everything brown?
Yeah, this is why I’m not new car shopping. Like, ever. I’m done. I’ll drive my Crosstrek until the engine falls out, and then I’ll replace said engine with an EV powertrain and drive it some more.
Yeah, he’s up to owning four of them, two of which are purely parts cars and one of which is currently apparently irrevocably broken with its parking pawl latched into place and thus immobile in his garage without hooking it with a wrecker and literally dragging it on the tires.
And that guy pretty much knows what he’s doing with various offbeat EV’s, and has a huge amount of shop space and apparently funds at his disposal to just fuck with these things as a hobby. The average owner, meanwhile, has no chance.
I used the shit out of their WYSIWYG HTML editor when I was an up and coming little script kiddie.
Maybe, but they can’t change the look of all those third party .cpl applets.
And sure, anyone could theoretically do anything. But this is Microsoft we’re talking about. They’ll just put another layer of cruft on top of the five or six layers of cruft they’ve already got and then call it job done.
This is never going to happen fully, because there is a ton of software and also device drivers that hook into the OG Control Panel system and install their own .cpl’s there, which are required for that hardware/software to work. The system to support those is going to have to remain in place, otherwise Microsoft is going to have a lot of very angry corporate customers and hardware vendors up their noses in short order.
In fact, this is most likely the exact reason the Control Panel still exists behind the scenes the way it does today in Win10 and Win11. They’ll probably go to ever-greater lengths to hide it from home users, but I’d doubt they can actually remove it completely at this point.
In fact, from TFA:
Tip: while the Control Panel still exists for compatibility reasons and to provide access to some settings that have not yet migrated, you’re encouraged to use the Settings app, whenever possible.
It’s gotten to the point that I associate advertisements with bad products.
I wish more marketers understood this. In fact, keeping on topic with Youtube in general, any product I see Youtubers doing sponsored ad reads for is for me is an instant and automatic hard pass for whatever it is. I just automatically assume that product is either crap or a scam. Or both. When I was shopping for headphones, the #1 brand I refused to consider for any price was Raycon. If I’m looking for a new game to pick up, I can guarantee you it will never be Raid: Shadow Legends or War Thunder, no matter how bored I am. If I need a new razor, it absolutely will not be from Manscaped. Etc., etc.
If I am bombarded incessantly with really insipid ads for a particular product, the only thing it makes automatically come to my mind when shopping for a product in that category is that the one I definitely don’t want is that one with the fucking annoying ads. This is obviously completely counterproductive from the advertiser’s standpoint, and I have to imagine I’m not the only person in the world who rolls this way.
The only possibilities I can think of are that advertisers really are dumb enough to oversaturate people’s attention to the point that they get turned off from the product entirely but keep soldiering on anyway because it earns a paycheck. Or worse, that it doesn’t matter because for every one viewer who gets pissed off and vows to never buy your product, they are outnumbered and offset by a horde of other viewers who are stupid enough to conflate repetition with truth and actually will be enticed to buy whatever it is, insipidity be damned. And the marketers probably know it.
The entire second half of the column is literally how to fix it.
Almost all ranges are propane compatible but will require the effort of installing the (included) propane conversion kit. The exception is Frigidaire, where the kit has to be purchased separately.
FYI, most of Whirlpool’s range lineup (including Amana, Maytag and the non-“Pro” KitchenAid models), all of Frigidaire’s range lineup, most of GE’s base line range lineup (not Profile or Café) do not have Wi-Fi capability. It’s mostly Samsung and LG pathologically putting connectivity into everything they make.
What features did you need that you couldn’t avoid connectivity? I just queried my own product database and came up with 202 models that are LP compatible without purchase of a kit and do not have Wi-Fi capability. 261 if you’re willing to countenance Frigidaire. And even among most of those that do have connectivity (KitchenAid’s “Pro” models being an irritating exception) you don’t need to connect to Wi-Fi or use the app for any functionality of the appliance; it’s just an extra.
Monkeys are old hat. I much prefer to calculate pi in binary and then dump the result into a bitmap, then scroll through it infinitely. Eventually I’ll learn everyone’s secrets…
I can do you one better: My GPD laptop has a charging indicator on the center type-C port indicating that this is where the power supply goes, but it can actually be charged from either port regardless of the icon. Both ports are USB 3.0 or 3.2 or whatever the current fast standard is this week, but only the center one supports video out via an external GPU enclosure. So if you want to use it docked with an eGPU, it’s actually required to not plug the power supply into the port that says you should plug the power supply into it.
So not only is the marking meaningless, it’s arguably worse than meaningless because in one of the headline hardware setups for the machine it is actually 100% incorrect to do what the marking is telling you to do. Wrap your head around that one…