Month: May 2022

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

seat-safety-switch:

Making new parts is fun. Fixing old parts is less fun. This, in a nutshell, is why at-home fabrication has never been more popular. It turns out if you lock a lot of weirdos inside their houses and tell them that they might die if they talk to another person face-to-face, what they do is immediately go on AliExpress, and type “CNC router” into the little search box. Social scientists are still amazed.

Of course, there are downsides to turning your boring residential home into a scale-miniature version of an actual workplace where trained and experienced professionals work. For one thing, trained and experienced professionals work at a real machine shop instead of an IT department, and as such they have no interest in spending thousands of dollars to run off a crappy bushing adapter at home when they could instead eat dinner, drink a single beer, and think really hard about tolerances.

The other thing is the mess. When you cut up a piece of metal, the shavings don’t just disappear into the ether. What they actually do is turn into a mist of razor-sharp death, which you then cut yourself on a thousand times a week. And don’t think you can clean it up, either: all that swarf will be there when you’ve died of heavy-metal poisoning and your home is passed on to another bunch of suckers. Vacuums can’t touch it, not unless they like to blow out their motor windings, so pro-tier home machinists simply stage an arson when the pile gets too big and move into a new house with the insurance money. Hey, if you tool a little bit of magnesium once in awhile, it’ll be a really pretty fire, too.

Come to think of it, if the fire is big enough, that means you’ll get to buy a whole new set of tools all over again. Which will be really good for the brand new shop layout! No more having to drag heavy tools around because you forgot to put the lathe next to the mill. Which is good: if your friends come over to help you move it, they might breathe on you, and then you’d both die.

Tags:

#storytime #unreality cw #poison cw #illness tw #death tw #I like the juxtaposition here between ”getting fucked over by breathing metal fragments” and ”getting fucked over by breathing viruses” #very dynomight-better-air-quality-is-the-easiest-way-not-to-die.html

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

autisticcosima:

my sense of humor: getting birthday cards with the wildly incorrect age on it for people

 

magicoftelevision:

tumblr_inline_nigk3sgoj11r72rqz

 

thebagelhut:

I see this and raise you: getting cards for a wildly different occasion and customizing them to fit the holiday you need

369d9dedb35111c61349dbc1a85416fbc02d6d8f
9cb85d9e942f5491d349925997bdf4a67f559944

 

motherhenna:

94f39afcb6c76c505a8f016d0ecd671b5fcf52d6

 

discount-butlins:

ab8e8bd1ce11740d7cab865495fb583594b0d1b8

 

qu3ercus:

d099d54f687675503a60062165dbe2c10ea46208
34771e0d3cf66bd67ad56cedbfc5ea9450f966f4

throwback to the time my partner put in his 2 week notice with a birthday card for a 2 year old

 

silly-slacker-person:

King

 

kkshowtunes:

Once I got a card that said “BEST GREAT GRANPA EVER!!”

I’m a teenager

 

unscharf-an-den-raendern:

5971125cde2b002d75b39a0f6193746db8c3228a

Tags:

#juxtaposition #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(the last one) #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what #injury cw?

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

sigmaleph:

wingedcatgirl:

603a97b94e8f852d77353a186af21f76ff4568caALT

… took us a second to realize they meant stoves

well, it was ok yesterday, and if it was ok on one day it should also be on the next one, so

Tags:

#first thought: are you telling me they used a picture from an electric-coil stove instead of an actual induction stove and #*didn’t even use a spiral coil*?? #second thought: no actually there’s like a 75% chance you’re not going to be okay #more if you count trauma #third thought‚ after scrolling down: and Sigma’s joke isn’t *either* of the interpretations that came to my mind #how many are we up to now

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

sketiana:

plumlatte:

sketiana:

you spend so much time trying to make yourself more palatable that in the end you taste bland. forgettable

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ba219665c4463d6b7ea22cd7249c5a901441b745

Tags:

#Hannibal #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #cannibalism cw? #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

archangelofthestars:

New Star Trek headcanon just dropped: Geordi and data regularly hang out in the dark and Geordi sometimes forgets that people need light to see

 

archangelofthestars:

3122f052507da712a6e552ba8ef8c04a89c7b7a6

This is so incredibly important how dare you hide this in the tags /lh

 

datafucker420:

Pov you walk into a pitch black room and you see two creepy glowing android eyes, two flashing red lights, and the fucked up thing cats’ eyes do in the dark

 

cheeseanonioncrisps:

Further hc that Data can’t actually see in the dark either.

He’s just never thought to mention this because he has a photographic memory and direct neural access to all of the Enterprise’s schematics, and therefore doesn’t actually need sight to know where everything is.

 

archangelofthestars:

32d125c63fd38fd13e8928fce49f7064f108eb2d

okay no cause like i love this.

 

unicorn-and-bluebells:

YES

 

telanana:

Ok but imagine the Enterprise goes to help people on this planet where everyone lives underground in the dark because of radiation or something. Like it’s bad enough that hundreds of generations have lived underground and, over the course of time, have adapted to the darkness so well that light sources actually hurt them. So Picard has to figure out how to help them without sending people in with lights.

And the obvious answer is to send Geordi down, but the settlements are so far down the communicators cut out and Picard isn’t sending anyone into that alone.

“Data and I should be able to handle it,” Geordi says. “Neither of us need light to see and Engineering can manage fine without us for a few hours.”

Picard nods and is on the verge of sanctioning the mission with his trademark, “Make it so,” when Data speaks up.

“Actually, my visual sensors are designed to be as much like the human eye as possible,” he says. “They only process information transmitted by the reflection of light off physical surfaces. My ability to function onboard Enterprise in unlit spaces is due to my memorization of both the ship’s schematics and the design preferences of those whose quarters I visit regularly.”

Behind his visor, unbeknownst to the rest of the crew, Geordi blinks as he tries to process this new information. He’s almost about to apologize to Picard and Data for the assumption when Data continues.

“However, I would be able to integrate the information from our tricorder scans to navigate without much difficulty. I could accompany Geordi to the settlement and provide some level of assistance.”

Picard looks a bit confused at the correction, but nods. “Make it so.”

Later, when they’ve beamed down into the caverns, Geordi asks why Data never mentioned that he couldn’t actually see in the dark. He would’ve turned the lights on if he’d known.

“I did not need it,” Data answers simply, as if that was explanation enough.

“Data, most people like the lights to be on, even if they don’t need it,” Geordi points out. “It’s a comfort thing. And polite, too, I guess.”

Data pauses, processing. “I was not uncomfortable, nor did I find the lack of light to be rude. I enjoy our conversations in the dark.”

“Huh.” Geordi stops, watching as Data continues down the tunnel a bit further. “But you keep your quarters dark sometimes, too.”

“Spot is nocturnal,” Data explains. “I have read that it is important for cats to maintain a sense of routine, including a regular day and night cycle.”

“You do your work in the dark for Spot?”

“For my friends.”

 

cheeseanonioncrisps:

Oh god this is adorable! I love it!

Tags:

#Star Trek #TNG #headcanons #adorable #embarrassment squick?

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

brin-bellway:

hater-of-terfs:

broken-horn-of-equius:

magnetictapedatastorage:

magnetictapedatastorage:

tape casette recorders are compatible with literally every. single. thing. im out here living in 2095.

things you can record (audio only), simply by lying to your computer, telling it that the tape recorder is actually a set of headphones:

  • discord call
  • podcast
  • documentary
  • radio and internet radio
  • music, from any source. without having to download it at all.
  • music you make on virtual pianos/etc
  • noteworthy news items (fireside esque, interviews, huge events)
  • stand-up comedy
  • rented or borrowed media
  • any other sound your pc can produce

and with a VCR you could do all of this AND have the visuals as well… but an audio cassette recorder is a good place to start, since they’re small and simple. I would not recommend a boombox, because those are large and nowadays all very, very bad quality.

Now you may be saying “how is any of this helpful, I want a digital file…” here’s the fucking magic. You go into Audacity (free program), and lie to it that the tape recorder is really a microphone. Then you hit record on Audacity, and hit play on the tape, and let it play at regular speed. Trim and export the digital file, and you’re doing gangbusters. You’re cooking with gas. You’re thinking with portals. You’ve won the internet.

Congratulations, you can “pirate”* anything you want, and literally no one can catch you, because you’re not downloading in the traditional sense. You’re streaming to an external device, and that device is recording what it receives. It’s exactly like taping a live tv show to a VHS. This is a very low-key and non-strenuous task for the computer, since your tape recorder does all the work.

*Is this piracy? No. Well- it’s time shifting. Sort of. Tell it to my Steely Dan albums. Tell it to my The Sims: Hot Date VG Soundtrack album.

OP, dropping surprising knowledge from across time and space:

Fun fact: this is called the analog loophole, and it’s completely impossible to close, even in principle. No matter how much copy protection you add to a piece of media, it will eventually have to be sent to a display and then turned into an audio/video output that humans can interpret, because… that’s the whole fucking point

So even if they find some way to encrypt the signal sent to the display so you can’t intercept it with a VCR or tape recorder (which would be exceedingly difficult if not impossible), at the end of the day you just can’t do anything about someone pointing a camera at the screen or a microphone at the speaker. Yo ho ho

(By the way, I’d love to see someone actually talk about the legal precedent of this wrt it being literally the same thing as recording a TV show on a VCR or recording a mixtape off of the radio, both of which I believe are absolutely unambiguously legal. OP may be right that this is literally, legally, not piracy, but I’m not a lawyer nor am I opposed to crimes so don’t ask me)

What’s the advantage to including a tape recorder in this process, rather than cutting out the middle steps and just having Audacity record your headphone output? Is it just that it bears a closer resemblance to the situations that set legal precedent regarding time-shifting?

Don’t get me wrong, it did occur to me (though by the time I decided it was worth including in my response, I’d already left for work) that OP’s username is magnetictapedatastorage: presumably they take pleasure in integrating tape into their stream-archiving workflow.

But looking at the notes, there seem to be a lot of people under the honest impression that a separate recorder is *required*, and I would like to be clear that–at least in terms of practicality: I can’t speak to legal camouflage–the tape is in fact optional. You can plug a pair of non-lie headphones in and instruct Audacity to record what’s sent to them.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #oh look an update #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers