I started trying to teach my kid something about electronics the other day. I tore apart some broken dongle or other to show him what capacitors and stuff look like. But I didn't recognize any of the multicolored 1 mm sq. little bits of stuff stuck to the board.

So I tore apart some broken dongle or other from 10 years ago to show him what capacitors and stuff look like, and the little multicolored bits were about 3 mm sq. Not much of an improvement. I'm almost positive I probably identified one of the bits correctly as a germanium diode though.

So I tore apart some broken dongle or other from 20 years ago, and lo, there were capacitors and stuff there, but knowing what capacitors used to look like in the dark ages isn't that useful really. It wasn't a very productive day.

The most stupidly expensive wood lathe I can find is only $7500. Who turns bowls on a $25,000 lathe?

Grep maintainer quitting. 900 billion people use grep. Somebody else will maintain it. Nothing to see here, move along.

Also, we're too broke to afford vacations even when we have time.

From puppies running around on little wheels. Obviously.

George Jetson!

Not unjustifiably so. The older generation Wacom stuff worked beautifully. Wear it out, go buy the most similar thing still available for sale, download an experimental driver, upgrade your entire operating system, replace half the packages on your operating system with other packages from a PPA to get the driver to work, and then your new thing you paid big money for mostly half works. Older hardware is a much safer bet on Linux. It takes drivers a long time to catch up whenever there's some new product line instead of a minor evolution of the old product line.

Uhh, you'd be aware of that because you were, uhhh, well educated? Just going out on a limb here.

Is it wrong to jump out at them with a working replica 13th century broadsword? "I just scared the little blighters, I didn't stab'em!"

I've used splash screens to dedicate things to fallen loved ones. If there isn't a splash screen, another good place is in the about box, and another is the release note.

I've put dedications in several places in honor of several lost friends and family. It may be easier to get away with such things in the FOSS world, I guess. Anyway, the response from users was always such that I never felt I'd gone too far with any of the dedications. As a meme in the world of code, I think dedicating your work to someone you've lost is reasonable, as long as you don't go nuts and make it too annoying.

We did C64 BASIC in some class I had in middle school. I had a low opinion of these things, since I had a TRS-80 Color Computer at home, which I perceived to be a superior platform (perhaps erroneously, in retrospect). In high school, the "computer science" class had an Apple //e or two, while they had the most low end available IBM PS/2s in the business classroom as part of the vocational education program; for teaching kids Word Perfect and so forth.

The official curriculum had something to do with writing stuff in either Apple BASIC or maybe Apple C on the //e, but I hated that green monochrome POS, and insisted on doing all my projects in Turbo BASIC and later Turbo Pascal on my PC at home, and bringing them to school on a floppy to run on the PS/2 in the business classroom.

Thinking back, I don't guess I was taught in high school so much as I taught my teacher.

Supercalifragilisticexpialidensis.

I keep skimming that headline, and every time I read it as a robot to foil meth exams.

We have lots of roving gangs of meth cookers who go around doing everything they can to foil the government's attempts to avoid selling them Sudafed. It's a big problem that could get even bigger if this Fujitsu robot really helps them foil meth exams.

Please allow me to be the first to bow to our meth addicted, toothless hillbilly Fujitsu robot overlords.

I'll believe it when I see it. 54.5 mpg? We have a LONG way to go.

I'm stuck with a long and miserable commute, and I'm highly motivated to maximize my fuel economy. I couldn't afford a hybrid, even with all the incentives, so I got the most fuel efficient conventional car I could lay my hands on at the time. I get 38.0 mpg, which isn't bad, but the difference between this and my last car makes 54.5 mpg look impossibly far away.

This thing weighs 1/3 what my old car did, has fewer cylinders, more than a liter less displacement, it's miserably cramped with no room to haul anything larger than a couple of small duffle bags. For all this sacrifice, I gained about 10 mpg. I don't think I could get the other ~20 in anything that could actually survive driving 100 miles a day through the mountains surrounded by 18-wheelers. This miserable little econobox is plenty torture enough, thanks.