When I looked into a paper cutter for doing papercraft and other projects I ended up finding and buying the Silhouette Cameo machine instead. It didn't have pre-defined templates, but what it did have was simple software that would import any svg, or trace the outline of a graphic. You can also create freehand or use bezier curves to make custom designs. It has an optical sensor to align the paper to cut along the edges of designs, so cutting out printed designs looks clean and sharp.

Since then I have also used it to cut out custom decorations, vinyl stickers, fabric, fondant cake sheets, cork and silicone gaskets (which I used in a 50+ year old car), and solder overlays.

The Cricut machine even back then seemed like a giant DRM brick that I wasn't going to keep throwing money at just to get another set of templates I could make myself. To me the Cricut machine was aimed at those that wanted to appear crafty, for a fee of course. The Silhouette machine on the other hand allowed me to create what I wanted, when I wanted. I just had to be willing to put in the time to make it.

Look on Amazon for a "joycon repair kit", there are many out there. A kit should come with a set of screw drivers (the Y shaped bit will strip if you use a + tip, so at the very least you need that), a plastic tool for prying the control apart, and a few replacement sticks. Nothing is too complicated and it all comes apart pretty easily. If you then look on Youtube you should find a bunch of videos on how to open and replace the sticks. Once you get the hang of it, it should only take about 5 minutes to replace them. That is way better then mailing them in for a "free" repair and being without controls for a few weeks, or buying a new set (which will of course wear out as well).

After you replaced the sticks, just re-calibrate them and they should work again, for a while that is.

On another note, after posting earlier I did a bit of poking around to find if someone made better parts (that don't wear out). I found that someone makes a usb emulator stick that allows you to use other controllers from other consoles. The "Mayflash Magic-NS", says it works with a bunch of PS and XBox controllers, I might give that a shot next time.

Having "fixed" a few I can say it was just a bad design. It is made up of a circuit board with a variable resistance coating over which metal contacts slide. The sliding of the metal across the coating eventually eats it away until the resistance change is no longer linear.

A better design was the old N64 controllers that used a slotted optical wheel which an ir beam detected the movement. A newer non-contact method would have been to use a 3D magnetic hall sensor with a tiny magnet mounted to the bottom of the stick. Either of the these designs would be a great improvement and won't cause wear even with heavy use.

But until they come up with a replacement its pretty easy to find the control sticks online in bulk and replace them, way cheaper than replacing the whole control and more convenient than mailing it in for a fix.

That reminds me.

The last place I worked they used html templates with injected code. When I started looking at the html output I kept seeing a bunch of comments, including a few rants devs made. Instead of making these comments in the code, almost everyone made them in the html. So yeah, clients probably saw a few of them. That is until I brought it up to my supervisor who tasked me with moving them to inside code blocks.

As far as comments, it depends. A comment that says something like, "update all child records with new parent id" can be helpful and gives you a clue as to why the next 8 or so lines exist. A comment like, "for each child record, find parent record, get parent id, update child id, loop to next child" is pretty pointless because you could read the code and figure that out. I usually write comments that quickly state the intent of the code not the function of the code, which is pretty helpful if I have to look at it later on and remember why I wrote it.

Now as for the comment being correct, that is a different matter. If you have a dev writing false comments all over the code then I think you have bigger problems.

It is in a comment on line 9 of the html source, not very hard to find at all. The bigger question is who would even bother to look in the first place?

Looking at the page, they could use some help on not embedding svg images directly into the page. Nothing like wasting bandwidth sending the same information over and over again instead of just making an svg file that will be cached by the browser. They did use some svg images, so I'm not sure why they didn't do that consistently.

Oh, and please get some help in sizing images appropriately, an image 2500x1250 transmitted in full only to be scaled by css to 617x477 (and yes the browser is cropping the sides to not distort the aspect ratio). That kind of laziness annoys me to no end. If you wanted people to view the full picture, make it a link to it, but use an appropriate thumbnail.

Lots of mystery meat navigation as well, and things you would expect to be links that aren't. Sadly this is about par with most corp sites I've seen.

Another twitter account down!

Because you are being sold a fantasy.

Take a look at modern day TV and Movies and you see the same thing. Advertisers known that sex sells. You put young sexy people in your commercial/tv/movie and people want to buy your product; even if that product is to sell others a 30 second time slot for their product.

The crowd shots you see in the movies are extras, people hired to fill in the scene, not random people. TV and Movies when shooting on location will have police presence to keep the area clear of the general population so they can control the shot. The last thing you want is a bunch of random people waving at the camera in the background while your big car chase goes by.

The "man in the street" shots are just a filtered view of the person wanted presented. You aren't being shown every interview that was done, just the careful few they wanted.

I believe Penn and Teller admitted to this bit when they did a show on homeopathic medicine. They did a bit where they using live snails to "cleanse" peoples faces, with lots of shots of various people having snails crawling on their faces. In the end they mentioned that most people knew it was BS but that doesn't make good television, they just needed a few to make it seem like a thing. This is the crux of opinion polls, just because 9 out of 10 doctors say your product is the best, doesn't mean it is. Who are the doctors, how many doctors were surveyed, what exactly was asked and what exactly was their answer.

So to sum it all up, Filters. You are being shown filtered content intended to influence your behavior.


Also of note, the biggest factor is genetic. Exercise and diet does have "some" effect but you can't cheat your genes. There are people who can eat pizza for days and not gain an ounce, and others who put on pounds eating just vegetables. It all comes down to how your body processes it. Early man only survived because of being able to store fat, as food was not readily available. The ability to turn food into fat and survive off it during winter months is the only reason any of us are here now; and the food they ate was mostly all natural fruits and vegetables.

So if you think eating nothing but healthy options is they way to go, more power to you. But don't force your religion on me.

You are right it could have been. Without performing an open independent investigation we will never know. But that is the whole point of this story, that the WHO is now only getting the chance to look at the records in China almost a year afterwards. Even then, it looks like there will be sever limits on access to information and records. Even if the cleanup of records hasn't begun they still have almost a month to get their story straight.

As far as where it most likely started, ask a fire chief where a fire broke out and they will point to where the oldest burn with the most damage is. Its not bigotry that makes people jump to a conclusion, its following what evidence is available. The first major reported number of cases started in a region of China. People traveling through there also started showing signs of the virus a few weeks to a month later. While there are reports of earlier cases in other areas its doubtful to their accuracy as it took months to get an accurate test, and testing a sample multiple times often yielded conflicting results. Not to mention that unless those samples were carefully preserved and new tests conducted to prevent contamination the results should be taken with a huge grain of salt.

While I don't blame China for the virus, I do blame them for covering up information that might yield some insights on how to prevent (or limit) this from happening again. I don't believe the covering up is malicious, just an act to save face, which is really sad. Something bad happened, own up to it and move on. Don't loose the trust and your honor because you don't want bad publicity.

An Emulator Farm is not Good or Evil. We must stop applying labels to these poor emulators who are just trying to earn a living.

If your are looking for fault, try the bank that allowed multiple requests per second from the same network address for multiple accounts. A good security algorithm will detect this and honey pot off the calls, or just deny all requests for some period of time. Also SMS, seriously! A code transmitted in plain text used as a secure verification token, who ever thought that would work should never work at a bank again.

I'm also not sure how or why any secure software would use the device id as part of a key. You should never use data that can't be changed as part of a key. A key should consist of some random data that has no relation to either device/user/account/date/time/etc, and then change that key on a regular basis (say every 24 hours, or 10 requests).

I am free to express my opinion. You are free to ignore me.

Italy you say? I wonder if Italy has a large number of Chinese immigrant workers who travel back and forth between China and Italy? Yep, they do reuters.com. So that leaves one to wonder, did the virus start in Italy or was it brought there?

Also if you read the article. It doesn't say Italy discovered the virus in a boy back in November (it heavily infers it though). It says they re-examined swabs taken from patients and found that they had traces of the virus. What the article doesn't state is how those swabs were kept and under what conditions the re-testing took place (some clues indicate a full 3 months later, by which time these swabs may have been contaminated from other sources or the test equipment itself). Lets not even go into the whole tests that were wildly inaccurate to the point where you needed at least three to be reasonable sure you did or didn't have the virus. Again the article doesn't mention under what conditions the tests were performed.

The article also tries to instill doubt by saying that what was thought to be measles wasn't confirmed by the tests initially. So obviously it must have been the virus. . . or any number of other things for which they did not test for. I can't count the number of times I've had test results ordered by a doctor that showed nothing only to have to take yet another round of tests.

The whole article seems to be a PR piece created to shift the blame to elsewhere. If Italy was serious they would have examined the hospital records to do contact tracing to find a common source of all the cases they noted. Somehow I think if they did that they might not find an answer they like, which explains why it was never done.

You are "free" to write your own bot to get one. You are also "free" to make a business out of selling bots to others.

You could also just realize that being the "first" to own something isn't worth the extra fee and hassle. Personally I wouldn't buy a console that is less than a year old anyway. Not until I know there are games I want to play on it, and that the manufacture isn't going to impose some limits or say "I am altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further." Even if they sold the console at $50, without good games I want to play its just a hunk of plastic and metal.

The theaters around here will still let you buy the snacks, but no movies are showing at the moment.

I took advantage of this on Halloween. I bought a huge bag of fresh popped pop corn with a small cup of butter for $10 from the local theater. Then a couple of us munched on popcorn in the driveway while watching Halloween movies on a 40" tv hooked up to a laptop. I also had a table setup with full sized candy bars at the end of the driveway and just spent the night telling kids "one each".

Not sure I agree, while visiting relatives in Texas a few years ago the road ways and access points seemed by be designed on a spur of the moment thing.

For example, while on the freeway you had to know to exit off to a side road about 2 miles before a right turn because the main connecting road into the town didn't have a direct freeway exit. It did have a freeway entrance though! So if you didn't turn 2 miles before, you drove another 5 miles down the road to the next exit, went over the freeway and drove about 1/4 mile then again exited on a side road because. . . you guessed it, no direct exit from the freeway.

In town was not much better, driving along the freeway I spot a Best Buy on the left just up ahead. How to get there. Well exit on the right, drive another 1 1/2 miles down a street next to the freeway, go under the freeway, drive 1 1/2 miles back down another street next to the other side of the freeway, and turn right. Mind you this was all in a pretty packed business district, so those side roads moved at a snails pace.

Then major freeway connections were just mind boggling. When one would join with another there would often be concrete barriers at least a mile out, so if you didn't pick the right lane you would wind up on the wrong freeway. The trouble is that you wouldn't see a sign until it was too late, well unless you had a car that could jump the concrete barriers that is. And of course to get back, you guessed it, go a few miles, exit on a side road, go a few more miles, cross over, then continue down another side road, merge with the freeway, and play the guess the right lane game all over again.

Still the best. While driving back on a 5 lane freeway traffic slowed down to a standstill for over an hour (*note the place we were was only about 45 minutes from the house we were staying at). During this whole inching forward everyone was doing (because of a two car accident mind you), the GPS system announces "Switching to pedestrian mode". I guess it thought we jumped out of the car and started walking (which to think of it might have been faster.)


Don't get me started on the weather, 11:30 at night trying to take a walk around the block, we needed a towel by the time we got back to the house.

If you look at the Reddit post, they indicate it was after August 2015.

There is also a pin for it on Google Maps