It is amazing how bloated software has gotten. Used to be, your computer’s OS fit on a floppy diskette.

I’m reminded of a few projects I’ve seen here and there where a dad with some electronics skills builds a control panel for his kid with a bunch of knobs, buttons, lights, switches, gauges, displays etc. that makes suitably impressive industrial noises as you mess with the controls because what kid doesn’t want that? I want that.

I’m rounding year 15 with a nylon one. I’ve never had a leather wallet last that long.

There is none. These are not made. They should not be made. We will not help you make these.

The reason power plugs/sockets are gendered the way they are is to prevent energized contacts from ever being exposed to touch. A cable that reverses the gender can and almost certainly will expose mains voltage to exposed contacts, which almost certainly will electrocute someone or cause a fire.

Bad stupid wrong reasons people come up with for wanting these:

• Attaching a generator to the circuits in a house. Plug one end into the generator’s outlet, plug the other into a wall socket, and now that circuit in your house, and possibly others, are energized. In addition to the cable being a death hazard if unplugged from the house end, I don’t know how circuit breakers behave when the source is on the load side, and if you don’t throw the main breaker you’re energizing the lines coming out of your house, meaning you’re putting power on the mains. You probably want to do this during a power failure, which means linemen might be working on the lines, they expect them to be cold, but because an idiot bought a generator and some parts from aisle 3 at Lowe’s, it isn’t. If you’re trying to run your generator while attached to the grid to try to reduce your power bill, you deserve the resulting fire. There is a correct way to do this; you can get plugs and sockets designed for this, you’ll often find camper trailers equipped with them, and you need an interlocked switch that prevents both the generator and the power grid from being attached simultaneously.

• You strung your Christmas lights backwards, and now the female end is closest to where you want to plug them in. Okay fine, I’ll just get a male-to-male cable and plug them in backwards, what can go wrong? The male plug at the end of your daisy chain dangling somewhere in a bush, under your eaves etc. in the winter weather getting rained or snowed on is what can go wrong. The correct solution is pay attention to what you’re doing, Clark Griswold.

He finally got his chores done so he can waste time with his friends!

I typed it in his voice.

Vibe profits.

There might be a world, after we’ve pulled the last billionaire’s lungs out, when humans are back in control, that we can do research into defecating video that can identify bowel cancer just by letting a computer watch someone take a dump.

We do not yet live in this world though.

Their parents didn’t hit them hard enough.

Okay, we’ll rename American football to Cricket.

Yeah, none of you guys are the main character, I’M the main character.

I wonder if you could use four of the LEDs themselves to form a full bridge rectifier?

I’ve seen that cropping up in a lot of videos lately from tech adjacent creators. Cathode Ray Dude veered off in his video about an HP laptop that had a feature that overwrote the Windows boot splash screen with a calendar view using the “Ring -2” management system into this kind of beautiful screed about basically why society is unraveling.

How many moon landings have been done in metric?

Well you see, Americans called the game with goalies “soccer” because that’s what the British called it back when we were crown colonies, so when we invented the game with linebackers, we called that “football.” then everyone else heard our word and decided to change the game with goalies’ name to “football.” So as usual, America continues to be correct, and the rest of the world is bound and determined to fuck it up.

You know, I’ve got one of those who doesn’t have any power. His lack of hilariousness is at a maximum.

There will never be another general election in the United States.

So, do you remember back in like, 2004, when “feature phones” like the LG EnV or the Sidekick came out? It had a little more OS to it than a typical flip phone, they often had full keyboards, integration with intant messengers at the time, web browsers, etc? Some were more media focused and had mp3 oriented features, some were social machines for emailing and texting, some were more camera oriented, some more game oriented, you could get a phone that fit your interests.

Microsoft intended to shoulder into that market circa 2008. The year after the iPhone launched. It then took them two years and a billion dollars to develop. Through in-fighting with development of their OTHER mobile product, Windows Phone. And finally in 2010, the era of the iPhone 4, they released the Kin.

The Kin did not perform well, it was very mediocre hardware.

It had no app store or software library at all.

It couldn’t access several instant messengers that were popular at the time.

The few people who did buy one returned them.

It wasn’t Verizon’s fault that Microsoft pulled a Microsoft and poured tons of money into arriving at a trend too late to compete with an overpriced mediocre product.

It’s not compatible with newer motherboards. Anybody with the last couple generations of computers can’t use it.

I learned how to Linux on a Raspberry Pi. That is, in fact, what they’re for. I’ve got one (a Pi 2) that sits on my LAN with a hard drive attached as one part of my backup solution.