I can’t wait for this to cost a mint, have a mandatory smartphone app that spies on you and without which the helmet will have features intentionally crippled, and have a battery life of 12 minutes but that’s okay because it overheats in 11. These sterling features are already found in the latest GoPro cameras, so I can’t see why a helmet with one of the damn things built into it will be any different.

This will be a hard pass from anyone with a brain.

Sadly, probably not the ones from his first term. Whether or not his second term election was actually legitimate and the machines were not fucked with is certainly more questionable. Plus there is a 14th argument that Trump should not be qualified to serve as president after the January 6th coup attempt.

Anyway, Alito and Thomas were appointed by George W. to begin with. Part of this shitshow is also down to Obama failing to successfully appoint someone to replace Antonin Scalia under the objections of Mitch fucking McConnell.

I have, but in general I find Inkscape to be superior overall. The last time I tried the LibreOffice component it did not handle multiple pages very well.

Yes, and PHP can even implicitly (or explicitly!) cast variables between different types. Dot (.) is for strings and + is for math. It’s one of the few things about PHP that makes sense.

Your workflow in the main Corel suite apps is completely customizable. It has a default layout and shortcut configuration as well as a preset that it comes with which allegedly apes Illustrator’s, but you can if you prefer redefine almost everything.

You can choose what tools go in your toolbars, which options show in your drop down menus, where those toolbars are located, and you can even reconfigure the keyboard shortcuts for literally every command, including adding shortcuts to commands which don’t have one by default. I think the only limitation is that they can’t conflict with inbuilt OS hotkeys, e.g. you can’t bind anything to Alt + F4.

You can also perform macros and script the main suite apps using VBA which is only mildly opaque, but opens up the possibility of a world of batch processing tricks if you feel like going down that rabbit hole. I prefer to use Imagemagick for that sort of thing, personally.

This is a fairly common complaint with the output produced by any slicer using the Arachne perimeter generator, which includes Prusa and its derivatives by default now, and also Cura.

If you are using Prusa or a derivative you can switch back from the Arachne perimeter generator to Classic in your “Layer and Perimeters” tab. If you can’t stomach not using Arachne for whatever reason, you could try messing with the “Perimeter Transitioning Threshold Angle” setting. There is some additional wordage on all of the above here. TL;DR: The Arachne generator attempts to build perimeters out of variable line widths and explicitly does not go back and fill in tiny voids like these with a separate operation. The point is that it’s not supposed to have to, but as you can see it doesn’t always work out that way.

As others have pointed out, doing an ironing pass on your top layer may help conceal this from an aesthetic standpoint but won’t do anything for you structurally (i.e. for anyone running into this issue with a shape they hope to be watertight. The nuclear option would be to instruct the slicer to do an ironing pass on every layer which may help your print look boss at the end of things but will certainly also take forever.

This could still be a UMRP situation, then. Most of our UMRP or at least MAP agreements have a stipulation where we’re allowed to round the price up or down some small amount, typically up to 49 cents, in order to make the final figure a round dollar amount or make the pennies the same as the other items in our catalog (XXX.99, XXX.97, XXX.49, etc.) ostensibly for aesthetic purposes. This would also cover your system making all clearance items end in 96 cents or whatever the hell.

This is surely a case of corporate stupidity, but whether or not it’s Apple’s stupidity or Best Buy’s stupidity I couldn’t tell you. Possibly both!

Typically these UMRP agreements are void once a product becomes discontinued. At that point it can be put on genuine clearance. I have to deal with that with several vendors at my business; none of them give a rat’s ass about the price once they’re no longer listing a product themselves.

It’s more likely a combination of the two in this case; some C-suite asshole somewhere is hyperventilating about how much they’ve “invested” in stock in this product and sees clearancing it as a “loss” rather than what it is, which is unloading dead stock that they’ve already paid for at a value that is still at least greater than nothing and making room for inventory they’ll hopefully have better luck with next time. I imagine subtracting the 4 cents from the price is automatic, and is the tell their system adds to the price of any clearance item. Flagging it at clearance probably also marks it nonreturnable.

I presume for similar reasons, one of my local Walmarts still had up until very recently a back aisle endcap full of “clearance” electronics goods which included some 32 and 64 megabyte USB 1 flash drives for, I believe, a whole three cents less than MSRP, 30 or 40 bucks each. So no wonder they’re still there.

I imagine this is hypothetically possible given correct and sufficient training data, but that’s besides the point I think needs to be made, here.

Basically nothing anyone is programming in user space these days produces machine code, and certainly none of it runs on the bare metal of the processor. Nothing outside of extremely low power embedded microcontroller applications, or dweebs deliberately producing for oldschool video game consoles, or similar anyway.

Everything happens through multiple layers of abstractions, libraries, hardware privilege levels, and APIs provided by your operating system. At the bottom of all of those is the machine code resulting in instructions happening on the processor. You can’t run plain machine code simultaneously with a modern OS, and even if you did it’d have to be in x86 protected mode so that you didn’t trample the memory and registers in use by the OS or other applications running on it, and you’d have a tough-to-impossible time using any hardware or peripherals including networking, sound, storage access, or probably even putting output on the screen.

So what you’re asking for is probably not an output anyone would actually want.

This is the truth, right here. GIMP’s user interface is an entire F5 tornado’s worth of bullshit and it always has been. I always put it forth as the poster child of precisely how not to do it with any open source productivity software of any stripe and it’s consistently never failed to serve as an example for nigh-on decades.

If the GIMP people would just suck it up and broadly copy the layout of… well, pretty much anything, even MS Paint, it’d be a massive improvement to usability and would probably confer a tenfold increase to the number of users willing to try it out. Or at least stick with it for more than five minutes.

I’m sure it’s a perfectly capable program that’s able to do many things. I just can’t be bothered to put up with it. And this is coming from somebody who willingly uses FreeCAD.

Somehow in the transition from the bunch-of-disparate-floating-toolbar-windows paradigm to the current all-in-one design they’ve managed to make it slightly worse. GIMP’s feature discoverability is basically nonexistent, and the uninitated have no hope of figuring out how to do anything with it other than doodle with the preset brushes without resorting to tutorials.

I can’t believe the dockers (“dockable dialogs”) still take up so much space yet somehow there isn’t room to put title bars on them describing what they do even when you have one of them open and not just tabbed with an inscrutable icon at the top, nor is there any discoverable way to dismiss any of them once you’re done with them because that option is buried in a flyout menu for some reason.

I could go on forever. Don’t get me started.

I am a FOSS nerd for sure but GIMP sucks and it’s awful. I’d rather individually plink pixels into a bitmap manually from the command line with Imagemagick than use GIMP.

No idea, unfortunately. I have not touched any of the professional Adobe products in any detail since abandoning Premiere Pro back in probably around 2009. I briefly dabbled with a pirated version of Illustrator when I first got my X1 Yoga and discovered that it did not work correctly with the inbuilt stylus, full stop, and I abandoned it on the spot. I haven’t looked back since.

I did not choose the Corel suite on purpose at the beginning but when I was starting out working professionally it’s what the company worked for used in house, and I’ve stuck with it ever since due to CorelDraw and PhotoPaint doing everything I need and my continued familiarity with it. From what I understand Illustrator is more complex and for that reason some people insist it’s more “powerful,” but I suspect that really just means it’s more byzantine and harder to use. I’ve never not been able to do anything I needed to do with the Corel suite, except:

CorelDraw is to this day useless for editing .pdfs. Which is pretty damn rich for a professional graphics editing suite that costs $400 for a full license. I mean, it can, insofar as the file open and import dialogs will let you choose and load one, but it basically never works right and tends to produce a broken mess. Somehow Inkscape always works for me. So I have a copy of it around on all my machines alongside Corel, for those instances where I need to tweak or extract something from a .pdf and whoever gave it to me won’t provide the source.

Maybe! I have long maintained that if I ever luck into being obscenely wealthy, I will absolutely open some manner of food service or retail establishment similar to those I’ve worked at in the past, but not give a fuck about turning a profit and make a cornerstone of my business telling off customers for being the rude, self-centered, and entitled little shits that so many of them are. I’ll consider it a much needed public service.

You can wind up in the same trap in VB/VBA as well. It baffles me that in this current century there are still languages where text concatenation symbols and mathematical operators are the same character.

It’s even worse in the case of VB because you can also use & explicitly to concatenate strings, whereas + can be either a mathematical operator or a string concatenator depending on context and the types of variables you’ve put it between, which VB may or may not decide to cast into strings depending on an arcane set of conditions that nobody understands or remembers. So the solution was right there all along, i.e. just make & the only concatenator and reserve + for math only. But that would be too much like right.

I am a Corel kind of bird myself, having used it both professionally (which is how I got started with it) and at home for a couple of decades now. I will say two things about that:

In its current version Inkscape is roughly on par with were CorelDraw was in its 4.0 state or thereabouts (which I still have a copy of, on like seventeen 3.5" floppy disks!) which sounds like damning with faint praise but it really isn’t considering that Inkscape costs nothing to use.

However, one factor that I think most people don’t think about is that Inkscape is currently the best software I’ve ever used, bar none, for ripping apart .pdf documents made by other software, for the purposes of monkeying with their contents. And that’s a ten story tall flaming middle finger to Adobe, and completely obviates the need for 99.9999999% of all users to ever have to pay for the “pro” version of Adobe Acrobat or whatever they’re calling it this week just to be able to made minor adjustments to a .pdf.

These damn cash grab low effort video games these days, just reusing assets all the time…

(If you’d like to hear something you then won’t be able to unhear, try slowing down the noise that happens when you pick up a mushroom and playing it back.)

They’re also monstrously inefficient compared to mini splits even before you account for leaving a giant uninsulated hole in your wall with free movement of air between the inside and the outside.

I laugh every time I see one of these shoved in right below a brand new quadruple pane low-e argon filled latest ultra efficiency mega R value vinyl window. Yeah, the window is not where your air leak is, bro.

They’re under a pretty thick layer of clear coat or possibly a plastic shell. As for scratches, who knows. Invest in stock in Meguiar’s Plast-X, perhaps. I already have tons of the stuff lying around for the visors on my motorcycle helmets and the Slipstreamer windscreen on one of my bikes.

My continued dedication to making silly financial decisions so you can read about them is funded in small part by you, the reader, via your choice of Patreon or Ko-Fi.

Go on, live a little… vicariously. If you can’t afford a $100+ knife right now in these uncertain times, just be one of 100 or so people to give me a dollar and I can buy the knife and you get to read all about it.

This is the best scam job ever.

The one that leaps to mind is Miele. You know, the $1400 vacuum cleaner people. So that’s a little weird, but there it is.

Me! My front right pocket is for my knife only. Phone, lighter, flashlight, etc. go in other pockets.

Not necessarily so I don’t beat up my knife, although sometimes this is so. But more so my knife doesn’t beat up everything else.