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  1. Is it just me, or is everyone else who uses YouTube seeing ads for what looks like failed Kickstarter projects?

    The pressure washers and the very slim air conditioner in particular.

  2. My calculus book dates from the seventies, and introduces derivatives at page 90.

    youtube.com/shorts/3o3zcMTBPZc

  3. I took the "Is my blue your blue" test. Result in a hidden post below.

    ismy.blue/

  4. You can choose one desktop for your collection of Linux and BSD computers, a mix of laptops and desktops. Your only choices are MATE or Xfce. All of your computers will use that same desktop.

    Your computers are at most ten years old, and their operating systems are no more than a year old.

    What do you install?

    Feel free to add nuance below.

  5. @jalefkowit

    On the other hand, I feel confident in asserting Midnight Burger would never stop to pick him up.


    Cc @midnightburger

  6. Nice. Every twenty years or so I see balanced ternary computing pop up in theoretical designs, and I always get hopeful that we'll get a device, even if it was specialized and limited in scope.

    theregister.com/2026/03/18/ter

  7. From Kip Williams over at bsky:

    "I once heard Los Straitjackets play The Munsters theme, and at one point they actually lampshaded the hidden existence of the Mysterioso Pizzicato, upon which the theme is based. I had never noticed!"

    Anyway, could one of you kind of people help me out with a pointer to the exact track that does this? Eternal gratitude in advance."

    Kip is a terrific fellow, and helping him guarantees good karma.

  8. I'm not happy Shopify buttons (the purplish "Shop" button) are showing up on some sites that I've made purchases from.

    Worse, the layout is such that it becomes the default method of payment. I had to back out of the check-out process at one site and force it to use the payment method that I wanted, which I can't see an average shopper doing.

    It's a bad company run by bad people, and I really don't like having to jump through hoops to avoid using them.

  9. "Tell me Grammarian, have you ever seen a wild predicate dancing in the wind?"

    youtube.com/shorts/teUcza18RwE

  10. Scammers gotta scam.

    "This is a complicated, layered fraud, with two distinct versions and two different endpoints. But they both start the same way."

    writerbeware.blog/2025/11/14/i

  11. The music played in The Gap found a lot of fans.

    "Without missing a beat, he rattles off the lost playlists: June through November 1994, June to December 1992, October 2002, December 2002, July 2004 to October 2004, and on and on."

    theverge.com/report/790802/gap

  12. Really, Jewel grocery store? You had the correct name last year.

  13. I had my combination ceiling fan and lights replaced a while back. One feature that I never knew it had was a string of four candelabra or Christmas lights, I guess for mood lighting.

    Can it be repurposed? I don't recognize the plug, and I'm wondering if it can be adapted or if I should just snip it off and use something else.

  14. @7adi

    Who's "they"?

    This is literally a genre where people *do* read as a hobby, and one of the more popular series in it is about an alien machine culture (look up Ian Banks).

  15. @Lionesslady

    Yeah. Maybe the "we did it to make translation easier" reason is true. But in today's climate I worry about attempts to steal intellectual property or attempts to train LLMs.

  16. The U.S. Attorney's office *maybe* went over the top in claiming to know the motivations. It could also be as simple as overly enthusiastic nerdage and not wanting to have to leave their labs to do research.

    But yeah, this was stupid. At the very least the researcher at UofM should be fired.

    youtu.be/SApp0avAXco

  17. Hm. I honestly don't know how popular Tak is in real life. I've never seen a game in the wild, but that may be selection bias on my part.

    The video implies a wider following than I thought.

    youtu.be/Te0Wm_GCCAQ

  18. @Crovanian

    Yeah, shaking off their freight train heritage is long overdue.

    As an occasional user in the city (so not a regular user of a single line) it was always frustrating looking things up. And as Thom of TRA mentioned, keeping the compass direction in the name (a holdover from the original names) isn't terribly useful -- we already know which direction we're going.

    The "station of origin" idea made much more sense. I hope they adopt it.

  19. Good. The current naming of the Metra trains is absolutely terrible.

    youtu.be/aYaJoVgWPXA

  20. Someone here made an off-hand reference to Aurebesh, which of course meant I had to look it up. And now I want my programs to write all my decimal and hexadecimal digits in .

    Sadly, it's a letter scheme, not a constructed language (aka ) but on the plus side that means you can write your message out no matter what your native language is.

    Well done creator Stephen Crane.

    starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Aureb

  21. Well this is new.

    1) Start playing a YouTube video on Android phone.
    2) Turn the phone horizontally, getting the video into landscape mode.
    3) Turn the phone vertically again.
    4) The video freezes, and does not play no matter which way one holds it.

    Yes, I restarted the phone. Same results.

    Checking Manage Apps & Device... yup, YouTube app updated yesterday.

  22. @kellylepo

    I am apparently a charm quark, which seems backwards to me, though the claim that I like to team up with strange quarks is right on the money.

  23. I decided to spend the money. Also it finally dropped down to a two-digit price.

  24. I'm sad it took her passing for me to learn this, but all of Shelley Duvall's Faerie Tale Theatre episodes are on the Internet Archive.

    archive.org/details/fgtd5r

  25. You need to put a scripting language in your program. You may decide which features are important to you – size of script; size and complexity of interpreter in your program; speed; programming style. Your program runs on 32 and 64 bit cpus, and even manages 16 bit cpus minus some features.

    It's been arbitrarily decided that you can't use Python. The script interpreter will be written in-house.

    What do you choose? Summary of merits of each in the next post.


  26. Nice! Good to see it back in print. Spotted it in my neighborhood bookstore.


  27. I don't know what it says about me that a significant percentage of my friends are or have been copyeditors, but it may have something to do with the fact that I find articles like this very interesting.

    "I, a lifelong overhyphenator, still feel they deserve a place of honor alongside their siblings..."


    cincinnatireview.com/sea-moss-

  28. I just learned that there's a movement because the Chandra X-ray Observatory might need saving from budget cutting.

    savechandra.org/

  29. I was an early adopter of bulbs, and bought a lot of different brands (not that there were many brands at the time).

    I'm coming to the end of my supply of Switch bulbs (a brand that doesn't exist anymore).

    You may notice that we do better in terms of watts per lumen now.

  30. Did anyone experience TK Solver in the wild? It seemed like such an impressive piece of software back in the day, but the specialized programs I run into are all based on MathCAD, Maple, or Mathematica.

    Is it the lack of an M in the name?

    My own suspicion was that it's because it was released to be run on a 1980s PC, instead of on a VAX where the engineers were. But I remember really wanting a copy to run when I read the reviews.

    en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TK_Sol

  31. I dunno. My initial reaction to the is... so what's its scan code?

    I get it, unwanted advertising, imposition and extension of software bloat onto the keyboard, but... new key!

    It's not the extra dozen function keys that I want (and moved to the left side of the keyboard, WHERE THEY BELONG) but it's a new key, so let's adapt it for our own use.

  32. Let's get the hashtags out of the way:

    Back in the eighties Wenger released a left-handed Swiss Army knife. Blades, corkscrew, and scissors were mirror images of one of their regular SAKs.

    Years ago I put it away, because the scissors lost a screw and fell apart. I'd get it fixed someday, I told myself.

    Well... here we are. Is this something I can do myself, or should I get someone who knows what they're doing?

  33. The companies and their partners who are bidding for the next commercial have been shuffling their entries and swapping partners.

    arstechnica.com/space/2023/10/

  34. Yeesh. More details on this, from a professor of archeology at the Other Site.

    "It gets worse. First, @\WitsUniversity is proud of this unethical publicity stunt. Second, one of the fossils is part of a type specimen. Type specimens are international standards of reference and therefore are supposed to be preserved in perpetuity. [followed by a link to University of web page announcement]"