dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

I take umbrage at all these popsci articles that keep breathlessly insisting that the new wondermaterial is as “strong” as steel without meaningfully specifying how. Because inevitably it only matches just one mechanical property of steel, if it even manages that (so also look out for weasel words like “nearly as strong as steel”).

As strong in terms of tensile strength? Shear strength? Hardness? Elastic modulus? Abrasion resistance?

In this case it’s compressive strength. No other properties are mentioned except weight. That’s not terribly impressive from a mechanical engineering standpoint. From a chemistry standpoint, sure. But steel – even then, there are oodles of potential steel alloys – has a rough compressive strength ranging from 500-ish to a maximum of about 1500 MPa. Big whoop. Most ceramics meet or handily exceed that, and quite a lot of them are significantly lighter than steel. So why don’t we build airplanes out of those? Because their other properties are completely unsuitable for the task, especially for large pieces. In particular they’re much too brittle.

You want to know what else has a compressive (and tensile!) strength of up to 500 MPa? Aluminum. Guess what we build airplanes out of.

This is so. At the bottom of the article it says:

To help us give customers who use T-Life a smoother experience, we are rolling out a new tool in the app that will help us quickly troubleshoot reported or detected issues. This tool records activities within the app only and does not see or access any personal information. If a customer’s T-Life app currently supports the new functionality, it can be turned off in the settings under preferences.

So yes, it can only see itself, i.e. within the T-Mobile app. It’s still dumb.

I’m not well versed enough in Android app development to answer whether or not one userspace app can even access the screen contents of another app without root or special permissions, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there are several roadblocks in that path on the part of the OS for obvious reasons.

Dan did it first!

Is “Oh, exploitable” still a thing?

I stole this. Flipped colors, pegged background color to white, foreground to pure black. This is now suitable for printing on plain paper without wasting a ton of ink or toner:

Edit: And I centered the second line of text a little better. Why not.

It’s only 1280 pixels wide but it looks pretty nice laser printed with 4 to a sheet of 8.5x11 paper.

Can confirm; I used to manage a hardware store with an attached small engine repair shop. There’s a reason Briggs and Stratton abbreviates so readily to “BS.”

They’ve been trying to do the absolute bare minimum possible to maximize profits and making their machines flimsy and deliberately uneconomical to repair for several decades, now. All I can say is that we ought to be thankful for aftermarket parts.

I think we can all safely assume that EV’s are not relevant to this discussion.

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You can just right click on it and hit “remove from toolbar.” That’s all it takes.

Putting it back in my toolbar for the purposes of taking this screenshot was actually more clicks.

You can actually do this with most, but not all, of the toolbar items. You can even 86 the refresh button that way if you’re feeling truly perverse.

New cars absolutely do have dipsticks; they’re the ones designing them.

Notwithstanding the potential for software bugs or other issues inherent with monitoring oil levels only digitally, monitoring just the oil level is not the sole purpose of the dipstick. Being able to physically see a sample of the engine oil is a vital diagnostic tool and can alert an owner or mechanic to a head gasket problem or other oil contamination issue, or if something is grinding metal shavings into the oil, etc.

For what it’s worth I have yet to actually physically see a new vehicle without an oil dipstick. I guess they’re out there, but so far I’ve been lucky. But I have already had quite a few automatic transmission equipped cars without a transmission dipstick cross my path, and that’s already enough of a pain in the ass. If you’re lucky there’s a side plug in the transmission case you can use to check the fluid condition and level (after crawling under the vehicle…) but in a lot of cases there isn’t even that – your only recourse is to drop the transmission pan off entirely, which causes you to lose all the fluid in the process. And you’ll probably also have to replace the gasket while you’re at it. Needless to say, this is an incredibly moronic design decision.

Regardless of whatever it did or however it did it, the way Pocket was suddenly shoved in everyone’s faces by default definitely left a bad taste in a lot of mouths (including mine) and everybody just considered it more unasked-for adware. Especially since in its default configuration about a quarter of what it serves you is indeed flat out ads, when most of us are using Firefox with uBlock or similar specifically not to see ads.

Pocket provided a feature I suspect few people actually used, and in the process had an obnoxious presentation that a lot of people actively disliked. Add me to the list of people who won’t be sad to see it go.

I want my browser developer developing browsers, not other ancillary side projects and certainly not “curating content” or whatever the fuck.

I would not be at all surprised to learn that Pocket costs Mozilla a nontrivial amount of money and manpower to maintain, what with doing all that curation and all, and provides them bupkis in return.

Pocket absolutely would suggest you articles (and ads) by default unless you explicitly told it not to in your settings. This is separate from the tiles of frequently visited pages from your history.

The second slider down is your history/pinned shortcuts on the home screen. The third one is recommended junk, “Powered by Pocket.”

More info on that here, for however long this will do anyone any good:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/pocket-recommendations-firefox-new-tab

It was redundant anyway, since it was just bookmarks with extra steps. But you can sync bookmarks between devices with Firefox anyway and you’ve been able to for years, so I have no idea why they kept it around other than to use it as a vehicle to push ads (because it seemed like roughly 25% of the “articles” it suggested to you were actually ads). I can’t say as I’m too sad to see it go.

Fakespot could arguably have been useful on paper, but I have to admit I never used it because I treat most online reviews as if they’re bullshit anyway.

I don’t hate Discord, I simply hate that so many projects and companies have unanimously decided to use it as the wrong tool for the wrong job.

It’s fine for its intended use case, which is bickering with my friends about video games and fiction, and spamming each other with .gifs and meme images.

They couldn’t possibly make it any more garbage than it actually is.

In the middle of an audio book in any media player but you connect to your car? Too bad! Android Auto is its own separate little world and your playlist position is different in the car vs. out of it.

Someone sent you a text but ye gods forbid, they sent it before you started driving your car? Too bad! You can’t see past text messages, just the ones that were sent while you were driving. I guess if somebody texted you an address in advance you’ll have to fish your phone out of your pocket.

Somebody’s calling you who is already in your address book. Too bad! We’ll only show the phone number on the screen and not their contact name.

Etc., etc.

Android Auto is basically useless. My car stereo supports both, so I just screen mirror if I actually care about functionality. I only use Android Auto itself when all I want is a map.

Especially when the poster does not disclose that it’s AI.

The perpetual Youtube rabbit hole occasionally lands on one of these for me when I leave it unsupervised, and usually you can tell from the “cover” art. But only if you’re looking at it. Because if you just leave it going in the background eventually you start to realize, “Wow, this guy really tripped over the fine line between a groove and rut.” Then you click on it and look: Curses! Foiled again.

And golly gee, I’m sure glad Youtube took away the option to oughtright block channels. I’m sure that’s a total coincidence.

W/e. I’m a have-it-on-my-hard-drive kind of bird. Yt-dlp is your friend. Just use it to nab whatever it is you actually want and let your own media player decide how to shuffle and present it. This works great for big name commercial music as well, whereupon the record labels are inevitably dumb enough to post songs and albums in their entirety right there you Youtube. Who even needs piracy sites at that rate? Yoink!

I still maintain that the first Goomba in 1-1 probably has the highest kill count of any single creature in the universe.

No it won’t.

240 million grandmas, cheapskate businesses, and cash-strapped public schools will continue to use whatever operating system their computers already have, forever, until they break, security implications be damned.