I saw a video a few weeks back of a woman cleaning out layers of “decent quality insulated cups” from her cupboard, several each of a decade’s worth of fads. Those are going in landfills en masse before the 21st century is out.

beat me to it.

Well, English isn’t a prescriptive language, so if we just start saying “dongus” they’ll put it in the dictionary.

Anyone got a recommendation for a good bluetooth dongus?

Oh there’s gonna be Gen Alpha or Gen Beta kids filling dumpsters with Stanley cups, anime figurines, gundam models and retro consoles in the 2060s. “Why did my grandmother think this was cool?”

They probably didn’t capitalize “app” so as to avoid confusion with Windows App. Which is what they’ve renamed Remote Desktop to.

You can’t reach these decisions on normal people cocaine. You need the special executive cocaine for this shit.

I dumpster dived a Nokia Lumia tablet that had RT on it. It got used as a kitchen Youtube viewer for a couple months before I gave it away.

7 was about the last time that it felt like Microsoft was trying to make a good product that was useful for its customers. They’ve always been anticompetitive sniveling greedy little shits that would buy out or otherwise kill competition, but used to be they’d try to sell new versions of Windows or Office on features they could reasonably expect customers to want. “It does spell check in real time now! We’ve included USB plug-and-play! Your PC with a modem is also a fax machine now! We made a 3D graphics library for gaming enthusiasts! We ship or OS with a media player that can play DVDs and MP3s out of the box! Here’s a free video editor!”

I…don’t remember that happening after Windows 7. Windows 8 was an attempt to cash in on the mobile craze, they’re gonna make Windows a tablet product now! Except a lot of computers didn’t have tablet controls, and a lot of desktop PC software doesn’t work with tablet controls. They made a confusing annoying buggy hell mess. Win 10…I remember people hating it when it came out, they REALLY preferred 7, I was on Linux by that time and didn’t care that much, and Win 10 was almost a rolling release; it changed a lot over its lifetime. They’d go all in on something, pack Win 10 full of features, and then the fad would fade and they’d pull it back out. 3D, AR, a couple other things. And now we’ve got the openly user hostile Windows 11. “It Harms Your Family!^®”

Was that Windows 8.1, or Windows RT?

There’s a circle in hell for game publishers that only wrote “disc 1” on a CD or DVD (or floppy, back in the day) and not “disc 1 of 3”. I think it’s the one where they have to wade forever in shit.

My grandmother’s house. I have two sewing machines, a 6-place dining set, fine china to serve 8, two sewing machines, several rickety old pillar tables and candle stands, a cabinet full of random glassware, a drawer full of ratty, yellowed old doilies my father “remembers from when I was a kid.” At least three unassworthy antique rocking chairs that are too delicate to serve a purpose…So much shit my father wants, but won’t move into his own heavily cluttered house.

Shape shifting tables are actually quite common! There are quite a few types:

• Tilt Top Chair-tables. Hinged closed, it’s a table about the size of a poker table. Hinged open, it’s an armchair, with the tabletop forming the back.
• Drop-leaf tables. I’ve seen these in several shapes but the typical pattern is a long, thin rectangular table with hinged panels that can be folded up to extend the top. They can be folded to as little as 18 inches wide and stowed against a wall, you can open the free side with it still against the wall to seat a few people, or you can slide it away from the wall, open both leaves and have a full size table. Stowage of side chairs is a separate issue. The shakers were fond of drop-leaf tables, and made some truly huge ones that could seat a dozen people or more when unfolded, but would stow very efficiently.
• Extending tables. My dining room table is one of MANY examples, you’ll find them all over the United States because it’s objectively the worst of the lot: The long apron rails aren’t continuous but attached by a slide mechanism. The tabletop is split in half, so you get two table halves that can slide relative to each other. A gap can be opened wide enough to admit one or two lift-out sections to make the table longer. My dining room table can collapse to seat 4 around a (mostly) round table or extended to seat 6. All the additional hardware plus the two extra apron rails necessary make the table heavier than it should be, the slides never work right and if you prefer to have it collapsed, where do you stow the leaves? I guess with the two side chairs you nearly never use.

My understanding is there are several related things at play:

1. The jello effect. So, once upon a time, serving gelatin was reserved for the wealthy because making gelatin from scratch means rendering animal bones. You’ve got to be rich enough to pay servants/own slaves enough to do that for you. Then after WWII, there was suddenly a mass-produced easy to use product on the shelf called Jell-O. So in the 50’s and 60’s you saw an explosion in popularity of jello molds because serving gelatin was, to quote a Redditor I once read, “an impressive feat of housewifery.” Fancy dishes were similar; prior to WWII, fine decorated porcelain dishes were expensive, after WWII there were factories churning them out, and now Gladys from Topeka could have a floral print gilded gravy boat.
2. Fancy dishes, and housewares in general, were marketed HARD to young women. Macy’s popularized the wedding registry, supermarkets started offering catalogs…it was common for young women to receive a portion of a china set for most of her adolescent gift-receiving occasions; Christmases, birthdays, high school graduation…this was the era of the hope chest, an entire industry sprang up for manufacturing pieces of furniture designed for young women to squirrel away a physical dowry in. You just weren’t a proper middle class lady unless you could come up with a fancy set of dishes to serve a Christmas dinner worthy of a Norman Rockwell painting on.

So these damn dishes that can’t be machine washed were manufactured in the quadrillions; Gramma got really protective over them, she was taught to value them from a very young age, and they’re delicate, easily broken, her particular set hasn’t been manufactured since the Truman administration so in a way they’re irreplaceable, and they must be hand-washed. So only a few Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners, “special occasions” were served on them, and then by the 80’s gramma got sick of washing them, boomer dad “remembers that from when he was a kid” and thus they’re more sacred than God, God’s brother Jod and God’s nephew Zhod. To a boomer, there is no occasion special enough to break out gramma’s china, it’d be like eating dinner off of the original copy of the Declaration of Independence. Unthinkable.

Millennials, who eat a lot of meals out of paper and plastic takeout containers, have no attachment to those damn dishes and haul them to thrift stores by the truckload.

which is why I have a wood shop.

Oh yeah none of it matters, gramma’s china is mass manufactured catalog crap.

Microsoft is basically saying that Windows should not be used anymore in those.

I would agree with them.

“custom themed Gnome” is enough to scare me off. Theming is one of the many GUI fundamentals that the Martian cock smokers over at Gnome hate with every fiber of their alien ganglia.

It’s a government website, it wasn’t made by or for humans. Go renew a ham license; fcv.gov is hateful buttgarbage.

The FAA had to alter IACRA because of me. Well, to be honest it was their own damn fault.

IACRA is the system where you apply online for pilot’s licenses and such; instead of filling out an 8710-11 form and mailing it to the local FSDO or whatever, you do that on the internet.

I was applying for my light sport instructor license. One of the prerequisites to become any kind of aviation instructor is to demonstrate knowledge of the Fundamentals of Instruction. They accept four things:

• Scoring a 70 or above on the FAA’s FoI knowledge test within the last 24 calendar months
• Proof of employment at an accredited college or university as a professor
• A state-issued teaching certificate for grade 7 or higher
• Any other FAA issued instructor certificate, logic being is, if you’re already an instructor, you’ve presented evidence of one of the previous three.

I took and aced the FoI test fairly early in my CFI training…so early that the test result was threatening to expire. So rather than take it again, I decided to take the test for Basic Ground Instructor, which essentially made the test score permanent.

The day finally came for my CFI-SP checkride, I start filling out the IACRA form…and the website will only accept a knowledge test score. I call the examiner, she pulls it up, goes “Huh. Well, looks like you get to fill out a paper 8710 and I get to call Washington.”

So if you’re the web developer the government hired to make and/or fix that form, I was that guy! And since it’s a US Government website, I bet you did it in the most bullshit unusable way possible.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do with my old one…I think there may be an update in the future for the Prusa to the MMU, and I might keep my old Folger around for TPU parts and other things. Don’t know where I’ll put the old machine, is the main thing.

I’ve got a Prusa Mk4S on its way; I won’t be in the geezers club much longer.