It might be my pickup truck.

It might be my toilet. Every moving part in the thing can be bought at every hardware store in town.

My washing machine is pretty good, it’s a Kenmore 80 series, it’ll probably outlast me.

As far as I know those days have never arrived.

In the 1980’s you’d buy a computer and the diskette drive would eat disks, the tape drive would fail to load because the volume was turned up too loud, or the software was just badly written by an amateur and it would kill multiple people with high doses of radiation..

In the 1990’s the gaming computer as we know it today took shape, but you just go ahead and put one together. Install a graphics accelerator card or a sound card in Windows 3.1 or DOS. Go ahead. Windows 98, featuring USB Plug And Play! It just works!

It’s the year 2000! nothing bad will happen! Windows XP is so much better with so many new features, granted about half of your old Win9x software isn’t going to work because this is basically NT Home Edition. It’s the 21st century, computers are always online and have basically no built-in security. What could go wrong?

It’s 2010, and it seems these smart phones are here to stay. No problem, we’ll just rebuild the entire internet for tiny, vertical displays and release an entire generation of Windows as a touch-first UI. Nothing’s gonna go wrong.

It’s 2020, so put your mask on! Between a containership jackknifing across the Suez canal, traffic jams at ports because covid, impending political bullshit, and the rising trend of using AI to “write” software and said AI’s insatiable thirst for hardware meaning entire brands of computer parts are shutting down, maybe you should just go to the store, buy a stick of sidewalk chalk for $17 and just play a goddamn game of hopscotch instead.

One of my neighbors is The_Booty_Warrior. My hypothesis is that’s the pear-shaped Army chick that lives across the street, but it might be the balding middle aged family man two doors down.

Sally Ride married a man. What’s your point?

That, and they’ve done the best job at sabotaging the public’s ability to understand the spec in the first place.

I have already heard things like “unalive” defended as youth slang rather than Orwellian doublespeak.

Windows 11’s TPM requirements.

I recently built a brand new computer for my uncle. He was running a 3rd gen Core i7 machine running Windows 7. I get a call that it won’t boot. I do manage to get it booted, the SMART data shows the hard drive is on its last eyebrows, and anyway he’s running an OS that’s three generations out of date.

I’m a big Linux user, I’ve got my aunt running Linux Mint. My uncle is such a dunce at computers I don’t think I can do that, because he lacks the vocabulary to tell me what he wants his computer to do. “I might use it for business.” In his line of work that could mean anything from going to quickbooks.com to needing some piece of Windows-only shitware. So “Get a .exe from somewhere” had to remain intact.

For everything he actually does with that computer, that old 3rd gen i7 was fine. Replace the hard disk with a SATA SSD, maybe replace the weird 2-4-2-4 some but not all of it is dual channel 12GB of RAM with two 8 GB sticks of DDR3 and let it roll…except no currently supported version of WIndows runs on this computer.

For a large number of people, computers became objectively fast enough in 2015. That’s about when SSDs became standard equipment, fixing any hardware reason for “damn this thing is slow” even out of midrange consumer hardware. Gamers, home labbers and AI startups need more power, the rest of the world doesn’t. And that was a problem for Microsoft.

I do shop at Best Buy, usually for computer parts and accessories. Because my local alternatives for computer hardware and peripherals, AV gear etc. are Wal-Mart and maybe our increasingly pathetic Staples. Or Amazon. Best Buy is literally the only place within 20 miles to buy a GPU in a brick and mortar store.

I don’t watch TV ads though. Is this chick a spokesman?

Mario analogy. In Super Mario games, a green mushroom gives you an extra life, a chance to start over from a point in the past. A red mushroom makes Mario bigger, allowing him to survive some damage that would have killed him. Also in many games it makes him able to do things he can’t when small. RAID arrays often run faster than individual disks would.

It’s not an extra life, it’s another health point. Red mushroom, not green mushroom.

I also have a Synology NAS. It’s okay. I got a mid-range two-bay one. I could be happier with it. Also, I heard that they’re going toward requiring their brand hard drives, so I’m not buying another one.

Now, when that containership a few years ago wrecked and containers full of BMW motorcycles washed ashore…

You know what the problem with USB-C is? In 2010 or so, you could have a fistful of unique USB cables, A-B, A-MiniB, A-MicroB, 3A-3B, 3A-Micro3B, A-Lightning, they’re all different, but you can look at the cable and tell exactly what it does. Most of them are identical in capabilities but have physically different plugs, and the two USB 3 cables are also identical in capabilities but with different client side plugs. ALL of them will plug in and work in the same host-side port.

With USB-C, I can have a fistful of visually similar cables, with drastically different capabilities, and I have no way of telling them apart. The USB consortium has been inconsistent with their branding, it has been applied even more inconsistently or even fraudulently by manufacturers, and there’s no way to inspect the cable’s features without trying it to see if it works.

One actual reason I can think of is they haven’t passed customs inspections. There’s a reason they ask you if you have any fruit or vegetables when crossing national borders, or even some state borders in the US: To prevent the spread of invasive pests. All there need to be is some Brazilian Screaming Mites on those bananas and no plants will ever grow on the island of Britain again.

I’d say Alec of Technology Connections has increased in quality. Started good and got better.

This is the LockPickingLawyer, and today we have a-

lock spontaneously performs an impression of the bluesmobile at Daley Plaza

…in any case, that’s all I have for you today…

You will sometimes hear older pilots refer to a magnetic compass as a “whiskey compass.” Magnetic compasses are usually filled with some liquid to dampen it so it’s ever possible to read; an air-filled compass never stops swinging back and forth. Water would be the obvious choice, but then you’ll have an algae filled compass.

Legend has it that the US Navy in World War II used ethanol to fill the compasses. And then the planes would come back with empty compasses because the navy pilots drank it. So they switched to kerosene. And then the marines drank it.

The oldest single player game I keep going back to is Super Mario World on the SNES, Copyright 1990.

I will occasionally play games older than that, but the SNES is where my actual nostalgia begins.

Ahoy. video game documentarian. Makes 1 or 2 very high quality videos a year and has done so for years.

Vorta. Qt based front end for BorgBackup.