Posts by Tachikoma 191 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Oct 2012
I dug out my Sega Saturn the other week as I fancied some old school Sega Rally, I had to turn it off after half an hour, the warping textures and inconsistent framerate made me feel nauseous. I even fired up the original Tomb Raider and had the same problem, 2D games were fine (Baku Baku Animal is still amazing) but the early 3D console games are just an unpleasant experience now.
We have to use it in work, the first time I loaded it up I had the urge to type !list and see if there was a copy of "Photoshop-2-0-Floppy-Disk-Rip-and-Crack.par"
The most annoying part was when they added our GitHub to the commands and it endlessly spammed the chatroom every time someone did anything with the repo.
Although I wonder if the 3-D scanners are also scanning paint colours, in which case painting over it before scanning may not be the best solution - might make it a 2-step process, though...
Some can do this, but the kind your average nerd interested in knocking out bootleg toys will be using a cheap scanner that just uses a laser to create a point cloud with no colour information.
3D printing is changing the world, but counterfitting shouldn't be a worry unless the counterfit is better than the original! who would buy a counterfit engine part? and who wants a counterfit toy?
I dunno, my better half has a tendon condition and was showing me a video of a device that stretches the tendons to relieve pain, the device itself is pretty expensive for what it is (an ovoid bar with grips on each end), so I spent all of 4 minutes in Fusion360 designing a near enough exact copy, two hours 3D printing and she had one, I will stick the model on Thingiverse tonight so others can try it.
I actually had counterfeit Ninja Turtle toys as a kid, we used to go to the cattle market on the last Sunday of the month during the car boot sales and I would fill a carrier bag with bootleg toys fresh from some dudes garage for a couple of quid. The paint job was comical at best, but the molding was almost spot on, for £20 he would sell you a set of molds and you could knock out your own figures. Wish I bought one and kept it, would be a fun little keepsake.
I used to work for Tiny Computers when I were a wee lad and fresh out of college. They used to do the same tricks and the computer was only advertised on a small print out in a plexi-glass standee at the back of the store for two weeks before it appeared in the catalogue at the "reduced" price. One time the computer was legitimately a good deal even at the inflated price, and the "reduced" stock was always ridiculously low, maybe 20 units across the region just to get people in through the door and sell them something more expensive. I tried to buy the PC at the inflated price and got a call from the regional manager and was told explicitly that if I tried to go through with the sale that my time with the company will be short lived.
I dunno, I have gone hiking in Japan and some old baba's and oji's in 5 layers of clothing easily overtook me in 35C and 90% humidity. Japanese pensioners are made out of harder stuff than most give them credit for, but yeah the "granny is 117 years old, no you can't see her, she's sleeping, what do you mean there's a funny smell coming from her room?" is rather too common for my liking.
No point in money if you're not around to spend it.
I dunno, I come from a relatively poor family and worked up to a decent wage, I want to leave my kids as much as I can so they have an easier life.
If my kids are loaded though, I'm retiring early and moving into their spare room, they can wipe my shitty arse for a change!
My fear is that the Capita goons are not beyond attempting to use the same 'device capable of receiving' argument.
They can try, but then you just point them to the TV Licensing website and show them the section that states "only if you watch/record live TV (and iPlayer)"
Be polite, but don't take any shit from them, they live to intimidate and there's nothing more frustrating for them than being warmly welcomed in and quoted their own rules.
Same reason you still need a TV licence if you have a device capable of receiving OTA TV broadcasts even if you never plug the thing into an aerial/STB-connected-to-aerial-or-TVOIP-feed.
Completely and utterly wrong, you only need one if you watch or record live TV (and now iPlayer)
I have 3 TVs in my house and no licence, completely legally, one TV is plugged into my PC as a monitor, one is plugged into the XBOX in my sons room and the other is on the blink. No aerials have ever been plugged in, the nice Capita (is it still Capita?) hired thugs turn up every now and then, see the aerial is on the opposite side of the room to the TV and leave happy. Never needed to pay for one, never will and TV Licensing give me a shiny letter saying I don't need one.
I remember a few years ago it was a "thing" to put a particular search string into Google and it would give you the results for all the unsecured/open IP webcams and you could (allegedly) sit there watching nightclub door security cameras or baby monitors, etc. No doubt someone is crafting the search string for these devices as we speak.
Oh man, that is epic comedy material, and those comments, she really can't see anything but conspiracy no matter how eloquently people point out how utterly wrong she is. The film is phenomenal, out of all the subtle and not so subtle themes she only focuses on the "gender" of the robot and the main character being a white knight.
The problem is, there's no point recommending it as a career if they're going to run into toxic workplaces.
I feel the opposite is true, you are assuming women aren't able to stand up for themselves and challenge bad behavior. We should be telling young women to go out there and make a difference, not sit by the wayside until it is handed to them on a plate. My daughter is 3 years old, but I will be damned if I'm going to raise a delicate snowflake, I'm going to teach her to stand up for herself and fight for what she wants.
Of course it "flies" I haven't paid for a TV license for years, they send someone over periodically, I catch them off guard by warmly welcoming them in, show the TV with PC/PS3/etc connected in one corner of the room, I show the neatly bundled aerial lead tucked away in the other corner of the room, never to meet and they wander out of the door looking all disgruntled. Naturally I alt+tab out of Kodi before answering the door.
BBC has plenty of adverts, for its own stuff and there's plenty of product placement and endorsement. Just look at the disproportionate amount of positive coverage Apple get both on the BBC news website, BBC Click, news, etc, funnily enough most of the presenters use Apple products, and I'm sure they paid full price for them, honest. Then there's things like the Book Review which is just licence payer funded advertising for the author.
we won't be using them to compose emails just yet
Shame, an email/text message quantum app would be perfect for when you need to send a message to her indoors while in the pub, you type in drunken drawl and it calculates all the possibilities of what to send in the manner least likely to result in sleeping on the sofa.
* As in “small electric motor rotating an asymmetric weight to make your phone vibrate”, not “intimate massager”, you dirty-minded people.
Reminds me of school, a particularly nerdy young man build a "shock box" out of some bits and bobs, much hilarity ensued with the class shocking themselves until he made the comment that if you shocked a certain part of your body then it caused an "eruption" from somewhere intimate. Cut to the entire class running to the toilets to wash their hands.
Never underestimate the ability for kids to turn something innocuous into something rude. Anyone remember the Harry Potter "vibrating broomstick" and all the user reviews mentioning how their teenage daughters loved playing with it in their room?
http://www.methodshop.com/2003/12/harry-potter-broomstick.shtml
Scroll to the bottom of the article.
So I take it your body is a temple, you don't have a cup of tea/coffee in the morning, you don't have a bar of chocolate in the afternoon or don't have a swift shandy in the evening?
Cigarettes contain thousands of chemicals, a lot of them cause addiction, nicotine is only a small part of why people smoke, and since switching to vaping, once the initial itch has gone from all the other shyte they put in cigarettes, my nicotine intake has dropped substantially as I find I just don't like the aftertaste and I don't wake up a quivering wreck until I have had a puff, unlike with cigarettes. I could probably drop to zero nicotine and not notice, but I still enjoy the social aspects, fiddling with bits of wire and mixing my own (often horrendous) flavours of juice at home like some mad scientist.
What started as a way to get off the cancer sticks has turned into an enjoyable hobby that is no more or less cool looking than a middle aged man in spandex with a reinforced gusset riding a £5000 pushbike through the morning gridlock trying to convince himself people are staring out of jealousy.
To block Signal messages, these countries would also have to block all of google.com.
I think Signal underestimate how much control these places want over their populaces, and I'm sure other search engines would be more than happy to take up the slack, and probably offer some "under the counter" services Google won't.
I think the problem is worse than they think, in my city my phone proudly declares 4G, but I can't even open my email as it's so congested, if I need to use Google maps or something I have to force it to 3G which is nearly as slow or rob the WiFi at a Wetherspoons.
Beer icon because "I only went to the pub to use their WiFi dear"
A VPN shifts the internet breakout to some other despot country. No?
Yes, but I doubt Hungary/Poland/Switzerland/wherever really care or could do anything meaningful or nefarious with knowing "VPNUser1232157656784" enjoys a particular flavour of grumble flick, unlike the "honourable" Ms May.
I have been drilling the idea of VPNs into my son for years, he quite often asks "what country are we in today Dad?"
If he can't bypass a simple geo-lock then all he has to do is ask me how, I won't ask what for, his business is his own, not mine or Herr Mays.
Hmmm not convinced, on the Playstation Portable there was a game called Metal Gear Ac!d 2 which bundled a Google Cardboard-like box with lenses that you slipped over the screen which turned the PSP into a pseudo VR/stereogram viewer and let you play the game and watch gravure videos of Japanese girls in sexy army costumes in 3D. This was in 2005, the iPhone came out in 2007, Google Cardboard in 2014. Re-purposing portable screens isn't new or thanks to St Steve.
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