Linux gamer, retired aviator, profanity enthusiast

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Oh man, reminds me of kissthisguy.com. Back when the internet was still run by humans.

    Tell you one I recently realized: Chattanooga Choo Choo. I don’t know who the “original” artist of that one was, it’s been a country-western staple for awhile. Came back into my attention recently because I was rewatching Hyce & KaN’s Let’s Podcast of Railroads Online, and one of several backing tracks is an instrumental version, so the song got stuck in my head. Singing it while doing dishes, I got to a lyric I never understood, and looked it up.

    The lyric I heard:

    There’s gonna be a certain party at the station

    Satin and lace, a hustacauphanie face

    I…didn’t know what “hustacauphanie” meant. My brain did that thing where I assume a word exists I’m not familiar with. Like, you know how sometimes women’s skin is compared to alabaster? Hustacauphanie might have been dead people talk for some luxurious or exotic material or…something. So I looked it up. The actual lyric is:

    There’s gonna be a certain party at the station,

    Satin and lace, I used to call ‘funny face’

    The songwriter managed to pack the entire second act of It’s A Wonderful Life into half a lyric. We don’t have compression algorithms that good anymore.



  • GPS itself is a one-way technology. On a basic level, the GPS satellites broadcast their precise location in space, and a very accurate timestamp from an onboard atomic clock. By comparing the difference in timestamps from a few satellites, you can determine how far away you are from each, thus deducing your own position. User devices only receive broadcasts from the GPS constellation; they don’t transmit. This is by design; GPS originated with the US military who wanted a navigation system usable anywhere in the world passively. You can use GPS without giving away your position by transmitting radio waves.

    The privacy nightmare is when you mix a GPS receiver in with all the other sensors, storage and radios found in a smart phone. How many apps on your phone have GPS privileges? Why does it want that?





  • Printables added incentives. They’ve gamified it, there’s badges and ranks and you can earn Prusa Points to redeem for filament or, if you collect enough, 3D printers! They have a marketplace where you can sell your STLs for actual money.

    It’s also full of slop. They ran a “Valentine’s Day” contest, so it became impossible to browse through pages and pages of red benchies with hearts added or flexi dragons with hearts added or any other stereotypical 3D printer shit printed in red with hearts added. Scroll past that, through the 67 memes and anime titties and you hit the thick layer of random geometric shapes.










  • So, there’s a fun fact about that related to the Zelda series. You know how the Hylian language kind of sneaks out in enemy names? Like, Stal- is a prefix meaning skeletal, -fos is a suffix meaning warrior, so a stalfos is a skeletal warrior? And a lizalfos is a lizard warrior? A stalchild is a skeletal child. -orm or -arm means worm creature, like Moldorm.

    Well, in the games prior to the N64, geld- meant desert or sand. The geldarm is a sand worm creature, the geldman is a sand man like enemy from Link to the Past. Then in Ocarina of Time there’s a race of women from the desert called Gerudo. Hmm.