

You won’t scratch your stovetop with a razor blade. The ceramic glass top is significantly higher up on the Mohs scale than the steel razor blade.
Progenitor of the Weird Knife Wednesday feature column. Is “column” the right word? Anyway, apparently I also coined the Very Specific Object nomenclature now sporadically used in the 3D printing community. Yeah, that was me. This must be how Cory Doctorow feels all the time these days.


You won’t scratch your stovetop with a razor blade. The ceramic glass top is significantly higher up on the Mohs scale than the steel razor blade.


Random aside to rant about consumer OCR.
Recently for my work I had to do some OCR stuff to get some numbers out of a document that the vendor in their infinite wisdom refused to provide in an editable/selectable form. I.e. they just slapped a .jpeg onto a page and saved it as a .pdf. (This is a separate thing that infuriates me.)
Anyway, what I’m actually here to complain about is the baffling phenomenon that every single piece of OCR software I tried ranging from open source to trials of commercial programs, to the thingy that came with one of our all-in-one printer/scanners, and everything in between is that it’s somehow still exactly as crap as the lousy OCR programs we were all struggling with in the late '90s.
I have absolutely no idea how this facet of technology in particular has utterly and categorically failed to make any forward progress whatsoever in literal decades. I’ve personally worked on machine vision driven pick-and-place machines capable of accurately determining the orientation of densely printed cosmetics tubes, among other items, and placing them all face up in a box several times per second. Yet somehow the latest and greatest OCR transcription algorithms still can’t tell a 5 from a 6 or ye gods forbid an S, or an L from a J, or an M from a collection of back and forward slashes, all despite being handed crisp high contrast seriffed text that’s at least 60 pixels high.
Given the incredibly low bar for performance here given that apparently every single programmer involved just walked away circa about 2001, I can’t imagine that the current slop generation machines fare any better…


You don’t have to read the release notes. It literally puts it front and center in your face the first time you launch it after this update is applied.


It might be. If so, he gets away with no plate. I dunno about CO but where I am you “technically” don’t need a helmet to ride a 50cc but it’s still obviously not a great idea.
Edit: Actually, you can see the edge of one of the round headlights peeking out of the side there, which I missed. Yeah, it’s a Ruckus (or a clone thereof).


I’m more concerned about the cat. The rider can take his own risks, but the cat is not capable of articulating its opinions on the matter.
That appears to be a Honda Navi, which has me wondering why it has a low power scooter sticker (the blue thing) rather than a license plate. As far as I can tell Colorado should class that as a full-on motorcycle with all of the obligations required thereof, since the displacement limit is 50cc and the Navi is 109cc.


What you described as impossible to find is how basically every security DVR system has worked for decades. I have two Lorex branded boxes at work and a Night Owl one at home, and neither of them require anyone’s “cloud.”
They’re remotely accessible via your browser or a smartphone app although, yes, you do need to know your public facing IP address and poke the appropriate hole in your firewall for it.


Every X seconds is pretty generous. My Subaru only seems to poll the sensors every few minutes, and only when the wheel speed is above 35 MPH or so, at least via what I’ve observed with my diagnostic tool. The sensors are battery powered and I suspect the low refresh rate is a deliberate gambit to conserve battery life.
You are correct on the ID point, though. They can contain up to 16 hexidecimal digits as far as I’ve seen, and while there doesn’t seem to be any mechanism for truly enforcing uniqueness the chances of an ID collision are so low that you may as well consider it impossible. Some aftermarket sensors can be wirelessly reprogrammed with an arbitrary ID, though, which may be of marginal utility for the truly paranoid. (My diagnostic tool can do this, too. The intended use case is cloning the ID from an OEM sensor for a car whose TPMS relearn procedure is more trouble than it’s worth.)
Regardless of your vehicle’s polling frequency, most sensors can be woken up any time by a specific radio pulse, which my diagnostic tool can also do, and the range is surprisingly long. Just my car’s own BMS where the receiver is (above the rear left wheel well) can pick up the sensors in my snow tire rims even when said rims are sitting in their storage rack inside my garage, about three car lengths away.


Some of them certainly are. You can also get air rifles with built in “moderators” (i.e. suppressors) that are surprisingly quiet. Precharged pneumatic air rifles can be very powerful and also extremely accurate. I have a relatively cheap Hatsan that can, provided I’m using pellets that it likes, repeatably put pellets through the same hole in my target from as far away as I can get from it in my yard (probably about 20 yards) and do so about 30 times in succession before I have to pump it back up again. Its built in moderator makes it quiet enough at the muzzle that the sound of the hammer hitting the gas valve is actually louder than the report from firing.
Watch out: Researching this type of thing may send you tumbling down the rabbit hole of big bore air rifles and entice you to spend a lot of money. Don’t say I didn’t warn you…


In very select circumstances, possibly. I got a refund check from DHS/CBP/whoever a while back for some random thing I imported (which turned out to come from Germany, which I only discovered after I bought it…) for which I got tariffed personally. I presume after that particular tariff was retracted and/or struck down.
For the vast majority of consumers buying stuff off the shelf from retailers and vendors who jacked their prices up to compensate for said tariffs, no. Absolutely not. I predict said prices will remain jacked up for the foreseeable future as well, since retailer pricing policies are completely opaque to the consumer, and also notoriously ratchet-like — they tend to only move in one direction.


So in other words, what else is new?
The danger if this passes isn’t that someone will be able to successfully implement some manner of system for identifying gun parts which will, apparently, rely on pixie dust and magic. In reality this will effectively prohibit 3D printer sales in California entirely because compliance is literally impossible. And it’ll and give overreaching cops and prosecutors yet another nonsense charge they can arbitrarily slap people with over “circumventing” this mystical technology which does not in fact exist if they, ye gods forbid, build their own printer.
It’s the same horseshit rationale as the spent casing “microstamping” fantasy that legislators have been salivating about for decades. It doesn’t work, it’ll never work, but that’s not going to stop them from wishing it does and therefore turning it into a defacto ban.
Keep in mind, California also has the precedent of their infamous approved handguns list, which notoriously does things like arbitrarily declaring that the black version of some model of gun is legal, but possession of the stainless version of the exact same gun is a felony. We’re not dealing with people in possession of any type of rationality, here.


Prusa or Qidi. Avoid Bambu.


Poorly. According to a random Wikipedia query, commodity lithium ion is ~270 Wh per kilogram. So this is around 20% of that, according to the above.
“Excellent” may be in comparison to other byzantine specialty battery chemistries, but lithium ion remains resolutely enthroned.
It is a pune, or a play on words, relating to what a honing steel does.


Filament hinges. Filament hinges everywhere.


(Riffling through my Rolodex of ancient webcomics.)
Ah, here we are:



No, it’s specifically for Windows 2000. That should about tell you how useful it will be at this point, or really any point in the foreseeable future.
DDTPV-TXMX7-BBGJ9-WGY8K-B9GHM
I will be 100 years old and trying to remember my own social security number, and all I’ll be able to come up with is this goddamn thing. I can already see it.


Not until somebody shuts off the investor money faucet for AI. Then they’ll come crawling back — although inevitably not until after they go whining to all the world’s governments about wanting a bailout.
But hey, look at the bright side. We’ve already had the cryptocurrency mining boom and bust, and “AI” boom and soon to be bust. There’s still time for some idiot to invent the next tech scam fad which will conveniently require a shitload of hardware for no recognizably useful purpose.


Is it little endian or Bag Endian?
The manufacturer literally recommends you use a regular razor blade in the manual. This is from a GE manual, since you brought them up:
And so does the manufacturer of the most popular ceramic glass material used. A plastic scraper won’t accomplish much, especially if the plastic it’s made out of is softer than whatever is stuck to your cooking surface.
The markings are etched into the glass, not painted.