dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

You can already theoretically do this with the doors on a Jeep, but it hasn’t exactly turned into an epidemic.

Low towing capacity and an outrageously miserable bed size. Less than five feet? The powertrain of this should have been put in a station wagon, not a “truck.”

All true, but I am going to be that nerd and point out that there were indeed commercial devices with lithium ion battery packs in them in the mid to late '90s, especially so in the late '90s. By 2000-2001 you couldn’t escape the damn things in cameras, disc players, PDAs, etc. So yes, it did take relatively forever for the technology to become commercially ubiquitous, but not that long. (And yes, the first couple of waves of Li-Ion batteries were indeed crap, and had all of us geeks clamoring for gadgets that still took AA’s for a while.)

Hell, most of the major labels post tracks themselves to sponge up that sweet ad revenue. You can just use the tool of your choice to download the audio straight out of it if you decide you want to keep it for later.

I also haven’t forgiven them for trying to sue people for simply watching the Geohot video, or removing alternative OS functionality from the PS3, or for trying to reinvent MMC/SD memory cards in a different shape and charge more for for them. Hell, I still haven’t forgiven them for SonicStage.

I won’t buy anything from Sony for any reason. I don’t care what it is. I made damn sure my most recent camera purchase wasn’t a Sony, no matter what the reviews said. That’s because they pissed me off 20 years ago and haven’t demonstrated any improvement in behavior since. Nerds have long memories.

Indeed. Some of the seceding states had it written into their new constitutions. The post-hoc notion that this was not the case is laughably absurd.

I’ve always heard it called the “Lost Cause Of The South” by racist rednecks; they seem to be aware enough (or someone was, whoever it is they’re parroting) to attempt to distance it as much as possible from terminology that associates it with slavery because otherwise it looks even worse. Even though slavery is absolutely what it was all about.

The Leatherman tool company is indeed named after its creator’s last name, which is also of course “Leatherman.”

I know we all like to joke about that Tim Apple guy calling the shots and fucking everything up all the time at the iPhone-and-computer company, but the owner and founder of the Leatherman Tool Group is literally Tim Leatherman.

Certainly not.

In fact, no knife or gadget manufacturer has yet seen fit to pay me to shill their stuff. Which is a bummer.

when a calculator from the 80s can do the same thing.

1970’s! The little blighters are even older than most people think.

Which is why I find it extra hilarious / extra infuriating that we’ve gone through all of these contortions and huge wastes of computing power and electricity to ultimately just make a computer worse at math.

Math is the one thing that computers are inherently good at. It’s what they’re for. Trying to use LLM’s to perform it halfassedly is a completely braindead endeavor.

Other gadgets as well. For instance, this knife. (Plug.)

I already do. Flip a coin: Heads, the car is operating itself and is therefore being operated by a moron. Tails, the owner is driving it manually and therefore it is being operated by a moron.

Just be sure to carefully watch your six when you’re sitting at a stoplight. I’ve gotten out of the habit of sitting right in the center of the lane, because the odds are getting ever higher that I’ll have to scoot out of the way of some imbecile who’s coming in hot. That’s hard to do when your front tire is 24" away from the license plate of the car in front of you.

I have absolutely no idea what I’d do with this but I want one.

There you go.

And the Greeks were reportedly setting ships on fire with sunlight and mirrors millennia ago.

I’m positive competent nerds make up none of their earnings, because we’ve all been pirating Microsoft software ever since we were tall enough to reach the keyboard.

He did what?

Nature really is out of balance lately.

Photovalic solar was invented in 1954 and has been readily available since the 1960’s. In 1963 Japan was powering a lighthouse with it. And Solar One was operational in 1982.

If we gave a rat’s ass about solar at the time we easily could have done it also.

I’m not sure pissing off Miyazaki is a great move. He’s an old Japanese man who is famously so bitter that when he chain smokes he gives the cigarettes cancer, communicates largely in contemplative one-liners, and is known to own precisely one sword. And he has a beard. We’ve all seen this movie; we know how that kind of thing ends.

A parallel comment to my rant yesterday, I see the pushback has already begun in Garmin’s reviews against this nonsense. All of the recent reviews of their Android app are now overwhelmingly complaints about the subscription addition, and I suspect iOS is the same. If you haven’t done so already, please be sure to blow Garmin up over this on any platform you can get your grubby hands on.

I know posting this here is probably more like spitting on a forest fire; I’m sure the seven or eight nerds here on Lemmy dedicated enough to care have already put Garmin on blast for this (myself included), but it never hurts to make sure.

Pebble, but neither of their upcoming revived models have the same spread of sensors shoved into them as Garmin does if that sort of thing matters to you.

I would happily buy something just like my Fenix without the stupid pulse ox/heart rate monitor, but I understand I am in the minority there. I’d keep the GPS, compass, temperature, altimeter, and barometer functions. But then, I’m probably the sole person on Earth who would be the first to buy a phone without a goddamned selfie camera on it, either.