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.
I bought it on Dealextreme back in the day, which was kind of the precursor to our current Aliexpress/Wish/Temu/Shein arrangement. It's therefore possible that it is a knockoff (or a knockoff of a knockoff?) but the fact remains that it was absurdly cheap, is fully mechanical, and against all expectation and reason it continues to function and also keep pretty good time. It's actually just a hair fast, and requires me to knock a minute off of it about once per week.
If you're not squeamish you can get a thoroughly generic -- or perhaps heavily "inspired" by some particular name brand -- wind-up timepiece from any of the usual suspects for pocket change. $10-20, and other poster in here mentioned they bought theirs for $5.
There probably actually isn't an alternative. Whatever piece of software you might otherwise use to encode or convert video is probably using ffmpeg behind the scenes anyway.
That's okay, I'm also unfirable and the highest paid person in the building.
Nice. It is astounding what you can get for just a couple of bucks, and even more astounding that they genuinely work.
I just took a more detailed look. They do still make quite a few mechanicals but they have indeed shot up in price. $80-90 nowadays, it seems.
My old one is definitely mechanical. I wind it up every morning.
It's also approachably yet suspiciously cheap. I think I paid $20 for this close to 15 years ago, and Sinobi is apparently still at it making mechanical watches in the $30 range.
This one does two things: Tells you the time, and does so while not needing batteries.
If we're doing watches today, here's what I'm rocking lately.
I stopped using my Garmin smartwatch because they finally fell into the enshittification trap and recently tried adding AI slop and a subscription scheme into their watch app. That's a big old nope from me, dawg.
Marbles are too inconsistent in diameter and most of them are too small for paintball guns, and certainly wouldn't chamber or feed right. What's more likely is that these punks were using one of the myriad crop of nylon or aluminum "jawbreaker" ammo sold online these days specifically for use in paintball guns.
In addition to the dubious legality of this sort of thing if you actually did light somebody up with a hopper full of them, for anyone considering these for deterrence of ne'er-do-wells in the night, I'd give it a second think only because mostly what you'll accomplish is holes in your drywall and denting up your own stuff.
Decades of the Catholic church demonizing birth control methods and claiming condoms cause AIDS will do that do a continent.
No points for guessing. The Irish and the Spanish have already been considered "not white" at points in recent history. So have the Italians.
Some dude named Tyrone apparently had my phone number at some point before I did. For a couple of years at first I got a sporadic but persistent litany of calls before I managed to finally convince all of his debt collectors, parole officers, and/or babymommas that this was no longer his number.
It sounds stereotypical, but it's true. I thought somebody was pulling my leg the first time.
Anyway, I don't answer my phone for anyone who isn't on my contacts list anymore. If I don't know you, you don't need to be calling me.
I've posted this story in various guises before, but back in the '90s a friend of mine had a dedicated phone line for his modem (yes, this was before residential broadband of any stripe was readily accessible) which was the inverse of the local Dominos Pizza. Like, ###-###-0101 vs ###-###-1010.
Tons of calls from a wide cross section confused, stupid, angry, and belligerent would-be pizza seekers arrived at the telephone he had plugged into that line, and many many more must have gone into the black hole of the perpetual busy signal.
Christ.
You reminded me that I had to waste like an entire hour of my day a couple of weeks ago convincing my boss that yes, we absolutely can eBay off the four or five unopened toner cartridges we have lying around here for a printer we no longer have. It's fine. Just let them go. We can use the money for some other operational expense. "But already paid for them and that means we'll take a loss on them."
Sure, genius. Versus what, exactly? Leaving them mouldering on the supply room shelf until the day the sun burns out? An 80% return is better than 0% return.
It's not even a contest how easy it is to determine an incoming text message is marketing bullshit and ignore/blocklist it versus the time sunk into getting to the bottom of a phone call.
I essentially have no reason to own a telephone anymore, for any reason whatsoever, including at my work except for the fact that dimwits incessantly keep calling me on the damn thing. And for added bonus points, they insist on getting salty any time we can't instantly answer their phone call. Which for the record is because I already have all four other lines lit up and staff on all of them, wasting 15+ minutes each on some inane query or complaint that could have been a 10 second email.
Everything could easily be conducted over SMS or email, and in fact I prefer it to be because this leaves a paper trail. I'd much rather send one of my vendors a nasty email than have to call and yell at them, because when I need to refer back to that previous communication I have an exact date and time and I have what was said right there in black and white. If I give a client everything in writing they can't conveniently "misremember" what they were promised to try to scam more out of us. What I wrote is what I wrote. It's all right there. If somebody tries to ask me to do something stupid and demands I do it anyway even after I told them it was stupid, I automatically have documentation of that order and my objection for when it all inevitably goes pear shaped.
Etc., etc.
Bury the telephone. Its time has passed.
𝚈𝙾𝚄 𝙰𝚁𝙴 𝚂𝙴𝙶𝙵𝙰𝚄𝙻𝚃
We had to constantly remind people not to leave their disks on top of the monitors in those days, because on some models the degaussing pulse was enough to erase a floppy disk.
I was also proud of my ownership of a large speaker magnet which had a highly directional magnetic field, and could cause tube monitors and TV's go all paisley from about 20 feet away. I kept it stuck to the back of my steel garage door when not in use to keep it well away from all monitors, disks, and tapes.
It's the only way to be sure.
It's a great trio of games (Legends 1 and 2, and the Misadventures of Tron Bonne) with quite a bit of depth and if you ask me a fantastic art direction for their time. The one thing I will say is that the controls did not age very well. You get used to it after a while. These games predate modern dual-stick movement and aiming and use the shoulder buttons for strafing. I think the Playstation versions are superior due to the increased number of buttons available on the controller.
I'm going to be that kind of guy, you know what I mean?
It is now. It wasn't at first.
It was part of the Valve Orange Box and that was a big deal at the time. There was also a huge deal of whining from people who paid for it when Valve announced they were changing it to a free to play model.
I Know You Guys Are Into Digging, But, Uh...
Getting the side-eye from Branta canadensis in the US Mid Atlantic
Two honklers, afloat.
I presume this is a female on the left and a male on the right, but it's hard to tell with Canada geese because they exhibit no notable sexual dimorphism except that the males are slightly larger, and some of the noises they make are different. These two were uncharacteristically silent. It must be a Bird Fact that they can tell each other apart somehow, though, otherwise they wouldn't be able keep making more geese.
This is the best out of the bunch of several that I took, and was a great example of why your camera's autofocus is oftentimes annoying. Because mine kept insisting that the leaves in the background were more interesting than the bird directly in the center of the shot. I eventually resorted to manually focusing using the inbuilt magnifier function which I remembered I'd bound to one of the random buttons on my R10's body several days prior.
Buteo jamaicensis borealis Soaring, and Going "Screeaw" in the US Mid Atlantic
The red tailed hawk; no points awarded for guessing why it's called that. I imagine this is the Eastern variety, based on my location. I do like the way the sunlight is shining through the feathers here.
I should have probably bumped the exposure compensation up a bit for this but I was taking pictures of ducks on the ground at the time and was not expecting this hawk to fly right overhead. I got what I got. Canon R10, ƒ/8, a mere 1/8000 sec, ISO 640. Believe it or not, not the entire length of the lens -- only 325mm.
Bird fact: The noise that eagles make in movies is usually actually the cry of the red tailed hawk. This hawk made exactly that noise, which is what prompted me to look up. Eagles (or at least bald eagles, if experience is any judge) can make a similar noise, but often they make a range of rather different noises that don't carry as well.
Bonus picture of a red tailed hawks red hawk tail:
.
Swallows in general and the tree swallow in particular are easy to identify when they're flying because of their distinctive two-pronged forked tail and very pointy wingtips, which are visible when they are in a dive. You'll see them spiraling and swooping and juking around like mad in the air because they eat insects and snatch them right out of the air while they're on the wing. If you see one sitting around, like this one, their bellies are ridiculously white and easy to spot. You'll find these all over most of North America.
Fox!
Vulpes vulpes fulva, or the American red fox to be specific, padding around in the forest and being all photogenic.
This one may have been after the ducks floating in the pond nearby but certainly in vain. The ducks were having absolutely none of it; they wouldn't even quit swimming away from me and my camera so there's no chance they didn't see Basil here coming from a mile off.
This is at absolute maximum 400mm zoom for me. Foxy might have been mostly interested in ducks, but he or possibly she was on to us certainly wasn't coming any closer despite having no qualms about crossing over the footpath in broad daylight. Canon R10, ƒ/8, 1/400, ISO 640, 400mm.
Bonus fox pictures:
Quiscalus Quiscula Going "Awk"
...Possibly due to being pissed off about being rained on.
This is the common Grackle, looking quite a bit less iridescent than they can do thanks to it being grey and wet. If you see a thing that looks like a crow but is smaller and gives off the distinct impression of giving you The Eyeball, that's one of these.
Canon R10, ƒ/14, 1/640, ISO-1600, 400mm. I stepped up the exposure compensation a bit but maybe could have done with a little more. Oh well.
Bonus picture of this guy reevaluating his life choices:
Haemorhous Mexicanus Being Exasperated With The Clicky Thing
Just look at him face.
Canon R10, ƒ/14 (are we noticing a pattern?), 1/640, ISO-2500 because I forgot to unset it from auto, 400mm.
No bonus picture this time. Instead, a bonus video of this noisy little bugger:
(Link if it doesn't load in your client.)
Also Not a Bird
Probably despite desperate wishing on the part of the creature in question.
Canon R10, ƒ/14, 1/640, ISO-800, 400mm.
Bonus picture of the same doofus:
Crow
Corvus brachyrhynchos, most likely, just based on where I am. But I'm no ornithologist.
Canon R10, ƒ/16, 1/800, ISO-1600, 400mm.
Part of the deal with what I post here is that I deliberately put up pictures straight out of the camera. The board is Photography, after all, not "see how much you can twiddle with it in your image editor." In this case I was experimenting with which aperture value on my Bird Lens produces the sharpest result at a distance. I'm not entirely sure this guy was the best choice of subject. A black bird against a bright sky is like the archetypal beginner's trap that'll get you to screw up the exposure. But anyway, this shot I took at ƒ/14 was the one I liked best overall.
Bonus bird fight picture:
These two were scrapping over some kind of morsel. The one on the left ultimately wound up flapping away with it, whatever it
Rock Doves
Columba livia, or the common pigeon.
I imagine this is not the usual angle people are used to seeing pigeons; rather, you probably picture them from above, staring up at you from sidewalk level, begging for a piece of whatever it is your eating, in the dingy second-hand light found at the concrete bottom of your urban canyon.
In this light their iridescent neck feathers are quite striking.
Canon R10, f/14, 1/640sec, ISO-500, the full 400mm using the Bird Lens.
Bonus picture:
Dafuq you lookin' at?
Rock Doves
Columba livia, or the common pigeon.
I imagine this is not the usual angle people are used to seeing pigeons; rather, you probably picture them from above, staring up at you from sidewalk level, begging for a piece of whatever it is your eating, in the dingy second-hand light found at the concrete bottom of your urban canyon.
In this light their iridescent neck feathers are quite striking.
Canon R10, f/14, 1/640sec, ISO-500, the full 400mm using the Bird Lens.
Bonus picture:
Dafuq you lookin' at?
Not a Bird!
Rather, it is a wascawwy wabbit.
An Eastern Cottontail, to be precise.
Canon R10, f/8, 1/200, ISO-1600, 270mm. Which may have been a tad underexposed, come to think of it, being shot in the shade in the early evening. But that's how it is.
A Weekly Occurrence at Work
Y u no put the paper towels in the fucking dispenser rather than leaving the half torn open pack on the countertop?
Getting the new brick of towels out of the supply room and dragging it all the way to the bathroom is like 99% of the effort already. Just stuff them in the damn box.
(This is right up there with the old classic, getting out a new bog roll and leaving it delicately balanced on top of the old empty cardboard tube rather than just installing it on the damn spindle.)
You'd think I work in a building full of toddlers.
Goots
In the form of loaf.
Canon R10, f/14, 1/640 sec, ISO-1250, at the full 400mm because I don't feel like being hissed at today.
Common European Starling
The enemy.
That's because there's one minor problem here, which you've already guessed: I'm not in Europe.
Starlings are an invasive species in North America and a destructive one at that. They're even specifically excluded from the Migratory Bird Treaty Act for that reason. So, much to the consternation of aviphiles everywhere, these are generally shoot-on-sight on my property.
This one wasn't on my property, though, so I took at shot at him with my camera instead. I think it's a him. It's kind of hard to tell with starlings, but he was screeching at the top of his little lungs at the top of that pole which is typically male bird behavior. He stopped when he saw me.
At the moment the starlings and I have an uneasy truce. I think I've either blown away or scared off all of the ones that were hereditary nesters in my eaves and soffits. I care because they push out native birds, but also because they insist on trying to rip my soffit cladding off and otherwise destroy bits of my ho
Snowy Egret
Okay, okay, this one wasn't in my yard.
I managed to get this guy far enough away from the cage walls that they didn't interfere with the shot too much.
Canon R10 as usual, f/14, 1/500, ISO 1250, 300mm.
Want to see what the cage walls look like while they are interfering with the shot? In that case, bonus picture of a Sandhill Crane:
Awk!
I Found Yet Another Sentinel Combat Bug
That's right, negative one sentinel units in play.
Yes, this did have the predictable result of not allowing any additional Sentinels to spawn in and also locked me in the Sentinel "combat" state forever until I left the planet. Whereupon I was immediately jumped by a Sentinel capital ship which I summarily blew up.
I'm with the Vy'keen on this one, these guys need to go to hell already.
That's Funny, I Expected You To Be Shorter
Or, day 34: The Gek have still not realized I am not one of them...