If the song has been part of your boring ass six song radio playlist and has been for over two months…
Stop calling it new music.
“New Music”
Category: FAIL
When a picture is worth a million words
….the next thing out of it was “Failed to communicate with the ScanSnap”… I WONDER WHY??
Tongue surface piercings, or, “none of this works that way”.
Once again, you’re just gonna have to take the word of this random hacker yelling about the poor choices of others:
Don’t do this. (Identifying details censored using the Glitch app.) It’s not something to be proud of.
So what’s wrong here? Everything.
The human tongue is a very flexible part, as it needs to be. You can’t just go pinning it in place with a rigid bar.
It flexes in pretty much every possible direction. The only way you’re going to be able to get a piercing to not cause problems in healing and everyday activities is for it to just go through.
This one will probably never heal, and both the person who did it and the customer should know better. Well, even if the customer didn’t know better. Would I willingly wire up someone’s electric kitchen appliances using 16 gauge lamp cord which would get hot faster than their dinner and cause an electrical fire? No. Should a piercer agree to do something this stupid? No.
Just don’t. It does not work this way. None of this works that way. This is bad and you should feel bad for it.
Now, there are still risks and complications with having it done right, but at least that can heal – mainly I’ve heard of problems with the jewelry wearing into the teeth or gums.
Yeah uh sure, you can trust me saying all this, I’m the guy who had to search for the lost tiny ball whenever a DJ had an accident with a captive bead ring failing to keep its bead captive. The really crappy little 16 gauge ones from Hot Topic launch it at the lightest brush against one’s headphones. The best was when one went right down a headphone jack and lodged there — the DJ’s survival was guaranteed only by the fact she ordered me dinner from the Latin American Cafe while I replaced the jack with an old school indestructible leaf spring Switchcraft from my private stash.
More horrors from a local shop that’s managed to place themselves as the epicenter of all things ratchet:
Moldy nopeage.
Yeah, um, don’t leave your costumes sitting wet in a bag for weeks. Please see useful, informative graphic below.
A fairy tale about hard disk storage.
Once upon a time, in a computing industry far far away, there were many, many manufacturers of hard disks and other storage devices. Each remained competitive by advancing technologies used in their work, challenging each other to let us store away more and more of our precious bits and bytes while preserving reliability and overall product quality.
(Click below for Castle Thunder, then continue.)
Then, the kingdom was invaded by an evil horde of businessmen hellbent on consolidating every business, putting as many people as they could out of jobs, offshoring, and cheapening everything they could get their hands on. Eventually there were only three manufacturers left, all completely offshored for cheap labor. Innovation into increasing storage densities, reliability, access times, and data transfer rates stopped entirely as there was no longer any need to remain competitive whatsoever – customers simply had no significantly better options. Meanwhile, product quality slipped so badly that the industry began to cut warranties to shift the burden of replacing dead drives entirely to the consumer, occasionally deciding to lengthen them only to cut them short again weeks later. Some vendors even locked away the warranty return process behind a special software utility that issues an RMA code, but only … if it felt like it.
It’s nice to see this is only a fairytale.
Oh wait—
(Quite appropriate musical piece by Bob Orilee)
But this is the real world, so it’s nice to see that we don’t have to worry about things like the head stack on a hard drive being connected to the controller board by a dodgy little connector that touches a set of tin plated circuit board pads that corrode away just from things such as plastic fumes. Out here in the real world, the vendors at least give us a couple microns of gold protecting the connectors, right?
ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR, FIVE, SIX, SEVEN, EIGHT, NINE, FUCK, SHIT, PISS.
The good news…. I have successfully saved a couple of drives by removing the circuit boards and cleaning those pads. The bad news…. on the drive I photographed here, it seems like the firmware may have gotten trashed. Cleaning the pads restored proper servo operation and keeps it from just giving up and spinning down, but it just ain’t workin’. The piss yellow corrosion comes off with a pencil eraser. Drive pictured here is a Western Digital, but I’ve run into the same issues on a Seagate. Interestingly, I’ve never seen the same problems on a Hitachi GST drive. While Hitachi GST is owned by Western Digital, they haven’t had their engineering division cut off yet.
Back in the day I remember when Quantum was bought out by Maxtor… there was a hilarious transition period where you could buy a Quantum Fireball drive with a Maxtor sticker and firmware ID string in it, or a Maxtor DiamondMax drive (still bearing many engineering themes from Miniscribe such as the UPLEVEL numbers and all that) with a Quantum sticker on the lid. Alas, now, there’s no need for those pesky engineering teams, because there’s nobody to compete with. It has truly come full circle— and the circle I refer to is the circular path traced by a flushed turd as it approaches the drain.
A useful infographic on tech sector jobs in South Florida.
Keep your boards dry!
I mean, it’s obvious, but here’s what happens when the poor things suffer combination of electricity and water…
Yet Another “Comcast Sucks” Post…
Adding another one to the ether of the Internet.
I’m paying over $80 a month for supposedly 25 megabits from Comcast via cable. Price keeps going up, speeds keep going down, as does the connection itself.
The fault appears to NOT be with the last mile – the modem’s SNR and signal levels look quite acceptable. I’m gonna call 36.8dB SNR and -1.9dBmV “Lucky Duck!” levels for QAM256 demodulation… aka “you’re in luck, your DSP can accurately decode this in its sleep”.
Over the past couple of weeks, this is about average:
--- kg4cyx.net ping statistics --- 2598 packets transmitted, 2428 packets received, 6.5% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 53.373/535.039/4664.892/482.324 ms
And that’s IF, or WHEN, it works.
Calling Comcast support yields ONLY a “support” script telling me to scan my computers for viruses with their free version of Norton Antivirus. No thanks.
Sadly I live in an area where Comcast has an ABSOLUTE monopoly when it comes to home Internet.
Anyone know of a way to get a real tech on the line at Comcast who is CLUE equipped?
THAT’S NOT WHAT THE OBD2 PORT IS FOR!!!
This is the ZTE Mobley.
It’s a small wireless hotspot device.
And it’s wrong. Wrong!!! IT’S WRONG!!!! No!!!
Note the connector on the end of the device. This is an OBD2 diagnostic connector. If your vehicle is a US model (elsewhere?) and model year 1997 or later, it has one within three feet of the driver’s seat, usually under the dashboard.
On this port are +12 volt power, supplied from the engine control module, and several data lines. Newer vehicles likely use a CAN bus that is essentially grand central — everything uses it for communication.
You should simply not mess with this port if you don’t know what you’re. Here are some good reasons why.
A) Possible ECM damage.
The DC power on this port is limited. Short it out and one of two things happen. If you’re lucky, a fuse in the fuse box blows. Your vehicle shuts down immediately and will not restart until it is changed.
If you are not lucky, a circuit trace or internal pico fuse inside the ECM pops. Same as above, but you CAN’T replace it. Your vehicle is BRICKED. It’s possible the fuse protects only the OBD2 PORT power, in which case no diagnostic tools will work on the port until it’s fixed. Engine fault codes can’t be retrieved or cleared, and it will not pass an emissions inspection.
Internal repair to the ECM will be needed which may or may not be possible.
ECM replacement may be an option on older vehicles, but on newer ones and most European ones, you may find you also have to replace other modules that are keyed to the ECM for security (and service resistance) reasons.
B) “who the fuck is really driving?”
Did you see where I said that *everything* depends on that CAN network on newer vehicles? I mean it.
So here’s what can happen if the device were to mess up the CAN communications.
First off, your vehicle will likely shut down immediately or act really weird for a moment before doing so.
Second, you may lose control and crash. Seriously.
On some vehicles, a lot of functions that really shouldn’t be on the network in my opinion are.
Things like control over power brake assist, power steering, throttle….
I should mention how much I love my car’s hydraulic pedal clutch, old school hydraulic power steering, vacuum brake assist*, and manual transmission about now.
Even more worrisome is the thought that the hotspot device may actually be capable of sending and receiving data on the bus. It has metal pins in all the right places, at least.
Recently it was proven that CAN bus access could be used to remotely cause loss of control on a Chrysler vehicle and run it off into a ditch.
Just saying.
Don’t use this shit. ZTE should be fucking ashamed for even making it. It would have been just as easy to make it plug into a lighter socket; many vehicles have extras, some of which have constant power.
Oh, get this, Verizon offers the Delphi Connect, which actually touts canbus connectivity as a… “feature”.
* Actually there is an ABS pump, which may still be able to override brake pedal pressure, but nothing can disable the handbrake for the rear wheels… At least there’s that. WTF is with those electric parking brakes?!
Robert Reich hit the nail on the head.
I was listening to the episode of the Tavis Smiley show that aired yesterday with an interview with Robert Reich regarding the massive failures in the current American economy, and found it most refreshing to note that I’m not alone in observing the current issues facing the country.
It’s no surprise to say we’ve legitimately slipped from democracy to oligarchy. What surprises me is actually that this took so long to come to light – eventually, reluctantly, the media started to look at it NOW for some reason, but will still give no attention to those who seek to reverse the problem. Anyway… I found it interesting to note that he’s also aware of the curious “upward distribution” of wealth that keeps the lower class and working poor (a very disturbing new concept in itself) in a cycle of endless desperation.
Where’s the upward distribution? Everywhere. Have you also noticed there are entire DISTRICTS of check cashing stores now, constantly rising utility bills, and nonstop consolidations in the corporate world? It’s really noticeable in Miami, where infrastructure and political boundaries literally wall off the poor from the rich so they aren’t inconvenienced by having to share space with us saps who don’t make six figures a year or live off a trust fund.
It’s probably worth questioning why both the media and politicians have, for years, sold out to allow these issues to be swept under the rug. It’s definitely not in the public’s best interest. Unfortunately, it’s in their owners’ best interest, so that’s what we get. Yes, I am indeed implying that the government itself has sold out. Why else would they sign in bills written entirely by lobbyists?
The scary part is, I can’t really even see a way the problem can be outright fixed. It’s too deeply ingrained in every part of our systems of commerce and government. Alas, public awareness is definitely the first step towards correcting it.
And this is the biggest fucking Amscot I have ever seen, right on the western edge of Murder Gardens, Florida. Admire its predatory lending splendor.
