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.
For anyone wondering what the heck this thing is, it’s called a roll chart. Usually these are loaded with turn-by-turn instructions for rally racing or similar, but as you can see you can also stick a map in one.
If you’re going to do the map thing it kind of helps for your overall route to be oriented vertically, or else otherwise you have to stick the map in it sideways.
It’s a map in a roll chart holder. These days they’re used in rally and off road racing, and sometimes motorcycle touring.
Trains on rails have basically no traction, since the contact surfaces are steel on steel. Anything that makes them slippery becomes a no-go as soon as hills are involved, and stopping is also significantly impacted.
Having them not require tires is a solved problem, but as you can see that comes with some compromises.
It is the law in the US as well. Reverse cameras became mandatory in model year 2018.
Hang around any Trader Joe’s parking lot and watch for a while and you will realize that this has of course made driving less safe yet again, because moronic vehicle operators now unanimously behave as if any object not displayed on their camera’s screen does not exist.
Slate is also a Jeff Bezos venture, with the fucker himself being the major investor in it. I like the idea, but in light of that I think I’ll give it a pass.
Saturns were painted, even on the plastic components, not dyed. I owned one, an SL2. The plastic panels were black underneath the paint, which is the same formula GM was already using on plastic bumpers, etc.
On the true Saturns, i.e. the S and L series cars before they got reabsorbed back into GM and became more rebadged Chevys, the vertical surfaces were plastic but the horizontal ones were steel. So the hood, roof, and trunk lid were traditional sheet metal fabrications but the bumpers, doors, front fenders, and rear wings were plastic. These were overlaid on a “space frame” underneath made of pressed sheet steel parts, so despite all the plasticwork these things weren’t much lighter than a traditionally built car of roughly the same displacement. They were dent resistant in the same way a plastic bumper is, but if you hit them hard in cold temperatures you could get the panels to crack or even shatter.
There was also one poor bastard on the forums back in the day who posted a picture of his SL that he parked too close to a wildfire and all of the plastic panels melted and glued his card to the pavement. To be fair, the interior of that car was also a congealed puddle by that point so it would have been a writeoff even if it were a metal car.
On the bright side, my SL2 got a consistent 40 MPG and it wasn’t full of nannyware shit like the cars of today. The S series cars were also significantly easier to work on than many of their contemporaries, and basically anything made today. I sold mine to some kid who wrecked it like a week later, and the only reason I sold it was because I had too many cars at the time. In retrospect I should have kept the fucker and sold something else to make room in the driveway.
I’m not going by the price tag, I’m going by the fact that Speed Queen is literally the only consumer washing machine brand whose machines you can explicitly use in a commercial setting and it won’t void the warranty, per the bond in the back of the manual.
What a Speed Queen washer costs now is roughly what a quality Kenmore or Whirlpool washing machine cost in the 1980s, once you adjust for inflation.
Thanks to a rather high profile class action lawsuit, LG no longer uses linear compressors in their refrigerators. At least in the US.
The fact that they seem to fail to comprehend that LG and Signature Kitchen Suite are both made by LG in the same factory, and that Fisher & Paykel and “Cafe” (actually GE) are both owned and made by Haier, and that Thermador and Bosch are also the same company with several of their products being rebadges of each other does not fill me with confidence.
At the very least if they insist on breaking those sub-brands out separately they ought to make at least some mention at the bottom of the chart that they’re actually the same entity.
It absolutely is. Buy a Speed Queen.
I’m convinced that the majority of whinging about metric in the US is actually coming from old machine operators tucked away somewhere in the industrial sector who don’t want to give up their old decimal inch Bridgeports and Shipleys, or have bosses who wouldn’t buy them new machines anyway. Everything else stems from there, bubbling on up through the pipes as it does.
That’s because the endpoint device is supposed to have some manner of type B port (full sized, mini, micro) to denote that it is not a host device. Endpoint devices should not have a type A port for input, because double ended type A cables are not technically supposed to exist.
(Even though they self-evidently do, USB specs be damned. I have a flashlight that came with one, and its charging port is a full sized type A port. Using the cable it came with to plug two host devices together would be a bad idea and probably result in smoke.)
I have seen guys do it, though. I suppose in certain specific scenarios it might make sense. I’m in agreement there, though, I think I’ll give it a pass unless I absolutely have to.