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.
The point being, they abandoned updating it last year after roughly only a year and a half since its release.
People who still own one now have had it for two years and possibly some change. That doesn’t have anything to do with how quickly Garmin dropped it.
Ugh.
Listen here, you little shits. I hired you because I don’t need robots. I can build robots, for crying out loud.
Cripes, this argument again. Give it a rest already, people.
I don’t know about you but I’ve never used mine for combat and I’m unlikely to be in a position to try. Despite the inherent ridiculousness I do occasionally EDC mine, but mostly I use it as a folding camp knife.
There are oodles of other perfectly cromulent knives to recommend, of course (just ask me how I know!) but I zeroed in on this one for the sheer perversity of its selling price being near enough to precisely OP’s available figure.
If you’re going to be that way about it, might I recommend a Leatherman Skeletool which is also currently about $75.
An HOKC Finka-C is almost exactly $75 on Amazon right now.
Apropos of nothing, really.
I built that myself. Most of it is 3/4" ply. The shelves are side-screwed with 2-1/4" Spax screws, not resting on pegs (thus, also they can’t be moved). It’s not going anywhere.
If it weren’t for that damn Switch, the 360 would be the newest console I own.
Here’s what’s just plugged in at the moment, and not in milk crates in the basement:
(Don’t @ me about my shitty cell phone picture I took in the dark. I’m not getting out the mirrorless and the studio lighting for this, plus this way the potato quality handily conceals the fact that I probably also need to vacuum that carpet.)
Garmin still has pay-to-unlock shit in their app? I just checked, yes they do, and advertises at you on the app’s home screen. So, still no sale.
And Fenix owners, don’t get used to this. Garmin has apparently already abandoned the Fenix 7 which was only released in 2023. Surely nobody keeps an $800 watch for more than a year, right?
I used to recommend Garmin watches to people. Nowadays, I recommend you just buy a dumb Timex with a pedometer in it.
The interstate is for corn
The interstate is for corn
Sick of looking at, honking my horn at
Corn, corn, corn
Ooh, a 486-66. Yeah, you’ll be playing a ton of 3D games on that… I owned a Pentium 60 back when — yes, even one of the ones with the floating point division bug — and it could play Doom very nicely but couldn’t quite hack it for Quake and without some manner of hardware acceleration it was absolutely inadequate for any of the PS1 game ports that came out shortly thereafter.
The crux of it is that I think you’re doing quite a bit of conflation here between the PC (i.e. the Intel x86 compatible platform) and home computers, which indeed historically used all kinds of different architectures. Yes, the MSX and Commodores and Amiga and Sharp X68000 and all the rest of them were things that existed, and I find all of those equally interesting as old consoles because by and large they were all doing their own things and were not just yet another PC clone.
The Playstation beginning from the 4 on upwards and the XBox since its inception (literally “Direct X Box” initially) meanwhile are just low-rent x86 PCs. Using parts and hardware anyone could buy and put togther, if they felt like it. To each their own, but I don’t see any appeal there at all.
And for the record: Yes, I am well aware that the oodles of 8 bit home micros from the '80s and so forth had various joysticks and gamepads. I owned several and I still have a few of them. As far as game input goes, of them are without exception absolute crap compared to a simple NES pad.
I don’t think that’s really so. The difference between game consoles and desktop computers historically has been the input peripherals and also the dedicated hardware built into said consoles specifically for video game functionality. These were architectures built specifically around video games, not general purpose computing. It’s not good enough to say that an Apple II and an NES have the “same” processor when the Apple lacks the hardware tile mapping functionality, independent background layer support, hardware sprite transparency, screen scrolling registers, etc. Nobody figured out how to hook an actual NES controller up to a home computer until much later, either. The NES could also have the Zapper, the Power Pad, the robot. Not so much on your PC or Apple. Hell, the original Apple 2 barely even supported color.
But regardless of all of that, editing to clarify my main point here: The Apple II is not a PC. It is a home computer, but it’s not an x86 PC.
The 386 had just come out around the time of the American launch of the NES in 1986, and remember that the Famicom hardware itself dates back to 1983. The 286 was the hot ticket at that time and I don’t doubt a 286 machine would be better at running your spreadsheets, but certainly not action video games. They’re different machines that are purpose built for different applications.
Home computers desperately tried and failed to match the inherent gaming capability of consoles for quite some time. Remember that it was a big deal at the time that John Carmack managed to make “NES-like” scrolling happen on an IBM PC clone in Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement (the foundation of which later went on to become the Commander Keen games) but its scrolling was still multipixel and choppy and ugly compared to what the humble NES could do in its sleep. (One exception to this may have been the Amiga, which had rather Genesis-like architecture including hardware sprite support.)
It really took the Pentium to get the PC platform in particular in parity with consoles of its era, and that was accomplished through raw computing power up until the time that dedicated gaming oriented graphics cars became prevalent. At that rate the PC was “better” in several respects, see also the entire debacle with trying to get Doom working acceptably on the various 16 bit and early 32 bit consoles, but at the cost of… literally, cost. A PS1 cost $299 on launch day in 1995. A similarly capable PC, not just any random budget desktop, would run you somewhere between $2500 and $3500 in total.
Things got flip-flopped by the time of the advent of the original XBox, and certainly by the 360 and the PS4 on upwards. Desktop computing power had become cheap and accessible enough that it was trivial even at the time to just grab a processor and GPU of the same architecture and capability as was in the OG XBox (or much better!) and just slap it in your computer. In fact, by that time I already had.
My main problem with the current crop of consoles, excepting the Switch/2 (which I have a different problem with) is that they’re all just a cut-down PC anyway. Except one that you don’t control, and is subject to an order of magnitude more vendor bullshit even than usual. Consoles quit being interesting to me not just because of their reliance on internet connectivity and inevitable decay of all of the necessary features that this entails once the manufacturer loses interest in favor of the Next New Thing, but because they don’t do anything inherently interesting anymore. They all basically have the same controller, they all play basically the same games barring console exclusives, and none of them do anything experimental or innovative. Do you want the green one or the blue one? Otherwise, there may as well be no difference.
Except for dumb shit that Sony insists on keeping locked to the PS5 and other dumb shit Microsoft insist(ed) on keeping locked to the XBox Series Whatever, my PC can also have the same controller and play the same games better.
I have a pretty comprehensive collection of retro consoles from the slap-a-cartridge-in-and-play eras, and I have to wonder if anyone is going to bother in the future with preserving the PS4 and XBone, or the PS5 and XBox Series, etc. in the same way when half of what they did doesn’t work anymore because the servers are gone. Not to mention the Switch 2 cartridges which don’t actually contain the games.
In Windows 10, you could move it to the top, left, or right of the screen.
In every version of Windows up until now which has contained a taskbar and start menu, as far back as Windows 95. Not just Windows 10. Let’s not sell short the full extent idiocy on display, here.
“Pouring its engineering resources,” my ass.
By “depreciate quickly” we in fact mean “become worthless instantly.” I have various cases from the era where the power supply still went in the top rear corner rather than the bottom, and at this point they’re only of any interest as the foundation of a truly retro PC build for ironic purposes, or as a butt-to-ground adapter. You can’t even give the fuckers away because any computer nerds who would theoretically be interested in them already have a basement full of the damn things themselves.
So I would not lose too much sleep over hacking out a drive cage if it’s never going to be used. OP may even find that it’s riveted into place, in which case a few strategic drillings is all it’ll take to entice it to fall off.
He’s definitely wearing gloves. You can also see it on the plasma gun recoil sprite:
The shotgun:
And especially with the super shotgun in Doom 2:
And for good measure, these uncropped pistol sprites are in the “vault” thingy that came with the latest Bethesda rerelease:
I’ve applied some thought to this, actually. Not necessarily this thing in particular but liner locks in general.
It turns out liner locks are really a bitch to do with FDM printing for a couple of reasons. I’m pretty much decided they’re a no-go altogether, in fact.
Problem one is that it’s basically impossible to orient a liner lock mechanism for printing. The inherent shape is the definition of the kiss of death for filament printing: You need a long gently curved section that’s separated from the main body by an equally long slot. To avoid layer separation issues, you really want to orient this such that the slot is parallel to your layer lines, but that requires printing either the lock or the liner body with a significant portion of itself hanging in midair and unsupported on one end. This is impossible unless you use a ton of supports, which results in an ugly final product. The other option is to print the liner flat on the bed with the lock bar rising upwards, which results in a really shallow overhanging angle which is likewise impossible to print without supports.
But the main nail in the coffin is that PLA, the most common material, is famous for “cold creeping,” i.e. exhibiting permanent deflection if it’s bent and remains under load, even at room temperature. A liner lock mechanism is under load all the time whenever the blade is closed, with the lock bar straining against the heel of the blade all the time. This is a textbook example of a cold creep pitfall. Even if you managed to print such a thing the lock bar would turn into a wet noodle and after leaving it stored for probably even only a few hours it’d take a permanent set and wouldn’t lock anymore.
Acrylic (plexiglass) takes a lot more of a bend and/or exposure to way higher temperatures before that becomes an issue. You can mitigate it somewhat by printing in something other than PLA, but the more complex your part is the more of a pain in the ass that becomes. I believe ABS/ASA exhibit the lowest amount of permanent deflection under load out of the commonly available printable materials, which is why I make my Rockhopper liners out of it. But even it takes a noticeable set after a few days which is a surprisingly short amount of time. With how little I bend the spring bar in a Rockhopper it doesn’t take enough of a set to cause the spring action to quit working, but the difference is still noticeable.
A printed liner locker might work in ABS but given all of the above I haven’t been arsed to try.
Part of the problem with stainless steel is that it’s not a singular material. It’s an entire galaxy of alloys with a huge range of properties, and some are more corrosion resistant than others. It is certainly possible to concoct some alloy that is for all intents and purposes absolutely rustproof but it’s unlikely to have the other mechanical properties you need for whatever it is you’re doing.
If you’re looking at any object (probably a knife, or maybe a sink or faucet fixture) that simply declares itself “stainless steel” but the manufacturer refuses to admit which alloy even if you press them in a vise, that does indeed usually mean you’re looking at some junk. Low chromium and low nickel stainless alloys are the least corrosion resistant but all other things being equal are also typically the easiest to cut, machine, stamp, or otherwise work into shape.
First time with weird mouthfruit?