There’s also a small chance it’s a lame train of inside jokes, or a string of Monty Python quotes you’ve seen a thousand times before.

I’ll start:

“This. Is an *Ex-*parrot!”

If your Q1 is anything like my previous X-Plus or current X-Max 3, pretty much all of the routines you can run from the touch screen are macros that are defined in your printer.cfg and gcode_macro.cfg files on the machine itself. These are just text files full of gcode and you can dick with it freely without having to reflash the firmware. The only “fun” part will be figuring out which one of the custom macros it is, since Qidi doesn’t always give them a readable name and they tend to make them random looking numeric strings. I’ll have to take a look at mine when I get home and ensure that the filament load/unload/runout routines are located there, but I’m pretty sure they are.

You can edit your config files through the Mainsail interface within the Qidi Slicer or you can SSH into the machine and get a terminal via which you can mess with things directly (username mks, password makerbase).

You can deflect leaping headcrabs this way (or block them with a held object, although this causes you to automatically drop it afterwards) but as far as I know it deals no damage to enemies.

Apparently Valve experimented with melee weapons early in development, but intentionally decided to cut them because of the perceived lack of impact and weightlessness of held items, but the main thing was that playtesters kept getting their long melee weapons snagged on stuff. Alyx notably does not allow your hands or held items to intersect with other objects, nor does it let your hands get too far away from your body’s position to prevent shenanigans. If you unexpectedly hook your crowbar on a door frame or a table or something you’ll find yourself inexplicably leashed to it after walking a couple of feet and then not be able to find your hands.

This article goes into some detail. Apparently the crowbar specifically was removed to prevent players from assuming they were Gordon Freeman, despite the constant stream of evidence to the contrary. But it doesn’t seem like too much of a leap to replace that with Alyx grabbing a random length of pipe or chunk of rebar or something from the multitudes of trashed urban environments she traverses throughout the game.

Anyway, as soon as modding support was opened up for HL:A the first things that inevitably appeared were about 4,987 mods that added the crowbar back in. So it’s an easy enough wish to fulfill, if that’s what you want.

I never come up from my dungeon to talk to accounting. I send a precisely formatted, detailed, and concise email that they inevitably only read half of.

I’d rather have a paper trail anyway.

No one will buy it where, though? Probably not in the US, I’ll grant you, where scooters have always been a tough sell.

I’ll theorize that a big part of that is because our states are all stupid, and they insist on classifying anything with an engine greater than 49cc the same way as a full motorcycle and thus demand that anyone who wants to ride one must get a full M endorsement on their license with all the hassle that entails. Most people are not willing to do that, and those who are decide they may as well just get a “real” motorcycle while they’re at it. 49cc is not practical for intercity travel around here, only intracity use, which means it’s no surprise that in big cities (or sometimes beach towns) is basically the only place you ever see them.

Well, and at my house. We’ve got a Honda Metropolitan in the stable.

I think if this sort of thing is going to gain any kind of traction, our various governments both state and federal need to pull their heads out of their asses and raise the scooter/motorcycle division from 49cc to 126cc.

It’s not even. The data integrity algorithm is really kind of crap.

I like this one:

Also, whacking the manhacks with your crowbar goes from being a panicked flailing in flatscreen, to being an elegant one-swing home-run hit in VR.

It makes me like the fact that there are no melee weapons in Half Life: Alyx even less, though.

“All” digital tech?

I don’t think most people realize that any powertrain new enough to even have fuel injection is going to be a “computer vehicle” in some capacity. How are you with carburetors?

Windows 98 SE, maybe. We didn’t gain much traction there until about Win2k or XP.

Windows 98 in its original flavor didn’t even support USB mass storage devices out of the box without drivers. Hands up everyone who remembers having to carry around one of those tiny driver CDs that came in the box with every single Sandisk Cruzer for a couple of years? Yeah? How quickly we forget.

Shoot the dictator and prevent the war? But the dictator is merely the tip of the whole festering boil of social pus from which dictators emerge; shoot one, and there’ll be another one along in a minute. Shoot him too? Why not shoot everyone and invade Poland?

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner.

The only distinction is where a society draws the line on when violence can begin, and against who, and why.

It’s been insinuated by various outlets that the Steam Frame will be able to sideload .apk apps from the Quest. I don’t believe we’ve seen official confirmation of this yet.

Alexandrite reduces the thumbnail to this:

…Master Oogway?

There is indeed an owl sitting on his head.

Like many things in life, the same concepts that apply to motorcycles apply to bicycles. Having enough power on tap to just get the hell out of the way of crazy people is always beneficial.

Regarding the inevitable whining that will ensue about “dangers to pedestrians,” which the article also briefly touches upon, if your vehicle can go the same speed as car traffic you should not be operating it on the sidewalk in the first place. You should be operating it on the street, just like a motorcycle. That eliminates the pedestrian angle, or at least reduces it to the same magnitude as existing vehicular traffic. Just to name one example out of many, nobody cries about me riding my FZ6R down the sidewalk because I don’t.

As already thoroughly explored in the apparent documentary “99 Red Balloons,” in 1984.

For fuck’s sake.

In terms of Windows 11? You can move the start button back to the lower left corner in the settings, but you can’t stick the taskbar itself to the sides or top of your monitor nor resize it like you could do in previous versions. Even Windows 95 supported all of the above.

The functionality is still there, mind you, and you can do it via registry hacks or third party tools. Microsoft just saw fit to remove the option for the user to do it themselves for some inexplicable reason.

I’ll bet I can make your left eye twitch.

Are you ready?

A “large” amount of information.

Bitch, my computer has 128 gigabytes of RAM. It’s a tiny god. The fact that I have as many as 100 cells copied to the clipboard (which is the threshold that triggers this stupid message, if you’ve ever wondered) is not even a rounding error. I’m sure this was marginally important in 1982 or whenever this was first coded into Excel, but today my computer could lose an entire megabyte of memory or maybe even ten down between the couch cushions and neither of us would notice.

There is still no setting to disable this dumbshit message.

Be sure to stick an AR500 plate between your saddle and the mine as well, so you can enjoy a free added speed boost when you flak your enemy without scorching your buttcheeks.

It’ll totally work. I saw it in a cartoon once.

And setting upperbound limits on input length. Because if you expose it to users, it’s not a matter of if some joker will insist on entering precisely 4,294,967,297 bytes of random data into it to see if they can crash your shit, it’s a matter of when.