After accumulating pennies for something like a year (?) I bought this knife with Patreon money.

No, really. I did. If you want to contribute to that you can do so here or via Ko-Fi here.

Here’s a picture I didn’t use in the post, somehow:

I had a copy of Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator when I was a kid which repeated an entire chapter somewhere in the middle of the book. I think the one where the Knids are first seen.

I will see your Nerf darts, and raise you airsoft BBs. I still find the cats playing with one every now and again, or pick up a stray one with the vacuum cleaner. I can’t remember firing an airsoft gun inside the house at any time more recently than about 15 years ago. And yet.

The PSVR2 is mildly interesting if paired with the PC adapter, but you couldn’t get me to possession of a Meta Quest even if Facebook paid me $300 to take it off their hands. I don’t even want the fucking thing in my house. I have a similar opinion of the Bytedance/Pico units. The force behind them just isn’t trustworthy, even if they did sell the damn things in the US.

Here’s another vote for sticking with my existing rig until the Steam Frame comes out.

Aperture wide open … Small depth of field is ok.

Be mindful of vignetting around the edges of your lens. Unless you have very expensive glass, it’s likely you can’t get both the center and the edges of your frame in focus at the same time when shooting at a flat surface a short distance away from the lens thanks to our good old friend spherical aberration, and it’s even less likely if you have it wide open. There’s probably no harm in stopping down slightly and taking a longer exposure to compensate for this as much as you can, because your photos aren’t going to move. You might want to take a couple of test shots against a grid background or something to determine just how large the sweet spot of your particular lens is at that distance.

You can avoid this by backing the camera up from the subject some more, too, but I figure if you’re trying to preserve photos by taking further photos of them, you probably want to get as many of your sensor’s pixels across them as possible.

Use a tripod (any old).

I don’t know about yours, but none of my tripods are capable of pointing straight down and truly getting the camera perpendicular to the surface they’re standing on without the center barrel of the tripod itself being right spang in the middle of the frame just below the horizontal centerline. And that’s even if the head on your tripod can tilt down a full 90 degrees at all, and without some part of your camera or lens bonking into it. Even extending the idiot stick won’t help you any, because the mount and pivot head is out at the end of it rather than before the point where it extends from. (Maybe some kind of high dollar, high speed David Attenborough top flight pro rig tripod has a second pivot placed before the extension tube, but I’ve certainly never owned one set up that way.) When I have to do a true top-down shot for one of my myriad reviews, I always wind up hand holding the camera for that very reason.

Other gimcrack ideas involving 2x4s and spirit levels and 1/4-20 screws or mirrors suggest themselves, but the realistic outcome with a normal tripod is that you’ll wind up with your camera not quite square to the table and thus all of your photos-of-photos will wind up keystoned to some degree and this will drive you nuts. Perhaps you’d have better luck and spend less money just propping up one end of the surface you’re putting your subject photos on to get it perpendicular to the lens without getting any of the tripod itself in the shot.

Users with access to a remote shutter release can dispense with the self timer trick (but hey, I don’t knock it — I used to use the 2 second self timer on my camera as a vibration settling delay all the time when I was young and broke) and make their workflow speedier and significantly less annoying.

Penguins are cool. I ride dual sport motorcycles. (And other motorcycles. But definitely those.)

“Calls.”

There’s only one call, and it’s coming from Tim Sweeny at Epic. It’s just more of his usual yelling at clouds, because he’s got a pathological hate-on for anyone else who runs a storefont, including Apple and Google but especially Valve. He hasn’t made any positive contribution to the world since about 1998, and at this point we can all safely discard his opinion with nothing of value being lost. He wants to allow AI slime on his own platform because he thinks it’ll make him free money, but maybe he ought to worry about the smell coming from his own house before he goes around trying to dictate at others how they should run theirs.

Another fine idea. I’ve got a soap dispenser pump in mine.

I’m more of a Magnetbox bird, myself.

“You yadda-yaddad a homie stock? You can’t yadda-yadda a homie stock!”

My nephew went through this. Insurance wanted more for a used 2 door 1993 Cavalier because it was a “sports car.”

The '93 VL Cavalier produces an absolutely widowmaking 110 HP, and that was when it was new.

His was that horrid teal color that they were back in the day, but I’m sure if it were red that would have been another demerit. They could have at least been honest and cited their crash statistics, but no. “Sports car.”

Sports car, my ass. I could beat a '93 Cavalier in the quarter mile on my bicycle.

I’ve tried to tell the cops this, and did you know it didn’t work.

No dice on my argument that I’m trying to keep myself warm via air friction like the space shuttle, either.

Didn’t you know? This is what me and my buddies get up to on Saturday nights.

Motorcycle cops think they’re hot shit because they can weave between a bunch of cones. Amateurs. Lets see you try to work the throttle, brake, and clutch on a dirtbike while also wielding a 10’ long piece of PVC pipe with a boxing glove on the end of it.

This is especially true of motorcycles, where in Western countries they often go hand in hand with the time honored pastime of, “Let’s all ride our Harleys to the bar and get absolutely sideways, and then ride our Harleys to another bar.” I do know for sure that a large portion of motorcycle wrecks in general are single vehicle incidents, i.e. the rider ran out of skill and simply ate shit into a ditch, tree, guardrail, or the nearest Jersey wall.

I’d also be interested to see the source to determine what the geographical range of this is, i.e. whether or not it includes Southeast Asia where basically the entire population conducts all of its affairs from the back of a small motorbike.

At the end of the day, if you slam into something on your bike you’re pretty much guaranteed to be worse off than slamming into the same thing in a car or a bus. But you’re still not getting me off of mine.

Well, my answer is nothing, and as anyone who follows me knows, seeing me not buy any random novelty cutlery trash from China has certainly got to count for something.

…And get one of those filler plates for the now empty hole in your sink. They’re cheap. Get a real stainless one, not a chrome or “satin nickel” or whatever the hell, which will rust in short order.

That’s a regular 3 hole (4, including the sprayer) kitchen faucet. There is absolutely nothing unusual about that. Shut off the valves, unscrew the braided stainless supply lines, undo those big plastic nuts on the underside and the whole thing will come off. Take it to the hardware store and they’ll sell you another one just like it.

Having a 3/8" compression fitting on the output side of your shutoff valves there is pretty normal. In Ye Olden Times that would accept a piece of copper tubing with a compression nut and a ferrule, but these days the flexible supply lines have a fitting that screws on in place of that.

The white hose going from the faucet itself to the sprayer is likely to be proprietary and model or at least brand specific to whatever faucet you have. You’re unlikely to find a replacement to just that at any hardware store.

I’m positive they already have it. These are the same motherfuckers who maintain different premium brackets for different colors of the same car.

Ah. Like this?

Whoppsie-doodle, that’s one’s actually how bad actors farm shitloads fraudulent clicks to boost spurious news articles, manipulate search results, and spam political propaganda at social networking sites. My mistake!

Who’s “hoarding” all the devices now?

I don’t necessarily see why this example in particular even needed “AI.” What a pointless waste of silicon.

It could be done by licensing a 50 cent stock photo (or simply stealing it, usage rights be damned, which is business as usual online anyhow) and a script to twiddle the color channels. There aren’t even any logos on those peoples’ clothing to update and all of the text in the background is deliberately out of focus so it’s illegible and doesn’t require updating for each version either.

I could knock a set of these together in Corel in about 5 minutes, with each new color combo taking 30 seconds or so.

I think the main point of interest is that about half of the crowd in the second generated picture example seems to be made up of copies of the same dude.