dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

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.

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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • I can do you one better: My GPD laptop has a charging indicator on the center type-C port indicating that this is where the power supply goes, but it can actually be charged from either port regardless of the icon. Both ports are USB 3.0 or 3.2 or whatever the current fast standard is this week, but only the center one supports video out via an external GPU enclosure. So if you want to use it docked with an eGPU, it’s actually required to not plug the power supply into the port that says you should plug the power supply into it.

    So not only is the marking meaningless, it’s arguably worse than meaningless because in one of the headline hardware setups for the machine it is actually 100% incorrect to do what the marking is telling you to do. Wrap your head around that one…







  • If the US government bitching was enough to get the flight simulator easter egg removed from Excel (allegedly), I can’t imagine a similar stern glare from the Pentagon would not cause Recall to magically turn out to be uninstallable after all. At least from any US government owned computers originally so equipped.

    Anyway, isn’t this only going to roll out on “Copilot” compatible PC’s with the requisite AI acceleration chips in them? I would be furthermore immensely surprised if it could not be locked out in Group Policy for corporate customers.







  • Yeah, he’s up to owning four of them, two of which are purely parts cars and one of which is currently apparently irrevocably broken with its parking pawl latched into place and thus immobile in his garage without hooking it with a wrecker and literally dragging it on the tires.

    And that guy pretty much knows what he’s doing with various offbeat EV’s, and has a huge amount of shop space and apparently funds at his disposal to just fuck with these things as a hobby. The average owner, meanwhile, has no chance.



  • If you have a Dremel, grind a slot into it and unscrew it.

    This has saved my ass many times. I keep one of those diamond coated wheels on a spare cutoff mandrel already mounted up pretty much specifically for this purpose.

    Harbor Freight has a pretty cheap left handed drill bit set that is sometimes a lifesaver in these situations. Many times I just start drilling it with the left hand bit and often the bit grabs and unscrews the screw before even getting to the phase of trying the screw extractor on it. Sometimes not.



  • This is never going to happen fully, because there is a ton of software and also device drivers that hook into the OG Control Panel system and install their own .cpl’s there, which are required for that hardware/software to work. The system to support those is going to have to remain in place, otherwise Microsoft is going to have a lot of very angry corporate customers and hardware vendors up their noses in short order.

    In fact, this is most likely the exact reason the Control Panel still exists behind the scenes the way it does today in Win10 and Win11. They’ll probably go to ever-greater lengths to hide it from home users, but I’d doubt they can actually remove it completely at this point.

    In fact, from TFA:

    Tip: while the Control Panel still exists for compatibility reasons and to provide access to some settings that have not yet migrated, you’re encouraged to use the Settings app, whenever possible.