Phone camera app should start fast. Easy to activate shutter button (even with a knuckle). No confusing mode screen if you miss. Take the photo quickly, no "please hold your camera still" when you already are. Most important: don't tell me you took a picture when you actually didn't!

When I was a kid, I found a comic book at a relative's house, and enjoyed the tale of the Answer Man tackling a problem involving ancient robots on a planetoid and how to activate an interstellar weapon. I rather identified with one panel about how he was "always reading".

Škoda did some fascinating research on how to make bicycle bells that can be heard even through noise cancelling headphones. Better yet, they're making the results freely available to promote pedestrian safety. www.skoda-storyboard.com/en/skoda-wor...

I like to keep my nails filed, and prefer the Revlon files, they use manufacturing techniques to give long lasting, effective files. I prefer the "professional" length ones, which allow smooth, continuous motion, like a violin bow. Now only the unsatisfying "compact" ones are available.

I'm at a friend's house, helping assemble Ikea furniture and the screwdriver just isn't engaging well. Taking a closer look, I realize the Ikea screws aren't the Philips screws I expected, but Pozidriv screws. While I have Pozidriv screwdrivers, it hadn't occurred to me to bring them with me.

Wordle 1,742 2/6 🟩🟨⬜⬜⬜ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

I'm still getting "your car's factory warranty is about to expire." Um, my car is eighteen years old with over 200k miles. There is no warranty. I'm not about to buy your scammy coverage either.

When I was a kid, I had horrible nightmares. After a while, I realized they dealt with subjects I avoided thinking about while awake, so they apparently leaked out while I was asleep, and less in control. So I started intentionally thinking on them. It worked, nightmares are rare for me now.

Andy Weir's book Hail Mary is a great read, but it's complex, conceptual, cerebral, subtle, and hard science enough that I didn't think it could make an effective transition to film. However, the film version (just out) is amazing, whether or not you've read the book.

Yo, City of Brunswick, that provision violates the Sixth Amendment guarantee of the Right to Face your Accuser. Also, you misspelled "least". Also also, requiring a sketchy app to pay for parking is driving business from your town. Some people don't have smartphones or want their info stolen.

Bluetooth audio devices go through their supported protocols, and agree on "surround sound speaker". One is a car, and the other is a phone. Are you the stereo? Yes. I am also the stereo. What is your speaker position? Wat. (default to left rear) What is your speaker distance? Wat. Ringing! Wat.

While I can understand employers throwing in arbitrary requirements like a degree just to filter out some applicants, I roll my eyes when I see a PhD requirement along with a salary well under $100k.

The power lock stopped working on one of my car doors. Opened it up, it turned out the actuator was no longer attached, the weird little screw-rivet that held it in place had broken. Drilled it out, replaced it with a 10-24 screw and a clip nut, secured it with a nut and washer. Works fine again!

I took the "final expense insurance" people making illegal robocalls to court. They tried a bunch of delaying tactics and to get the case dismissed, but we persisted. Then we caught them lying on a deposition, and suddenly they were willing to settle. We got $50,000, of which I pocketed $7500.

Building a single board computer, it ran, but very slowly. I worked my way back to the clock generator, which is a simple inverter and crystal lashup. For some reason, it was oscillating at about 300kHz instead of 16MHz. Oscillator works with a '00 but not an '04 (same type and brand). Wat.

There's one area in the snow that's covered with little divots, I'm not sure why. I'll see this kind of thing under trees or birdfeeders, but this is out in the open.

I'm looking at an ordinary windshield squeegee, and wondering what the plastic tabs sticking out the ends are for.

I actually "bought" something from amazon. "Melania: devourer of men" in ebook format. It's free, so I didn't give them any money, but did my part to poison search results for things about "melania". Heh heh heh.

When we were in Iceland, I saw Fingies in the store, they're even AIRFRYER FRIENDLY. We already had plenty of food so I didn't get a chance to try them. And apparently they're not available in the United States (they come from Denmark).

"The gas pump keeps shutting off while I'm filling my car." "You need an $800 evaporative emissions filter." "The gas pump still keeps shutting off." "Your car is just like that." "You could have TOLD me before I shelled out $800!"

ONOZ! It's a ketchup volcano! Or Tómatsósa eldfjall, if you will. Run away (or toward, depending on how your tastes are)!

I had a teacher who gave a creative writing assignment of "I stepped into my TV set and...". I figured I'd mess with the assignment and just list the damage to the TV and the parts that would be needed to repair it. To my surprise, the teacher liked it and said it was very creative.

So, skystates.us, you make an illegal phone call to a number on the DNC list, and your pitch is I give you $3000, do unpaid work for you "as training" for 4 months, THEN you start jobhunting for me? Hard pass.

Aside from threats of legal action, words designed to attract the attention of NSA, and descriptions of grievous bodily harm, one of things I like to throw to robocallers is "grackle borgward" (one of Goulash's weird lines from Bored of the Rings). Weirdly, the last results in the fastest hangups.

Looking at old Artomatic photos, found one I liked of Barry S. Schmetter's exhibit. I got curious as to what he was up to these days, only to find out he'd died in 2023. That hit me harder than I expected, we didn't know each other, I'd just seen his art a few times.

If you post a link to an article that's paywalled, you don't get to complain to me about responding to the headline without reading the article.

Reading Mary Roach's new book "Replaceable You" [2025, W. W. Norton], there's a description of how human tears form layers, aided by a "brush-like scaffold that extends into the tear film", known as a glycocalyx. Curious, I looked for a picture of this, the first one I found was bemusing.

"What are those little brown things in my rice?" "Those are seeds, they're for flavor." "I don't want seeds in my rice!" I've got some bad news for you...

My sweetie and I were playing Wordle and noticed our patterns were the same, so we looked at the actual words we had played, which turned to also be identical. People say we think alike, and this would be evidence of that.

I was working on one project involving bus routes, and would get these periodic dumps of bus schedules in very messy CSV. I wrestled with it for a while, but then discovered I could fetch the structured data in General Transit Feed Specification format via an API. I wish I had known that earlier!

I'm not likely to download your stupid money funnel game anyway, but if you can't even get a simple word spelled correctly in your ad? Public mockery.

Sending me unwanted texts begging for money is bad enough, but flooding me with over sixty texts at once? Instablock, and I'm blackballing your entire campaign.

On a data recovery project, customer wanted a count of unique files recovered, as quickly as possible. Instead of worrying about efficiency, a couple of shell commands and a few minutes was enough. find . -type f -exec sum {} \; > sums sed -e "s/ \..*//g" < sums | sort | uniq | wc -l

For decades, I thought Abba‘s song “Take a Chance on Me” included the lyrics “If you‘re all alone, well I‘m pretty versatile”. But while watching The Muppet Show with captions, I found out they‘re really singing “If you‘re all alone when the pretty birds have flown”. Huh.

We're enjoying the show "Reginald the Vampire", starring the ever-appealing Jacob Batalon, and saw it's based on a "Fat Vampire" book. While travelling, we find a "Fat Vampire" book, autographed by the author! The story and characters are different, turns out there are two books with that title.

I was today years old when I realized "Palmolive" is palm + olive, two popular oils for making soap products.

I don't get drug ads in general, and in particular the ones that don't even give any indication of what condition the product is intended to treat. While I can glean that it's a monoclonal antibody by the -mab in "guselkumab", that's not much use.

I tried playing some 2D games with a graphics tablet. For some "hammer the bad guys" type games (for example, the "Whack a Zombie" minigame in Plants vs Zombies) that take a lot of precision clicking in a hurry, it utterly rules.

I don't understand these game ads. They show a freezing woman and child in a room with a broken window and no heat, and give you a choice of helping them by either painting the walls or picking up the trash.

A phototherapy lamp company closed their doors a while back and I bought some of their stock in bulk. Now what am I going to do with what's essentially a bunch of oddly-colored fluorescent lamps?

Watching a Technology Connections segment on humidifiers, I was distracted by a pile of boxes of miniature light bulbs. I wondered why he has so many bulbs. Then another shot revealed a pinball machine, which explains that neatly.

I bought a broken tunable helium-neon laser on eBay many moons ago. A few weeks ago, I coaxed the first laser light out of it (orange, interestingly enough). Soon I was able to get two reds and an orange out of it, but no more. On Christmas, it began lasing yellow!

Tested by experiment: "White Noise" is not a Christmas movie. That is all.

TFW you finally read the information sheet for a medication you've been taking for a long time and under "side effects" it lists ... Confusion.

To put a new coin cell in our key fob, I opened it, unfortunately, releasing a little metal slider that retains the mechanical key, whose spring pinged away and vanished. I found a suitable replacement, but it sprang off too. A less suitable one stayed, but, flustered, I put the cell in backwards.

For a GISHWHES challenge to generate mascots, I selected some animals, drew their front and back ends, and wrote a program to select two, join them, and combine their names. Once, it chose "octopus" twice, yielding "ocotpoctopus". This became a running joke. www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUFm...

Grump.

I think it's time to re-share an old pic I took of Sammy knocking over the Christmas tree.