This guy?

I await with interest the first serious accusation that I’m a bot. A very well armed bot, perhaps. I certainly type some strange things, but you guys have probably seen my hands too many times.

Unless my hands are also AI generated. Hmm.

I’ve already garnered the achievement of having several people on one of the Discord servers I hang around on of treating me as if I’m literally a penguin. Nobody’s yet come up with a credible explanation of how I’d be able to type. (Including, surprisingly, the obvious hunt and peck gag that presents itself.)

I have offers turned off on eBay for this reason. The only thing you ever get is low ball offers. Yes, I know you can set a lowerbound limit.

Since I have offers disabled (or if someone wants to try to underbid your setpoint out of optimism and/or stupidity) that prompts the lowballers message instead. Usually with an insulting poorly spelled paragraph attached, or some sob story. Or both. But since they messaged you, that means you now have their user handle and can block them. So, goodbye.

Edit: In fact, speak of the devil. I had to punk exactly such a rando right now. They came at me with a 50% offer on an item I already have listed at roughly 50% below its selling price with their excuse being, “Well, I’m taking a risk trusting you that it works.” Broheim, if it doesn’t work eBay will force me to take it back, no matter what… The beauty of this, by the way, is that this precludes such idiots from interacting with your listings anymore and, I think, even being able to view them. So you’ll never even see them again, unless they go out of their way to create another account. And they lose out on their chance to buy whatever your thing was at any price through their sheer greed and ineptitude.

I’m given to understand a sizable fraction of these dweebs try to make their living lowballing whoever they assume are desperate sellers of crap on eBay, and then turn around and list the same item right back for full price.

I’m assuming glass printer beds are supposed to be tempered, and just an FYI for you or anyone else attempting the hardware store or score-it-yourself method, the glass you wind up with will not be tempered and will also have exceedingly sharp edges and corners. If you have access to a belt sander with a suitably fine belt you can at least round off the sharp bits.

Untempered glass probably won’t deal with thermal loading very well, either. It might work, and it’ll be cheap, but prepare for disappointment.

In an LEP light? A regular LED, sure. But those lack the novelty of being able to lance somebody in the face with a laser beam.

My attorney has advised me to make no statements whatsoever regarding the applicability of the Lumintop Thor Mini I just bought the other week, which outputs a mere 250 lumens but does so in a narrow cone that’s got, to my reckoning, a divergence of only about four or five degrees.

I’ll have to do some measuring later, but at rear-windshield-to-asshole distance it’ll only throw a spot that’s probably about a foot wide, delivering maximum fuck you with a minimum of collateral damage.

Easy. I did it the just other day because I forgot that my new CRF250L is a Honda, and the position of the turn signal switch and the horn are reversed from every other bike I own, and probably not coincidentally every also other motorcycle brand on the planet. Some guy in the lane next to me got super butthurt because he thought I honked “at” him as I was completing my turn, which was quite hilarious to watch. (He was in the far left lane, I was doing a right on red from the right lane. There is no conceivable reality in which anything I was doing would be related to him, if not for the fact that he had Main Character Disorder.)

some folks just want to feel some kind of power because they feel powerless and they just need a wake-up call.

This is, like, the perfect summation of the human condition. Probably an awful lot of it, anyway.

That works. Also, back when I delivered pizza I kept a rather large LED flashlight in my cupholder all the time, ostensibly for spotting mailboxes and house numbers. (This was back in the day when having a powerful LED flashlight was a big deal, not like nowadays when you can get 3 for $10 on Amazon or whatever.) Pointing it out the back window usually got the point across when asshats felt the need to sit three feet off my back bumper and shine their high beams at me.

Slotted is the way to go. I’ve messed with a lot of drive types on 3D printed screws and I always come back to slotted, because it’s the most resistant to being reamed out. Phillips, Torx, Roberson (square), and especially Allen (hex) really don’t work very well when printed in plastic.

Whenever this comes up I’m obligated to mention that the illustration comes from Dougal Dixon’s Man After Man. It is chock-a-block full of these kinds of illustrations from Philip Hood and as soon as you get to the future phase in part 2, all of them are just as batshit as this one. It’s gold.

And I absolutely would not be able to resist labeling these as:

• English, U
• English, No U

Wow, the actual English flag, not the Union Jack?

I imagine that would trip up quite a few people even though there is a cheeky aspect of technical correctness to it.

melt ceramic

If you’re melting crockery in your microwave, I assure you whatever it is you’re using is not ceramic. Even the earthenware stuff that cheap coffee mugs are made out of has to be heated to upwards of 1000° C just as part of its hardening process, never mind melting.

You can absolutely get silica gel beads hot enough in a microwave to melt and deform plastic containers, though, including those faux stoneware textured ones. Beware if what you have is not actually Pyrex or ceramic.

I cook the shit out of my silica gel beads in the microwave in an old ceramic pie dish I have no other use for. There isn’t a mark on it. Although I will say, you probably want to microwave your beads gently anyway because at high power levels the moisture flash boils out of them fast enough to cause them to split and shatter, or occasionally leap out of the dish like popcorn.

I have a Dell Axim X50v in a box somewhere. I imagine the battery is toast and I’ll probably have to keep it in its cradle to remain powered. It was a hell of a machine for it’s day.

I went through a succession Windows CE/PocketPC machines back in the day, starting with a Casio Cassiopeia E-115, then an Audiovox Maestro which was a rebadged Toshiba, then an HP iPAQ 2215, and finally the Axim.

The displays on the Maestro and the Axim were really something, and I wish someone would bring these back for a modern smartphone. They were rotten at color accuracy, but both had transflective displays that were fully readable even in direct sunlight. The Axim X50v also had a full 480x640 screen resolution which blew the first few iPhones out of the water on pixel density and even gave the iPhone 4 a run for its money. “Retina” display, my ass.

I had a Microdrive bunged into the CompactFlash slot on my Axim which was… several gigabytes, I don’t remember how many. I kept it packed with MP3’s, and I had a custom wallpaper with a white-on-chartreuse silhouette of a pacifier on it with the legend, “All 10,000 Songs On Your iPod Suck.”

But then the entire PDA market got swallowed in one gulp by smartphones.

I’ll bet you a shiny penny that’s what it is. The backend recompresses things to some other format, probably a low bitrate JPEG, in order to save space and/or in case some joker uploads a 90 megabyte uncompressed TIFF image to use as a profile pic, or something.

Those are displayed in browser, right? The only reason that would be happening is if Piefeed is recompressing images and their code is not smart enough to identify an animated .gif and act accordingly.

I mean, that’s already how animated .gifs work. If somehow you manage to load one into a viewer that doesn’t support the animation functionality it will at least dutifully display the first frame.

How the hell you would manage to do that in this day and age escapes me, but there were a fair few years in the early '90s where you might run into that sort of thing.

Yes, the iPhone did not and never has supported Flash. At least not officially from Apple. There was support, albeit not quite 100% complete, on Windows CE/PocketPC at the time, though. That was one of the things that let me lord it over early iPhone adopters back in the day — my pocket nerd computer could play Homestar Runner videos, and their stupid expensive bauble couldn’t. So there.