I have long pondered a comedy set in the Star Wars universe. Maybe some beer-swilling, rowdy Jedi. And fortunately Auralnauts fulfilled my dream: https://youtu.be/WSCm8yAxBr8?si=QC1SNiLAMAu1rE0T

Some of the later entries in the series are a bit weak, but there are always worthwhile punchlines.

:( indeed. This got me right in the feels.

Ever see a toucan in person? I had an employee with a toucan he would sometimes bring into work. It could throw things, especially round fruit, with uncanny accuracy. Like it could easily play catch from at least 2m away.

Glaucous-winged gulls also seem to have uncanny accuracy with defecation, but that’s not quite throwing.

Mashing the upvote for Shadow Tactics and Shadow Tactics:Aiko’s Choice. And agreed, their controller scheme is so spot on. Aiko’s Choice adds some deeply bittersweet context to the first game.

A recumbent racing league would be awesome, both fared and non-faring

Oooooh! I’d watch this. Hell, I’d probably get back into racing. And I don’t even like recumbents that much (but still think they are the superlative design for most people). Without the UCI interference, we’d see some crazy cool stuff. I feel like the best we can get right now are the recumbent speed/distance records.

The UCI could fuck up a wet dream. They actively harm the advancement of bicycling. Whenever the UCI starts administering a race type, that whole industry sector is permafuct. Disc brakes (regardless of how one might feel about discs) were banned for many years, resulting in delay of that technology despite the demand being there. Recumbents are a superlative bicycle design for most humans, but thanks UCI ban.

One of the main reasons gravel bikes have innovated so quickly is because the UCI has yet to stick its stupid nose into the races. But they’ll be along shortly to ruin the fun.

If my juggling of balls catches your fancy, you might also be interested to know that I also smoke meat, play the flute, and churn butter. 😆

Oh, throughout the whole thing, he and his employees were treated like garbage. He would get through security, go directly to the person’s office, and reassemble the pistol in front of the manager. And then my friend (or one of his employees) would get interrogated for hours on unrelated questions, like it was somehow my friend’s fault that the TSA failed their audits.

I travel a lot for work. US Customs and the TSA are absolutely a sick joke. I could easily write a novella on the extremely poor training of TSA employees. I have a small permanent retainer (read: braces); about 25% of the time, that is considered suspicious, and I get an enhanced inspection. “Ya know, I could just open my mouth and show you what’s in there.”

The TSA always determines that my juggling balls are suspicious, so I never pack them in carry-on anymore. I have NEXUS, yet I always get an enhanced inspection on return to the US. Literally every other country to which I have flown just waves me through, even before I got Pre-Check/NEXUS/Global Entry.

My partner had her rigging knife in her backpack on a flight out and back. She was unpacking and found it in her backpack after the trip. Good catch, TSA.

And the absolute frosting on the TSA shit sandwich: one of my close friends owns a private security firm. His company was approached by the TSA to assist in security audits at a major international airport. He and his team were contracted to “smuggle” fake firearms through TSA checkpoints, any way they could. The TSA repeatedly failed to detect the firearms for each of five audits. The TSA division (district? regional?) manager, frustrated at his group’s 100% failure rate, determined that my friend’s company must have specialized criminal training, and everyone who worked that contract were put on the no-fly list. It took him about 18 months to unfuck that mess for him and his employees.

I had written a few more paragraphs about TSA hassles, but I think y’all get the picture.

I miss lawn darts, but the ban made sense. Holy hell, people were stupid with those things.

It’s sofa king exhausting. Craft a cover letter and tweak the resume for each application. And still get crickets.

For the entirety of my engineering career (25+ years), I’ve been accustomed to getting an offer for every position to which I applied. This time around, something is way off. I’m at 78 applications, despite being a perfect fit for almost all of those applications. There have been only two responses, and those were for interviews, still in progress. The fake listings makes a lot sense, but I can’t help but feel that the problem is way larger than this article indicates.

Oh, right! I forgot about all of the LIDAR-equipped planes in maritime communities! Those are way more economical to fly than any sUAS. /s in case that wasn’t obvious.

In case you, or anyone else, were vaguely interested in learning:

-kelp extent mapping needs to be done in repeatable fashion, specifically at low tide; we can put up an sUAS any time

-the communities most in need of monitoring absolutely cannot afford to send planes up monthly

-many of the kelp beds in the PacNW are in restricted airspace; it is much easier to get an FAA clearance to perform low-altitude surveys using sUAS

-that restricted airspace I mentioned? Some of these kelp beds are on approach paths for the airspace. Even if a plane were the preferred choice for surveying, the planes are unable to fly in the pattern we need

-(drifting a touch off your point of LIDAR-equipped planes) satellite imagery with the required resolution is prohibitively expensive

-most construction projects wouldn’t use a plane for tasks such as volumetric or area analysis

Consumer drones are quickly becoming the preferred, economical means for kelp health analysis, especially for communities that can’t afford planes or purchasing satellite imagery.

This “lonely adult” uses drones for aerial mapping and survey. This Summer’s huge project is a workflow I developed to map the extent of PacNW bull kelp forests in order to provide year-over-year health metrics. Using sUAS for this is way more automated, economical, repeatable, and granular than using airplanes and satellites, therefore within reach of those communities monitoring kelp health.

DJI hits the sweet spot of capabilities, compatibility, and cost. Skydio (go USA!) has abandoned the consumer/enthusiast market that built their business. And even before they turned their back on the consumer market, Skydio couldn’t come close to DJI’s hardware. Additionally, Skydio, in true capitalist fashion, locked capabilities away behind software licenses, capabilities that are already built into the drone.

It’s important for countries to have domestic drone manufacturing in the current conditions. But the USA’s actions here smack of protecting companies that just can’t hang.

Stainless steel that gets coated is no longer stainless steel. Stainless steel requires exposure to sufficient oxygen in order to maintain the protective oxide layer.

These are rudder bolts from the same gudgeon on my sailboat. The black stuff is anoxic corrosion.

One of my ex-GFs was fond of saying “Men are good for three things: heavy lifting, outdoor cooking, and sex.” Welp, two out of three ain’t bad.

Triple? In our galley, “1 clove” —> 1 bulb.

In most jurisdictions, a note could be put on the driving record. If a pattern on aggressive driving were to be established, a prosecutorial or civil suit effort would have an easier time of litigating against that driver.

In my case, yes, there was paint damage from my bike, which would be evidence.

Edit to add: this was a bit before camera phones.

Fear indeed. I went to college in a very… provincial small city. Riding my bicycle around, I was regularly harassed by insecure assholes in pickup trucks, and run off the road twice. The one time I managed to get a license plate, the police claimed that without witnesses, they couldn’t do anything. ACAB.

I added my 1911 to the strap of my messenger bag, at the top of my left shoulder, where the stainless frame would be plainly visible. I was suddenly given plenty of space on the road and even got occasional compliments when waiting at stoplights. It’s disgusting that I would be a target for bullying without my pistol, but suddenly I was an okay guy with my penis extension where douchebag drivers could see it.

So yeah, I’m living proof that non-military open carry is only for scaredy cats.

Copyright infringement, DRM circumvention, and “hacking.”

See: Aaron Swartz

On January 6, 2011, Swartz was arrested by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) police on state breaking-and-entering charges, after connecting a computer to the MIT network in an unmarked and unlocked closet and setting it to download academic journal articles systematically from JSTOR using a guest user account issued to him by MIT. Federal prosecutors, led by Carmen Ortiz, later charged him with two counts of wire fraud and eleven violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison, asset forfeiture, restitution, and supervised release.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

Negative. I worked in pharmaceutical automation, management, and auditing software, specifically tracking and auditing (read: “near real-time chain-of-custody”) of delivery of Schedule II and cancer drugs from institutional (“enormous”) pharmacies. It was actually rather fascinating work, as are most compliance automation software suites.