It’s closer to sending a PNG via slow-scan television. An analog to digital conversion takes place and if you convert back you’re not getting the exact image back.

In my experience, what gets you bit with a miter saw is trying to cut a very small piece that isn’t properly constrained by the fence, the saw kicks back, sending the blade back/up, the work and the fingers trying to hold it down forward/in, badda bing badda boom you get a good look at your philanges.

If the work isn’t long enough to hold to the fence/table with your entire free hand clear of the blade action, you need to use an auxiliary fence and a hold down stick. If you do a lot of small stuff like that. Or, consider using a sled on a table saw. Or, get a miter box and cut it with a back saw.

explainxkcd.com gives the publication date as 2013‑02‑05.

Sort of, yes, but I’ve seen it mis-represented a lot.

I have seen headlines like “man stores PNG file on bird!” which categorically did not happen, the image was analog.

A common tool that is used in amateur radio practice is called a Waterfall Display. It works a little bit like the visualizer in Windows Media Player if you remember those, you get a window that shows a section of radio (or audio) spectrum. A signal (or sound) at a particular frequency will make that spot on the graph glow, the louder the signal, the brighter that spot will glow. The entire chart continuously scrolls to represent the passage of time, so you end up with kind of a graph of what signals are being made over a brief amount of time.

If you made a signal that swept up in frequency over time, it would be seen as a diagonal line on the waterfall. Using that concept, you can make all kinds of weird signals to draw pictures in the waterfall. Youtuber Ringway Manchester shows off several examples of this that he recorded that were played as part of the Ukraine/Russia conflict. this video. Here it was done out of jamming military communication frequencies, propaganda and trolling. See also UVB-76 for a tangentially related rabbit hole to fall down. If you play these sounds out of a radio’s speaker, they just sound like a strange warbling noise.

Play that strange noise to a bird that is good at mimicking, like a mockingbird or starling, and it’ll mimic that sound. Point a microphone hooked up to a waterfall display at the mimicking bird, and the bird will draw the image on the waterfall display when it sings.

I would go with the patent term of 20 years. That’s enough time to monetize your creation, and then it’s in the public domain. Copyright being over a hundred years is essentially an end-run around the contract.

I would like to see a commonly used “Not Free For Corporations” license. Something a bit like the GPL; this is my copyrighted code, I’m offering the source code for others to examine, use, modify, redistribute, if you redistribute it it must have these same license terms. I would add it is free of charge for personal, educational, and small business commercial use, it is available on a per instance subscription basis for corporations. My work may not be used for the profit of shareholders unless I get a hefty piece of that pie.

The early sneaking into the castle during the rain music from the beginning of A Link to the Past?

My mind landed on Stickerbush Symphony from Donkey Kong Country 2 and kinda settled there. David Wise is damn good at composing video game music.

A lot of good music on the Genesis Sega games.

Arch Linux’s whole claim to fame is Some Assembly Required. Go with something like Mint or Fedora (the latter of which is available with the KDE desktop, source: am typing this on a gaming computer running Fedora KDE) and they’re much more complete out of the box.

And just like that, Microsoft goes straight to jail LMAO.

Don’t threaten me with a good time.

now thats just ignorance.

Explain the permanent state of GIMP’s UI without deliberate sabotage.

I went to a brand new middle school for one year, I was in the first 8th grade class to attend that school, it had a schmancy new VoIP system with a telephone mounted just inside the door of each room, and each could get a line to dial out.

Every other K-12 school I went to had an older PA system, each room had a slanted front speaker box that could be used for one-way communication from the office to the entire building, or could be used two-way to a classroom. The classroom couldn’t call out, but the office could call in. There were phones in office spaces dotted around the campus typically.

I also only remember one teacher prior to the 9th grade that owned a cell phone.

does the average Korean citizen have a PC of their own?

I’m reminded of a video I saw of a woman talking about her dating prospects using M&Ms. She poured a bunch on the table as a metaphor for her dating pool, and slid away M&Ms as she ruled the people they represent out. “8 million people in the city. But half are women slides half of the M&Ms away of the remaining 4 million men, 20% are under 25, slides more M&Ms away” until she got to a point where she had one candy left, and then she shattered it with a meat tenderizer and continued sliding pieces of it away.

You can do that for potential adoptees of Linux, because there are a bunch of filters in series you have to pass through before successfully adopting Linux.

8 billion people on the planet.

Subtract the Sentinelese and Amish and North Koreans and everyone else who just outright doesn’t have access to computers. Nothing we can really do about them and in some cases it would be unethical to try.

Now subtract out the people who only use a mobile device like a cell phone or tablet, which are locked to their OSes. Android or iOS is as much a part of the hardware as a microwave oven’s firmware is to them. Linux on mobile devices (excluding Android) is in a severely rough state, there’s basically no hardware and software combo that is ready for daily driving.

Now subtract out the people who do use a PC or other device, that won’t ever install an operating system on a computer themselves. You’ll get some of these folks by selling computers with Linux installed in stores and such, though I think you’ll have to address a few other points later. I think SteamOS is demonstrating this.

Now subtract the people who might install Linux themselves, say PC builders who would have to install an OS anyway, but bounce off the process of choosing a distro and then installing. The big distributors like Canonical and Fedora tend toward marketing wankshit instead of human language. You can’t tell their goddamn websites “I just want the normal end-user desktop version with KDE please.” Does “Core” mean our main, central product, or the IoT embedded system version? You kind of have to know Fedora calls their Gnome edition “Workstation” and if you want “normal Fedora but with KDE” that’s a “Spin.” Then you get the Trendy Fork Of The Month, things like Bazzite and Nobara that pretty much are Fedora or Ubuntu with a theme applied, maybe some actual features in the OS, but often just a redone onboarding process, like I think it’s Bazzite that offers a configurator on their website that lets you pick your desktop and such. Defuckulating the onboarding process of major distros might allow us to do away with the Trendy Fork Of The Month.

Now subtract the folks who get a Linux machine up and running and then bounce off of the unfamiliar UI. I’m pretty sure this is Gnome’s fault more often than not, Gnome is deliberately hostile to both distro maintainers and end users to the point there are now four DEs that are “We can’t do this anymore” forks of Gnome: MATE, Cinnamon, Unity and Cosmic. You’d probably see more people stick with Linux if it was less easy to stumble dick first into Gnome.

Now subtract the people who got this far and then said “My CAD/art/music/office/finance/whatever software doesn’t run on this.” and had to switch back. In a lot of cases, software like that exists in the FOSS ecosystem but it’s significantly inferior, like FreeCAD or GIMP. These are often kept in a deliberately shitty state because some opinionated programmer likes how the code they wrote in 2004 looks in their IDE, so open software continues to be unadoptable and people continue to pay subscriptions to the Captain Planet villains in charge of Microsoft, Apple, Google and Adobe.

It CAN be configured, but you have to go hunting for the tools to do so.

I’ve got an old 5.1 surround sound speaker setup attached to my main rig, and in both Cinnamon and KDE (the only two I’ve tried), you can’t use the normal DE’s audio control panel to put the thing in 5.1 mode without first installing an old, probably unmaintained tool called ALSAJackRetask. Once you’ve retasked the jacks, several options for surround appear in the DE’s audio control panel. It knows but it can’t do.

No, it should be punishable to build a system that just says “error” when it fails.

So is Titan.

I’m probably going to publish a book on this topic at some point. Furniture as a craft stopped in 1940.

After 1940, anything new that came out came from industry, not from craft. You can still find actual craftsmen making furniture, hell the Stickley factory is still open. You can buy mission style furniture made of quarter sawn white oak to this day. And it’s exactly like what you could buy 100 years ago, for about 100 times the price.

Meanwhile, there never has been a craftsmanship around modern furniture needs. Computer furniture has entirely been the realm of flat packed particle board, double wide mobile homes the nation over are having their built-in entertainment centers ripped out because a 75 inch flat panel doesn’t fit anywhere in it. You can buy a dining room cabinet, or a bedroom armoire, but I haven’t seen craft furniture made for home theater or video game enthusiasts.

Not that anyone young enough to like video games will ever be given the chance to have enough money to buy real furniture.

We really do need to start those lynch riots.

At some point I’m going to tackle designing and building a computer desk. I don’t think humanity has done it right yet.

I came up in the 90’s and 00’s when everyone had a Windows ME era Compaq set up on one of those Bush brand tube-and-panel desks that was supposedly purpose built to be a computer desk, but they STILL ended up way overcrowded because they STILL hadn’t thought about all the stuff you would have with a computer. So a subwoofer, the computer itself, both, or some other piece of equipment would end up in the foot well, cable management is a nightmare, no one in the furniture industry has ever acknowledged the existence of the UPS…

Then everyone got laptops, then everyone got phones and tablets, and then oh yeah desktop PCs are a thing, what are desktop PC gamers using for desks these days? A rectangular slab on L-shaped legs. Is the current state of the art in computer desk design. A table. Weirdly thick and heavy, and completely featureless.

It’s a challenge I want to tackle.