iFixit noted yesterday, “Though the bill is strong and should make repairs more available for everyone, it allows manufacturers to continue to engage in parts pairing, a practice by which they limit repairs with software blocks. They can also combine parts into expensive assemblies, which makes repairs more expensive.”

Similarly doubt there’s any way to legislate against the dismal engineering that tempts a failure avalanche like the Ford F150 taillight horrorshow I posted a few days ago.

Odd. I wondered why friends from Chicago always order tuna salad whenever they visit.

Thanks. Same day I created the community, I emailed announcements nearly forty active Midwest hackerspaces inviting members to join and post. I received a couple enthusiastic email replies, but as you see, still no posts. Granted, it’s only been a week. Still not sure how long to expect it to remain fresh in mind and don’t want to bug anyone about it repeatedly.

So I confess, I’ve had my moment of doubt that I already ruined it by greeting visitors with a ridiculous rocket-powered grain bin. The voice of approval is reassuring.

Iowa Driver’s License Manual, page 10, § 2.8 Traffic Signals.

ibid., page 15, § 2.21 Intersections.

I flunked Sunday school, so I’ll take the item description on its word that it’s a “great way to give witness to God’s truth in the Holy Bible.”

Recommend also the seminal TMRC dictionary for several terms absent here, plus some memorably elegant definitions:

Kludge: A crock that works.
Crock: A kludge that doesn’t work.

Same again true of Peter Samson’s original 1959 and 1960 editions.

Ah, just picked up a T480s Thinkpad earlier this week, installed Manjaro Cinnamon. Writing this reply on it now.

Less subjectively, there’s the 38 county jurisdiction of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Illinois, or for rough approximation, the 618 & 730 telephone area codes.

By either measure, that includes Calhoun and Jersey counties, northwest of Godfrey.

As I write this reply, three buttons appear below the text dialog, “Reply,” “Cancel” and “Preview.” Not having deleted the text from dialog, nor committed to “Reply” or “Cancel,” if I now decide to view your profile on this page by clicking your user name, it has no effect. This appears true of all links except !main and those to off-site URLs, for example, the donation heart you mentioned.

I also observe the “Cancel” button is not offered when typing a reply to your initial post.

Reminds me of how cake mixes never really needed you to add eggs, but were formulated to require them, just so customers could feel like they were making a cake.

6 Degrees in Bucktown had them for 13 years, but closed down last year. The owner was the daughter of Paul Keefner of Bachmann & Keefner Drug Store in Springfield, the last in the city to still have a lunch counter when it closed in 2004.

I speculate that horseshoes will migrate north as poutine migrates south, eventually to breed a hybrid called a “mooseshoe.”

i really miss the (relative) locality of the old BBS days

I was recalling BBS days with @TurtleTourParty’s “99.9999% uptime is overrated” remark. We really have become spoiled in little better than a quarter century. The typical BBS had one phone line. Once you got past a busy signal, you had to economize your time online to give other users a chance. You’d install an offline reader to download new mail, disconnect, reply at leisure, and upload when you got back in.

Aside from the local quality (enforced by a forgotten fact-of-life called “long distance charges,” defined as “not far outside city limits”), you never posted anything to discover someone else had replied simultaneously, because you were preventing them from doing so. I have fond memories of message boards that were games designed around this fact.

Have not tried it yet, but this promises to recapture some feel of the “good ol’ days.” I wish it included a sound effect of that satisfying “connected” modem squawk when you fired it up.

I found it curious, back in December, that Twitter suppressed tweets notifying followers of a Mastodon address, acknowledging no such threat from links to other social media companies, including a few that have in shorter work surpassed Twitter’s user base.

Similar behavior from Reddit briefly banning r/KbinMigration. There’s been a r/RedditAlternatives sub for over eleven years. Awkward if they suddenly decided that to be spam. For nearly as long, there’s been r/Facebook providing unofficial tech support for its users. Upon resolving their issue, one easily supposes they return to looking at ads on that hellhole rather than those on Reddit. That one, I’m confident, was subject to no interruption at all.

My preference is usually Chicago style, but this Detroit stuff will do.

“I don’t know, maybe Deliverance isn’t intense enough, how about we pair it with A Clockwork Orange?” – The Green Meadows Twin, Summer 1975.