You Know What Part

"Let us think the unthinkable, Let us do the undoable, Let us prepare to grapple with ineffable itself, And see if we may not eff it after all." Douglas Adams

  • Lesser-Known Advantages of Having Eyeglasses

    Everyone knows that have a pair of corrective lenses is the front-line way to enable you to see clearly. Near or far sighted, a pair of frames holding a glass or plastic set of lenses in front of your broken, carrot-deprived eyes lets you see important family events, cringe social media posts, and disgusting and questionable spots on your body. In some cultures, they’re even an indicator if intelligence or maturity, and a finely-chosen pair of glasses can transform someone’s appearance in unique ways.

    But what those lesser-known advantages? Here’s a quick list:

    • Need to know where a light source is? Keep moving your head until the pin prick of a reflection drives deep into your retina
    • You will know which of your shirts is good for cleaning glasses without a solvent and which shirts merely take a smudge the size of a grain of sand and mush it into a Pollock painting
    • Lens cleaning products are classified into Works and Snake Oil after burning through a couple dozen classes of products, ranging from “Bought at Great Expense from the Eye Doctor” to “As Seen On TV”. The only thing in Works is dish soap
    • If you sneeze just right, you can forcefully apply the remnants of a mouthful of food to the inside of your lenses
      • This will usually occur when you have no lens wipes or a Good Glasses Cleaning Shirt
    • In cold temperatures, you can instantly gauge the humidity of a room upon entering from outside by the degree of moisture on your glasses. Frost indicates you have made it indoors just in time to survive
    • If you’re fortunate enough to have progressive lenses, you get to experience a roller coaster ride anytime you like (and sometimes when you don’t) just by looking .5 mm in the a different direction

  • 3D Printing

    As a Christmas gift to myself, I bought an Anycubic Kobra 2. I’ve never owned a 3D printer and have been enamored of the tech for a while. With a holiday sale from Anycubic, I bought into the hobby for under $300.

    While I’m still heavily in the “print shit you find on Thingiverse” phase, I also know that it can somewhat easy to make things that make their way onto a heated platen. Many, many years ago, I was very good with 3D CAD software. I spent a summer digitized hand-drawn plans from a regional architect, designed corrugated boxes in industry-specific software, and worked for a company that made add-ons for SolidWorks.

    Which brings me to current state and, ho-ly crap has 3D modeling software gotten amazing. AutoCAD and SolidWorks are obviously still around but unattainable to general consumers. There’s OpenSCAD for programmers who refuse to learn CAD software. And SketchUp which is a solid, free, consumer-grade piece of modeling software.

    But the real *chef kiss* in the consumer market is Fusion360 and it is damn impressive to An Old who cut his teeth on older AutoDesk software. It’s also and very opinionated way to model; AutoDesk has always had an iron grip on people’s workflows and 360 is no different.

    Which, to bring it back to local concerns, means I don’t “know CAD” anymore. I understand conceptually how CAD software works, and I can still model three-dimensionally in my head, but converted concepts to digital items I can stick on a SD card is, well, hard.

    This isn’t a complaint; having to catch up on (hrm) 30 years of technology improvements is going to be hard. I’m just amazed at the progress in this space that is free to consumers and I hope 3D printing continues to push the boundaries in this space.

    Sidenote: I assume 3D printer manufacturers are not collaborating a lot, but there’s a market for moderately-featured consumer CAD software in the sub-$100 annual costs. I assume (with zero research) that the profit in 3D printer economies is in filament and replacement parts. I would hope removing cost-based friction to let non-engineers design and print objects leads to experimentation and more filament sales.

  • The picture is too large and will be truncated

    Old bugs are super fun. If you’re using Excel and copy/pasting as little as one row, you may get the following error:

    Windows dialog box with the warning icon. Error: The picture is too large and will be truncated

    “The picture is too large and will be truncated” If you inspect the results, the copy/paste was successful, but Excel will throw this error every time you paste again. I encountered the error in the MS365 Excel desktop version.

    Searching for a solution leads to many threads, some over 15 years old, with people complaining about the issue as far back as Excel 97.

    The fix, for me, was the same as the 15 year old thread on Mr Excel: my clipboard manager (and fantastic autocomplete tool as well) FastKeys. Quitting FastKeys stopped the error, although annoyingly also disables autocomplete and auto-spelling-replacement (still can’t spell accessibility without it triggering).

    Since this seems to happen with multiple clipboard managers, it looks like an Excel bug that is closing in on 20 years. Maybe backwards compatibility is oversold

  • The End (?) of Evernote

    With the announcement that Evernote’s new owners have laid off all US staff and are moving operations to Europe, the writing seems to be on the wall for the service in the short term.

    Over the years, Evernote has lost features in a code re-write, jacked up prices, and curtailed the utility of it’s free offering by moving to Electron, making the once popular service less attractive.

    My first Evernote note was in 2008, a photo and notes about Flying Dog Porter taken with my iPhone 3G. Evernote was one of the first iOS apps I ever downloaded and from the beginning, I was a heavy user. Early efforts included interesting companion apps like Evernote Food, something I used extensively on trips and special-occasion meals.

    I had been grandfathered into a lower pricing tier for years and kept trying to use Evernote as before, but the desktop experience wasn’t as good, with performance issues and a lack of local caching. Which led me to look elsewhere and starting highlighting how little I was getting for the amount I was paying for Evernote. And, to be honest, there isn’t a one-for-one replacement for the Evernote experience, especially for someone who lives on many platforms (Windows, Mac, and iOS for me).

    But, the main issue for Evernote I believe is that all this churn is making the alternatives conversation more visible and more active. People, like me, are re-evaluating the value of Evernote and finding that the value isn’t as good as something like Obsidian or Notion. It’s also highlighting the utility of an app that allows for quick displacement when that app decides to upend it’s user experience or raise prices. Will that be the end of Evernote? I hope not, but for now I’m sitting out their ecosystem until they, hopefully, look more stable and worthwhile of my time and money.

  • Tornado Season

    It’s tornado season and we’re getting a good chance at one today. Someone at work posted this video and I found it informative. Still not good at reading radar imaging, but this got me a little better.

  • Culture Catch-Up

    I am old enough to remember (less each day, though) life before the modern Internet. This post is not a nostalgia-laden trip back to the heady days of the mid-1980s, but more to establish that I’ve been an adult for nearly the entire run of what currently passes for the Internet (IP and DNS-based http content for lack of a better definition).

    And yet, at a time when Web 2.0 is finding new (and not so new) and creative ways to wind down, I still find myself discovering pockets of Internet culture that missed me or that I stupidly passed on at the time. Today’s example is, frankly, something that shocked me as being a blind spot: AMV or Anime Music Video. Thanks to the Garbage Day newsletter for the clue-in.

    AMV is essentially popular music layered with anime clips, sort of a remix, and an early pre-Youtube way to get fan content out over file sharing like Kazaa (oh Kazaa, you virus-filled beautiful cesspool). It’s amazing and I’m bummed I missed it at an age where I’d been more plugged into contemporary pop culture. I wonder deeply about where I would have gone if this Jimmy Eat World AMV hit me at the right time.

    I also missed Pokemon, something that a younger coworker was squarely in the midst of when it hit. I missed Dungeons and Dragons too, although not from my ignorance but a concerted effort by the parents in my conservative enclave to keep away from all of us. I had friends I knew played it, but fear of exposure to my parents’ peer group kept the invites to play far away from me. Still watched the cartoon, though.

    Anyway, now I’m curious what other things I missed and can’t wait to find them.

    Sidebar: Jimmy Eat World is still going strong and, frankly, putting out some of their best work right now.