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Progenitor of the Weird Knife Wednesday feature column. Is “column” the right word?

I make knives now, too. Why not buy one at flightlessforge.com?

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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • You can extract the chip’s serial number in software trivially. In Windows, from a commandline:

    wmic cpu get pricessorid

    I’m positive you can do the same with some Linux command, and failing that certainly with basically every vaguely modern benchmarking tool. Same deal with hard drives and probably also video cards. My BIOS/UEFI even enumerates all my connected hard drive serial numbers on screen if I interrupt its graphical boot screen.

    Given that the anti-cheat schemes these competitive games are literal rootkits, I don’t think gathering the user’s hardware serial numbers in order to attempt identify them is much of a stretch.




  • Except in a few exceptional circumstances this is surprisingly not the case. People drive at a speed they perceive as appropriate for the design of the road. Wider roads, wider lanes, straighter roads, open sightlines, and bigger shoulders will make people naturally settle on driving faster. This is why just blithely reducing speed limits with poxy signs on problem roads famously doesn’t accomplish anything. It’s also why people go bombing down the stroad in your local commercial district at 55+ MPH in complete contravention of all the signs everywhere that probably say something around 35. The damn thing looks like a highway to peoples’ monkey brains, so they treat it as such.

    People certainly talk about how “my strategy for speeding is to take the speed limit and then you can go around 5/10/15/whatever over and the cops probably won’t care,” and if you sit there in the passenger seat and actively press them on it they may actually drive that way for as many as several consecutive minutes. But in actual reality most of them just fall back to their perceptual “intuitive” speed for whatever road along with everyone else. Especially if they see everyone else passing them.



  • Yes. For a typical American dishwasher installation, anyway, where the dishwasher is connected to the hot water line which is in turn connected to your storage tank water heater.

    First, your water heater is already full of hot water that you’ve already paid the energy cost to heat up. It’s therefore nonsensical to deliberately pump cold water from the line into your dishwasher only for the dishwasher to have to heat it up (using energy/money) and then have your water heater also heat up the displaced water inside it that was just pumped out.

    On dumb dishwashers that don’t do anything to sense the internal water temperature, this will also moderately improve your wash performance. (GE calls this feature “Automatic HotStart,” for instance. Other brands call it something different. These machines will pause and run their little internal water heater coil at full blast until their current charge of water is at a temperature their programming considers acceptable to start the cycle. There is no performance detriment in this case, but it will cost you time and more energy/money.)

    Modern dishwashers use a surprisingly small amount of water per cycle. Usually somewhere around 3.5 gallons for the entire thing from start to finish. This is contrary to what your parents think, who will insist to you they can totally hand wash an entire sink of dishes with “less water” than that wasteful dishwasher, which they absolutely cannot. Your dishwasher is not consuming water the entire time it is running. It will fill and recirculate that fill’s worth of water inside itself, usually going through 3 or 4 phases of filling and draining throughout the cycle to arrive that that final water usage figure of around three and a half gallons. Therefore it does not readily have access to hot water unless you’ve primed it by running your sink, as what used to be hot water in your pipes rapidly cools off when said water is not flowing. Your dishwasher probably will not draw in enough water in one fill cycle to purge all of the standing cold water that’s in the pipe unless the distance from your water heater to the dishwasher is unrealistically short.

    (The latter actually is the case for the dishwasher at my office, which is fed by an undersink “low boy” water heater that’s directly next to it and only separated from the dishwasher by a grand total of about 18 inches of pipe.)






  • I freed up a couple of spare brain cells on that sort of thing back in the day once it was discovered around the schoolyard that Windows 95 (in addition to Office and a couple of other M$ products) would happily accept a CD key of all ones: 111-1111111. I don’t think this was applicable to the OEM versions, though. Windows 98 meanwhile would take a key of 12345-12345-12345, etc.

    I still have the Windows 2000 MSDN CD key memorized. From XP onwards, the… alternative… activation methods did not require knowing license keys anymore.

    One wonders what it was like to be a member of mankind in an era when all you had to memorize was actually useful information.





  • To expand on what the others are saying here, cartridge based systems load quickly because they are more or less directly accessing the data in the cartridge as if it were memory. In fact, in many older systems the cartridge storage area is mapped directly into the memory (RAM) address space. Disk based systems need to sequentially read data into memory temporarily in order to use it for anything, and are inherently limited by their small amount of memory so they can’t load anything even approaching the entire contents of the disk at once, and they also tended to have slow drives in order to make them cheaper. A Playstation 1 has 2 megabytes of memory but a CD can hold somewhere in the neighborhood of 650 or 700 megabytes of data. There’s no amount of programming trickery that’s going to get the entire game into memory all at once unless your game is hilariously small, so the system is going to have to pull the parts of it needs off of the disk as it needs them, which necessitates loading screens.

    Meanwhile a cartridge based system can access all (deliberately leaving more complicated topics like bank switching out of the conversation, here) of the data on cartridge more or less instantly.

    Things are starting to come full circle here a bit with the Switch and Switch 2 which are indeed cartridge based, but have to load as if they had a disk because the data on their cartridges is both encrypted and compressed, so it can’t be used directly off of the cart like in the good old days and instead has to be unpacked and copied into the system’s memory first.