I’ll take a slight tangent to this topic and talk about FOSS software I’ve recently had to give up that I really really miss: Autokey. Autokey is a rough equivalent to AutoHotKey on Windows, it can do anything from on the fly text replacement (type teh and it will correct to the, or type *date and it fills in today’s date) right up to firing whole Python scripts. it doesn’t work on Wayland (apparently there are security features that prevent it from working the same way it does on X11?), and I’ve yet to find a replacement for it that does.

I’m using Fedora KDE right now for their Wayland support, because I wanted stuff like FreeSync on my AMD GPU, but I do miss Cinnamon. And Autokey.

The Steam Deck is a slightly funny shaped x86_64 laptop. It has an AMD APU in it. You can hook it up to a monitor, mouse and keyboard and do your taxes on it if you want.

You know what the main difference between the Steam Deck OLED and the PS5 Pro is? Customers wanted and asked for the Steam Deck OLED.

I’m hoping to have bought my last x86 portable device. Hell it wouldn’t hurt my feelings if my Ryzen 7700x was the last x86 processor I ever buy.

Trying to put the thought in my head into words…Let’s try this: Beetlejuice has an excuse plot like a lot of video games do. The plot is a framework to attach fun and amusing scenes together. It’s an excuse to go to the ghost DMV and to have the dinner and seance and wedding scenes.

At one point they do have a stated goal of scaring away the Deetzes, but they don’t achieve this goal. They scare off Otho, by making his…suit less trendy? Am I remembering that right? But the Maitlands and Deetzes end up living in harmony, Lydia gets the movie’s victory lap. Beetlejuice is the title character, but he’s really the closest thing the film has to an antagonist.

Really, the characters and plot don’t matter as much as the series of fun and interesting scenes. That’s why I enjoyed the movie; it’s built more like a haunted house than a feature film. It’s a series of loosely related vignettes. And if those are fun, then mission achieved.

Story cohesion

In one or two simlpe sentences, summarize the story of the original Beetlejuice film. In just a few words, what is Beetlejuice about?

But hey we now have checks notes Monica Bellucci, the worst actress the big screen has ever seen…

May I introduce you to Monique Gabrielle?

Jackdaws

So this has bothered me since I was a teenager.

In Empire Strikes Back, Yoda talked like this: “Put the cart before the horse, I have.” And he mostly did it while he was pretending to be a dingus early on to test Luke’s patience. Some actual movie quotes: “I cannot teach him. The boy has not patience.” “No. Do, or do not. There is no try.” “Judge me by my size, do you?”

In the prequel trilogy, it’s like Lucas bought into the meme that Yoda talks funny, so all of a sudden Yoda talks like this “Before the horse, the cart, I have put.” “Around the survivors, a perimeter, create!”

Anyway.

This

I had a Logitech MX Ergo mouse that allegedly had horizontal scrolling. The wheel could tilt left and right which clicked like a button, and the screen would scroll very very slightly to the side. Worst trackball I’ve ever had.

Just before they stopped making PCs, I saw an IBM computer with a mouse that had one of their Thinkpad clits instead of a scroll wheel. So a proper XY input. I think a blackberry ball would work too.

I honestly can’t be mad at this point because what they SHOULD do is sell cables in bulk packaging to the Apple store, and then when they sell a phone they say “Do you need a USB cable? Free with the phone.” If they say “No we’re okay I’ve got hundreds of them by now” no problem, if they say “Yeah in fact can I get two?” Sure. Same with chargers. Of course this is Apple we’re talking about, so they’re probably $69.99 each.

You know what always weirds me out:

The knife is a technology. It was invented by a person. And that person was not the same species as us. The knife has been around longer than Homo Sapiens.

I’ve commented on this before, but it reminds me of the mortise and tenon joint. The oldest intact wooden structure on Earth is held together with mortise and tenon joints. The man who built it never wrote his name down, because writing hadn’t been invented yet. He never rode a horse, because animal husbandry hadn’t been invented yet. He used stone tools, because copper smelting hadn’t been invented yet. In the present day, Festool sells a tool to make mortises called the Domino which they still hold a patent on. We’re still actively developing this technology which has been with us slightly longer than civilization has.

There are some records which are “threaded” backwards, in that you start at the center and work out rather than start at the edge and work in. This is not standard, automatic turntables might not be able to handle this, but the reason they do this is because of the effect above. You can get greater dynamic range near the outside of the disc, and you probably want greater dynamic range near the end of the recording as the music reaches a climax. Consider Ravel’s Bolero, which is one long crescendo.

I don’t own a Steam Deck. I am a Linux gamer, and I appreciate that it exists.

Internally it’s basically a laptop using its AMD integrated graphics, yeah? No discrete GPU? Which makes it actually pretty impressive at what it does.

A surprising amount of Fractal Design’s cases do.

You copied that floppy?!?!

(I know you’re joking but the builder in me is genuinely curious if you can make a rubber-like substance out of polystyrene)

You mean that inferior version of Scorched Earth?

I thought Gen Alpha was very explicitly NOT learning cursive.