(from Doctor-X, a tv series about a sexy freelance surgeon; via)

Remember when Preview.app was a solid, reliable tool for working with images and PDF files? Yeah, didn’t think so.

Please stop gutting Mac software to achieve feature parity with iPads.

(and the correct answer is “OS X 10.6.8, like pretty much everything else you’ve screwed up in the past five years”)

Actually, instead of discussing the feathers, can I ask what she’s doing with that microphone?

Okay, now we can talk feathers. Clearly these outfits are left over from your canceled musical, “The Dirty Pair Blows Up Vegas”.

…and the ocean sawed back.

(by Patrice Carré, via)

Lying under oath to steal children: was that wrong? should we not have done that?

Trott: You mean to tell us due process is consistent with a government official submitting perjured testimony and false evidence? How is that consistent? I mean I hate to get pumped up about this but I’m just staggered by the claim that people in the shoes of your clients wouldn’t be on notice that you can’t use perjury and false evidence to take away somebody’s children. That to me is mind boggling.

Lin: In criminal proceedings we know this to be true because . . .

Trott: No, no! It’s a court proceeding with a liberty interest, a fundamental liberty interest at stake.

Lin: And on the reverse side . . .

Trott: And you’re telling us that these officials [weren’t] on notice that you can’t commit perjury and put in false evidence?

Lin: I understand broadly the principle that common sense tells us that lying is wrong and lying to . . .

So, someone got me one of these for my birthday, and I finally got around to building a stand for the outdoor sensor (basically an oversized tameshigiri stand made with pressure-treated lumber).

A promised feature was remote access to your data through an iOS/Android app, so I downloaded the app …and it didn’t work. Surprise! You have to:

1. register your purchase online (and the form wouldn't let me hit Submit until I added demographic data...),
2. plug the USB cable on the indoor sensor into a computer,
3. download and run their PC/Mac app in the background,
4. and leave your computer on at all times to report the data.

I have two words for that, and the first one starts with “F”.

So, delete the Mac app, delete the iPhone app, unplug the cable, and now I have a standalone weather station. Oh, well, at least it wasn’t an Internet of Things Thing that sat on my wireless and took orders from The Cloud.

Update: now that the sun is down, I can report that the backlighting on the screen is bright. I won’t be needing a nightlight downstairs any more.

Can you imagine what the world would be like today if Hef had gone with his original “stag” logo and theme? Antlers just don’t have the same impact. Then again, as our lead bunny-girl’s companion illustrates, what if he’d gone with a kitten theme and started the catgirl revolution decades early?

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(original source lost; image search turns up a bunch of fake blogs filled with text and pictures stolen from other sites and randomly thrown together, sigh)

(via)

…today’s headlines would simply have read, “Mentally Ill Spy Wins Early Release”.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that these are slightly less than legit:

BEST Shooting Glasses UV Blacklight Flashlight Yellow Safety Eye protection by iLumen8. See Dog Cat Urine with Amber Black Lights Night Vision Ultraviolet

Seriously, one of the included accessories is a “Crush Resistant Storage Box”. It’s a cardboard box with a logo sticker on it.

There are a number of short, oddly-written five-star reviews, too.

Found in my spam folder. I haven’t seen one of these in quite a few years, and then only in English (admittedly, some of my Chinese spam may have contained similar offers, but usually those are about infected zip/excel/pdf files).

Subject: Artikelanfrage für dotclue.org

Hallo J Greely,

für meine Kunden suche ich hochwertige Artikelplätze mit thematischem Bezug. Ein konkretes Interesse meines Kunden auf Ihrer Seite zu buchen besteht bereits. So bin ich auf Ihre Seite aufmerksam geworden. Ich würde gern bei Ihnen einen thematisch passenden Artikel buchen.

Ich liefere Ihnen gern einen sehr hochwertigen und professionell geschriebenen Text, welcher von meiner hauptberuflichen Redakteurin aufwendig recherchiert und getextet wird. Alternativ können Sie aber auch gern den Text verfassen. Der Text sollte mindestens 2 Jahre online bleiben.

Bieten Sie so etwas an? Können Sie mir bitte ein Beispiel und Ihren Preis mailen?

Haben Sie evtl. noch weitere Seiten, auf denen so etwas möglich ist?

Ich danke Ihnen für Ihr Feedback.

True bravery is taking a stand against the oppression that only exists inside your head.

I expect steaming piles of praise for such actions to be published on Friday.

[Update: keep it classy, leftists: “other groups tried to disrupt the day’s events by burning flags, throwing bricks and rioting en masse, leading to injuries and nearly 100 arrests by early afternoon”]

…for some reason.

I had forgotten a lot of the stuff in this video; pretty much all that remained after 30 years was the dancing girls in Flintstones costumes.

All in favor?

Seriously, kid, just run.

Pop quiz: while examining a product listing (of the does what I need for now, but isn’t the $1,200 one I’d buy if I were serious type), I noticed a few oddities in the “related items” list. See if you can figure out what I was looking at:

Even after an extensive exclusion list, the majority of pictures in the dog_days category on Gelbooru featured heavy petting, so some popular characters are sadly underrepresented.

Red half-rims below the fold, because boobs.

Update: I never knew there was a bonus onsen episode from the third season:

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We’re in for a long four+ years. At this point, Trump could spend his entire administration playing Windows Solitaire, and every day there’d be twenty news stories and ten thousand retweets about how he’s keeping the black cards down. Nothing is too trivial or false for them to spin up the hate machine.

And I get it now. It’s simple, really. They hate Trump because he’s not ashamed of America.

He’s not going to continue the international apology tour. He’s not going to scold us for not being Europeans. He likes America, and Americans. And they can’t stand that.

In unrelated news, here’s Shizuka Nakamura doing her impression of the plants in my yard:

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(via)

I walked into TAP Plastics today. The sign on the door said:

"Scrap sale, 75% off"

I gained 15 pounds of HDPE, for $8. I think I’ll go back tomorrow for a load of acrylic.

[Update: another $20, another 38 pounds of plastic (~21 HDPE, ~17 cast acrylic); I may go back again if I can find someone working there who knows what some of the mystery plastics in the scrap bin are…]

This scene has been running through my head recently.

Controlling the narrative isn’t as easy as it used to be…

(via)

On seeing the contents of the Amazon package that she’d brought over from the other building, the cute glasses-wearing female engineer said:

"You have a cordless circular saw? Cool!"

…and now she’s going off to assemble a CNC router kit…

Joan Jett singing the Mary Tyler Moore theme:

In other news, the recent “women’s march” on DC featured a speaker who got 25-to-life for her active role in kidnapping, torturing, raping, and murdering a 62-year-old man.

Which feminism do you prefer?

(via, and he’s got lots more!)

…in a Republic far, far away:

"The more you lose your grip, Left-wing, the more our systems will slip through your fingers."

This is a 2-inch square seal created in Illustrator with my script, imported to VCarve Desktop, and cut from a mounted linoleum block on my Nomad with a 20-degree v-bit. The hardest part about getting a good firm impression on paper is that my stamp pad is too darn small; I’ll have to buy an uninked pad at an office supply shop and load it up with the good pigment.

Also making a good impression is glamour model Meru Tsujimura, who cannot be found at office supply shops…

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I decided to see how much detail I could get with the 20-degree v-bit. This was carved out of the end grain of a generic hardwood 1-inch square dowel.

Update: I shined a flashlight onto the seal to get a better look at it.

“Ninja” was obviously too broad a category, but “ninja cat_ears” wasn’t quite enough. Besides, you can’t have too much Yuki, so I expanded the search to include all animal ears, real and fake.

No red half-rims, so let’s start off with a little Nonsense:

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This is a terrible list of possible security questions.

How many of these questions are trivial to answer for anyone with even a small social-media presence? How many of the rest are things that people over 30 probably don’t even remember? And seriously, zip code? Date of birth? Last four digits of SSN? To stop someone from trying to break into my brokerage account?!?

How about these, instead?

• Who do you most regret voting for?
• Who would you go to jail for sex with?
• What's the ugliest car you've ever seen?
• What pistol do you keep by the bed?
• What's the name of the first person you begged for sex?
• Did it work?
• What do you only wear when no one else is around?
• Lid up, lid down, seat down, or "Asian squat toilet"?
• What's the most ridiculous food fad?
• What do you keep losing?
• What does cilantro taste like to you?
• What was the first thing you had surgically removed?
• Where do you usually masturbate?
• What foreign country would you never visit?
• What historical figure would you travel back in time to kill?
• What's your favorite smell?
• What part of your body was involved in your first emergency room visit?
• What celebrity would you clone?
• What's your favorite food you can't find any more?
• What's the worst injury you ever caused by accident?
• Who would you lock up and throw away the key?
• What superpower would you abuse the most?

Don’t answer in the comments, or I’ll steal your identity…