Amazon has three new entries in the Internet of Things That Buy Other Things space. Dash is a wifi-connected magic wand that uses voice recognition and a barcode scanner to replenish your stock of household consumables. Dash Button is a wifi-connected magic button that orders a specific product when pushed. Dash Replenishment Service is an API that allows anyone to give their Internet-connected device the ability to order its own consumables.

At this time, I am not the target market for this. I buy an awful lot from Amazon, but I buy bulk consumables at the local Costco, so Dash wouldn’t do much for me. And I can’t think of any single item that I buy in bulk that would merit a dedicated Dash Button. Okay, maybe ammo.

What would be fun is a Dash Reward button, which purchased a random item from your wish list. “Hey Amazon Japan, I’ve been working out really hard this week; send me a Bluray from my ‘busty cheesecake’ list.”

The latest bullying by gay activists is being led by Apple CEO Tim Cook, demonstrating once again that tolerance isn’t good enough: they demand praise. They’ll gleefully punish any photographer, baker, or florist who refuses to affirmatively support gay marriage, and now they’ve moved on to shunning an entire state for an unexceptional law that might allow photographers, bakers, and florists to escape from their angry mobs.

Maybe someone should send Tim Cook a nice White Sheet Cake.

[Update: that pizzeria in Indiana that said they (hypothetically) wouldn’t cater a gay wedding? Closed, possibly permanently, due to death threats. Extra credit to the high-school coach that solicited accomplices for arson. And of course the thousands of people who harassed them on Twitter and Yelp would be offended if you called them hate-filled intolerant bigots.

Reporter Alyssa Marino was sent out to create a fake news story, and she and her editor willfully destroyed the lives of people whose only crime was honestly answering a hypothetical question about an extremely unlikely event, while at the same time affirming that they had never discriminated against gay customers in the past and had no plans to start. Alyssa Marino is not the one being threatened by strangers around the country. She’s not the one whose livelihood was taken away from her by fear of retaliation. She’s also, apparently, without regret or shame.]

There is a significant overlap between the categories “router bits” and “end mills”, something Amazon reflects by freely switching between the two in search results, so that it can be a bit tricky to find the exact tool you’re looking for. In almost all ways, a search that begins by drilling down (sorry) through the category path Industrial & Scientific → Cutting Tools → Milling Tools → End Mills will be far more useful than a top-level search that inevitably takes you to the Router Bits section of the Tools & Home Improvement category.

The reward for careful navigation is the ability to refine your search by almost every possible characteristic of an end mill: material, coating, overall length, end cut type, cut type, flute count, and cutting diameter. If they added shank diameter, it would be perfect.

(still don’t have my Shapeoko 3 yet, sigh; according to the last update, there was One Last Part that Finally Shipped, and once it arrived and had some finish work done, they’d start charging credit cards and shipping out product)

With the number of servers that have caught fire or things that have needed sudden extra attention at work, I ask, in the words of Lyra Lackwit:

"Will things please stop happening now?"

…not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Based on my experience of walking in SF, I suspect the actual percentages were 6.2% LGBT, 81.3% straight, and 12.5% “gimme a dollar!”.

So, the old Radioactive Panda site is mostly dead, but, as promised, Stone Clouds is back, this time on its own domain, starting with a re-release of the old material, with cleanup and color.

No, not like this, although the title is certainly Potterish:

Instead, I’m referring to a rather long bit of alternate-canon fan-fiction in which young Harry Potter was raised, not by the Dursleys, but by a science professor at Oxford. As a result, he grew up reading science fiction and fantasy, and learned to apply the scientific method to the world around him. The quite long story has finally been completed:

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

The ending is less satisfying than the beginning, or even the middle, but it holds together surprisingly well. And the author was very careful to not only use real science, but to cross-reference each chapter so you can follow up on any concept that strikes your fancy.

I think I can live with this performance on the new Comcast line.

[Bonus! My new static IP range is not blacklisted by Paypal. Both my old AT&T and Sonic.net ranges were for as long as I had them, and not only does Paypal silently treat it as “incorrect password”, their customer-service folks don’t even acknowledge that this is possible. For years, I’ve had to open a VPN connection to my office just to be able to log in to my account.]