Turn something this into a moderately off road capable adventure bike and I’m sold. The BMW and KTM guys will absolutely pay $20,000 for it, albeit maybe not $37,000.

My KLR has about 200 miles of range per fill, if you’re even the slightest bit careful with it, which is necessary for excursions out into the bush where there are neither gas stations nor charging points.

winget install -e --id Mozilla.Firefox

On my site I have long since routed requests from Amazon associated IP blocks directly to the wood chipper, so it’s nice to see that I was vindicated in doing so. Their request patterns did indeed look pretty scrapey and I was wondering why.

Step five:

https://www.sordum.org/downloads/?st-edge-block

Not in this instance in particular, but I have a copy of Fantasia (i.e. the recalled/rareish game, which makes this even more annoying) which also refuses to boot. I’ve never been able to determine why. The contacts look good, all the traces look good, no part of the board is cracked, and staring at it under magnification doesn’t reveal any of the pins on the chips lifted or anything. It’s the only cartridge game I have for any system that doesn’t work. 'Tis a mystery.

Well, you didn’t leave the house without your sword again, did you?

It might be better to start her off with a Lancrastian Army Knife instead.

http://www.doctorshrugs.com/foxhound/comic.php?id=249

…I did not have linking to The Last Days of FOXHOUND on my bingo card today.

I never used the one on the CD case, I just used all ones. Or 123451234512345, etc. for Windows 98.

It doesn’t, but the side windows do if there’s anything solid within reach you can grab.

…Or just put it in reverse.

Ah. I was thinking one hand out the window, like James was trying to accomplish. Either/or.

You could also just open the door into the obstacle and push if you were really hard up, with the understanding that you may mar the paint on the door edge.

They do. They also have a manual clutch.

Yeah, at this rate it’s basically just a tinkering project for the grins. Whenever I do bust out my SX130 these days I use the stock firmware with it because I can’t be bothered.

The 130 is a little monster of a point-and-shoot, though. I’m always pleased and amazed with the quality of pictures it can take provided whatever you’re doing doesn’t require them to be a zillion megapixels. I bought it new back in the day and I have no idea what I paid for it. I think the original MSRP was $249.99 in 2009 or whatever.

CHDK? The SX120 is indeed supported:

https://chdk.fandom.com/wiki/SX120IS

My SX130 is as well. It’s a little pokey, but it works.

If history is any indicator, the cockroaches themselves will continue to manufacture AAA, AA, and D cells. C cells might be harder to get.

Hey, I recognize that Canon SX profile from the top! I have an SX130 still, because it takes AA batteries and therefore will continue to be operable well after the collapse of human civilization and I’ll still be able to take pictures of the cockroaches taking over.

Nobody anymore, but even as of a few short years ago the Windows fanboys would crusade and do battle specifically against the Mac fanboys, for some reason.

I’m not exactly a fan of Apple, but I’m not going to go around automatically championing Microsoft because of it…

Many, many years ago I took an A+ certification course because it was provided free by the state. And a fat lot of good it did me, but it was amusing for a while all the same. (I tried to opt to just take the stupid exam, but no, you have to sit through the course.)

We were given various old office PCs to fiddle with, and would use them throughout the course for all of the electronic learning materials. In order to instill in us a sense of the Troubleshooting Spirit, I suppose, the course’s instructor would deliberately fuck with everyone’s machine overnight so you’d have to track down what he did in order to get yours working again. Naturally this resulted in much wailing and gnashing of teeth, whining, sulking, and impressive displays of learned helplessness from the class which was always amusing to watch.

For me, anyway. I was the only person there with any computer chops and at the place I’d worked at prior to this I was the only IT person simply by default. I’ve been plugging computers together since I was big enough to hold a screwdriver. Have you ever smoked a motherboard by failing to put the two AT power plugs in with the black wires in the middle, relative to each other? Ever made your own cable select IDE ribbon by carefully chopping out pin 28’s wire with a razor blade? No? Then I don’t want to hear it.

It didn’t take long before I was forbidden to help other people with their troubleshooting stuff. Fine, I’ll sit here and play Doom until everyone’s finally ready.

I tried, and failed, to convey the notion that messing with my PC was a futile effort. Short of outright stealing some vital component from it, you weren’t going to keep me down for more than about a minute.

Anyway, the moral of the story is that most of the problems deliberately instilled in people’s machines involved unplugging some cable or another, and motherfuckers never figured this out. It’s truly astonishing how resistant people will be to considering the most obvious of solutions and starting there. Mind you, this was basically the entire point of the class so I didn’t hold out much hope for the future IT careers of my peers, to put it mildly.

One day I found that the instructor had backed my network cable out slightly but left it hanging in the socket, unclipped, just enough to look still plugged in but not make contact. Obviously the lack of blinkenlights on the jack was a major clue, but this stumped quite a few of our recruits. I must have given him a sarcastic look or something when I clicked it back in, because the next day he got clever and covered the contacts on the end of the plug with a piece of clear tape and fully plugged it back in. That was devious. Not only can you not trust the user to lie to you, but now we have to contend with active sabotage!

I got him back, though. I got into his presentation computer one day and discovered there was an unused USB header on the motherboard. One header-to-port breakout cable later and I plugged the receiver for my wireless mouse and keyboard into his machine inside the case and started messing with his cursor surreptitiously. What goes around comes around, Mr. funny guy.

Internet Pedantry Alert!

If it’s what you’re thinking of and it probably is, the OG “bubble car” was the BMW Isetta and I’m afraid the scenario outlined above is a myth that was promulgated by Top Gear. The Isetta does indeed have a reverse gear, because even ze Bavarians were smart enough to think of that. Yes, this is also the car that Steve Urkel drove.

What’s true is that in the immediate postwar years, quite a lot of other lesser European microcars hit the streets which were built around largely as-is motorbike drivetrains which didn’t have reverse. Vanishingly few of these did not have side opening doors, though, with some strange exceptions.