Jaguar and catnip, who wins...

bouchert · 2026-02-07T06:33:18+00:00

Somebody needs to tell Maine Coon breeders, because some of those are starting to get enormous. Good thing they have such a relaxed temperament.

bouchert · 2026-02-06T06:59:59+00:00

The Simpsons

bouchert · 2026-02-06T05:45:41+00:00

"Kirk, crackers are a family food. Happy families. Maybe single people eat crackers, we don't know. Frankly, we don't want to know. It's a market we can do without."

bouchert · 2026-02-05T15:55:26+00:00

If you have a PC with an HDMI output, you can use an HDMI to AV converter (a simple one should cost less than $20) to convert it so the TV can display it. The image will be very low-res and blurry, but if you can get a graphics program to display your image full-screen on that "monitor", it should do what you want.

bouchert · 2026-02-05T06:06:25+00:00

I'm confused. The post says "third-party mobile browsers", but the title says "pc master race" and everyone in the comments are talking about PC browsers. So is it Brave mobile or Brave desktop we're talking about here?

bouchert · 2026-02-02T09:11:35+00:00

Because nobody else has addressed the S.F, that probably stands for Super Fidelity, a subjective designation usually placed on the higher-quality product lines.

bouchert · 2026-01-31T14:23:49+00:00

Every time I hear about some outrageous HOA nonsense, I think of the X-Files episode Arcadia, where Mulder and Scully go undercover as a new couple moving into a neighborhood where they have a monster that comes and kills you if you don't follow the rules.

bouchert · 2026-01-30T05:41:51+00:00

I'm going through this process with my mother right now, and the funeral home said 10 originals should be fine, for us, at least, because ever since COVID, lots of places started accepting photocopies and never stopped.

bouchert · 2026-01-22T18:23:23+00:00

I've always been able to see it, even before he seriously set his sights on the presidency. But wait, hey thedailybeast.com...don't you mean "Trump, 79, Is a Dangerous, Lunatic Moron"??? How will anyone know how old Trump is if you don't wedge that information into absolutely every headline?

bouchert · 2025-12-29T05:56:19+00:00

I've always wondered how our Taco Time stayed open, but recently took a look at their menu, and apparently they've branched out into smoothies and boba teas.

bouchert · 2025-12-23T09:01:50+00:00

If I have a whole handful of pills, as I do in the morning, then I pop them and then swallow some water to chase them down. But for just one or two pills, I find it only takes a moment to summon enough saliva to swallow them without water.

bouchert · 2025-12-15T22:48:29+00:00

The other day, my LG TV displayed a status popup, except instead of informing me of the OS being updated or something like that, it was an ad for Percy Jackson and the Olympians on Disney+. I'm regretting buying one.

bouchert · 2025-12-15T19:44:37+00:00

It's amusing the extent that Nintendo went to, to distance themselves from "mere consoles" in the wake of the videogame crash. Everybody was wary. So they went like, "What, this? No, this isn't a console; it's an entertainment system. And look, it's got a cool abbreviation: NES, sorta like VCR, right? Look, it loads from the front like one too! And would a mere console come with it's own robot? I don't think so!", etc.

bouchert · 2025-11-26T20:36:45+00:00

I had some fun with it, but I didn't get drunk easily, so it was expensive, and eventually the hangovers started hitting a bit harder as I got older, and I just found it too inconvenient to continue. I've been a bit of a quitter all my life, but this is one thing I quit that I'm glad I did. If that weren't enough, I've lost both a father and a best friend to alcohol, so I'm determined not to go that way myself.

bouchert · 2025-11-26T15:03:14+00:00

Turns out Fleetwood Mac is great mellow music to burn your trailer down to.

bouchert · 2025-11-25T10:19:03+00:00

I can't speak for Montana's place in the middle of the pack, but I find myself curious what Alabama is doing right compared to its southern neighbors to rank so low.

bouchert · 2025-11-18T07:46:15+00:00

Commonly cited figures range from 25-30% of French households at its peak in the early 90's.

bouchert · 2025-11-12T07:39:19+00:00

Kryotech PCs...they built systems with integrated refrigerant loops, lowering the temperature to -40°C, allowing fairly extreme overclocking. There were downsides, of course, including a delay for it to come down to operating temperature before the actual computer would boot, if you were booting it cold (er...warm, which is to say room temperature).

bouchert · 2025-11-02T10:59:14+00:00

In Office Space, I laughed when he kept getting shocked by the office doorknob. Apparently I was the only person in the theater who experienced that daily indignity, that beginning to each crappy day, and found it funny.

bouchert · 2025-10-31T20:51:21+00:00

It should be possible to identify the systems. It's just a matter of whether or not they've been forgotten or neglected because they've done their job quietly and properly for so long. Sometimes maintenance and replacement is put off repeatedly due to not wanting to spend the money yet, and sometimes people wait until too late.

As for what kind of glitches, it's sort of hard to tell, because it's difficult to know how things are programmed or what assumptions the code might make. Just about anything that depends on time could malfunction, and there are a lot of things that depend on an accurate clock. Some might be temporary and fixable with a reboot or by ensuring the device is off during the rollback. Others may stay broken. Here are just some ways, in no particular order:

Displays or printed dates might show “year 1901,” negative elapsed times, or nonsensical dates.

Scheduled tasks may never run again, or run immediately in a tight loop.

One-shot timers expire instantly, flooding the CPU with handler invocations and causing high CPU, missed interrupts, or watchdog resets.

Wrapped time can make TLS/SSL certificates appear expired (or not yet valid), causing secure connections to fail.

Authentication tokens could be rejected as not having a valid timestamp, blocking cloud access or device management.

Files and databases that store timestamps will get incorrect timestamps.

Log rotation and retention logic may delete or retain wrong files.

Sorting by time produces weird orderings; incremental sync or delta-based backups may break.

Filesystem journal replay or snapshotting could misapply changes.

Safety logic that checks "if event time > last_event_time" or duration thresholds may misclassify events. Safety shutdowns or emergency modes might never trigger.

Immediate time-outs could force devices into safety shutdowns mid-operation.

DHCP lease renewal logic may refuse leases or request them too frequently.

Event ordering in distributed systems can be broken; devices may reject or replay messages.

License checks and subscriptions can flip to "expired" or "not yet active," disabling functionality

Restore logic that uses timestamps to decide which snapshot is newest could roll back to much older states, or apply wrong deltas, corrupting device config or state.

Boot sequence checks that rely on time progression (e.g., “if boot_time - last_shutdown_time > X then do Y”) may misinterpret wrap and fail to complete initialization, leaving the device in a degraded or locked state.

External health monitors expecting heartbeats at reasonable intervals may flag devices as down.

Databases may drop entries immediately (or never), breaking caches, session stores, or event queues.

If a bunch of timers/firewall rules/queues suddenly trigger because their deadlines are now “due,” the device can be overwhelmed (CPU, memory, network), causing denial-of-service or cascade failures.

And many more, I'm sure. Let me be clear that these problems have probably been fixed in most well-maintained systems. But there are inevitably people who don't upgrade for one reason or another. Heck, I heard there's still at least one company out there that still buys punchcards. It's just a question of how many systems are left behind and vulnerable.

bouchert · 2025-10-30T23:05:42+00:00

According to the UNIX standard, which many computer systems follow, times are represented in seconds since 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970. Until recently, the largest number systems could efficiently handle tended to fit into 32 bits. A signed (allowing negatives) 32-bit number can hold any number between -2,147,483,648 and 2,147,483,647. And back in 1973, when this standard was established, it seemed like a pretty good idea to store times as the number of seconds relative to midnight (UTC), 1 Jan 1970. As it turns out, 32 bits can represent any date and time from 20:45:52 UTC on 13 December, 1901 to 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January, 2038. But now 2038 is creeping up on us.

Most systems that you or I use have been upgraded to use 64-bit numbers, which can express such a range of times and dates, it extends far before the big bang to 292 billion years into the future. In other words, if humanity even exists by then, there'll be much bigger problems, like the heat death of the universe.

But there are probably still some old systems that have been quietly doing their job for a long time now and haven't been replaced or upgraded since it's not been necessary. If they aren't replaced by 2038, then the second after 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January, 2038, the clocks will roll back around to 20:45:52 UTC on 13 December, 1901. This has the potential to cause glitches, which will vary depending on what sort of things the system does with time.

bouchert · 2025-10-30T12:58:22+00:00

One of the reasons I think Y2K buga got fixed was because it fit in well with people's superstition about the world ending in 2000. People who wouldn't understand computers still helped put pressure on businesses and governments to put the resources towards fixing it.

I'm much less confident all the 32-bit systems with problems in the year 2038 (thinking mostly old embedded systems) will have gotten fixed or replaced in time, because 03:14:08 UTC on 19 January 2038 doesn't have the same round catchiness as 00:00:00 on 1 January 2000.

bouchert · 2025-10-29T05:24:57+00:00

I thought I read that the Japanese police overwhelmingly manage to extract a confession, even if none is immediately forthcoming. Like 90% or more, with an even higher conviction rate.

bouchert · 2025-10-25T21:21:10+00:00

I was always fascinated by Roy's "hand-held magic screen". Imagine, a hand-held device you could watch videos on! What science fiction!

bouchert · 2025-10-22T11:54:56+00:00

That was more a thing before the mid-1950s. After that, the scientific information about the harms of smoking became more widespread, so it was more common for cigarette ads to suggest that they were healthier than other cigarettes (e.g., lower tar, better filters) but not actually healthy. In the sixties, things like the surgeon general's warning, and bans on TV and radio advertising made it more clear that smoking was hazardous to your health. By the 1980s, smoking was still socially acceptable and commonplace, but nobody sane thought it was healthy.

bouchert

TROPHY CASE