dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

Progenitor of the Weird Knife Wednesday feature column. Is “column” the right word? Anyway, apparently I also coined the Very Specific Object nomenclature now sporadically used in the 3D printing community. Yeah, that was me. This must be how Cory Doctorow feels all the time these days.

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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • Another factor to add is that major retailers use anything they throw away as a tax write-off “loss” and they are therefore extremely cagey about giving any of it away for any reason, even to employees, I guess because if this is found out it could have some kind of implications, I dunno.

    My nephew works for Target and apparently they do this. He tells me a manager will stand there and watch them crushing perfectly good floor model TV’s and other electronics in the trash compactor so he can sign off that they did it and none of those items were used for any beneficial purpose whatsoever, because weaseling out of $0.02 in taxes is apparently more worthwhile to corporate than giving a dedicated employee a new but slightly scuffed TV they were going to throw away anyway.

    It’s positively infuriating. I’m sure the perishable goods/food sector is even worse.


  • Here is the anti-story to the above:

    Back when I was in school I needed a handful of 35mm film canisters for some damn fool project or another. I don’t remember exactly what I was planning to use them for. So I went to the local camera store and asked the clerk there if I could just buy like 20 or 30 empty film canisters figuring they’d have a fair few lying around. This was, of course, in the days when 35mm film was still the predominant photography standard, and consumer grade digital cameras that could even achieve one real world megapixel were very new, very exciting, and very expensive.

    Apparently I was right, because they guy said, “Good god, please take some” and gave me an entire shopping bag full of the damn things. For free. Apparently just to be rid of them.

    I was using film canisters to store everything and anything for years after that.











  • As somewhat of a retro '90’s-2000’s electronics collecting nerd, this stuff is the bane of my existence.

    It seems like in the early 2000’s there were only three types of finishes applied to electronics products:

    • TPE “soft touch” coatings that turn into snot after a few years (many game console controllers, binoculars and other optics, some portable tape/CD players, etc.)
    • Crappy metallized silver paint that starts flaking off immediately (basically every digital camera ever made from 1999-2006, and quite a few computer input devices)
    • White or Bondi Blue plastic under a clear acrylic layer trying to ape an early iMac or iPod, which gets dirt trapped between the layers and then turns yellow (the Nintendo 3DS Lite, innumerable computer mice, USB hubs, and knockoff MP3 players)

    You just can’t win.


  • There might be something to this. I went and checked just now, prompted by a your comment, and I found a handful (like, six) comments from ages ago on reddit that did not get torched when I did my mass edit-and-delete, somehow. I found these mostly because some punters found them and necroposted on those threads, so I have notifications regarding them.

    I found a few more and deleted those by hand, too. Most of them were from the same sub, so that sub was probably locked when I did my mass delete.