palordrolap
@palordrolap@fedia.io
Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitating it, trying to be amusing and informative.
Lurked Digg until v4. Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.
Was on kbin.social (dying/dead) and kbin.run (mysteriously vanished). Now here on fedia.io.
Really hoping he hasn't brought the jinx with him.
Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish
- Comment on xkcd #3149: Measure Twice, Cut Once 2 days ago:
Top right quadrant is full of forgetful carpenters.
- Comment on New U.S. gov't rule says chipmakers have to make one chip in the US for each chip imported from another country to avoid 100% tariffs — Trump admin allegedly preps new 1:1 chip export rule under new t 1 week ago:
No idea. I did find that WDC are still making a variant of the 16-bit successor to the 6502, so I hadn't considered that the tech might not still be around for the earlier generation.
It was only very recently that they stopped making Z80 cores for embeddable use, so if that tech was mothballed rather than thrown out it, theoretically it wouldn't take long to spin all that back up again.
That "theoretically" might just be an uninformed dream though.
- Comment on New U.S. gov't rule says chipmakers have to make one chip in the US for each chip imported from another country to avoid 100% tariffs — Trump admin allegedly preps new 1:1 chip export rule under new t 1 week ago:
Ha. What are the odds that someone resurrects the Z80?
(I'm a 6502 boy, but it would be interesting to see the rival come back)
- Comment on Should you copy a person's accent when pronouncing their name? 1 week ago:
I saw something about this the other day, but I forget exactly where. They spoke about two famous people, both with given name "Craig" where one was British and the other American. They said that they would deliberately pronounce the name differently for each person in order to reflect that person's preferred pronunciation.
Approximating that within your own accent wasn't mentioned, but I assume that would be acceptable.
Another one that springs to mind is the name "Colin". There was that well-known US politician who insisted that his name was to be pronounced with a long 'o' not a short one, which deviated even from the standard US pronunciation.
If I remember correctly, he insisted that if it was to be pronounced the other way, it should have had two L's in it. Makes me wonder how he spelled/pronounced travel(l)ing.
- Comment on I get texting and driving being a danger. But back in my day you could eat drink change radio stations etc. Why weren't laws implemented back then? 1 week ago:
In some countries there's definitely a catch-all law for this. It's called Driving without due care and attention where I live.
I can imagine that in jurisdictions where the police are more likely to be predatory, retaliatory or have quotas to meet that such a law might be considered too powerful by a judiciary that isn't quite as corrupt, so that could be why such a thing doesn't exist. Assuming that it's true that no such law exists, anyway.
- Comment on Notepad gets AI features like Summarize, Write, and Rewrite, using local and cloud models. 1 week ago:
Markdown varies a little from instance to instance, but you ought to be able to get away with a backslash before a problematic character (like that dot) or else backticks around something to get monospace text.
edit\.com → edit.com
`EDIT.COM` →EDIT.COMTry not to twist your brain on how I managed to get the left hand sides of those arrows.
- Comment on Republican senator targets overseas facial recognition site(PimeEyes) over ICE doxing 2 weeks ago:
You know America is well down the pan when people almost certainly in the pocket of the CCP are actually talking sense about it.
But then, this does make a convenient distraction from the similarly atrocious things they're doing, and planning to do, in their own back yard.
- Comment on Notepad gets AI features like Summarize, Write, and Rewrite, using local and cloud models. 2 weeks ago:
Well, yes, but actually no. It's more like MS-DOS's
EDIT.COMsince it runs in a command line / "DOS" window.In fact, since
EDIT.COMwent through a couple of distinct variants back in the day, you could say that this is the third variant of it.The other two being 1) the BASIC-deactivated side of
QBASIC.EXEwhich was an editor and programming language in one, and then 2) a stand-alone, from the ground up, version (with no BASIC to disable) which came along with Win9x / MS-DOS 7.I keep a copy of the latter in my DOSBox config. It's only 70kB.
- Comment on If you had to buy a new TV, what brand would you get? 2 weeks ago:
There's at least one supplier here in the UK that still sells free-to-air-only dumb TVs. Digital of course, because we turned off analogue TV signals years ago, but no smarter than that. Definitely no Internet connectivity.
If I decided I was going to become a regular TV watcher again, I'd probably get one of those.
- Comment on Taliban leader bans Wi-Fi in an Afghan province to 'prevent immorality' 2 weeks ago:
That's just a symptom of moral prescriptivism, which in turn is a symptom of otherwise impotent desire for control over a weird and scary world.
That doesn't mean they're making good choices, but it does explain why they're making them.
- Comment on My friend exposed a guy for bad stuff. Now he's created a site where he archives everything my friend posts online & deliberately twists it to make her look bad/discredit her. What should she do? 2 weeks ago:
If these twisted statements are provably false - even if they contain elements of truth - then this is a case of libel.
Creating accounts everywhere someone is in order to track what they do and say is stalking.
Making repeated efforts to ruin a person's day is harassment.
Contact law enforcement and/or legal representation. I'm not either of those but it seems like there's a strong case here.
- Comment on Microsoft is testing full-screen Microsoft 365 ads in Windows 11 for expired subscriptions 3 weeks ago:
Tricky. Microsoft currently use two different executable formats and only one of them is compatible with WINE. That still doesn't mean that a compatible one will work properly though.
On the other hand, people who make ads want their ads to be literally everywhere, so they might make it Windows 3.11 compatible with all library functions baked in just to be safe. WINE would almost certainly run that.
- Comment on Microsoft still can't convince folks to upgrade to Windows 11 3 weeks ago:
I thought Win2K was peak Windows, but I begrudgingly got comfortable with XP (using the classic Windows theme) then Win 7 after they ironed most of Vista's kinks out.
Been on Linux since then.
But it would be unfair to say that masochist tendencies aren't a requirement to be a Linux system owner.
All systems require some level of that. It's just Linux has been rushing towards "less masochism" and Windows even quicker towards "more", and we find ourselves at that sweet spot where they've the same level of requirement.
Frankly, I'd prefer this sweet spot to be more towards "less", so I'm hoping Linux continues its trend.
- Comment on Reddit is dropping subscriber counts on subreddits: Users will now see seven-day metrics that track active visitors and contributions instead. 3 weeks ago:
This kind of already happens there though. Video view counts are visible and often way below a channel's sub count.
Sure, there are exceptions (viral video views often far exceeding the sub count), but by and large they're a good metric for seeing how a channel is actually doing.
- Comment on What's the Bechdel test equivalent for images? 3 weeks ago:
I'm not sure that counts, considering which subset of the population is the largest consumer of it. That in and of itself doesn't make it fail*, but the fact that the makers of it know this and thus might be tailoring it for that audience does kind of make the the whole thing about men.
Basically, we're just swapping one meaning of intercourse for another.
* in the same way a group of men watching a regular movie that passes the test wouldn't change that fact.
- Comment on Google's plan to restrict sideloading on Android has a potential escape hatch for users 3 weeks ago:
Option 1 is a potential cause of "lost" revenue.
Late stage capitalism absolutely forbids anything that could cause that, even if the cost of implementation outweighs any potential gain.
- Comment on Mark Zuckerberg, the Lawyer, Is Suing Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO 4 weeks ago:
Serious answer: A surprising number of people, especially those who still have Facebook accounts in 2025, are susceptible to scams where someone pretends to be a rich and/or famous person asking for favours or money.
They get a message from a fake Zuck, and because they are dangerously credulous, they believe it is the real Zuck.
Zuck says they've been selected, or won a prize, or should send a photo or some such, and then suddenly Zuck's blackmailing for a compromising photo or otherwise requesting Amazon gift cards or Bitcoin to "unlock" the prize or whatever.
"Zuck's a rich man who owns the platform. He knows what he's doing. I'd better look into how to do this Bitcoin thing."
Facebook knows all this and so any Zucks that are not the Zuck get flagged as scammers and have their accounts shut down.
- Comment on xkcd #3137: Cursed Number 4 weeks ago:
Well, this is embarrassing. This is what I get for mathing after midnight.
- Comment on xkcd #3137: Cursed Number 4 weeks ago:
Felt like noodling a little with some numbers. I have a nice candidate. 22301. Pretty small, right? It's prime. That's not troubling to most anyone's sanity.
There's something that can be done to that number four times (but no more) which results in a prime each time and the fourth step results in a 70 digit number that I may have looked at slightly tOo LoNnNg.
- Comment on I Love Reading 1980s Computer Magazines, and So Should You 4 weeks ago:
So your cross your fingers and ran it and got an error.
And eventually we learned to understand the programs we were typing in, knowing what those errors meant and how to fix them without looking back at the listing. Magical.
- Comment on what does it mean being nice to your coworkers to you? 4 weeks ago:
I think they're going for "What does 'being nice to your coworkers' mean to you?"
As someone who is also neurodivergent, to me this meant leaving them the heck alone unless they were only person who could help me with something, which is also how I expected to be treated in return.
Neurotypicals might ask others about their day, make hot drinks for others, or even do out-of-work favours, but I never had the urge to do that, even if it might have been be appreciated. There are probably other things that they do that I was and might still be oblivious to.
- Comment on I Love Reading 1980s Computer Magazines, and So Should You 4 weeks ago:
I was given a bunch of old Compute!'s Gazettes by an uncle who'd moved onto PCs from his Commodore 64. I did not get the benefit of the tape or disk option unfortunately, but as a result many of those magazines are bedaubed with felt-tip where I marked my progress whiling away hours typing in those programs.
I learned so much about the Commodore 64 from those magazines.
By the time I got my C64C in the '90s, magazines had long since stopped publishing code listings due to cost. If they'd continued to do so, magazines would have been twice the price and they wouldn't have been able to sell twice as many to make up for it. As it was, the magazines were, by that point, at least partially subsidised by game companies who wanted to get a demo out on the tape or disk.
I'm still annoyed my subscription to one of those magazines ran out the month before the last ever issue. I could probably get one on eBay for a reasonable price, but it's the principle, dammit.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
Dennis is one of those (fictional) people who I clearly remember being much younger than, briefly being the same age as, and now being much older than. The two main others are Gordon Freeman (27) and Homer Simpson (under 40).
Now if only my mental age had kept up...
- Comment on xkcd #3134: Wavefunction Collapse 5 weeks ago:
"Problems that go away by themselves come back by themselves."
- Comment on YSK that you can usually tell news site's bias based on how complimentary the picture they attached is 5 weeks ago:
The reverse is true of pictures of sports folk, who are almost always pictured with their mouths open in celebration.
There used to be a saying here (UK) along the lines of "the back page of a newspaper always has a picture of a man with his mouth open" and that's why. Sports at the back. Almost always men's sports. Main picture was usually some leading point scorer celebrating.
- Comment on What's the thing video players do after lag where they speed up the footage to catch up to the current frame before playing as normal? 5 weeks ago:
"Rubber-banding" maybe?
- Comment on Word documents will be saved to the cloud automatically on Windows going forward 5 weeks ago:
Are there ways of doing table things in LibreOffice, even if that specific feature isn't there? That's been why they haven't added things in the past... but then eventually caved in and added them.
I'm thinking mainly of the fact that for long enough either LibreOffice (or its predecessor OpenOffice? It might have been that long ago) would try to add all one million vertical cells as a data range to a chart if the user selected an entire column, and the devs refused to "fix" that to only use everything down to the last non-blank cell.
But eventually someone got on the dev team who was willing to do that.
No harm in asking again.
- Comment on Word documents will be saved to the cloud automatically on Windows going forward 5 weeks ago:
This is a call for those people who are missing a feature that they absolutely must have in LibreOffice, to 1) check whether it has been added since they last looked (when was that, again?) and 2) to put in a feature request if it isn't there.
- Comment on Is there a word for the happiness in finding the exact right word? 5 weeks ago:
The adjectival form is "felicitous". (fe-LI-si-tus)
- Comment on Where did the word and concept of "derpy" come from and where is it going? 5 weeks ago:
It's the onomatopoeia associated with a stupid person trying to think with an emphasis generating -p suffix, in the manner of well → welp and no → nope, then modified further into an adjective with a further -y suffix. Der + -p + -y.
Wiktionary doesn't currently talk about the -p snap suffix at derp, but it does at welp. While I don't quite have the gall to edit it into derp myself, I'm convinced it's the same thing.
(One definition of "herp" is, of course, derived in the same way, doubly emphatic due to the unnecessary aspiration on a hesitation noise. h- + er + -p. Thus was born phrases like "herp-a-derp" for someone acting with a ridiculous lack of care.)