no post has ever made me feel more seen than this one.
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@quinn Out of all the pieces of hardware to keep, this person kept their printer???
Those things are constantly trying to call home and rewire themselves to keep you from using unapproved ink. That's the official story of what they're doing anyway--who even knows if that's true. They're like the last thing I'd keep around. You can go to the library and use a printer. You probably have to anyway because you're out of ink. You just bought ink yesterday but you're out.
WTF with the printer?
@crazyeddie @quinn They need the yellow to always be usable so they can print https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots
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no post has ever made me feel more seen than this one.
@quinn The programmer is driving a bunch of us to lunch, and we come to an at grade RR crossing with automatic gates and signals
The programmer STOPS the car, rolls down the windows, looks carefully then crosses the track
when we all say: you don't have to do that, there are automatic signals, he says
Software
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@quinn A dot-matrix printer, so that you hear well its work and no smart engine processes your dots.
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@crazyeddie @quinn They need the yellow to always be usable so they can print https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots
@pwloftus lol i've worked on those, helped a friend break a story about a whistle blower who got caught because of them. one of my favorite gov whistleblowers in fact
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@quinn Fun Fact: The late sci-fi author and tech writer Jerry Pournelle actually did keep a gun next to his terminal. Many, many years ago I helped him with his CP/M system at his home that he used for his writing, and it was impossible not to notice.
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@pwloftus lol i've worked on those, helped a friend break a story about a whistle blower who got caught because of them. one of my favorite gov whistleblowers in fact
@quinn We had a ton of fun internally testing the money recognition and printing out ledger sized $20 bills.
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no post has ever made me feel more seen than this one.
I once pulled a dot matrix printer off it's shelf and stomped it into pieces on the floor before throwing it in the trash. This was long ago - I think before 'Office Space'. The printer had a single cartridge which contained multiple compartments for different primary colors. It seemed to always be out of ink. I opened it up and found a stalagmite of dried ink an inch high where it had been leaking for the entire time I had owned it. Cue rage-quit.
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no post has ever made me feel more seen than this one.
@quinn I'd love to tech-out my house, and tech only has two states: works approximately correctly and broken
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I once pulled a dot matrix printer off it's shelf and stomped it into pieces on the floor before throwing it in the trash. This was long ago - I think before 'Office Space'. The printer had a single cartridge which contained multiple compartments for different primary colors. It seemed to always be out of ink. I opened it up and found a stalagmite of dried ink an inch high where it had been leaking for the entire time I had owned it. Cue rage-quit.
@LovingFalloutLondon1954 omg
that's terrible i love it so much -
@quinn I'd love to tech-out my house, and tech only has two states: works approximately correctly and broken
@webhat but it has so many more states of compromised!
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@quinn Fun Fact: The late sci-fi author and tech writer Jerry Pournelle actually did keep a gun next to his terminal. Many, many years ago I helped him with his CP/M system at his home that he used for his writing, and it was impossible not to notice.
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@pwloftus lol i've worked on those, helped a friend break a story about a whistle blower who got caught because of them. one of my favorite gov whistleblowers in fact
@quinn That'd be a fun read. Is it published somewhere?
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@quinn Fun Fact: The late sci-fi author and tech writer Jerry Pournelle actually did keep a gun next to his terminal. Many, many years ago I helped him with his CP/M system at his home that he used for his writing, and it was impossible not to notice.
@lauren I was the designated sci-fi nerd at an indie bookshop in santa barbara in the early 90s, i babysat the sci-fi authors as a 20 year old. all of them were some level of skivy, except ray bradbury, who was an old nerdy guy and fucking saint.
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@quinn That'd be a fun read. Is it published somewhere?
@pwloftus uuuuuuuuh yes. where is a good question.
AHA! https://source.opennews.org/articles/how-protect-your-sources-when-releasing-sensitive-/
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@SilverArrows @quinn
I don't own a dm printer since the half of the 90s, but I used one at home since a couple of years after the release of that song.
Their noise (and quality) made me move to inkjet and lasers (when economically accessible). -
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@lauren I was the designated sci-fi nerd at an indie bookshop in santa barbara in the early 90s, i babysat the sci-fi authors as a 20 year old. all of them were some level of skivy, except ray bradbury, who was an old nerdy guy and fucking saint.
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@michaelgemar @lauren oh there were plenty of gross libertarian tech bros back then. i was kinda one of them. I became violent and thick skinned, so it was perfect for a career in tech journalism
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@lauren I was the designated sci-fi nerd at an indie bookshop in santa barbara in the early 90s, i babysat the sci-fi authors as a 20 year old. all of them were some level of skivy, except ray bradbury, who was an old nerdy guy and fucking saint.
@quinn Ray was a great guy. I'm so glad that I met him. We shall never see his like again.
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no post has ever made me feel more seen than this one.
@quinn Oh, man. That's fabulous. I looked at my ISP's router recently to see what all was connected and was blown away by all the xxxx. We went from cable to IPTV and the internet kept dropping, so I wondered if we were overloaded with devices.
I'm an obsolete techy and became pretty afraid of what was coming when in the early 2000s when our medical records were being put online (not for us - for the data thieves) and it just got worse from there.
