Don’t care. Where stick credit card? The machine, put it on face now please, release date when?

You can have a good laugh at Grainger’s prices on just about everything. They exist purely to rip off other businesses with large expense accounts, in the “don’t care, it ain’t my money” tradition.

Unlike hard drives and SSDs which as you have observed are incessantly manufactured in powers-of-ten mega/giga/terabytes but marketed as if they were powers-of-two mebi/gibi/tebibytes, a RAM chip’s capacity is absolutely, definitely, 100% down to the individual bit precisely the capacity at which it is rated in powers-of-two megabytes. Due to the way that memory is accessed there is no other way and it cannot be fudged. (The exception is ECC RAM which typically has an extra bit per byte to hold the parity data, but this is not accessible to the user so that’s moot.)

There is a small bite of your memory space taken out for Memtestx86 to reside in, which is necessary in order for it to run. Your BIOS probably has some portion of memory reserved as well, either for peripheral memory mapping or for use as video memory, or similar.

There is probably also some rounding going on in the total capacity that Memtestx86 reports.

Because a wide swath of speed limits are not credible, and are deliberately set unrealistically low in contravention of traffic studies, civil engineers’ best practices and experience, and common sense simply as a revenue grab via fines and to have a convenient legal justification to pull over and harass undesirable people, i.e. minorities.

You ever drive through an all-white beach down in Nowhere, Florida or someplace and wonder why all of the sudden the speed limit on their major six lane thoroughfare is suddenly 20 MPH? You’d better believe the people who live there aren’t the targets of getting pulled over constantly.

Edit to add: This is before getting into the possibility of emergencies, fleeing disasters, getting someone to the hospital, etc.

It’s anodized aluminum, for sure.

There may be an off chance that someone has an example of the same/similar (most likely Chinese mass produced) item, and has already done the legwork. It’s worth a shot, but unlikely.

The kind that fits. Nobody is going to be able to tell what kind of diameter and thread pitch that is by just looking at a picture of it.

If I had to guess, probably metric. Clean it out thoroughly, take it to the hardware store, and start test fitting. If you have a thread pitch gauge you can at least figure out the pitch, and if you have a pair of calipers you could measure the inner diameter and take a pretty good stab at the bolt diameter, as well.

This is all predicated on it being a standard thread pitch of some description because the manufacturer was cheap, and not something bespoke because they were bastards.

Don’t tell the /fuckcars people that. They’ll get absolutely livid and start calling you names.

Unless you have a reliable way of filtering out bot traffic, if you just go by raw access rates in the logs to judge the proportion of “people” who are bouncing your perception is going to be skewed because the vast majority of traffic these days is not, in fact, people.

I take an extremely ruthless approach to blocking, filtering, and banning bots from my website (my real one, not my stupid hobby one) and even so easily two thirds of the the traffic I get is still bots.

This is right in my wheelhouse. No, it’s not stupid.

The vast majority of web analytics are actually objectively useless. Yes, you will generate a lot of data. No, obsessing over this data is unlikely to lead to making your website better in any way whatsoever.

Thing the first: My personal “business” website (I use this term very loosely) isn’t even dynamic. Yes, Flightless Forge is static HTML. I don’t even use any Javavscript. The horror!

Thing the second: That’s because for my job I manage an online storefront that’s completely bespoke (written by: guess who) and part of the above is because I decided I really don’t want to bring work home with me. We used to use every stupid analytics platform under the sun and over time, one by one, I wound up turning them all off. This is because they’re not only privacy nightmares for our users but also incredibly bloated, and provide all-singing, all dancing dashboards that are veritable avalanches of useless information that management never successfully used to do anything. So I gave up.

The problems with these things is that they make big promises couched in marketing-speak, but there is no actual way to realistically deliver on those results. It’s the Night Watchman problem for the digital age.

There is very little actual useful information you can glean from your userbase other than what pages they went to and when. Especially now, mouse cursor heatmaps tell a distorted story because 90% of your users will be on mobile and will have no mouse cursor. Behavior flow indicators will only tell you what you already know, which is that your users insist on using incorrect search terms and don’t read. Vanishingly little you can do aside from ensuring that no part of your interface is outright broken will actually increase your conversion rate. You cannot actually determine what your users are thinking unless they tell you, and even then they will lie to you.

So my strategy has instead become to make our website work the way I want it to work on a daily basis, by avoiding the annoyances that annoy me. It must be working, because we have one of the highest rated sites in our industry and our clients go out of their way to compliment us on how much easier to use it is than our competitors.

The number one thing that will drive users away from your site and hurt your conversion rate is anything they perceive as friction in your process, because as soon as they encounter the slightest frustration or adversity or even a simple behavior of your interface that doesn’t behave the way they expect it to, they’ll click off and go somewhere else. Nirvana is achieved when you realize that a nontrivial fraction of the “friction” your users experienced was in fact them shooting themselves in the foot by being stupid and you can’t do anything about this. I log what people put in the search box, for instance, and you would not believe the asinine shit they put in there. Your best practices are therefore not to give the user enough rope to hang himself, and compensate for his stupidity at every opportunity.

(And no, I am not telling you where I work.)

Absolutely not. What’s actually unethical is the ruinous prices the name brands charge for their “genuine” batteries which under the hood are just as much Chinese garbage as the off-brand ones.

Before you even get to that, the point everyone forgets is that if you’re using the typical type of zap-and-you’re-in-dinosaur-times method of time travel as invariably imaged by fiction, the planet will be in a very different place in the universe from where you are right now if you travel to any time. Even just a few seconds, in fact.

You’re going to have to come up with one hell of a hand-wave to cover how your location stays glued to some particular spot on the Earth’s surface even as you’re whizzing off decades or centuries into the future or past. It’s probably not even good enough to mumble about local frames of reference or what have you, because there is no such thing as a truly global frame of reference (because what would it be referenced to?) or even static spatial coordinates in the universe. If the simple Newtonian movement of the planet/solar system/galaxy/etc. doesn’t get you then the universe’s constant expansion probably will.

You might want to bring some oxygen and a very fast spacecraft with you.

For the record, my heat pump system works just fine throughout the entire year, including the times in the depths of winter where it drops into the single digits or, in the case of this last winter, below zero on the Fahrenheit scale. (That’d be -17° C, for our Euro bros.) And no, mine does not have resistive electric backup heat.

This happened to my dad once when I was a kid, but obviously not with a cell phone but rather his keys. We learned a few things that day, one of which is that cast iron storm drain grates are even heavier than they look, but the other was that if you get your hands on a big prybar you get all Archimedes in its face and not have to lift the damn thing.

If you’re e.g. an average apartment dweller and haven’t got a 7’ prybar in your shed, I don’t know what to tell you.

As he told it, Paul hated Christians and then had a vision of Jesus who told him off about it, and then he had a big change of heart and invented (modern) Christianity.

Arguably they didn’t. The modern trappings of Christianity were invented out of the whole cloth from Paul of Tarsus, when he had a “vision” of Jesus conveniently not seen by anyone else purportedly while he was traveling on the road to Damascus. Notably, all of this went down some decades after big J’s death.

It was Paul who discarded the bulk of the Jewish stuff, either out of desire to make it more palatable to his Roman peers or, possibly, simply because he was a raving nut. Paul was a self-described persecutor of the existing Christians, so he would have been in a pretty good position to know what their beliefs were to use as a starting point.

College is not a test of intelligence. It’s a test of your parents’ finances, perhaps, and your ability to conform and play the game, and in some cases one’s willingness to cheat as well. In my experience very few people come out of college any smarter than they went in, and given the preponderance of people who seem to major in beer the opposite may in fact be true.

What worries me is not the number of people who manage to stumble through college and still some out the other side stupid. Based on my personal experience with my client base, what keeps me up at night is the sheer majority of people who apparently cannot read and possess no critical thinking skills whatsoever and probably shouldn’t be trusted to tie their own shoelaces, but some asshole still saw fit to issue these people drivers’ licenses, insurance policies, mortgages, and allow them to buy giant SUVs and guns.

*Asterisk.

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Teflon. Goddamned Teflon. Did your podcast mention Dr. Kenneth Berry? (No, not the nutrition quack. The other one.)

Dr. Roy J. Plunkett gets all the credit for the discovery of Teflon and it’s true that his name appears on the patent for the process for creating the actual material. As it was the dry powered precipitate wasn’t terribly useful as a consumer product and mostly only saw use being pressed into solid forms for making highly corrosion resistant gaskets and seals for e.g. nuclear equipment.

Dr. Kenneth Berry’s picture is not hanging in the hallways in DuPont’s offices. His name appears on no plaque. He’s not mentioned in the Wikipedia article about Teflon. When it comes to DuPont’s puff pieces and their official history, you’ll notice that in the gap between the accidental discovery of that weird slippery white powder and its advent as a consumer product there is inevitably some dismissive handwaving and use of the passive voice. Oh, “it was discovered that…” and “DuPont engineers determined that…”

They don’t mention that Dr. Kenneth Berry was the inventor of the solution form of Teflon. He figured out how to dissolve and suspend it in liquid, and by extension how to actually apply it to surfaces in a useful manner. He did not invent the pan, but he was instrumental in figuring out how it could be done. And it was Dr. Berry who ate the first fried egg cooked on a Teflon surface — not Marc Grégoire. It’s quite clear. Dr. Berry’s patent was applied for and granted in 1951. Grégoire’s, 1954.

DuPont doesn’t mention this because Dr. Berry also knew damn well what nasty chemicals DuPont was using to produce Teflon, and to some degree he knew where and how they were dumping them. He documented all of this he could, stored it in a bank deposit box, and wrote it into his will that these documents were to be released to the public when he died in 2008. In retaliation for this, DuPont memory holed him. He is persona non grata there, even in death.

I know this because he told me so. Dr. Berry lived in the town I grew up in. It’s not in whole thanks to him that we know the full story of the deeply evil things DuPont has done, but it is certainly in part. I was knee high to a grasshopper at the time so the significance of this was surely lost on me. I know, however, why my mother was so insistent that we never owned any Teflon pans.

Dr. Kenneth Berry: Lived, invented, developed a conscience, once shot my stuck kite out of a tree with his shotgun, tattled on DuPont, died.

I can confirm this to at least some degree. Part of my job involves marketing and this unfortunately requires at least some minimum peripheral contact with professional marketing people.

They’re idiots, at least on the creative side. They live in a bubble of their own making and are among the worst people on Earth for predicting how regular people think, interact with products or websites, or make decisions.

However, they also get piles and piles of cash shoveled in their direction by executive types who are also idiots, in the vain hope of an ROI that is legendarily fuzzy and also extremely easy to fudge. Thus, the machine churns on.