minusLik

And I wasn't sure if the donation form was real or part of the game *g

Stories like this wonderfully explain why Windows is as quirky as it is, and I love them for that.

I doubt that, I have a ABL-100 and its step counter cannot be turned off. It even beeps at you when you sit on your butt for too long.

However, the manual recommends to be sparing with the backlight.

Yup, the ingenuity to pull this off fascinates me every day, too.

The button press sequences are still combo-style; when I set one of the alarms on my ABL-100WE, it always ends in trial and error. I mean, basically it's logical, but when the buttons change what they do (e.g. when the display says "SET", the light button becomes "up"), it throws me off.

Despite not quite being an artist, this resonated with me. This fits well in line with my favourite example of corpo-speak: "challenge" instead of "problem". Lately, I find myself replacing these two in my mind occasionally when reading them and the texts still don't change their meaning.

It's a bit depressing watching language get shallow …

lol

But sketchbooks don't run 9front :(

> Wacomized laptops with pens. > Crack the screen open and draw on it.

I don't think "crack the screen open" is the best choice of words here …

I fed the technical data of my motorcycle into the model and it told me right away that this build would destroy a real engine because the piston speed would be too great.

The real thing has been running for 56,000 miles, so it can't be that bad. *g

For me, it's the European Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR). It is intended to reduce/recycle waste from shipping packages.

The eyebrow-raising part is that each country has a registry at which every company that intends to ship goods (independent of size) must sign up. Plus, it has to look for a recycling company. Each year, the company has to give an estimate on what amount of packages it is going to use and pay the recycling cost for it beforehand. Both companies are then required to report that amount to the registry. At the end of the year, they report again, this time the actual amount of packaging used (you get the part of the fee back if you overpaid).

If you ship to other EU countries, you are required to register in similar registries in every single one of them. Plus, they have their own requirements to your packages and Austria, for example, wants you to appoint a representative who does the paperwork for you and takes liability (the EU is working on making the representative mandatory in general).

Needless to say that all this stuff does not come for free. The fees for postage, the registry, the adaptions to foreign regulations and all costs associated with it easily get over a thousand Euros. No problem for the big merchants, but I think you all can guess how well this pays off if you only have a handful of shipments from, say, Germany to Austria.

And that's why shops only ship to selected countries despite the EU having free movement of goods.

PS: Merchants from outside EU (e. g. Temu) don't have to do any of this.

I for my part didn't like the sparse selection of colors. Blue, silver, green, but nothing reddish. But later there came the Zune theme and it was awesome (silver-black with orange X buttons).

In Germany, using shock collars on dogs is even verboten.

The account is not directly required, but you have a very hard time using an Android smartphone without a Google account. It's a bit easier with Apple, however both have in common that the apps required for eIDAS are available in their app stores – and they are not usable without an account (for common users).

It's an account requirement in a roundabout way.

Fairphone actually does this. My FP3+ displays a red bar with an open padlock as long as the bootloader is unlocked, and when one changes the bootloader lock one way or the other, the phone wipes itself.

This. The German government issues electronic IDs which can provide proof of age in a privacy-saving way, but I've never seen that being used in the wild.

Hewlett Packard had a lifetime warranty on their network gear back in the day.

So, do you like this? I do.

These 0.21/day are MPESA transaction fees. I stumbled upon that, too.

Well, to get started you could buy one of these:

https://www.reiner-sct.com/en/produkt/reiner-sct-authenticat...

… and then decide whether you really want to get into electronics development.

That book looks very promising. Thanks a bunch!

Is there an exploit? I've always wanted to explore the inner workings of my car's computer system, but I don't know how.

Does it work better when you use the key fob from inside the car? I would expect that because they surely tested a "unlocked accidentally and locked again right away" kind of scenario.

The cars I know lock their doors automatically when they go at a certain speed (e. g. mine does at 20 km/h). Doesn't yours?

Maybe it's intended to help with calculations. For comparison, the German BBK recommends a emergency stock to last ten days.

Amazing! The DTMF sounds look like the pins on the barrel of a music box. I am intrigued, I wouldn't ever have pictured them like that.

Thank you for the article! I found the "I understand computers and therefore the world" in the beginning a bit pretentious, but after reading the rest anyway, it doesn't anymore. I'd summarize the piece as:

"The hacker mindset comes with powerful tools: The urge to figure stuff out, the creativity to use it in unusual ways and the passion to share knowledge. Let's use it to make the world a better place. Start a company and gather allies. If enough of us do this, we'll have an impact on the world."

> You can't solve political problems with technical solutions.

Yes, that's what I've been thinking too. Tom Quiter even mentions in the interview that there already have been companies which tried to offer cheap wheelchairs, but the quasi-monopolists had the FDA alter the regulations in a way with which the newbies couldn't comply.

However, since the MIF already attracted suppliers, I hope they can gain some leverage.

What the article does not seem to mention is that an usual electric wheelchair costs about $65,000 (and is intended to be replaced every six years or so). This and the non-availability of replacement parts is why some wheelchair users started a project to open-source a wheelchair from standard parts:

https://themif.org/

Louis Rossmann interviewed the founder of the project here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaAj59025Kk

> “Why”? What kind of question is “why”?

Because low-level applications like this were promised when UEFI was introduced, that's why. UEFI's creators went even as far as to dream of replacing the Linux-based Internet-only mini-OSes of some vendors which could be accessed by pressing a certain key during boot (though I don't remember what they were called).