Never named any of my cars until we got an ID4. It is called Heidi.

Some of the very first ones were great; Trevor the vampire, and the one that birthed Homsar (possibly the very first one?). Stuck with it for all the classics; lightswitch rave, Trogdor, teen girl squad, 20X6, Sweet Cuppin’ Cakes (I still bring up Eh, Steve! to this day).

Eventually they started getting longer and longer and lost a lot of the punchiness and I stopped watching.

I think my favourite is probably Trogdor. The way Strong Mad has just carved ‘DAGRON’ into the table always makes me chuckle for some reason.

It’s the same in the UK but “legal tender” doesn’t mean what most people think it means.

When you buy something from a shop you’re technically offering to enter a contractual relationship for the purchase of said goods. If the shop agrees to your terms, including how you’d like to pay, then the contract is ratified. If they don’t accept your preferred method of payment then there is no contract of sale and there is no debt to be paid.

This is also why shops don’t have to honour pricing errors; when you bring the item to the checkout you’re technically just offering to buy it for the listed price and they can choose to reject your offer.

This is the correct answer. Due to wear levelling, a traditional drive wipe program isn’t going to work reliably, whereas most (all?) SSDs have some sort of secure erase function.

It’s been a while since I read up on it but I think it works due to the drive encrypting everything that’s written to it, though you wouldn’t know it’s happening. When you call the secure erase function it just forgets the key and cycles in a new one, rendering everything previously written to it irrecoverable. The bonus is that it’s an incredibly quick operation.

Failing that, smash it to bits.

Aw man, yeah, the ending of AC1 where Desmond uses the eagle vision and discovers the code on the wall, it gave me chills at the time. I was so hyped for where they were going to go with the story and for a modern day assassin arc.

But I guess they realised they had near infinite points of history they could stretch the franchise out to, and keeping the Desmond story going was only going to limit their cash cow’s potential.

I checked out half way through the Ezio arc that seemed to go on forever and only went back because everyone was raving about Black Flag. By then the modern day story made zero sense to me and was just a slog.

This reminds me of working for a UK developer back in the PS2 days. From what I remember, one of the coders there wrote a tool that enabled the comparatively cheap QA test kits that would only boot from a CD/DVD to appear to dev PCs as full blown dev kits (that cost 4 or 5 times the price) and boot code pushed to them over the network.

They didn’t have as much memory or processing grunt so there was still need for a few proper dev kits, but it saved them a fortune in hardware costs. Pretty sure it was an open secret that Sony reluctantly allowed, and most of the UK dev studios were using it at one point.

My kids are of the age where they’re starting to think critically about it. We’ve never directly lied and said that he’s real and have instead answered their questions with a “do you think he’s real?”, and then they have a think and conclude that he is.

When they come to us with more of a statement than a question, for example “Santa isn’t real, is he?”, then we will let them in on the ruse.

Also people with 0 legs bring the average down even further.

You need to keep the floor clear and empty its bin, sure, but it’s way less effort than actually vacuuming. We’ve only had it for a couple of weeks but have got into the habit of doing a quick run around picking up toys and other obstacles before we go to bed (though I did specifically buy a model that can avoid those things).

Anything that takes away shitty chores. People take washing machines for granted these days, but a decent dishwasher is a godsend. Modern ones don’t need anything more than a basic scrape of the dishes as “prep” and loading it before bed to then wake up to a load of sparkling clean dishes is amazing.

In a similar vein we’ve just got a robot vacuum cleaner that we’ve set to run every night. The amount of dog fur in its bin every morning is eye opening, and other than for the stairs there’s almost no need to do vacuuming ourselves now.

Likewise trackballs. Took me all of a day to get used to using a thumb ball (Logitech MX Ergo), my wrist pain cleared right up and I haven’t looked back.

Yeah, they’re not great for twitch gaming, but on the flip side it’s highly amusing to watch people’s brains crash when they try to push it around like a mouse.

Do audiobooks count? I’m on chapter 27 of The Stand with about 38 hours to go. It’s been quite the experience in this post-Covid world.

The Trip. I thought it would be hard to find because there’s another much more recent, much more popular, but entirely unrelated show with the same name, but it turns out some legend made a playlist of them!

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzivW1Rnct6_lMstFHmw9XC8MG47-cFYG

Hats. It used to be that people wouldn’t be seen dead outside without a hat but these days, unless you’re a big fan of baseball hats, your options are sorely limited.

This is great. Reminds me of a late night show that used to be on in the UK featuring minimalist techno played against a backdrop of stock 60s and 70s space race footage. It was called The Trip for those that remember it.