A long time ago I wrote a little web app that takes a search string and finds all the words in the dictionary that have overlap with its spelling. Sort of a portmanteau generator. It was just a fun project at the time, but I have used it on countless occasions to brainstorm unique names for projects, websites, etc.

You can try it from the link below. Just type any word or name and it will populate the results.

https://dev.djdupriest.org/name-combinator/index.html

Are those flying squirrels at the top of the first image?

Now I want a “what if?” on this. I would love to see all the g-forces and wind resistance and other details of how to survive with a big ramp.

If you get the torrent from a site using HTTPS and get the data only from encrypted peers is it even possible to tell what people are downloading?

I think it’s neat that in a lot of these “penis stuck in thing” cases where bloodflow makes removal difficult a doctor can usually just show the patient the massive needle they will have to insert to remove excess blood and the sight alone usually “solves” the problem.

I was a new JET Programme participant located in rural Japan. The CIR variety, so I knew a good bit of Japanese and was there to teach and write about US culture, history, food, etc.

The local dialect was pretty difficult to understand however, and I was constantly asking what words meant. One day my coworker used an expression beginning with “o”, which is a common honorific prefix, and wanting to basically say “o - what?” I clearly proclaimed “onani?” in the middle of the board of education office. More than one person stifled a laugh and my coworker almost did a spit take.

It wasn’t until much later that I learned “onani” is masturbation in Japanese, based on the English term onanism, which I also didn’t know at the time. So I basically failed hard in both languages that day.

Flashbacks to reading the Guinness Book of World Records in elementary school.

Poor VR support. I’d probably switch if it ever becomes stable.

Smullyan would be proud.

That is really cool. I would love to implement that in a VR world, but I’m guessing the dithering might not line up for both eyes and it would be annoying.

As an origami fan I would be very interested to see how they managed to fold this thing up.

Squid: “Nobody at home’s ever gonna believe this.”

First I just want to say, that is a damn beautiful website. No ads, no popups, just pure information.

And second, as a former back end developer who has spent a huge amount of time working on input sanitization and building database schemas, that list gave me mild PTSD for a job I have never even had.

Somethin’ like a fish.

One time while reading on my phone in bed with the lights turned off a single solitary firefly-like point of light appeared and drifted across my field of vision. It had depth, so I know it wasn’t a phenomenon originating just in one eye, and wasn’t constrained to the screen. There is also a zero percent chance it was an actual firefly. My only explanation is that it might have been a hypnagogic hallucination, but I’ve never seen one as bright and clear as this was. Like an ember from a bonfire.

Maybe this only works on certain fish, but if you stop the first long cut just short of the tail you can flip the fillet over and it stays connected to the body, making it easier to hold while you cut the fillet away from the skin.

“TREE(3)” likes got me.

The Sony Mavica FD91 was the first digital camera I ever owned! I used it the last couple years of high school and during a short homestay in Japan. You could pick up a giant box of 3.5" floppies for cheap, and as long as you fed it a stead supply of batteries it worked pretty well.

Here are some photos I took that are at, I believe, the highest quality setting (1024 x 768 and about 170kb each). Though I think Lemmy shows them shrunk down in the feed, if you open the image in a new tab you can see the full resolution.

Zoomed in.

And a closeup.

The 14x optical zoom was pretty amazing back then.

I’m really bad at arithmetic so it took me two years to do the calculations, but the math does check out.

When I first moved to Japan over twenty years ago they were already about a hundred years ahead of typical US toilet/bath technology. For me, using one of these faucets where you can just set the temperature by number was like Liko getting beamed from her hut directly onto the damn Enterprise.