Twitter Info Threads

I like to ramble about things on twitter. Sometimes these are interesting long threads, so I'm going to try to collect them here.

Aliexpress/ebay/amazon is full of Weird Junk

• Censored Hello Kitty, creepy masks, giant vegetable pillows,
• There are no vape phones, but you can punch beekeepers, sadden your beard, and wear haunted masks
• Tiny phones!
• Weird connectors, like connecting to PCI over DVI
• Strange SD cards and Mini-PCIe cards
• Power USB devices with 9V batteries, or spin your BBQ rotisserie spit from USB
• Save me USB adapters! And the secret behind USB yfrjgbntkm
• Industrial connectors: Because sometimes you want to screw in your USB-C connector
• USB cables come in the same types as romance novels
• Sex toys, to ensure porper pressure on your tender skin
• Strange novelty phones
• Who needs a 9-key keyboard?
• Industrial keyboards on ebay
• Custom/industrial keyboards on ebay
• The government deals site has paintings, police soda machines, and driving simulators
• I was bored at a Guitar Center and took a bunch of pictures of musical stuff
• Does ebay have SATAN? on VHS? Oh yes
• What about Jesus? On VHS? Yes as well.
• Point of Sale keyboards
• Waterproof Connectors
• Old IBM computer controllers, with a tangent into how Williams Tubes Memory worked

Biology

• Eyes are weird and use timetravel to hide your temporary blindness
• How long could you run a human on a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator?
• Scanning your body using antimatter, the same kind that's in bananas
• Don't eat the rich, it isn't healthy. Compost the rich instead.
• Joking about the 7th sense, and how many senses do we have anyway? And how that relates to ADHD.
• Why you can see moving dots when you look at a blue sky
• Winking vs. Blinking, Smiling, Latin Trumpets, and Babylon 5?

Calendars

• Kodak's Nuclear Reactor and the International Fixed Calendar
• The US Presidential Date System, invented in the 4th Year of Trump
• Windows 95 doesn't know about George W. Bush and his ideas about Daylight Saving Time

The Cold War

• Why not put a nuclear reactor in a plane?
• How do you take pictures on a spy satellite in the age of film?
• Can you run a plane on AA batteries? (no) and why the USSR accidentally irradiated Canada.
• Why are Bikinis named after an island that the US nuked?
• Duck and Cover isn't silly propaganda, it's good advice

Computer Displays

• How CRTs work and the amazing image of a round nude tube
• How does your computer figure out what monitor you plugged in?
• Planar graphics and why they were used

Computer Keyboards & Mice & Joysticks

• The looming security implications of mechanical keyboards
• How Keyboards Work
• How can my mouse have 8 buttons if Windows only lets you have 5 buttons?
• The PC Joystick interface is slightly bananas: It's two timers
• How do those serial-to-ps/2 adapters for mice work?
• How Mice Work
• How keyboards communicate keypresses to Windows, and why you can't easily get a keyboard with an Emoji Button

Computer History

• Why 2038 is The End Of Time
• The connection between Naked Lunch and PNG files
• Punch Cards and the history of IBM
• How did you program in 1962?
• How you can use your CD-ROM driver to stop MS-DOS from booting
• How does your computer know which hard drive is which?
• EZ-Drive/Data Lifeguard/On Track Disk Manager, and how they let you have a hard drive bigger than 500mb
• Why Windows 95 had a "It's now safe to turn off your computer" screen and how the boot-screen was animated without being animated
• Why you can't have a file named "aux.h" on Windows
• Bubble Memory: The Next Big Thing that Never Was

Computer Programming

• Web scraping and the many sins of Tumblr
• The endless failures of the Panera Bread & McDonalds websites
• The horrors of hacking and my dad's deathtrap van

Chemical Elements

• Hafnium and the possibility of a nuclear hand-grenade
• Rhodium doesn't cause cancer, it can prevent it! and how that's connected to Bunsen burners
• Dysprosium is why you shouldn't eat a Prius

Electronics

• What connector you should definitely NOT use for a sex machine?

Flea Market (Electronics/De Anza)

• March 2017
• May 2017
• June 2017 and Follow-up with stuff I Got
• July 2017 and Follow-up with stuff I Got
• August 2017 and Follow-up with stuff I Got
• September 2017 and Follow-up with stuff I Got
• April 2018
• May 2018
• August 2018
• April 2019
• May 2019
• June 2019
• September 2019

Floppy Disks

• How superfloppy drives were able to fit more data on the same size disks as standard floppies
• What does formatting a disk mean, and how it's completely different from hard drives or SSDs
• How USB Floppy Drives use a protocol from Shugart embedded in another protocol from Shugart embedded in another protocol from Shugart and who is this Shugart Guy anyway?
• The cool trick used in double-sided drives
• Why is it Optical Discs, but Floppy Disks? (And how IDE works)
• The spiral-disks of the Famicom Disk System

Games

• River-crossing puzzles
• Amulets & Armor: Is it Doom? And if not, why would anyone think it was?
• How I used a moustache to prevent cheating when playing videogames back in the early 2000s
• Conquests of the Longbow: The Legend of Robin Hood is neat and should get a remake
• How game controls have shifted over time
• How DOOM encrypted its cheat codes, and how long did it take someone to figure them out anyway
• Playing through the KFC Visual Novel
• Why PC games don't have ROMs, what a ROM is, and why your Nintendo Switch games are DOOMED
• ExciteBike for the Famicom and how it stored tracks, and what that has to do with batteries and floppy disks
• Pilotwings for the SNES can work differently, even on an identical ROM and the follow-up when the game was released on the Switch
• Companion chips used to enhance SNES games
• Building a generator for Silent Hill 2 is so hard that I get mad and livetweet building a Rambo (NES) generator
• The SNES was designed with NES backwards compatibility in mind, even if it never had it
• How the 10NES chip kept you from playing games if the connector was dirty
• Gaming in the transhumanist future
• SimCity 2000, SimCopter, The Yes Men, and the Bhopal Disaster
• Playing Super Mario Bros on a printer, and why Super Mario Bros 2 is Like That

Gender

• Doctor James Barry was an awesome trans man you should have learned about in history class
• The woman who took a picture of a black hole, the harassment, and my awesome grandma

My Government Job

• I made a progress bar that was 100% lies
• The Air Force loves World of Warcraft
• Everything is fractal disasters and why there are no New Projects, ever
• The horrors of CSV and how to loophole a government contract to intentionally lose 10 years of data
• Why a free program cost too much for the US government to afford, and why you should never scan anything with Windows 98
• Why we charged you for public domain information that was free
• Why I don't think the US military is fully off floppy disks, why they used them in the first place, and why there's so much weather data from Alaska
• Why I had to virus scan my own files or lose a couple million dollars

US History & Politics

• Florence Nightgale's contribution to statistics, a scam in Ohio, and how to fight a war with counterfeiting
• The Black Hawk War that Sufjan Stevens sung about
• Jury Nullification and how it has been used
• The Goodyear Blimp is none of those three things

The James Webb Ground Device

• It has a twitter account. That makes me angry
• All the other space projects that have launched in the meantime, and why that makes me angry
• Maybe Elon Musk could launch the JWST for free? He didn't, and that makes me angry.
• Can we launch (no pun intended) a kickstarter for NASA to launch the JWST? Because the funding problems make me angry
• The JWST is coded in Javascript running on an iMac and that makes me angry

Linguistics

• How do sci-fi universal translators know when to stop?
• Jabberwocky, the word ye, and why we have two words for cow and two words for feces
• How rebracketing changed English words
• The history of the snowclone "X is hard, let's go shopping"

Magazines

• Electronic adverts in 1980s Playboys
• Video Games & hardware from PC Review, May 1992
• Hardware from PC Magazine, January 1995
• Input devices and software from Byte, March 1992

Misc Science

• Learning about things you already knew: How written numbers work, how grammatical cases work, and the difference between centralized communist economies and capitalist ones
• Why is there coal? Because trees won the evolutionary arms race.

Money

• The US has had some weird currency and why our current bills are illegal and have to be redesigned, and how Lin-Manuel Miranda messed that up
• How rich is Jeff Bezos? He's a dragon.

Music

• Weird Al's endless licensing issues
• The history of the Rickroll
• If Never Gonna Give You Up is the rickroll of the 80s, what are the rickrolls of other decades?

Personal History:

• How I ended up owing 18k$ because of a single typo
• The horror of the company that had The Repo
• The animals that tried to invade my bedroom as a teen, and the Snake in my PC
• Why the FBI mentioned my old username in a federal investigation

Religion

• How do you find the direction to Mecca? What if you're in space?

Space Science

• Nuclear reactors before humans and WHY IS THERE A MOON?
• We learned something about meteorites by setting off a nuclear bomb, and the mystery of the nuclear explosion where there shouldn't have been one
• How we figured out if there's more than one galaxy: Cepheid Variables
• The Challenger disaster, and Normalization of Deviance
• What films did they watch on the International Space Station?
• Does the International Space Station have a "front"?
• The first picture of earth taken from a satellite, and what that has to do with the UK's nuclear missiles
• A spaceship engine that's slower than a snail, and why jet engines are CHEATING
• There are floppy disks on the International Space Station: How'd they get there?
• How can we get power out of a black hole?

Science Fiction & Anime

• Giant robots are stupid and fictional superweapons are weaker than ones we've already deployed
• When is the Golden Age of Star Trek, 1997 or 2020? And then just "boy look at all this 90s sci-fi"
• Alternate casts for Star Trek: TNG? and also, if you released Star Wars one month earlier, Obama wouldn't have been president.
• How uniforms and props from Forbidden Planet kept showing up in later films and shows
• The first episode of Star Trek and why it had to be restored from multiple sources
• Why ebay thinks I want to buy a skirt, and what that has to do with Star Trek and navels
• My idea for a Star Trek fanshow: incredulous starfleet officers reading mission logs
• The original story for Zyuranger, which Power Rangers was based on, involves DINOSAURS and SATAN and I love it
• How Contact keeps its special effects grounded to make it feel more real
• My favorite thing in Sci-Fi: Bullshit Cosmology/Ontology
• That movie where a dragon-rider fights a hydra on the moon
• How I realized a plot point from my Starmap setting was stolen from Asimov's Foundation series
• Star Trek TOS didn't have floppy disks in it. And the data tapes in Star Wars probably aren't tapes. And why the Star Trek timeline is weird
• The neat animation of Akira
• Mechanical animation of Evangelion

Thrifting

• Goodwill Thrifting that got my tires slashed
• Dolls wrapped in Plastic
• Thrifting with Cool Phones and Uranium Glass
• Looking for laserdiscs and finding Tijuana Christmas
• Unisex Rocking
• Laserdiscs in Santa Cruz, and Everflex Balls
• Appropriately weird stuff at the Weird Stuff Warehouse
• Giant Hard Drives at the Weird Stuff Warehouse
• IBM PC/XTs at the Weird Stuff Warehouse
• More PCs at Weird Stuff Warehouse
• Test your network with a suitcase at Weird Stuff Warehouse
• Plotters & MPreg at the Weird Stuff Warehouse
• Minidiscs & a stealthy CRT at the Weird Stuff Warehouse
• The Noise Generator at the Weird Stuff Warehouse
• Vic-20s at the Weird Stuff Warehouse
• Floppies and Tandy CoCos at the Weird Stuff Warehouse
• Half a car at the very Weird Stuff Warehouse
• Sphygmomanometers and mixer panels at Weird Stuff Warehouse
• Slockets and power adapters
• Minidisc recorders at Excess Solutions
• Prototyping boards and tube-testers at Halted
• Pinball with friends, and thrifting at Urban Ore

Video, Film, & Television

• Why it was hard to make amateur porn films in 1980 and what that has to do with proprietary Sony SSDs
• Early Instant-Replay systems were DEADLY giant hard drives
• How Slip Rings were vital to your VCR, and how helical-scan made VHS tapes small enough to be usable
• How to morph a character on screen in 1960, without cutting, but it'll only work in black & white