Obligatory.

And I absolutely would not be able to resist labeling these as:

• English, U
• English, No U

Wow, the actual English flag, not the Union Jack?

I imagine that would trip up quite a few people even though there is a cheeky aspect of technical correctness to it.

And if you know anything about what he’s talking about, you quickly realize that in fact he does not know it all.

Can I be a big time Twitch celebrity too if I doodle a series of completely nondescriptive boxes and link them with little lines in MS Paint as I talk?

I have a Dell Axim X50v in a box somewhere. I imagine the battery is toast and I’ll probably have to keep it in its cradle to remain powered. It was a hell of a machine for it’s day.

I went through a succession Windows CE/PocketPC machines back in the day, starting with a Casio Cassiopeia E-115, then an Audiovox Maestro which was a rebadged Toshiba, then an HP iPAQ 2215, and finally the Axim.

The displays on the Maestro and the Axim were really something, and I wish someone would bring these back for a modern smartphone. They were rotten at color accuracy, but both had transflective displays that were fully readable even in direct sunlight. The Axim X50v also had a full 480x640 screen resolution which blew the first few iPhones out of the water on pixel density and even gave the iPhone 4 a run for its money. “Retina” display, my ass.

I had a Microdrive bunged into the CompactFlash slot on my Axim which was… several gigabytes, I don’t remember how many. I kept it packed with MP3’s, and I had a custom wallpaper with a white-on-chartreuse silhouette of a pacifier on it with the legend, “All 10,000 Songs On Your iPod Suck.”

But then the entire PDA market got swallowed in one gulp by smartphones.

I’ll bet you a shiny penny that’s what it is. The backend recompresses things to some other format, probably a low bitrate JPEG, in order to save space and/or in case some joker uploads a 90 megabyte uncompressed TIFF image to use as a profile pic, or something.

Those are displayed in browser, right? The only reason that would be happening is if Piefeed is recompressing images and their code is not smart enough to identify an animated .gif and act accordingly.

I mean, that’s already how animated .gifs work. If somehow you manage to load one into a viewer that doesn’t support the animation functionality it will at least dutifully display the first frame.

How the hell you would manage to do that in this day and age escapes me, but there were a fair few years in the early '90s where you might run into that sort of thing.

Yes, the iPhone did not and never has supported Flash. At least not officially from Apple. There was support, albeit not quite 100% complete, on Windows CE/PocketPC at the time, though. That was one of the things that let me lord it over early iPhone adopters back in the day — my pocket nerd computer could play Homestar Runner videos, and their stupid expensive bauble couldn’t. So there.

Just like in the NES days. Everything old is new again!

It sure does. But America is the center of the world, right…?

People here in the US will say “in the South” and mean, like, Alabama. Not Tierra del Fuego.

They even made us memorize this one in grade school:

1. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Note that this says nothing about having to be a citizen for this to apply to you, either. And while we’re at it, see also this.

Old people are actively using tablets. Lots and lots of them. A significant cross-section of my Boomer-and-up client base uses an iPad to do absolutely everything. It’s broadly the same experience as what they have on their phone, so I guess it’s familiar, but the screen is giant so they can actually see it. They seem to like that.

Bull. I don’t even get to have a double jump implant installed but I still have to deal with corpofascism. This is all a total rip-off.

Especially since the majority of computer users worldwide now no longer use a PC to do their computing. The average consumer now uses Windows only at work. Their personal device, whatever it is, runs Android or is some manner of iDevice, two platforms which have thoroughly eaten Microsoft’s lunch.

It’s too bad for Microsoft that their mobile platform – Windows Mobile, er, I mean Windows 8 RT, er, actually it was Pocket PC, um, no wait, it was Windows CE, et. cetera – all bombed so spectacularly, and the most recent one mere moments before Google took over the world.

I imagine Microsoft is no longer eyeing private users as a cash cow except purely as advertising targets.

It’s only a matter of time before some brilliant dipshit over there manages to envision Windows as a subscription service aimed solely at businesses, and the days of Windows as a standalone OS will be over.

In light of the above, then, I hereby propose that squirrels get renamed to “treegulls.”

The original Legend of Zelda. I still have it on cartridge and every once in a while I’ll just steamroll the entire game and whoop Ganon’s ass. I can usually do it in about 4 hours.

I don’t use any glitches or speedrun optimizations, I just know where everything is and what order to do things in.

I liked the 2013 Johnny Depp Lone Ranger movie. Apparently nobody else did, though.

One of the things I learned as a wee waddler on my path to being a fully-fledged computer nerd (that was two bird puns in one sentence, I don’t know if you noticed) was that keeping a spare power supply or two around is always a good idea.

A blown power supply can bring your day’s Unreal Tournament matches productivity to a halt instantly, and inevitably on a Sunday when all the stores are closed, too. To make matters more interesting, a partially failed power supply can cause all manner of strange and otherwise undiagnosable mystery issues. E.g. you’re telling me two of your hard drives, your RAM, and your video card all started acting flaky at once? More likely is your PSU’s +12v rail is wonky, or something. Swap in a known good one and see. A power supply is also the first in line of all your PC components that can be killed by external forces, e.g. dirty power or nearby lightning strikes, or maybe your dad just deciding to plug his 1970s vintage arc welder into the same circuit in the house, etc.

To this day I have a generic 750w PSU sealed in its shrink wrap on the parts shelf in my basement, because you never know when it’ll get you or someone you know out of a jam. And eventually it probably will.