Bear TK

@bear-xiong

Just a bear. LGBTQ+ being. Cars, music, retrotech, alternative. Makes stories, poems, and questionable life choices. Help me learn Mandarin!

209 Folgt307 Follower4.445 Posts

Bluesky

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Bear TK@bear-xiong· 5d

If only the DX7 had shipped with enhanced firmware like this from the start...

Bear TK@bear-xiong· 5d

My cheap marketplace #YamahaDX7 has now had a whole stack of repairs and upgrades. And of course, a lot of time. From duff keys and battery, to a brain transplant and now... a new display panel. This one is my favourite. Now I can see the screen! It's also the 2nd cheapest repair after the battery.

An LCD display on a Yamaha DX7 from 1984z It is set deep in the machine and not backlit, so never easy to see.

A new red on black OLED display in the same DX7... what a difference it makes, as the illuminated letters stand out in all lighting.

Bear TK@bear-xiong· 11d

I hope whoever took Mercedes onto McPherson struts and then designed these four coil long-loop non-central springs, and mounts that trap any compressors, and shocks that /retract/, and is proud of themselves because I want to scrap the car rather than try any more configurations of tool.

Bear TK@bear-xiong· 27d

*mostly - I've been told I should paint the lower bit on the wings with a bit of Bambus Metallic. It is metal - new sections welded in - but it could do with the front corners given the same treatment (the useful bit of a pattern wing spliced in). And... my headlining... But pics of yours?

Not an exciting new cheese, this brown and orange foamy sticky mess is what is left of the headlining (roof trim) on the Audi 100 Avant. The old material was cut away so it didn't snare the MOT tester - and I want to fix it properly rather than the usual "fill the backing board with staples or push pins" approach which weakens the board.

Bear TK@bear-xiong· 28d

Autobahn is thirsty work. Something rarer than the Audi visiting Tesco!

A 1989 Audi 100 Avant parked at a petrol pump with a black sports car behind it. One of a handful left on UK roads - possibly only 3 facelift Avant non-quattro in the UK now.

A Porsche 924S LeMans - genuine, in black with distinctive coordinated stripes and teledial wheels, plus 10hp more and special trim. A handful of these in each of black or white were sold, 12 remain according to the owner.

The chances of these two cars from 1988-89 meeting are amazingly slim!

Bear TK@bear-xiong· Jul 9

Shock! Illegitimate child of so-called "Count" Binface traced, reveals forced working in horrific conditions in 1980s before finding obscurity behind a cornershop in Evesham. More on this breaking story in 3, 2, 1

Another British Bin that put Farage's work ethic to shame, this classic bin with cheerful eyes and red nose wears yellow shows and giant white gloves evocative of a clown.

Bear TK@bear-xiong· Jul 7

The reason I have owned so many cars is not what you think. I fix them. Because once they are healthy... I can harvest their souls for sustenance...

a long haired idiot blows vape smoke over a running Audi engine with K-jet injection to search for vacuum leaks

Checking the warm up regulator area by gently blowing vape smoke towards the vacuum lines

After detaching one vacuum pipe smoke subtly tends to drift towards it at idle. It was too windy for precise testing.

A 1989 Audi Avant, rear 3/4 view. When Audi was cool and subtle and genuinely better.

Audi is still here, just lacks a soul.

Bear TK@bear-xiong· Jul 1

There I am trying to work out where to stick the mirror and... ...the top tint has a little bit cut out of it where the mirror goes. (Identified by the smudge of old adhesive yet to give up tenure)

Bear TK@bear-xiong· Jul 1

Forget Spotify, and what's an iPod? Here's the proper roadtrip jukebox. What's taking over from whatever is on @bbcradio2bot.bsky.social ?

A picture of a 1988-1990 Audi 100 dashboard and centre console showing the Blaupunkt autoreverse tape player and glovebox open full of cassettes.

On top you can see Tina Turner, Enigma, Madonna, Gunship, Swing Out Sister, Now 16, Now 18, a couple of Select Magazine cover tapes, but what else is there - and what would you bring?

Bear TK@bear-xiong· Jun 23

Cars which now have MOTs, a short series:

A 1989 Audi 100 Avant and a 1994 Mazda RX-7 - the latter has not been on the road since 2008.

Bear TK@bear-xiong· May 24

Looks like a Triumph Herald 1200 (1147cc) or possibly a related Standard engine - recognised the distinctive pushrod section and dizzy location but a quick search seems to confirm it...

A cutaway view of the Herald 1200 engine showing trio of openings next to the bores, and circular, central distributor mounting.

Bear TK@bear-xiong· May 24

Anyone who has been to Risa with Jean-Luc has carte-blanche to cart their blanche however they like.

Patrick Stewart portrays Jean-Luc Picard enjoying a holiday on Risa, apparently about to explain that it is all about the rippin' and the tearin'

Bear TK@bear-xiong· May 24

Star Trek: Deep Hurting Joel and Frank, at the Exchange Crow, his arms folded

Bear TK@bear-xiong· May 24

Can you put a mock TV "Mute" icon for Enterprise, please?

It's been a long way... and even in the depths of space I can't escape that bloody song.

Bear TK@bear-xiong· May 24

A lost episode where every character (including Morn) is played by Jeffrey Coombs. It's an Odo one.

A deep space spacestation shaped as a ring structure around a central needle, with a title reading Coombs As You Are in a reference to prolific Star Trek character actor Jeffrey Coombs who portrays many beings in Deep Space Nine.

Bear TK@bear-xiong· May 23

Qterdämmerung - A Ressikan Recital"

Picard completes his holodeck free lone-actor performance of The Ring Cycle arranged for Ressikan Flute and Mariachi Band. Riker's trombone runs out of grease and develops an annoying squeak.

Bear TK@bear-xiong· May 21

Some petards are the tiniest and have 36 year fuses, but still they hoist...

A 3M 3.5 inch floppy disk, Double Sided Double Density 1.0 megabyte capacity from 1988-89. The label says Pentax K1000 archive - some old publications.

There is a write protect hole on the left of the disc
On the right, another hole has been punched.

The data had not survived.

Bear TK@bear-xiong· May 20

Fun additional fact!

An emoticon finger pokes the owners of WebCrawler link, InfoSpace Holdings.

The first thing you see on Infospace Holdings: SYSTEM operates an industry-leading responsive acquisition marketing platform (RAMP) powered by Al & machine learning

Bear TK@bear-xiong· May 20

The scary stuff isn't what it imagines for the user who doesn't know what they want, or how to describe it, or have any thought as to whether the dispenser has generated anything copied, implausible, broken, etc. It's what it does when you specify something so precisely that any errors are intent.

A recreation of a sketch I did when bored and playing with a paperclip, in my typical office doodle attempted "style" of blue biro and pencil shading. After explaining my lack of skill, defective visual pespective and the disjointed paw the LLM generated a pretty close match of the cat head trying to bite, the mouse using a real paperclip stuck in the paper as a stick or sword, and a swiping, crude paw - the paw is not right, the mouse is flattering in detail on the ear and nose but correctly posed and proportioned to how I remember drawing it, the cat is bang on.

Another cat sketch recreation. Mine was not this good, I had the point of the ear curve into the shoulder in one move and did not shade the ears that way - but the shaky, weird-symmetry glance and energy of the original cat sketch are close enough that if I found it in a notebook of my sketches, I would think I'd been having a good day but it was mine.

Bear TK@bear-xiong· May 20

That's not just the illustrator's job that is undermined though, it's questioning who looks at that image and accepts it? It's who prompts, what they ask for, how they decide if it's fit for purpose. I've been doing an article on image generation and manipulation with AI and honestly...

An OpenAI generated image drawn to a specific brief - no elements have been inferred or filled in by the LLM, the style is what I would have been copying from the styles I've seen if my hands did as they were told. It is the first in a series of 3 depicting a reductive version of Internet publishing - 1999: the content pipeline.

It shows a user with a computer receiving a signal served by the OS represented by a Penguin with a serving platter, chained to a single cookie taking a note. There is a lone jack in the box springing up a pop-up advert, a spider making connections on a switchboard, and finally a classic flowchart representation of a mass storage device, and two 1930s-looking publishers - one, near a typewriter connected to the mass storage, the other handing dollars to ink-stained hands.

2009, and the content centipede begins to form. The Penguin is pressed to the user's screen with pressure, and has dropped the contained presentation of the serving platter. The cookie has merged with the penguin, and become many cookies, many springs, many ads. The spider has got bigger, with a familiar pattern in the eyes - they spell goog as the the most eye-like form I could adapt to eyes - and there is an insatiable vacuum gathering pages from the publisher, who is now paying the ink-stained hands with pennies

2019 and we have the parasitic publishing model - the users are being pulled into smartphone and computer screens, the penguin merged with the cookie horror, exhausted, trapped. In the centre, the spider is bloated, glowing, spinning a web of dollars. It is vomiting pages into the funnel while the publisher, head impaled with one of its claws, tries to feed a handful into the stream. The publisher paying the hands has an upturned hat, and the hands are empty. Every piece of value, from
the user to the publisher, has been absorbed by the mechanism designed to connect them.

Bear TK@bear-xiong· May 20

*clicks the extra follow button* This trip to Egypt where I was reviewing an M9 setup was when I made the choice to spend a lot on an M9-P and wish life had not made keeping that way of working no longer an option :/ (I didn't want the obvious red dot, and did want the better screen glass).

Bear TK@bear-xiong· May 16

I am still loving that when asked to sketch what a dinosaur (sauropod) discovered in Thailand in the 2020s looks like, the artist basically drew #MooDeng with a long neck.

Giant new dinosaur identified from fossils in Thailand. The Nagatitan lived between 100 and 120 million years ago and has been drawn in a classic Dinosaur style but witj colouring, eyes and smiling mouth that really resemble the adorable and famous baby hippo Moo Deng.

Bear TK@bear-xiong· May 15

It is a good shape, though.

One of the finest aerodynamic vehicles of the 1980s. With an Audi 100 Avant in Bamboo metallic in front of it.

Bear TK@bear-xiong· May 13

Mr Blobby is evil... Nessie is good. Open the alt-text of these benign sweets and learn all (the words cursed me a couple of years back so now they must escape).

A tin of Japanese sweets.

"What's in the box?"

Noel's eyes darkened. Was it the studio lights that caused the hint of a tear, brimming? Or a glint of hardened steel as he turned his gaze upon the braying audience.

"You think there is happiness, in here? Or a cheerful disappointment, Swapped like a Saturday morning board game for a jigsaw with the corners lost?"

The audienced laughed, some nervously, then repeated the chant. Beneath his TV-acceptable, tidy greying beard, Noel's lip quivered, then stiffened, arcing like forged steel into the rictus grin of the TV presenter welcoming everyone to their 50Hz flickering void.

"Open the box!" the rapt viewers cried, in near ecstasy.

The microphone, close to the latches, seemed to rumble with anticipation, the drumming, stamping feet of the audience a 120bpm thump against the laughter.

He could hold out no longer. Viewers in 4K saw a diamond-drop glimmer as a single tear fell, before the close-mic thud of the catches silenced all.

"This. This is what is in the box. This is what has always been in the box."

Though the audience had frozen, the beat still carried through the soundbars and subwoofers of home audio. The camera's shake overwhelmed gimbal, revealing the human hands that create the spectacle as it tilted to an angle never storyboarded or scripted.

His hands released the box, and he fled the studio, uttering a wailing sound BBC insiders likened to Kenny Everett's more exuberant backstage fan meets; acts that were rarely done in the best possible taste - or discretion.

Spilling out of the box, green, slime-like blood slithered to the floor. Within, the still beating, dark pink and yellow spotted heart of Mr. Blobby.

Still pulsing. Still possessing. Still alive.

Noel was found, crushed, on the North Circular. As the paramedics helped move his remains, they noticed his trousers, scrunched, dragged.

"Better straighten those out. We'd hate anyone to notice his crinkly bottom"

Bear TK@bear-xiong· May 13

Okay, I apologise up front. This is AI generated illustration. But damn it. It works. #KierStarmer #UKPol #PlAIgiarism #Green Alt text has the description and why I chose to share it.

A generic classic newspaper style illustration, captioned "No-one should stink so bad they raise the spectre of the dead". At the top we see cemetery gates - the Labour Movement Cemetery. In the middle of the frame, a pencil-colour shaded Kier Starmer - wearing a badge reading Steer Calmer - sits in a cloud of policy they have expelled. The stench of their emission is so bad it has reanimated Kier Hardie, Clement Attllee "This is a National Health Dis-service" (mine), Aneurin Bevan "I didn't spend the afterlife waiting for means-tested hope" (OpenAI), Tony Benn "Even I couldn't linger this long" (mine), Barbara Castle "The United Nations will condemn this unwarranted attack" (mine). Michael Foot, and Trade Union figures are also fleeing the graves, which include "The Common Good" "Clause IV", and "Old Dogma". Starmer is supported on a bench labelled pragmatism and this refinement of the image has the policy stench turning green as it revives the spectres of the left.

The original inspiration was generating a silly image after I produced a fart so unpleasant my partner suggested I leave the house and sleep opposite in the graveyard, and I wanted a daft cartoon to share with them depicting the consequences.

Of you read this far and ask, I'll share that.

But as with the fart, this is not output I'm proud of or claim to have concocted myself. It's just surprising and a little uncomfortable.

Bear TK@bear-xiong· May 12

This is not what I used in '89-92ish, I had a IIx. But I keep one around just in case!

A Macintosh LC475 (with a full '040) running AI.

Adobe Illustrator 88.

Not version 88. 1988.

Bear TK@bear-xiong· May 10

Again - this is just what is legally required to be declared in terms of spending on influence. Think tanks literally sell their ability to lobby and influence under the guise of "information and data" - check out the LinkedIn post screengrab - then sign! petition.parliament.uk/petitions/75...

A screenshot from a LinkedIn post by GBNews (Gbeebies) presenter Will Kingston. A quote - "We don't just measure what people think - we show you which ideas can be paid for, legislated, and sold to voters" - has been pulled and dropped over the image. It is taken from the body text in Impact font to highlight the relevant sentence. This is an edit made after capturing and does not alter the original text, it merely obscures the image of a statue.

The original post reads:

Will Kingston
Presenter on GB News | Partner at Adam Smith Insi...
3w • Edited

I'm thrilled to join the partnership at Adam Smith Insights (part of the Adam Smith Institute). Unlike other pollsters, Adam Smith Insights combines rigorous opinion research with a deep grasp of what is economically and politically feasible. We don't just measure what people think - we show you which ideas can be paid for, legislated, and sold to voters. Reach out to me for a chat if you need help bridging the gap between public sentiment and real-world strategy (will@adamsmith.org).

Bear TK@bear-xiong· May 9

Many things I am prepared to try doing, or have tried, without any more than just "well I think it works like this". Do people eventually assume I can do anything if I want, therefore if it's not done... I must not want to. But other than my actual ankle? Welding is my achilles' heel. Make new?

A broken piece of metal bracket with rivet heads to be drilled out, clamped in a vice which has been used to straighten it... the bolt was into a cast iron manifold so I am very proud of getting it to undo.

The other half of the bracket is still riveted to a heatshield. I can repair the rivets - but should I try welding the crack, or just fold and drill a new bracket from suitable steel flat bar? I suspect the latter will be easier and better... but if I could just Bzzt spark those together I'd feel like I have levelled up a missing skill! 35 years without trying, yet owning a welder of some sort for most of them as it sat in a corner taunting me...

Bear TK@bear-xiong· May 9

Holy shit, they said it out loud: "we show you which ideas can be paid for, legislated, and sold to voters" Which is why voters should absolutely know /who/ is paying. #GBNews #UKPol #ThinkTanks petition.parliament.uk/petitions/75...

Will Kingston, presenter on GB News, Partner at Adam Smith Institute: 3W old post on LinkedIn reposted by ASI.

I'm thrilled to join the partnership at Adam Smith Insights (part of the Adam Smith Institute). Unlike other pollsters, Adam Smith Insights combines rigorous opinion research with a deep grasp of what is economically and politically feasible. We don't just measure what people think - we show you which ideas can be paid for, legislated, and sold to voters. Reach out to me for a chat if you need help bridging the gap between public sentiment and real-world strategy (will@adamsmith.org).

Bear TK@bear-xiong· May 2

These top bearings are so weird, I swear the design is missing a component... (The rubber bush fits in the bodywork, a bearing to spin the upper spring seat below - but the fixed point the bolt secures against is on the rubber seat, so the middle stays still and the shock cylinder has to rotate)