tuckerm

tuckerm, 6 days ago

That's Metal Gear Solid Y for those who are more familiar with the Xbox layout.

tuckerm, 7 days ago

This post made me realize just how few consoles had a CD flap. Is it just the Playstation, Dreamcast, Saturn, and Gamecube? Kind of weird how that was the default for CD players pretty much forever, but not many consoles went with that. PS2, Xbox, and everything after those had some kind of tray or slot. Maybe it was because they could visually stand apart from their competitors more that way.

tuckerm, 7 days ago

I've never been excited for DLC before, but Street Fighter 6 adding Terry and Mai, from King of Fighters, was very unexpected. I think that was my favorite.

I've been playing Capcom vs. SNK 2 whenver I have a few minutes to spare these days: https://saltylike.us/@tuckerm/112482256002789207.

tuckerm, 12 days ago

Bleh, yeah I really hate to side with Google, especially when releasing this documentation benefits users and hiding it benefits Google.

It seems weird for this new license to be legally binding. If someone committed this to the wrong repo, and that person didn't have legal authority over the original content, then how can they have legally relicensed it? I would think that it would be necessary for them to have ownership of the content in the first place.

tuckerm, 12 days ago

I downloaded an ISO of it a while ago and played through maybe third of the game. I found it to be very playable. People always mention the long load times, but it's worth mentioning that long load times were much more common back then. (Although Half-Life on DC was even longer than usual.)

Also, I hate to be nit picky, but the blog post linked here manages to be weirdly wrong about two things and it's barely one paragraph long, lol.

Half-Life is one of the most successful video games of the early 2000s.

Ahhh, 1998. One of the best years of the early 2000s.

Half-Life was everywhere... except one notable place: Sega's Dreamcast. It has been a mystery as to what happened with a game destined to have a port on every possible platform.

Half-Life was a PC exclusive until the PS2 port in November 2001, ten months after the Dreamcast was discontinued. The PC and PS2 versions are still the only official versions to this day. Half-Life is not known for being on every platform. Was the author thinking of Doom, one of the best games of the mid 70s?

tuckerm, 11 days ago

Come to think of it, there are probably still people playing CS 1.6 today.

Whoa, turns out to be a lot of them. 14,400 as of a few minutes ago! https://steamcharts.com/app/10

That's as many as the two most recent Battlefield games have combined right now. Battlefield 2042 currently around 8,000 and Battlefield V at 6,000. I'm sure console players would boost the Battlefield numbers quite a bit, but still. That's pretty cool.

tuckerm, 13 days ago

Aw, I was looking forward to this one. But also, meh, my unplayed backlog is huge.

I'm gonna put on my casual-observer-business-analyst hat real quick: it seems weird that Sony is making so many decisions that they know will piss off customers with their brand lately. Microsoft has been striking out hard with underwhelming exclusives, whereas at least Sony has had a few hits. Sony could take advantage of that and use this generation to crush the Xbox brand pretty hard. The payoff would be huge later on.

Business execs always fancy themselves as military generals; I'm sure they've heard that Napoleon quote, "Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake." Instead, they seem to be taking advantage of Microsoft's blunders to just knowingly make their own blunders.

Like, even from a cutthroat business exec mindset, there is a profit-motivated reason to just chill out with the anti-consumer stuff right now. Your biggest competitor has been absolutely unloading a clip into their own foot for like two years. Quit drawing attention to yourself.

tuckerm, 13 days ago

I think the the previous post was sarcasm. :)

tuckerm, 14 days ago

From the article, emphasis mine:

also found that 56% of Republican registered voters said the case would have no effect on their vote and 35% said they were more likely to support Trump

Far more of them like that he paid off a porn star to keep quiet about the fact that he cheated on his wife.

tuckerm, 14 days ago

They have a kickstarter going right now with 18 hours to go! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mirlo/mirlo

I bought a few songs from Mirlo just last week. Very nice to see some non-VC-backed alternatives to Bandcamp.

tuckerm, 19 days ago

I was expecting the twist to be that fart was an acronym. Like:

Fess up
Admit mistakes
Reassess direction
Time-bound

A good leader is willing to have a F.A.R.T. discussion.

tuckerm, 19 days ago

Their Infinitybook models -- both the 14 and 16 inch -- disappeared from their site recently. It was their slim, lightweight model, and I thought that was their flagship computer, too. I'm wondering if the Stellaris Slim is the new Infinitybook, or if there's a new Infinitybook coming that they haven't announced yet.

tuckerm, 19 days ago

I'm so glad I bought this in a store back when PC games were still available in physical releases. Even though I'm pretty sure this one was just a Steam installer on a CD, I love having an actual copy of The Orange Box on my shelf.

tuckerm, 22 days ago

Unfortunately, this seems to be the only option, besides using your own domain so that you control forwarding yourself. Basically, pay someone like Firefox Relay to do forwarding, or do your own forwarding. Firefox Relay does give you five email addresses for free, which is cool. (https://relay.firefox.com/#pricing)

I've noticed that the "+" sign trick with Gmail just doesn't work at all anymore. Anyone that wants to maliciously send you emails knows to remove what comes after the + sign, so that you can't tell which of your sub-addresses was originally used. And anyone that hacks a database to steal email addresses knows to remove it as well, to cover their tracks.

tuckerm, 26 days ago

Note that this was a few years ago -- I searched for the judge's name, and it looks like he has since retired.

It's always frustrating that these stories usually end with someone receiving a written warning, rather than being removed from their position due to the fact that they are obviously unqualified for it.

tuckerm, 1 month ago

I know that Telegram has a lot of users, so I'm not describing all of them here. But I've noticed that it seems especially popular among people who kind of like to "play pretend" as underground hackers. You know, the kind of person who likes to imagine that the government would be after them.

This mudslinging feels like more of a marketing campaign than anything else. An info op that will work well on the Telegram users who like to imagine that they have outmaneuvered all the info ops.

tuckerm, 1 month ago

GN also asked him for advice as part of their video -- they mention him a few times in it.

tuckerm, 1 month ago

Man, I'm hoping for a reintroduction of this character in Street Fighter 6. Twelve had so many unique properties that other SF characters have never had, like an air dash, and the fact that his forward walk simply went underneath projectiles. They just made him do no damage for some reason.

All of the SF6 rebooted characters have been great so far.

tuckerm, 1 month ago

Or "things you possess," either. I remember being told (maybe in a college class, but I don't remember exactly) that you can be compelled to give up the key to a lock, but not the combination to a lock.

tuckerm, 1 month ago

I've heard this argument before, but I'm not sure that the numbers support it. Despite the Dreamcast having a head start, the PS2 started eclipsing the DC's sales almost immediately, and that's even with the PS2 having some supply problems early on.

If piracy was the main problem, I would expect to see huge system sales and small game sales. Instead, the DC just didn't sell very well outside of its initial launch.

I'm not saying piracy didn't exist, but Sega had lost so much support from customers and developers with the 32X, Sega CD, and Saturn, I suspect those are more to blame. They'd have been able to handle the problem of game copying better if they didn't have a dozen other problems at the same time. Heck, it was the first console with built-in online services, and that's the industry's main way of dealing with piracy now.

tuckerm, 1 month ago

I suppose they only did it now due to some license agreement expiring?

Yep, if I understand it right, Denuvo charges an annual fee to be used. That's why you always see it getting removed after the game loses relevance, when sales aren't enough to justify paying for Denuvo anymore.

Kind of weird how, because Bethesda (and other publishers) are Denuvo's consumer, this particular anti-consumer license agreement is actually benefiting the players, haha.

tuckerm, 1 month ago

I'm late to the party with Hades, but am enjoying the first game right now.

Also, wow, there's a familiar face in that video! I remember watching Greg Kasavin do reviews for Gamespot back when video reviews were still a pretty new thing. (found one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhb9ZpfU-mQ)

tuckerm, 2 months ago

Yes, recently! About two years ago I realized that I wanted more physical media in my house. I wanted stuff that I could put on a shelf, so that when someone came over, they could look at that shelf and say, "Hey, I like that album," or "Oh, I've read that book."

So I went a used bookstore near me (and immediately fell in love with it, why the hell was I not spending more time there before), and bought an extremely beat-up paperback copy of A Game of Thrones and a CD of Santana's Greatest Hits.

When I got home I realized I had no way of listening to the CD. I didn't own a CD player or a Blu-ray player, my computer didn't have an optical drive, nothing. Then I remembered my old Dreamcast, which was in a box in the garage. So I got that out, set it up, and listened to Santana's Greatest Hits on ye olde Dreamcast. CDs sound so much warmer on a Dreamcast...

That is also what renewed my interest in retro games. Wanting to listen to a music CD reminded me of how great that system was.

tuckerm, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

That looks cool, I hadn't heard of Circles before. I want to check it out now. I'm curious if it somehow keeps your data private from the server owner. That feels like the missing feature in most federated, privacy-focused social networks.

Side note: looks like it's made by Futo; I hadn't realized they were working on something like that. I've been using another one of their apps, Grayjay for almost all of my mobile Youtube viewing lately. It works great.

tuckerm, 2 months ago

I haven't heard anything bad about Grayjay before; what's the issue with it?

tuckerm, 2 months ago

Cultural crackdowns, motivated by religion or nationalism, are terrible. (In Chechnya's case, it'll be religion and nationalism.)

That being said, this means they just created the genre of ILLEGAL BEATS, which sounds like absolute 🔥🔥🔥. Like, the illegal beats lineup at Chechella this year is going to be sick.

tuckerm, 2 months ago

Yeah, this is a ragebait headline (and I'll admit that it caught me). This is actually in line with what you see on Android and most Linux distros. It's also likely that Microsoft doesn't want you to easily change from Edge, but still. This is better than allowing an application to silently change which applications open things on your computer.

tuckerm, 2 months ago

This blog post is pretty buzzword-heavy, but Penpot is a legitimately great tool. It's used for UI design and layouts. I've seen a couple of open source projects use a self-hosted Penpot instance for working on and discussing new designs.

Figma would be the most popular, proprietary example of this type of tool. I'm not aware of any open source competitors besides Penpot.

edit: It's like Google docs for web page layouts or app layouts. The animation on their homepage is probably the best way of showing what it does.

tuckerm, 2 months ago

is the mainline situation any better than with ARM?

Unfortunately, sounds like "no" currently. The ones that let you install Debian usually provide some kind of custom Debian image for that specific SBC. Like you, I'm not really a fan of that. But apparently there are some desktop motherboards with RISC-V CPUs coming out. Hopefully that will increase the chance of things getting supported in mainline distros.

tuckerm, 2 months ago

It sounds like the answer to "can I run this application on RISC-V" is very dependent on what the backend for that application is. What's the backend stack for your websites? Are they static HTML sites, or do they have other components? Someone else mentioned that they built postgres and mariadb Docker images for RISC-V, but I don't even know which programming languages can be compiled for RISC-V right now.

tuckerm, 2 months ago

That looks so cool. I was completely unaware that there were desktop motherboards with RISC-V CPUs. I thought they were all still SBCs.

tuckerm, 2 months ago

Wow, thanks! That's fantastic. I hadn't even thought about the fact that Docker images will have to be recreated for RISC-V, but it sounds like some of the most important parts of the stack are useable already. Nice to see that nginx works -- I was leaning towards moving my blog to a RISC-V SBC, and it's just a static HTML site.

tuckerm, 2 months ago

That is very cool, I hadn't heard of that before. I have never done anything with a microcontroller, but I'm thinking about it for RISC-V. It sounds like that might be one of the better ways of getting a RISC-V device in practical use, until more software packages become available for a full Linux machine.

tuckerm, 2 months ago

A homemade RISC-V fightstick? This is combining all of my favorite things! I bought a leverless controller recently (an SGF Bridget).

I'm only vaguely familiar with microcontrollers, but I know there are libraries out there for using an Arduino to make a mechanical keyboard or fightstick. Is there something similar for the CH32V305?

tuckerm, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

From the article, emphasis mine:

Dorsey, 52, was convicted and placed on death row in 2008 after pleading guilty [...]

The governor’s decision to proceed with Dorsey’s injection comes after his legal team filed a clemency application, stressing Dorsey’s “extraordinary rehabilitation” behind bars, his apparent mental state on the night of the murders as well as inadequate legal representation at trial

Sounds like there must have been inadequate legal representation -- how does one plead guilty and still wind up with the death penalty? What the hell was the plea deal?

tuckerm, 2 months ago

Someone on Mastodon made a good observation about how this headline is framed: https://mastodon.social/@jeffjarvis/112238112958275511

The New York Times does not assume Trump's motives whenever he says or does something; the headline simply reads "Trump Says Thing." But they will insert a motive for something Biden does. In this case, "swing-state pitch," instead of "doing more of the thing that he has done several times before." Can we assume that he hopes to pick up some votes by doing this? Of course. But the NYTimes' editorial standards are very inconsistent, and worth noticing.

tuckerm, 2 months ago

I mean, I'm no Trump apologist, but "let he who did not try looking at the eclipse cast the first stone."

tuckerm, 2 months ago

MK9 is also the start of the modern game mechanics, in addition to the story. They established the current gameplay formula in MK9, and have been iterating on it since then.

Unless you really want to play the classic games, I think MK9 is the best starting point.

edit: Wait wtf am I talking about you obviously start with the movie from 1995.

tuckerm, 2 months ago

I remember thinking that it was the pinnacle of graphics. I mean, it was photos of real people, that had to be as realistic as games could possibly look.

AND I WAS RIGHT.

tuckerm, 2 months ago

When I was maybe five years old, I was with my parents at the grocery store, and there was an advertisement for Reba (a TV show starring Reba McEntire) on those little plastic sticks that you place on the conveyor belt to separate your items from the other person's items.

I have absolutely no idea why I have remembered this fact for so long, or even why it stuck out to me as a five year old. But there was an INCH of space available, and someone had the business idea to slap an advertisement on it.

tuckerm, 2 months ago

I agree with your point, but I also agree with the parent post as well. Advertising and tracking can be considered separate issues while also both being bad. I'd also say tracking is almost always bad, whereas there are advertisements that I think are perfectly fine.

People have been talking about how manipulative advertising can be long before targeting individuals was possible. (Like Joe Camel.)

But I also think that there is a whole new level of maliciousness to these highly-targeted ad services that can show you specific content based on a personality profile, formed about you by aggregating data across many different areas of your life. It's related to advertising in general, but takes it to such an invasive extreme that it's worth singling out on its own.

tuckerm, 2 months ago

Basketball courts too, newly added in the last couple years. There's one sponsor logo physically printed on the court, and one that's digitally added for the TV broadcast (tailored to your location, of course).

I was watching a game a few weeks ago and the superimposed logo kept screwing up. It was moving with the camera instead of being fixed on the ground, and sometimes it wouldn't be cropped around the players, it would just go on top of them. It was kind of amusing. They removed it after a few minutes.

tuckerm, 2 months ago

The progress bar screen during an AMD driver update. Cycles between ads for video games, ads for CPUs, and a "how are we doing" survey.

tuckerm, 2 months ago

The original video already had a bunch of quotes (like that one) that have lived in my head for years. This remake just added, "Mum pisses in jars!" to the list. :D

tuckerm, 1 month ago

Nice, it's good to know that the software being Windows-only isn't a dealbreaker for keyboards.