kbrackbill

Yeah, I completely ditched windows about 3 years ago now and I haven't looked back. My taste in games definitely helps, I mostly play indies and older games.

I've only run into a few big issues. One is that gamepass doesn't work at all (of course) so I cancelled it when I switched, but between price increases and BDS I would have cancelled anyway. The other is anticheat like everyone says, but the only game I've actually run into this with is Fall Guys (I only play this every few months and it usually works with some fiddling but sometimes it doesn't). Other multiplayer games like Rocket League and all of the Valve ones have been fine.

The only issue I can remember running into on a steam game was a crash in Civ V multiplayer that had an easy to find workaround. Outside of steam I've had a few small issues with older games from gog like Arcanum and KOTOR2, but my understanding is that these are fairly buggy on windows too.

I bought a PSP on my first trip to Japan in 2008. I think it was around 30k yen. I remember the store I was at had used ones labeled with which firmware version they had, and I got a slightly more expensive one with an older firmware (3.4.0?) because it was one that had some vulnerability that involved a specially crafted save file for Lumines that allowed installing a custom firmware.

It was(/is) a great device for playing ps1 and snes games. It doesn't seem so special now that there are so many emulation focused handhelds, but at the time it felt really awesome to be able to play games like that on a plane.

The best phone I ever had was a Sony Xperia XZ2 Compact. I would still be using it if it wasn't too slow to run modern versions of android. This is one of those things that just makes me feel so out of touch with the rest of the world. Does everyone else have giant pockets and giant hands? Does everyone use their phone with two hands and carry a bag everywhere? Is it just a trend like small phones were a trend before smartphones? Why do people want these giant phones?

I guess people want different things out of small phones. I had a Z flip 3 for a few years because I thought the small pocket size would be nice, but it still doesn't solve the main issue that I can't reach the whole screen with my thumb. (and besides that I have a million other complaints about it, never going to buy a foldable again)

I tried with a Jelly Max but despite what they say it doesn't work on verizon :(. It's the perfect phone for me otherwise.

I'm about 8 hours in and really enjoying it, but I feel like I can see this in my future. For now I have so many puzzles/threads going that even if one doesn't work on a run because of RNG I'm still making progress somewhere else, but I could see that drying up a bit as I solve more things and want to focus on something specific.

The puzzles for resources you mention are by far the worst part for me. I really wish there were a way to say "I get it, I know how to solve simple logic puzzles and do basic arithmetic, just give me the stuff".

Thanks for the suggestion, that was really fun. One I've been really enjoying in the same vein is https://raddle.quest

This is really cool, thanks for the writeup. Love how thorough you were, one of my first thoughts was whether you could hook it up to a gamecube and it was already done in the blog post :).

One cool advantage of real cartridge compatibility I hadn't really thought about is that lets you not have to think about memory mappers (I'm mostly familiar with NES's dozens of different mappers, not sure if GB carts work the same way) and other custom cartridge hardware since you're just "emulating" up to the cartridge boundary. I guess this means even crazier hardware like the camera/rumble/sewing machine would "just work" with an original cartridge without any special support right?

I guess that doesn't save too much for this though if it supports loading ROMs. For that do you still end up having to emulate all the different mappers in the FPGA?

That makes sense about strava, they don't seem the friendliest to work with. Good to know about linking garmin, etc. accounts though, I missed that and it would definitely do what I want.

This is really cool, just tried it with a recent hike ( https://cubetrek.com/view/362602 ). Strava has a really basic 3d visualization but it's from a fixed angle which isn't very useful. Being able to move around and the replay mode are really neat. I was confused a little about the flame effect on the route before I realized it was matching my mouse on the other charts.

I second the request to be able to visualize routes without timing, it'd be awesome to take some route I have planned out in caltopo and view it here.

Also it seems like not quite what you're aiming for but I already have a few places I can (and sometimes do) upload these for the sharing/community/diary aspect (strava and peakery) and it would be cool to have some sort of integration where I could visualize activities from there without having to download/upload the GPX. Maybe I really need some kind of GPX multiplexer to upload stuff from my GPS to all the different places it could go :).

I tried the same thing with Haskell one year with a similar result (fell back to python then gave up). The beginning was nice when the puzzles were easy and I could focus on learning the language, but once the puzzles got tough it was too much trying to struggle with them and the language at the same time.

I find it hard enough without restrictions (especially toward the end) so I'm not doing anything too wild, but I've been trying to solve quickly this time. My goal was to get in the top 100 on one of the days to actually get a point, but I think I missed my window where the problems got too hard for LLMs but were still doable quickly for me. At least I managed a 136 which is much better than I've ever done before.

Maybe next year I'll actually prepare some utility code for parsing grids and 2d vector math and such.

This is a really impressive rendition of our corporate hellscape. It reminds me of games like cart life in that I appreciate what it's doing, but even though the frustration is intended it still makes it really unpleasant to play. I lasted until I needed to figure out how to pay the ISP bill before I threw in the towel.

I don't know where you're referring to specifically, but a common thing I've seen is that cities will make some set of roads bikeable (usually roads they were repaving/redesigning anyway) but they're not really connected in a sensible way. It makes biking on the improved roads nicer, but most practical trips will still involve other roads which might be more dangerous, scary, or difficult.

re: the library integration, I'm confused about how you or your wife's computer is even involved in the process. For my kindle I borrow books on libby and amazon magically beams them over. Does your library not use libby? Are you taking extra steps to avoid amazon?

I'm curious, how did disconnecting lead to a career change?

I think what makes it hard to be realistic about these things is that they're all aspirational. People want to be the kind of people who have parties, have guests often, do big projects that need a truck. Admitting to yourself that you don't need these things is admitting that you're not living up to the ideal in your head.

Las Vegas

Pros: Cheap relative to other US cities (especially California). Close to lots of beautiful nature (red rock, charleston, valley of fire, mojave, zion, death valley, joshua tree, eastern sierra). Airport has cheap direct flights to lots of places for the size of the city. Friends/family come to visit a lot. Good food if you can find it hidden away in the strip malls.

Cons: Arguably not a city, just the absolute worst suburban sprawl you can imagine. Cookie cutter homes, huge stroads everywhere. Need a car to go anywhere, walking or biking sucks. The summer, obviously. The population is very transient (at least in my experience, but most of my friends are climbers/other outdoors people which might bias things)

Linux (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson#Operating_systems)

It's really easy to cheat in pretty much all of the wordle-alikes, but where's the fun in that?

I wish my Garmin bike stuff had USB C.

Same, my last non-usb C devices are my inreach and edge 500. I guess it's a testament to how long they last.

I recently read "Cadillac Desert" by Marc Reisner which I highly recommend if you're interested in the history of water issues in the west and California in particular.

A great portion of the book is devoted to dams. The gist of it is that many dams of questionable utility were constructed throughout the 20th century due to pork barrel politics and the unstoppable bureaucratic engines of the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corp of Engineers. Like much infrastructure built in the US, not much concern was given to ongoing maintenance and so the book predicts that this will be a larger concern as time goes on.

Hopefully close calls like Oroville will bring more attention to this issue before a larger disaster happens.

We had an almost identical bug, also at Microsoft, when I was working on Hotmail (it may have been Outlook.com by then, I can't remember): POP, the email protocol, was localized into UK English as DAD.

I agree, I made the beginnings of an NES emulator a while ago and just never implemented sound. It didn't seem worth it for how much work it would be, and as you say debugging seems really hard. I remember there being a bunch of test roms folks had made for video and cpu things but not really for sound.

Also I'm not sure if this is the same for Gameboy but I remember for NES implementing sound also required you to do more work in the CPU/PPU to keep track of the exact timing to make sure things started at the right time, the right data was there at the right time, etc.

Is it possible to buy a new car these days without the remote/cell connection stuff? Or if not, can it be disabled? My car is 15 years old so I haven't had to think about it yet, but I'm worried about what I'll do when it finally gives up. Maybe just buy another older used one or something.

Alternatively, are there any killer features that make having an always connected car desirable? I understand why car manufacturers would want it for telemetry and updates and such but I'm not sure what the value is for me.

This seems believable. I've been solving the saturdays at a higher rate over time.

I think you could also configure some codes to work that way- like "set the value at this memory address to 0 when you press the button".

I'm not sure if this applies to the playstation, but I remember the nintendo 64 gameshark I had had some "code finding" features that involved using a button on the cartridge to filter down to memory addresses that had changed a certain way since the last button press. This meant that if you were looking for say, the address where your character's health was stored, you could press the button, get hit in the game, press the button again, and search for values in memory that had decreased since the last button press. Doing this several times was a fairly reliable way of finding things. I'm a bit fuzzy on the details but that was the general idea.

Most modern emulators have similar but much more fleshed out features. They're nice not only for finding cheat codes but for reverse engineering games for the purposes of making romhacks or tool assisted speedruns and things like that.

Right, this is just an answer for "why has this obvious disruption never come up in the last ~100+ years"

Many states have laws that explicitly prohibit direct sales. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_dealerships_in_the_United_...