saberworks

Don’t know the ultimate goal but this project makes it very easy to install and play the game on modern windows and Linux computers. Getting the original game to work right can be a pain.

There’s a fork of this by one LadyEebs that adds a whole bunch of modern touches like ragdoll physics, advanced lighting, fog, and she’s even been tastefully modding the single player maps with more detail. I don’t have the repo handy because I am on my phone, but a lot of the dev discussion takes place on the Discord of The Massassi Temple (https://www.massassi.net/). I do run that site but am not involved in openjkdf2 or Eeb’s fork. There is also another JK reimplementation project by BAH_Strike that is also impressive.

Yep, there's a thread with hundreds of people on M1,2,3 macs having issues, it bit some people at work on newer macs. If you installed it a while ago, it's fine, but if you installed recently, it's buggered. The solution was to install podman-desktop which was somehow packaged such that it's not getting the bug (podman machine start hangs forever).

Yeah, super slow startup of apps, themes not applying correctly with snap versions when they do fine with non-snap versions, inability to control when updates happen (this has been fixed since 20.04 but it was a huge PITA), a zillion weird entries in fstab, and multiple ways to manage packages on the same system. It is all a mess. I just recently moved off of 20.04 and after trying a few distros ended up on Linux Mint because not only are snaps completely disabled, they have a system in place for basing off vanilla debian instead of ubuntu if ubuntu ever makes it impossible to skip the snaps.

It's a white light sitting below my tv constantly shining a light at my face. What is the point of it? I already know the thing is powered on because I powered it on and it's playing a movie or whatever. Facing it backwards helps but then all the wires are exposed and look ugly.

Anyway, it wasn't really a strong complaint, but parent poster said Apple generally doesn't do it, but I have it on at least two generations of apple tv.

AppleTV 4k has super bright white led on the front (outwards to user) while the device is on. So annoying!

I'm not convinced. Recently moved to a new computer and firefox didn't sync my settings in about:config and didn't sync my container assignments (had to go in and enable it manually in both the source and target computers, buried deep in the settings for the containers extension). It doesn't sync addons or addon settings. I don't think it synced all the interface customization (like removing pocket icon from the url bar, separate urlbar/search box), only some of it. I got my bookmarks, so that was helpful. To sync a lot of other stuff I was able to copy my prefs.js from the old to the new, and most of those settings worked.

It does.

Only sort of. First, this is a new feature, there used to be a whole section on adding "sending identities" and describing how to do it in order to send from a masked email address. I have support emails from 1Password pointing me to those docs as well. That whole section has been removed and now there's a note in the docs saying why (no date, though, so I don't know how recent).

Second, your description glosses over the fact that if I click the "from" address dropdown, and then in the filter/search field, type the domain associated with the masked email address, nothing shows up except "Show All." Why wouldn't a filter/search find the address? I have to click "Show All" and then repeat the search.

However, if I search/filter for any of the dozens of "sending identities" I created previously, the search/filter works correctly. So the UI is completely broken. When I search/filter something, and nothing shows up except a "Show All" button, that's the UI telling me that there were no matches. Oh, but now I learn that there are matches, they're just hidden under "Show All" (which should be renamed to "show matching masked email addresses" or something!?).

I use Fastmail and 1Password, and I do used the masked email functionality. There is a massive gap, though, that makes it very difficult to rely on masked email. When I sign up for a new account somewhere, I can choose to create a masked email. If I later need to email that company (not reply via an existing email message), I must first somehow look up what email I used for that company, go into fastmail settings and create a "sender identity", remember the email address again, and then when I compose, remember to choose the sender identity that is associated with the masked email address I created for that specific company. If I forget or mess up any of those steps, I end up sending from my primary account or some other masked email address associated with some other company. Multiply that by dozens or even a hundred companies!

It would be really nice if adding a masked email automatically created a "sending identity." Further, it would be nice if the masked email account had a nickname that included the domain I was on when I created the account. That way if I need to send an email to support@nike.com, I can use the filter and type "nike.com" and get the correct masked email address.

The Ring doorbell absolutely works as a mechanical doorbell if it's hard-wired into the doorbell system in the house...if there is one.

When the ring doorbell lost wifi, because we changed ISPs, it no longer functioned as a doorbell. When pressed, it would only make the chime outside at the button, it would not ring inside the house. Yes it's hard wired to a doorbell inside the house.

When connected to wifi and active, when the ring doorbell button is pressed, it will ring inside the house one single time. Then it starts recording, by default for 2 minutes. During the time it's recording, if the button is pressed again, the button press is completely ignored. So by default you can ring the doorbell 1 time every 2 minutes -- anything more often gets ignored. There is a huge bug report / thread about this on ring's site and they just say it's by design.

When the ring doorbell is completely disconnected from wifi and reset back to factory settings, it indeed functions as a regular doorbell. But it also has a spinning light that notifies everybody that it's not set up and is not recording.

My brother in law works for a home builder that installs Ring doorbell buttons by default on all their homes. He said he noticed that about half of them get replaced with a regular doorbell button or a different "smart/camera" doorbell within a few weeks of initial move-in.

No one is willing to give up control.

Agreed. I recently moved into a new house. The builder put in a "clare smart home system." This included a clare home display mounted in the hallway with an inward facing camera. This device is exclusively controlled by security/smart home companies that contract with clare. I have no option to disable the camera, disable the phoning home, etc. In fact, before I can do anything meaningful on the device, they required an in-home appointment where they would set up every smart device in the house for "free," but future additions would require a paid service call for them to come out and set them up.

I had emailed them asking about whether there was an alarm system, and before I got any reply I found an option on the display to activate the alarm. Which I did. But before it actually activated (it gave some sort of countdown), I pressed Cancel. It prompted me for a PIN, which I could only get from the installers. I had no option to cancel the alarm other than to cut power to the device, but once I pulled it off the wall it started wailing a tamper alarm that wouldn't stop until I pulled the backup battery. Oh and I found out later that it was snapping photos of me against my will and without my permission. Please note this all happened before the in-home appointment (which never happened).

I canceled the appointment, permanently tore the thing off the wall, and it's destined for a landfill because the only way to get it to work is to activate it through that alarm company. Oh and they won't even return my calls/emails after I canceled the appointment. I tried calling them to see if they wanted it so they could use it as a warranty replacement or something, instead of putting it in the garbage.

Every "smart" thing they put in this house sucks. The Ring doorbell doesn't function as a doorbell if it loses wifi connection. Oh and when it's connected, the initial press does ring the doorbell, but subsequent presses don't ring the doorbell, and this is by design. During the brief time I had it connected, I was getting constant alerts of suspicious people in my neighborhood, with attached photos of black people walking on a sidewalk. what!? It turns out it didn't recognize my address so connected me to some default place in Texas (I live in Washington!). There was no way to manually select a location, so I guess I was going to get false, racist alerts until such time as Ring decided to recognize my address. I reset it and canceled my Ring account. I'm going to replace it with a normal door bell button. This is getting thrown in the garbage as well.

The "smart" z-wave switches haven't been connected/activated so should function as normal switches right? Nope, they do this stupid dim/undim thing and periodically completely fail to work until I turn off/on the circuit breaker. Another 5 items destined for a landfill to be replaced by regular switches.

The smart front door lock (keypad) and smart garage door openers have never been connected to anything and I'm going to leave them that way. I really wish there was a hardware kill switch that would disable all wireless connections and leave them in a dumb mode. I'm worried someone else can come in and connect their phone or something, since I've never set them up.

(in case anyone wants a free clare home panel, PM me an address to mail it to and I'll send it; rather have someone tinker with or hack it than trash it)

FWIW in Washington state where I live (and in the 3 cities/towns I've lived in here), multiple times a year Waste Management/WM sends out a flyer explaining what can and can't be recycled. It changes over time and it's extra confusing because the recycle cans have different rules printed on them than what is in the flyer. We used to be able to recycle juice boxes and milk cartons, no more. Then we were supposed to recycle glass jars and their metal lids, but now "no lids of any kind." We were told to flatten and recycle all paperboard boxes, but now we are supposed to skip recycling any paperboard boxes that have a clear coating on them (every freezer box, according to their instructions). Plastic bags have always been prohibited. But of course I see my neighbors putting plastic bags in their cans all the time. There are so many rules about what plastics can be recycled that I can't even remember them.

I think the "education" aspect has been attempted and it's not working. It's time to go nuclear and have the government dictate what types of materials can be used for packaging and ban everything else.

If I never see another blister pack it will be too soon.

I understand the sentiment but it's not a solution. The only solution is to prohibit plastic packaging or force companies to use types of plastic that are easy to recycle. I believe it's easier to regulate the company producing the waste than try to get the entire population to agree on and behave in a certain way.

Yes, as a music app both apple music and youtube music are completely worthless. Why can't they remember where I was at when I get back into my car and the bluetooth connects. It can't be that hard right? I get that apple's stupid policy kills the active process if I haven't used it in a while, but it can't be that difficult to just store where I was so next time I hit play, it's in the same place? Oh, amazon music can't remember my place either. I never had this problem with an ipod, a creative labs music player, a cassette tape, or even a cd (in my car where they will pick up where it left off).

Apple maps enrages me for doing this. When you first open the app it like shows a screenshot of what you were looking at last time while it loads. Sometimes that screenshot is retained as the active view (for example if I have a search up), but other times after a couple of seconds the whole app just resets. This causes me to hit the "dictation" button quite often instead of the X button that was on screen when I start tapping (X button to close previous search result is replaced with a view reset and now the dictation button is under my thumb).

A screenshot of the app shouldn't be a loading screen!! It seems to depend on how long it's been since the app was last opened and/or how the internet connection is at the time. Bank apps show a proper loading screen.

You linked a screenshot after you already selected a property. If you are back on the property search page, it shows a nightly price and a total price on hover, but when you click the total price goes up by the cleaning fee and the service fee. And those seem to be completely random so it's not like you can just add $100 in your head to every price. Anywhere they show a price, it should be the total price.

Same goes for hotels + resort fees, though. It seems like the only place I can really see the actual price is on airline websites?

EDIT: I just tried to repro and now the total is always matching. I swear I was just raging about this 4 days ago when I booked a trip... gah.

Neat idea and I hope you will be successful. On initial inspection it seems like your matching algo or something is off. First example I clicked on is this dining set, which sounded like a great deal: https://www.spoken.io/page/11DmKO6MxLYnRP0tRls8 for $680. But when I click through it's actually $688 and only includes the table (is not a set as originally claimed): https://www.theclassyhome.com/Product/JFN-1511-82/Jofran+Fur...

Same with the higher price linked on your site. It's still only the table and it's out of stock. https://www.afastores.com/jofran-cannon-valley-trestle-dinin...

I think it's less frustrating browsing sites directly because their prices and stock indicators are more accurate. I get this with google shopping results, too, where you click through and either the price was totally wrong or the item is out of stock.

I probably should have followed this route. I've been at my job for over a decade and all my big promotions and large pay raises happened in the first half of that. Been single digit raises since then and I don't think there's any more room to move up unless I want to try management, which I really don't.

Really dissatisfied with pay increase this year in February. CEO talked up how everyone was going to be really happy with big bumps to make us more competitive (they have been struggling with high turnover after a couple of acquisitions). I get "exceeds expectations" multiple years in a row and did everything my manager suggested last year to try to get a bigger bump this year. I got 2% base salary increase and 5% bonus target increase. Chances of seeing the full bonus targets this year? Not high.

I'll be looking for a new job this year for sure.

Yeah tell me about it. I actually made a mistake, they raised it by $600. The landlord acted so surprised when we didn't renew our lease. When we left, the landlord listed it and rented it out for the original lease amount. I'm guessing those people can expect a big rent increase when their term is up as well.

Somewhat related: any time a business/person has access to data about a customer or their business, they're in a position of power and are able to use that data against the customer.

When you apply to rent a house, you're required to provide pay stubs and salary information. The landlord can (does?) use this to know how much they can jack up your rent next lease term (my landlord raised our rent $800/month in January).

Same with insurance salespeople, car salespeople, etc. Everyone who gets access to your financial data can use it against you.

There should be a 3rd party involved -- they take your documentation and then report to the landlord/salesperson/etc. a simple "is the person qualified?" Yes or No. And then permanently destroy said documentation.

I really appreciate your comment!

I actually emailed you a couple of days ago (at something alphapapa) -- my email address is the same but with `massassi.com` instead of `massassi.net`. Hope to hear from you!!!

I agree, we had so many great people help over the years. It was amazing because virtually everybody had essentially root access to the site and we had no backups, no recovery plan, nothing at all in case things went south. It's quite a bit better now!

That's the one! Thanks!

Nobody has cloned and re-hosted (yet?). It requires significant tech knowledge at this point. Plus I'm only 2 out of 4 on the list of things to make that possible.

That said, there are quite a few people in the JK community that are trying to "archive the jk universe" and they have crawled and saved the site and the forums and they do make their copies publicly available.

At first my instinct was "they copied my entire site, that's not right." But (so far) their goal is to copy/archive every JK site and I'm glad they are doing it because tons of old sites have just dropped off the face of the internet. Including the site that originally hosted the Jed (JK) editor and a bunch of other tools, many of which had the involvement of at least one of the original developers of the game. It's just cool stuff and it sucks that it gets lost.

I have a ton of experience with this. I've been running a "Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight" fan site since early 1998. We've been in it so long that probably over 90% of our outbound links are at best broken or at worst lead to malware or pornography (of course I clean it up when I find it -- by removing the links and adding a note). And yet, stuff that people have been directly contributing to our site since 1998 is still available, still open, and freely available without creating an account. The only thing that saves content like this is people who care. Reddit doesn't care, they're in it for the dollars. Facebook doesn't care, google doesn't care (look how many services have been removed over the years).

I miss the days of every site having their own community. I remember when most game companies would put a landing page for each new game that came out and that was about it. Hundreds or thousands of fan sites popped up and provided a community that far outlasted the direct revenue of most games. Then gaming companies decided to create their own "communities," but they're stale, without personality, and as soon as the game isn't making money anymore, the sites languish and are eventually deleted, along with all the helpful content that has been posted by users.

I'm completely torn because you can't count on idiots like me (and all the people who have helped with my site over the decades!!) to keep things going forever.

My take on this was to make all the content "open" -- it started with all our static assets being converted from 25 years of spaghetti HTML to clean markdown and a static site generator. Anyone can clone the repo, recreate the site (including all the static content) and upload it wherever they want. The next step was to open-source the dynamic back-end. The remaining two steps are somehow regularly distributing a database dump (with personal information stripped out, of course) and then finally figuring out how to make available regular dumps of the content that doesn't fit in git or the database (like the ~10G of maps, mods, and screenshots that users have submitted). These two are still being planned.

I wish every site with anything to say had a plan for what to do when the owner is done maintaining it. Figure out a way to make the important content open and up. Internet Archive is great but they miss so much stuff, especially zip files, image files, etc.

I don't think any of this works with a profit motive, however.

Ugh, it's like they're trying to drive users away.

I use an ad blocker so don't generally see ads. However, I own a Kindle Voyage which I use to read sci-fi and fantasy novels. I have not paid the extra $20 or whatever it is to disable the ads. The ads are definitely targeted, as I only see ads for books related to what I've already purchased and read. In fact, all I see is ads for books in the series I happen to be reading at the time. For example, I'm finally getting around to reading the rest of the Robert Jordan Wheel of Time series. I started over and now I'm on book 5, all purchased through Amazon so far, all directly through the store on the kindle. And it just keeps advertising books 1-5 (which I've already purchased). It makes no sense.

I have a list of authors I follow on amazon.com. It would be a better use of everyone's time if they just picked a random book from any of my favorite authors, made sure I hadn't already purchased it through amazon, and only then show it to me. It's like they're not even trying.

Over 200 comments and nobody has mentioned privacy. Read the Rivian privacy policy, it's downright scary. They track and record everything: location, acceleration/braking, charging, etc., and they explicitly state that they will "share" all the personal information with 3d party advertisers. I don't know how anyone gets on board with this stuff. I would be in line for one of these (or any electric vehicle) but every company seems to do it nowadays, with no option for opting out.

Awesome! Might I recommend adding Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight? There's already an open source renderer available (https://github.com/stephanreiter/jkview) and you can see it, here, for example: https://www.massassi.net/levels/files/323.shtml (under the screenshots, see the 3d preview). It's got blurred textures on purpose (afraid of copyright issues), but it can render the original textures as well.