It is. Oldest part of my computing setup by decades, and still working perfectly. Also robust enough to withstand ‘cat typing’ - the ThinkPad next to it that I use for work is missing a couple of keycaps

Your standard-issue cat may be able to work a mouse, but mine can do a keyboard…

Might be a controversial take, but Raspberry Pi’s are pure ass as media servers. They’re profoundly i/o limited, which extends to access to external USB devices as well as ethernet, and lack the oomph required to decode hi-res video streams locally. 1080p can be choppy, forget about 4K.

Pi5 occupies the unhappy spot where it’s too expensive for enthusiast and hobby applications, but inadequate as a desktop PC which benefit from a bit more power.

A mini-PC is a much better fit. An N100 might even be overkill - mine has a Skylake from a decade ago in it, and it crushes ‘media’ activities while gently sipping at electricity.

Yeah. Throw litterboxes away, buy a general storage box that’s much taller and wider, problem solved. Ours is about 18" x 24" and 6" deep, only needs a thin layer of litter in the bottom, all cats happy. Probably cheaper than a dedicated litter tray, too.

Hey! Mine not only tells the time, but also the day of the week and month, and has an integrated alarm clock and stopwatch. Battery lasts for seven years, keeps time to within a few minutes per year, is cheap enough so that I don’t mind wearing it when I’m cycling as I can just replace it if I break it, and it has a celebrity endorsement. Of sorts, anyway.

If the lesson is “just let Ubisoft die, and support their former workers if they want to produce labour-of-love games in small indie studios”, then we could be in for great things. E33 is possibly the French-est game ever made and has brought French culture around the globe, in the way that “yet another Rainbow 6 sequel” certainly does not.

Trying to out-jank Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, eh? I didn’t see any game-breaking bugs in that 14-minute longplay, must try harder.

I don’t think that being a vampire hunting people down in a maze of streets is necessarily a bad idea. If they’d gone for a stealthier, keep-out-of-sight and strike from the shadows approach, like perhaps a vampire might do, then they could have had something. The original Castle Wolfenstein was released in '81 for inspiration, and this does have ‘better’ graphics - more stuff moving, more detail, more colour. In fact, probably looks better than most versions of Metal Gear, from '87. You’d obviously want to keep it quick so that people keep putting money in, but I don’t think ‘arcade sneaking game’ is exactly an over-done genre, even now.

It’s one of the best ones, get playing it. Lots of shooting up Nazis, zombies and death robots; a little bit of stealth, lots of Quake 3 bunny hopping, plenty of action.

Not like the new ones, which make you watch 45 minutes of torture porn before letting you do five minutes of corridor shooting, and which just can’t commit to deciding whether killing Nazis is bad.

Java dev in charge of a $100M product here. Can’t actually compile it with less than 32 GB of RAM.

My old job working with a hydraulic analysis firm, needed 256 GB to run the product it in local development mode; to run customer models in production was a mainframe job - typically multi-terabytes. Computational fluid dynamics eats all your memory and asks for more. My work computer would have been pretty shitty as a gaming desktop, but did have every memory slot maxed out.

Yes, you might be working on something more lightweight, and that is fine. That doesn’t mean that your requirements are the be all and end all.

Likewise. Bought a three-month sub so’s that I wouldn’t have to top it up too often, and then they came out with all that shit. Subscription expires in two days - forever. Hello, iVPN.

Excuse me, why is my cat in your house? Please return her immediately.

Outlook is lousy, but what gets me is the fact that basically all “email, calendar, rss and chat (maybe)” apps are pretty bad. You’d think someone would have implemented something better by now.

Excel is perfect, PowerPoint doesn’t need to be any better.

Word is a terrible text editor and its layout algorithm is lousy. You can make better-looking documents by converting markdown to html and then applying some css; modern browsers have much more sophisticated styling options than Word offers as “styles”. You can make much better looking documents with Latex, which is pushing fifty years old now.

Both ways let you edit text files in a superior editor (which should be Vim, of course - the most superior editor). Collaborative working and revision history with Git, which runs none of the risk of Word just randomly deciding to shit itself when those features are enabled.

Fine - Word can retain a “compatible layout” mode for all those ancient documents where people have paginated by pressing enter 17 times exactly, and the line-breaking, hyphenation, text colour etc. algorithms cannot be updated. But for the rest of us, let’s push things forward.

It lets you “add game”, but then gives you the choice of Linux / Windows with a Wine version / browser, and you have to put in the path.

So for example, in Lutris I could have “every Zelda game” or “every Castlevania game” as a filter. Castlevania needs MSX, NES, Gameboy, SNES, N64, DS, PSX, PS2, and Wii emulation; and one of (Steam, or PS3 or X360 emulation) to be reasonably complete.

I suppose I could create a Linux shell script that daisy-chains into the correct emulator, but that would be quite clunky compared to Lutris, which is still pretty clunky. And I wouldn’t be able to filter to that, nor sort them by release date.

Just for gaming purposes, having a unified front end that:

• lets you start an application with the arguments it needs, whether to use a specific Wine folder, or start an emulator with the right arguments

• lets you tag up each application with some custom arguments - genre, date, and so on - and lets you filter and sort by them

• lets you configure each app with their own box art or whatever as an icon

• keeps some gaming-related metadata; hours played, whether you’ve finished it, …

Essentially, Windows 3.1 Program Manager for the 21st century. Lutris did that quite well. Heroic doesn’t let you add custom stuff, it just integrates with store fronts. RetroArch has the old-school Linux problem of “all the functionality you need, plus all the functionality anyone might ever need, plus all the functionality that no-one needs, all arranged seemingly at random in dozens of menus”.

Lutris scripts were great - just having the required winetricks commands to get something obscure working was awesome, but packaged up in a useful way along with art and metadata was handy. The front-end being “only what you need” was good as well. Shame it’s gone off the rails a bit…

Support for Linux has to be explicitly enabled, it’s not on by default. Even when it’s enabled, it causes complete bullshit. For instance, I can’t use all of my CPU cores when playing Elden Ring - EAC isn’t compatible with so many, have to disable some so that it can start.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1245620/discussions/0/597412189643679711/

Fine Young Cannibals?

What a shame - Netflix have given up on doing anything at all imaginative, and have fallen back on making Harry Potter and FIFA games, chucking everyone else to the wolves.

In some ways, having someone with a head for business would appear to make sense for a gaming studio. You could look at most of the announcements from eg. Obsidian or Double Fine on their intention to make ‘Scope Creep: The Video Game’, guaranteed to release massively over-budget to critical success but modest sales which will put the studio into a lot of trouble; and think that someone holding the purse strings, keeping the creatives from their worst excesses, and vetoing any really stupid ideas would be a clever idea. Unfortunately, this role always seems to go to dumb-arse dipshits without a single thought in their heads.

Would appear that an Indie Studio of three people might be ideal - Suspicious Developments, Team Cherry, Cuzzillo/Boch/Foddy have put out some great stuff recently. Small enough to stay focussed, and also small enough to put in a few years of polish without running up crazy bills. Seems like Night School, being four people, was just a bit too big.

Yeah. I’ve got my home server set to install all security updates and restart Monday at 3 am; my first thought when seeing a two-month uptime on any of my machines is ‘whoops’, not ‘wow’.

Amazing uptimes are strictly for machines that aren’t connected to a network, and I’d start to be concerned whether they’d restart on eg. power failure if I started seeing really big numbers.

Exactly - most game engines now will hide this rather than stutter.

Got an NVMe and a RAID array in my gaming desktop; the RAID does about 1 GB/s sustained read and write, which is good, but its latency is quite bad. Was playing Elden Ring directly from it since I couldn’t be bothered moving it - load times were good, but “fog doors” appear over doorways and cave entrances while they’re being loaded, which never happens on SSD. Never dropped a frame, though.

It isn’t a problem; mote has misunderstood the law.