tal

@tal@lemmy.today

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨At the airport. The TSA thought my daughter's Hello Kitty carry-on was suspicious. [More in body.]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m pretty sure that the airspace around Heathrow is controlled, too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK's elite hardware talent is being wasted.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  ARM – a fabless design company – doesn’t seem like a very good example to be using if the argument is “manufacturing and design need to be physically colocated”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Garmin GPS Ghost USB Issue⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Either way, garmin’s user manual(link) says it is not needed. See page 36, saying “Data Storage Life: Indefinite; no memory battery required”

  I don’t think that they’re saying that the button cell is some sort of undying thing, but rather that your traces and such are being written to nonvolatile memory.

  I assume that you already went looking for a replacement cell and couldn’t find one, else you’d have replaced it rather than resoldered the existing one.

  Assuming that the button cell is actually the problem and that it’s rechargeable, it occurs to me that you might try pulling the cell off again and checking the recharging voltage across the connectors to try to get an idea of what type of cell it is, try getting a new cell with similar characteristics. Might kill the unit doing so if you get the voltage wrong, but if it’s not usable now and you’re confident that the battery is the issue…shrugs

  To be honest, if I had the unit, I would probably pitch it rather than to invest time in fixing it. It looks like this is a fifteen-year-old unit, and my smartphone is probably a more-capable GPS unit running free software. The value of the time I’d spend on fixing it probably exceeds the value of the unit. There’s a reason that consumer electronics repair isn’t much of a business. If you’re viewing the repair as a hobby or something, though, fair enough.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Got any must-play games for strategy fans?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  For some reason, Warno didn’t grab me and Steel Division 2 did. That being said, I may not have given it a fair chance – I bailed out on it after a short period of time, probably because SD2 was also available at about the same time. It is true that it’s one of the few options out there with a late Cold War setting, like Wargame, so if you like that setting over WW2 – which is refreshing – it’s certainly worth looking into.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Got any must-play games for strategy fans?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Hmm. “Strategy” is pretty broad. Most of the new stuff you have is turn-based, but you’ve got tactics stuff like X-COM and strategy stuff. If we’re including both real-time and turn-based, and both strategy and tactics…What do I enjoy? I tend to lean more towards the milsim side of strategy…

  • Stellaris. Lot of stuff to do here – follows the Paradox model of a ton of DLCs with content and lots of iteration on the game. Not cheap, though. Turn-based, 4x.

  • Hearts of Iron 4. Another Paradox game. I think unless someone is specifically into World War II grand strategy, I’d recommend Stellaris first, which I’d call a lot more approachable. Real time, grand strategy. I haven’t found myself playing this recently – the sheer scope can be kind of overwhelming, and unlike 4X games like Stellaris, it doesn’t “start out small” – well, not if you’re playing the US, at any rate.

  • Carrier Command 2. Feels a little unfinished, but it keeps pulling me back. Really intended to be played multiplayer, but you can play single-player if you can handle the load of playing all of the roles concurrently. Real-time tactics.

  • Rule the Waves 3. Lot of ship design here, fun if you’re into gun-era naval combat. Turn-based strategy (light strategy), with real-time tactics combat. Not beautiful. There is a niche of people who are super-into this.

  • I agree with the other user who recommended Steel Division 2. If you’ve played Wargame: Red Dragon or earlier Eugen games, which are really designed to be played multiplayer, you know that the AI is abysmal. I generally don’t like playing multiplayer games, and persisted in playing it single-player. Steel Division 2’s AI is actually fun to play against single-player. Real-time tactics, leaning towards the MOBA genre but without heroes and themed with relatively-real-world military hardware.

  • XCOM-alikes. I didn’t like XCOM 2 – it felt way too glizy for me to tolerate, too much time looking at animations, but I may have just not given it a fair chance, as I bailed out after spending only a little time with the game. I have enjoyed turn-based tactics games in the X-COM series and the genre in the past – squad-based, real-time tactics games. Problem is that I don’t know if I can recommend any of them in 2024 – all the games in that genre I’ve played are pretty long in the tooth now. Jagged Alliance 2 is fun, but very old. Silent Storm is almost as old, has destructable terrain, but feels low-budget and unpolished. There were a number of attempts to restart the Jagged Alliance series after 2 and a long delay that were not very successful; I understand that Jagged Alliance 3 is supposed to be better, but I don’t think I’ve played through it yet. Wasteland 2 and Wasteland 3 aren’t really in the same genre, are more like Fallout 1 and Fallout 2, CRPGs with turn-based tactics combat. But if you enjoy turn-based-tactics, you might also enjoy them, and Wasteland 3 isn’t that old.

  • If you like squad based real-time tactics, you might give the Close Combat series a look. I really liked the (now ancient) Close Combat 2. The balance for that game was terrible – it heavily rewarded use of keeping heavy tanks on hills – but it was an extremely popular game, and I loved playing it. There are (many) newer games in the series but they started including a strategic layer and a round timer after Close Combat 3. These improved things in the game (and if you like a strategy aspect, you might prefer that), but I just wanted to play the tactics side, and don’t feel like the later games every quite had the appeal of the earlier ones. Still, they’ve certainly had enough to make me come back and replay them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Got any must-play games for strategy fans?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  For old school RTS, Total Annihilation

  If you don’t care about the campaign, probably the much-newer games based on Total Annihilation that run on the Spring engine.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Got any must-play games for strategy fans?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, it’s not beautiful, but for strategy games and other high-replayability games, I don’t find that eye candy buys that much. Like, I feel like a good strategy game is one that you should spend a lot of time playing as you master the mechanics, and no matter how pretty the graphics, when you’ve seen them a ton of times…shrugs I think that eye candy works better for genres where you only see something once, like adventure games, so that the novelty is fresh. But what you like is what you like.

  If it’s too complicated – and the game does have a lot of mechanics going on, even by strategy game standards – Illwinter also has another series, Conquest of Elysium, which is considerably simpler, albeit more RNG-dependent. I personally prefer the latter, even though I know Dominions. Dominions turns into a micromanagement slogfest when you have a zillion armies moving around later in the game. Especially if you have one of the nations that can induce freespawn, like MA Ermor. Huge amounts of time handling troop movement.

  It might be more tolerable if you play against other humans – I mean, if you’re playing one turn a day or something, I imagine that it’s more tolerable to look at what’s going on. But if you’re playing against the computer, which is what I do, it has more micromanagement than I’d like.

  Trying to optimize your build is neat, though. There are a lot of mutually-exclusive or semi-compatible strategies to use, lots of levers to play with, which I think is a big part of making a strategy game interesting.

  I think that Dwarf Fortress has a higher learning curve, but if you’re wanting a strategy game that has a gentle learning curve, I agree, Dominions probably isn’t the best choice. It also doesn’t have a tutorial/introduction system – it’s got an old-school, nice hefty manual.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Got any must-play games for strategy fans?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Unciv is a free, open-source reimplementation of Civilization V. It doesn’t have all the eye candy and music and such that the series is famous for but as a result of not having it runs responsively on a phone.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Doom is playable on PDFs (at least in Chromium-based browsers)⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I can see it now: “New worm infects PDFs, causes users viewing them to mine Bitcoin.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Favorite retro games?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I think that Tetris is probably the oldest game that I’ll play some implementation of occasionally. I don’t know if I’d call it my favorite, but it’s aged very gracefully over the decades.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Baldur’s Gate 3 Dev Larian Says Its 'Full Attention' Is on Its Next Game, 'Media Blackout' for the Foreseeable⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Bethesda has said that they aren’t going to do one until after the next Elder Scrolls game, so if anything in the Fallout world is going to come out on any kind of a near-term schedule, it’s going to have to be via someone with available bandwidth licensing it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨They fucking geoblocked blahaj.zone⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  So now if i want to see a post by a user on blahaj, i have to turn on my VPN just to see it. Fuck this place. 🙄

  One of the first conversations I was on when I joined was one between Ada, the lemmy.blahaj.zone admin, and some guy in a Middle Eastern country. Apparently his country had blocked lemmy.blahaj.zone at the national network level.

  The Threadiverse is federated, so one could view posts from lemmy.blahaj.zone elsewhere, but not images, which did not propagate.

  I thought that at some point, lemmy servers had started also storing images, but upon checking, it looks like they have not. I did run into one – no longer up – that had, according to the description, had apparently been modified to do this, probably to afford its users more privacy. In theory, if you could find one that did so, you could just rely on propagation through the network.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If you save, we will charge you more⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Electrical service should have a fixed connection fee.

  The reason this happens is because electrical companies have two different kind of costs:

  • Those related to obtaining the electrical power from generation companies.

  • Those related to maintaining the grid and providing a connection.

  In the past, normally what they did was to simply reduce this to a single price, and for that to be per unit of electricity used. That is, the consumer pays $N. That was at least not an entirely unreasonable approximation when people were pulling electricity off the grid.

  The thing is, if a user mostly generates power locally, they still want to have that electrical connection and providing that connection still costs money. But now they’re also not paying for their share of the grid connectivity – it’s getting offloaded to the people who aren’t generating electricity locally.

  Hence, the split that many utility companies are shifting to. There’s a fixed charge to have a connection to the grid, which covers the cost of grid maintenance. And there’s a separate cost per kWh of energy used.

  If someone doesn’t care about the grid connection – like, they’re confident that they can handle their power needs locally, don’t care about having a grid connection, they do have the option to just drop service. But most people want to have the access to draw more power if they aren’t generating enough, so they want to retain their grid connection. With the grid connection fee being broken out, they cover their share of the costs.

  Now, I’ve no disagreement that California electricity rates are pretty bonkers. They’re some of the highest in the US:

  electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/

  But the issue isn’t having a separate grid connection fee from an electricity used fee.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sony shows off conceptual immersive gaming tech that lets you stand in a TV box and sniff The Last of Us⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  If you seriously want to set something like this up, you’re going to need a device that can emit the smells that you want.

  This instance of a device looks like it uses atomizers hooked up to different tanks:

  www.amazon.com/…/B0CNMXSN2K

  I’d imagine that one run as many tanks as one wanted.

  One limiting factor is that scent isn’t going to immediately change when you change your virtual environment. I’d guess that emitting the vapor close to your face, maybe running a hose up towards it, would help. Probably want some kind of exhaust to purge the previous smell from the room.

  Second, some form of computer control. Maybe some device that has relays controlled via USB. A relay is an electromechanical switch that can can cut power to an atomizer on and off, could run it to the atomizer.

  ncd.io/usb-relay/

  Those guys sell USB devices with up to 64 relays. I haven’t looked, but it probably looks to the computer like a virtual serial port, takes text commands.

  Then you need some kind of daemon running on the computer to send these commands at appropriate times.

  And lastly, you need some way to trigger the daemon when the game is seeing some sort of event. Could monitor the game’s logfile if it has one and contains the necessary information – I recall some Skyrim-hooking software that does this – take a screenshot periodically and analyze it, or identify and then monitor the game’s memory, probably either a technique called library injection (on Linux, library interposers are a way to so this) or using the same API that debuggers use.

  If the hentai game that your friend is after is Ren’Py-based – a popular option for visual novels, which many such games are – and the game includes the Python source .rpy files, which some do, then the game’s source itself could simply be modified. If it contains only compiled .rpyc files, that won’t be an option.

  You’re going to need to obtain whatever scents you want to emit as well. You can get collections of essential oils – the aromatherapy crowd is into those – and mix them up to create blends that you want.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lenovo is removing the iconic Trackpoint with its new ThinkPad X9⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I finally dropped Lenovo last month, got a laptop from Tuxedo. No three physical button trackpad, but it does have a 100 Wh battery.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lenovo is removing the iconic Trackpoint with its new ThinkPad X9⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t care about the Trackpoint, but I do like the three Thinkpad physical buttons on that Synaptic trackpad. Hard to find feature on laptops.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Netflix bad... Shocker, I know⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I doubt that Airplay provides a path under the control of trusted hardware.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Netflix bad... Shocker, I know⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  kagis

  It sounds like 4k specifically requires a trusted hardware stack, and I assume that the things you’ve tried are going to result in untrusted components somewhere in the stack.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨25 hours of snow.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I had an acquaintance out here in California who eventually moved back to the Midwest. He wasn’t happy that he couldn’t get a good hot dog out here, which I suppose is kinda true.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨25 hours of snow.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Gather snow, mix with sweetened condensed milk and vanilla or peppermint extract, snow ice cream.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨There's a new toll I'll have to pay to drive anywhere.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I once knew someone who commuted into NYC each day by rail – drove to the train station, and went from there. Can move out of NYC and commute in, I suppose. Housing will probably be cheaper. Was a long commute.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Beyond TikTok: The National Security Risks of Chinese Agricultural Drones⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  A lot of this sounds pretty abstract to me.

  It argues that drones transmit data about use to Chinese drone manufacturers, which could leverage that data to provide an edge globally.

  Okay, fine. I’ll believe that farms have models of when to spray and such, and that these models have value. And this effectively gives drone manufacturers a fair bit of that data.

  But…how secret is that data now? Like, is this actually data not generally available? There are a lot of corn farms out there. Did each corn farm go carefully work up their own model on their own in a way that China can’t obtain that data? Or can I go read information publicly about recommended spraying intervals?

  More radically, agricultural data could be used to unleash biological warfare against crops, annihilating an adversary’s food supply. Such scenarios pose a significant threat to national security, offering China multiple avenues to undermine critical infrastructures by devastating food availability, threatening trade and economic resilience, and destabilizing agricultural systems.

  That seems like an awful stretch.

  Biowarfare with infectious disease is hard to control. Countries historically have been more interested militarily in stuff like anthrax, which works more like a chemical weapon. I am dubious that China has a raging interest in biowarfare against American crops.

  Even if we assume that China does have the intent and ability to develop something like a crop disease, I have a very hard time seeing as how somewhat finer-grained information about agriculture is going to make such an attack much more effective. Let’s say that China identifies a crop that is principally grown in the US and develops an infectious diease targeting it. Does it really need to know the fine points of that crop, or can it just release it at various points and let it spread?

  As for food security, the US is not really a country at any sort of food security risk.

  • It exports a lot of staple food. It’s the source, not the consumer.

  • It has large margins due to producing luxuries that could be reduced in a wartime emergency – I recall once reading a statistic that if the US went vegetarian, it could provide for all of Europe’s food needs without bringing any more land into production.

  • It is wealthy enough to have access to the global food market. If the US is starving, a lot of the world is going to be starving first. In some cases, one can cut off physical transport access to the global market via blockade even where a country could normally buy from those markets – as Germany tried to do to the UK in World War II or the US did to Japan in World War II, but that would be extraordinarily difficult to do to the US given the present balance of power. The US is by far the largest naval power in the world.

  I’m willing to believe that it might be possible to target “university IT systems” for commercially-useful data, but it’s not clear to me that that’s something specific to drones or to China. There are shit-tons of devices on all kinds of networks that come out of China. I’d be more worried about the firmware on one’s Lenovo Thinkpad as being a practical attack vector than agricultural drones.

  Now, okay. The article is referencing both American national security concerns and potential risks to other places, fine. It’s talking about Brazil, Spain, etc. Some of my response is specific to the US. But I’m going to need some rather less hand-wavy and concrete issues to get that excited about this. You cannot hedge against every risk. Yes, there are risks that I can imagine agricultural drones represent, though I think that just being remotely-bricked around harvest time would be a more-realistic concern. But there are also counters. Sure, China no doubt has vectors via which it could hit the US. But the same is also true going the other way, and if China starts pulling levers, well, the US can pull some in response. That’s a pretty significant deterrent. Unless an attack can put the US in a position where it cannot respond, like enabling a Chinese nuclear first strike or something, those deterrents are probably going to be reasonably substantial. If we reach a point where China is conducting biowarfare against American crops to starve out the US, then we’ve got a shooting war on, and there are other things that are going to be higher on the priority list.

  5G infrastructure is, I agree, critical. TikTok might be from an information warfare perspective. You can hedge against some of the worst risks. But you cannot just run down the list of every product that China sells and hedge against every way in which one might be leveraged. Do that and you’re looking at heading towards autarky and that also hurts a country – look at North Korea. Sanctions might not do much to it, but it’s also unable to do much.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pornhub Is Now Blocked In Almost All of the U.S. South⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think that it’s kind of globally-applicable.

  And I’ve wondered in the past whether the long-run for the Internet was always going to be people generally winding up with VPNs for similar reasons. I’m far from the first:

  The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

  – John Gilmore

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pornhub Is Now Blocked In Almost All of the U.S. South⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Or does it make it more taboo and thus more appealing?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pornhub Is Now Blocked In Almost All of the U.S. South⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Honestly, it might be a good thing long-run to have a higher percentage of users on VPNs. They aren’t a magic cure-all, but they do help make it safer to use untrusted networks and discourage some things on the service side, like geolocating and data-mining users based on IP.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨No one: Laptop. Could this be hardware or software related?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It could be software or hardware-related.

  I’ve had overheating hardware cause full-screen artifacts, as well as bugs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Putin's 'sovereign' gaming console projects detailed, found lacking⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Interestingly, Gorelkin emphasized that the console should not merely serve as a platform for porting old games but also for popularizing domestic video games.

  Apparently state-subsidized efforts have not yet popularized domestic games on their own.

  youtube.com/watch?v=REGKtrAHsnA

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Not enough people buying Premium, eh?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  trailer

  I mean, that’s an advertisement. I feel like if you’re going to watch an ad, that the company trying to sell the product should find a way to have the ad in high resolution themselves.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fan-made PC port of Star Fox 64 is out now⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I have no idea why people do this.

  I mean, I like a number of old Nintendo games too. But I just cannot imagine putting this kind of work into something like this, where it’s almost certainly going to get taken down.

  The worst is when people do things like create unauthorized sequels to games and that gets taken down. Like, you could have gone and created your own game with your own setting.

  reddit.com/…/what_are_some_of_the_metroid_fan_gam…

  Like, I like the Metroid series too. But if all the people who like the series enough to have created unauthorized sequels in the series had just used a different setting and characters to make their Metroidvania, we could have had a fantastic unencumbered series.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I Streamed To A Game Boy⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There has got to be some kind of simple compression that the Game Boy processor can handle in real time that will let it push a typical frame in the datarate available. Maybe use run length encoding, as it looks like most of those images have large flat color areas.