toddestan
@toddestan@lemm.ee
- Comment on Windows 7 and 8 now dead for gaming, as new Steam update pulls support 1 week ago:
Valve pulled support for Steam at the start of January 2024 for Windows 7/8. I thought that was the end, but apparently it actually just meant “Steam may still run but we don’t support it in any way”. Which surprised me when I booted up the old Windows 7 PC a few months ago and discovered that Steam still ran and seemed to work.
Apparently this update is actually incompatible and now Steam won’t run at all.
- Comment on [Même] Which movie was this for you? 1 week ago:
Iron Sky is one of those movies that was great the first time I watched it, but when I watched it the second time knowing the plot and where all the jokes were going I realized it was actually pretty terrible.
If you don’t actually remember any of it, you might enjoy the rewatch.
- Comment on [Même] Which movie was this for you? 1 week ago:
Huh. I enjoyed The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen myself, but never really thought to look up the reviews. I never had any idea that movies was so disliked by reviewers. I suppose I’ve found the movie I liked but everyone else seems to dislike.
- Comment on The 1900s 4 weeks ago:
I have a Jansport that’s about that old from the college days. It’s held up pretty well I must say. No idea about newer ones.
When I was in college, I would have thought it crazy to be using a backpack older than I was.
- Comment on If Biden wanted to could he have people kill Trump since he is in office and SCOTUS said it was ok? 1 month ago:
That’s assuming if Biden was to issue such an order as things stand right now.
If Biden really wanted to abuse his newfound powers of immunity, his very first official act would be making sure the supreme court won’t be standing in his way for any subsequent official acts.
- Comment on Jazz hands 1 month ago:
Right. If you were to attempt something like this, you’d be better off with something like a chunk of granite than plutonium.
- Comment on [Technology Connections] Thermoelectric cooling: it's not great. 1 month ago:
aren’t you still limited by ambient air temp because the hot side of the Peltier needs to be cooled by air anyway?
You can certainly get subambient. Put some electrical current through a Peltier and one side gets cold, and the other side gets hot. Use the cold side to cool your components, and get the heat away from the hot side, and you can make it work.
It can be a bit tricky. The hot side is right next to the cold side and it gets really hot, so if you can’t get the heat away it’ll leak right back over. Peltiers use a lot of power so you need a beefy power supply, and that’ll be another source of heat. Assuming you can figure that all out, you also have to be careful that the cold side doesn’t get too cold or you get condensation. Electrical components tend to not like moisture very much.
I remember people experimented around with it back in early-mid 2000’s. General consensus nowadays seems to be is that it’s not terribly effective and not worth the trouble.
- Comment on Burning Up 2 months ago:
Why should the ideal temperature be right in the middle of the range?
It’s no surprise that the maximum end of the range is right around the body temperature, as it’s difficult for the body to keep itself cool once the environment is around or warmer than the body temperature. Sure, we can sweat, but that uses up a lot of water and people generally find that getting all sweaty to not be pleasant.
On the other hand, if the environment is a lot cooler than the body temperature, then it is difficult for the body to keep warm. I’m sure for our distant ancestors who lived in what is now Africa, their minimum temperature was much higher, possibly putting the ideal temperature right around the middle of their range. Luckily for us, we can put on more clothing to stay warm, which is how we can now make the minimum so low. But while we can use clothing to lower our minimum, we really don’t have anything different to raise our maximum vs. our ancestors - we’re both limited by how well we can cool ourselves by sweating. So for that reason it doesn’t really surprise me that our ideal temperature is towards the upper end of what we consider the minimum and maximum temperatures.
- Comment on Burning Up 2 months ago:
Actually, it’s the other way around. 100 degrees F weather is really hot. Driving 100 MPH is really fast.
In metric we have 40 degrees C weather is really hot, and driving…uhhh… gets out a calculator 170 kph is really fast.
- Comment on Behold, the '98 Ford Aerostar 3 months ago:
Besides there being no 1998 Aerostar, this is one of the early models. The badges on the front fenders went away after the first few model years, and the later ones have composite headlights rather than the sealed beams.
- Comment on what would happen if a rogue, earth-size planet ran straight into the sun? anything interesting? 3 months ago:
Probably the biggest threat to us would be the rogue planet kicking some largish objects out in the Oort cloud into new orbits as it passed through. Some of the orbits would go into the inner solar system and could intersect with the Earth at some point.
- Comment on If you could change the ending of one movie, which one would it be, and how would you change it? 3 months ago:
A.I., the 2001 movie.
David (the robot kid) is trapped underwater repeatedly asking the statue to make him a real boy. His batteries run out and everything goes dark. Tragic. Credits roll.
Everything that happened after that in the actual movie in the far future involving aliens or whatever that was ends up on the editing room floor.
- Comment on If you could change the ending of one movie, which one would it be, and how would you change it? 3 months ago:
I’d rewrite the ending of The Force Awakens so that they don’t destroy Starkiller Base at the end. Instead they’d just damage it heavily or somehow disable it.
Then the second movie would then have to be rewritten to be about the First Order trying to repair Starkiller Base, perhaps they need some rare resource or something, and the rebels are trying to stop them.
The third movie would then also have to be rewritten. The First Order has got the thing working again, so the rebellion would get to destroy it for good this time.
Really, the problem the sequel trilogy had is that they didn’t know what to do with it. The Force Awakens end up as a soft reboot of A New Hope, which is why we got a third Deathstar. But then they blow it up at the end of the first movie, which puts them in a bind as now they really don’t know what to do with the next two movies. What now, a fourth Deathstar? At least this would give some sort of overarching story for the trilogy, rather than the making-it-up-as-we-go mess that we ended up with.
- Comment on Real 4 months ago:
That’s the problem. A lot of those high-end, expensive appliances are built just as shitty as the low-end, basic models. The difference is just some bells and whistles and a higher price tag.
I have no problem paying extra for a higher quality, better built appliance. But the challenge is differentiating those from the low quality, built as cheaply as possible appliances that have just been marked up with a premium price tag.
At least when I buy the cheap, shitty model, I get what I paid for.
- Comment on Futuristic movies timeline 5 months ago:
My guess is this was graphic made some time ago and the line on the chart was the current year. Given the newest films on the list look to be Idiocracy and Children of Men from 2006, that would make the line sometime in the mid-late 2000’s.
- Comment on Futuristic movies timeline 5 months ago:
Idiocracy and Children of Men are from 2006, which I believe are the newest films on the list. Though the bar for Star Trek suggests that it’s depicting the timeline from the 2009 movie, but that could be debated.
- Comment on The Way Forward, an update from the team behind Cities: Skylines 7 months ago:
The thing is, it forced the people making games to release them as a finished, working product, with the bugs (mostly) stamped out.
Today it’s just push something out the door now, and we’ll
patch itsoak them for more money with DLC later. - Comment on Windows 10 is the last version of Windows 7 months ago:
Well, if you’re sticking with Windows, you really have no choice. The sun is rapidly setting on using Windows 7 as a “daily driver” - a lot of new software doesn’t support it and the older versions that work on Windows 7 are getting less and less viable. Windows 8 is in the same boat as Windows 7. Windows 10 goes out of support next year, but you’ve probably got to 2028 or maybe 2029 before you really have to move.
I ended up riding Windows 7 to pretty much the bitter end. Steam dropping Windows 7 support last December was it for the last Windows box. Everything now is running Linux.
- Comment on Windows 10 is the last version of Windows 7 months ago:
I consider Windows 7 the last good version, but I still consider Windows 2000 to be when Microsoft was at the top of their game.