ProdigalFrog
@ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net
- HW News - US Bans Most Routers - Shortage Likely, AMD Joins Corrupt Council, CPU Price Hikewww.youtube.com ↗Submitted 1 day ago to technology@beehaw.org | 2 comments
- Comment on PS6 and Xbox Project Helix "will start at a 50% higher price" than PS5 and Xbox Series X, predict analysts following Sony price hike – and $999 "is not impossible" 5 days ago:
Just gonna throw this out there; If you’ve never had a Nintendo Wii, I’d genuinely recommend picking one up and modding it.
My last console was a PS3, after that I went exclusively PC. I’d always written off the Wii as a gimmick, but after taking a closer look at its library, it’s actually surprisingly packed with good titles, and the motion controls are actually a pretty unique way to interact with games. I picked one up a few months ago off ebay, and even with a Wii balance board, it was less than $80. Modding it was extremely easy, and after it’s done, I was amazing to find that after it connects to wifi, you have access to an online homebrew store full of emulators and cool little homebrew games that download and install with a single click.
That means the console has access to:
- The entire Wii library (Including modern light-gun game ports and original titles, plus Wii fit with the balance board, which is actually really fun)
- All gamecube games with the Nintendont emulator (best paired with either a gamecube controller or the Wii Classic controller)
- Pretty much every retro console such as SNES, Genesis, GB, GBC, GBA, etc with emulators
- The highlights of the N64 and NeoGeo thanks to being ported to the Virtual Console
All for less than $100. It’s an absolute gem of a console, especially when paired with sailing the high seas, and has quickly become my favorite of all time. I sold every other console I’ve ever owned, but I suspect I’ll be keeping the Wii for the foreseeable future.
- Comment on PS6 and Xbox Project Helix "will start at a 50% higher price" than PS5 and Xbox Series X, predict analysts following Sony price hike – and $999 "is not impossible" 5 days ago:
But it is possible to pick up a cheap used office PC off ebay and stick a GPU in it, which would let someone play almost any game on the market for much less than a console.
- Comment on Just shave it bro 1 week ago:
Be the baldness you want to see in the world (I.e, create a baldness community here :3)
- Comment on RuneScape's monthly membership now costs as much as a World of Warcraft subscription as Jagex announces its second price hike in less than 2 years 2 weeks ago:
It certainly was my kind of game growing up when I had a lot of free time, but even then, I wasn’t super into grinding, I just did it to get to the quests, which I very much enjoyed. If there was a server with virtually no grinding and just quests to where I could play it essentially like an online point’n’click adventure with some combat, I’d hit it for sure. :)
- Comment on RuneScape's monthly membership now costs as much as a World of Warcraft subscription as Jagex announces its second price hike in less than 2 years 2 weeks ago:
I tried a couple of those a few years back, but even with the xp multipliers, it seemed like a bit too much of a time commitment :(
- Comment on RuneScape's monthly membership now costs as much as a World of Warcraft subscription as Jagex announces its second price hike in less than 2 years 2 weeks ago:
Uhh, no? I pointed out the good parts about it that stand out even to this day, and that I had a much higher tolerance for endless grinding when I was younger (the clear negative of the game).
Your response is leads me to believe you’re either trolling or only read the first few words of my comment.
- Comment on RuneScape's monthly membership now costs as much as a World of Warcraft subscription as Jagex announces its second price hike in less than 2 years 2 weeks ago:
I played the older rune scape growing up, like a lot, it was my first MMO.
The draw of the game, at least for me, were two things.
One: the punishment for dying was losing all but 3 of your items, do there were high stakes that made enemy encounters kinda exciting. It was pretty unique at the time, though maybe Ultima Online had that too, not sure.
Two: the quests in run escape actually slapped. Unlike literally every other MMO on the market (which had simple fetch quests or kill X amount of things quests), Rune scape had really well written, funny, interesting quests that often played like an older point’n’click adventure, many of which gave really unique and odd rewards that you could practically use in other parts of the game.
Those just blew my wee little mind back then, and I was absolutely hooked on it. I think in particular the quests would hold up, even against modern titles.
The downside was to get to those quests, you had to grind like a motherfucker to get the required skill levels to start it. That padded out the play time by hundreds of hours, but doing it with friends or chatting while you did cooked some lobster for the 300th time made it bearable, sometimes even soothing to zone out to.
I could never tolerate the grind today like 12 year old me could, it’s unbearable, but if I could play a version of runescspe that removed the grind, I’d be tempted just to play allthe quests I never got to.
- Comment on What should we actually turn our aggression towards? 2 weeks ago:
but I see it like trying to fill a jug with a hole in the bottom.
If viewed from the perspective that the community fridge isn’t solving the issue of the people near it needing it to be continuously resupplied, then yes, it is a ‘bottomless pit’. But at the same time, what it is providing is a somewhat constant relief from the system which created the circumstances for a community fridge to be needed, which means its also a source of endless/ongoing harm reduction.
But, if the community fridge is viewed as one tool in our belt with which to build alternative systems that would eventually allow us to decouple from our current one, then it is not a bottomless pit, and instead is one very needed and useful stepping stone leading to a much more egalitarian and prosperous society that could eliminate food deserts and wage labor entirely. In that way, a community fridge is just one form of prefiguration. Specifically, a community fridge is building out one part of a gift-economy.
If you’d like to see the end result of those efforts visualized in a very realisistic manner, I’d highly suggest The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin, which is a classic sci-fi novel based in an egalitarian gift-economy, and goes quite in-depth on how it functions.
- Comment on What should we actually turn our aggression towards? 2 weeks ago:
Hi, no offense taken.
but that particular recommendation seems like something that would be ignored, marginalized, or abused/destroyed.
If I may ask, are you basing that on personal experience, or your own research into the effectiveness of community food fridges?
Personally, I don’t see it as terribly different from the work of Food Not Bombs, which provides food to anyone who needs it at a particular location at set schedule.
The usefulness of a community fridge is that it can often be used to prevent food wastage. As an example, if your garden produces too many zucchini for you or your neighbors to eat, the extra can be distributed to the food fridge for anyone who needs them. Local small businesses also often participate, and donate their unsold food to prevent having to throw it away.
The Teach a Man to fish analogy is often not viable in vulnerable communities or impoverished ones. As an example, if someone lives and works in a food desert, they may not have access to a car to get them to a grocery store with more healthy food options, and their job’s low pay may effectively trap them in that area if the places closer to a good grocery store are too expensive to rent. You could potentially teach them how to grow their own food if they have a viable place to grow them, but they may not be able to spare the extra funds to purchase the seeds or the equipment required to start growing effectively.
I’d suggest taking a look at this instructional video on how to set up a food fridge by someone who has already done so to see how viable it is in practice, and how much good it can potentially do. You may find that your views on it change when its laid out in such a way.
- Comment on What should we actually turn our aggression towards? 3 weeks ago:
Turn your aggression toward building up alternative systems that allow us to reduce and eventually eliminate our need to rely on capitalist systems dominated by sociopaths. That could be taking part in a mutual aid group, creating a free food fridge in food deserts, or learning how to grow your own produce along with your friends and neighbors.
For more info on exactly how to do that stuff, look here: slrpnk.net/post/34794436/21025333
- Comment on Android: sideloading blocked and open source updates withheld to twice a year 3 weeks ago:
Donate to PostmarketOS so they can support more phones and polish it up. It’s based on upstream Linux, and once polished would give us a true and permanent alternative.
- Comment on Firearm Advice 3 weeks ago:
No prob! :)
- Comment on Firearm Advice 3 weeks ago:
Yes, the meat analog he uses, though not perfect, is the closest to a real-world test I’ve found that a regular person could reasonably perform themselves.
357 out of a revolver is indeed still too slow, even with lighter bullets. Only in a lever action carbine does 357 start to reach the required power to perform some hydrostatic tearing, since 357 is really able to take advantage of that extra barrel length to increase velocity fairly dramatically.
There was an extremely comprehensive video done on real-world wound ballistics that I was struggling to find for my last comment, but I found it just now, once again thanks to Luckygunner.
He gives a summary of it here, and also made this video as a supplement, but if you’d like to see the absolute last word on firearm wound ballistics, I’d suggest this full documentary featuring Dr. Martin Fackler (but be warned, this has NSFW gory images as examples).
- Comment on Firearm Advice 3 weeks ago:
When it comes to pistol calibers, raw kinetic energy isn’t really a factor, they’re just too weak to actually induce any sort of hydro-static shock that could cause a permanent rupturing of nearby tissues, you need much higher velocities or energy to do that that, which only rifle rounds or shotgun slugs can reliably induce.
For pistols, the only mechanism of action they can rely on is the mechanical size of the bullet itself, as the bigger the bullet, the larger the hole, and thus the faster the blood loss. Hollow points are the best method to cause bigger holes.
Ballistic gel is a somewhat deceptive testing media, as it can show a big permanent wound cavity beyond the size of the bullet itself, which isn’t actually how it would perform real tissue, which is able to stretch much more than ballistic gel. What really matters for pistol rounds are being able to expand as much as possible while also maintaining adequate penetration (12" in gel), so that you can reliably penetrate bone and muscle to reach critical organs from any angle. You also want to ensure that the specific hollow point chosen isn’t prone to being plugged by heavy clothing if you live in colder environments.
LuckyGunner provides the best comparison of bullets that I’ve personally seen for every pistol caliber, allowing you to avoid bullets that don’t adequately penetrate, expand, or over-penetrate.
All pistol defensive pistol calibers break bone when struck, the xtreme penetrators will simply penetrate further and through more bone than a hollow point. This makes it act similarly to a hardcast (ultra hard lead that doesn’t deform) flatnose bullet, which are also usually only recommended for bear protection.
Over-penetration is an extremely negative trait in personal defense against humans, as it means that the bullet will pass through the target into anything behind them, including innocent who you do not intent to hurt. In self defense rounds you want the bullet to stop inside the first target to avoid endangering anything behind them.
But how do you assess value?
Xtreme Defenders are a good value for bear protection, but are extremely poor value for self-defense, as they are more expensive than a good hollow point while providing less effective wounding characteristics and increased danger to bystanders.
- Comment on Firearm Advice 3 weeks ago:
These aren’t really that effective compared to a hollow point. They create a big visual in ballistic gel, but in a more realistic medium they act more like an improved FMJ, but still over penetrate badly (which isn’t a good thing in most cases).
They tend to be recommend as a bear round, where over-penetration is actually valuable and desired.
The same manufacturer actually makes a deeper cut version that doesn’t over penetrate called the xtreme defender, which is generally still worse than a good hollow point in standard calibers, but can be a good option for weaker calibers like .380, where hollow point under-penetrate.
however, for 9mm and above, you’re better off with a standard hollow point, which is more effective and far more affordable than the all-copper xtreme rounds.
- Comment on Avocado. Is it really so untasty or I am doing something wrong? 3 weeks ago:
It’s definitely a taste thing too. Unripe avacados have very little flavor.
- Submitted 4 weeks ago to gaming@beehaw.org | 7 comments
- Comment on "Game preservation only works if people care" As GOG doubles down on its commitment to saving old games, it's asking players "who give a s**t" to support its crusade 5 weeks ago:
Yes, many games implement that. More famously The Crew (which was mostly a singleplayer game with a large campaign with some multiplayer tacked on) became completely unplayable after Ubisoft shut down the multiplayer portion of the game due to always online DRM. They only later patched the game to become playable in singleplayer again after the extreme backlash from the SKG campaign, which focused on The Crew as an example.
There are many more singeplayer games either already killed, or currently at-risk of being destroyed. SKG keeps an up to date list of them here: stopkillinggames.wiki.gg/wiki/Dead_game_list
- Comment on "Game preservation only works if people care" As GOG doubles down on its commitment to saving old games, it's asking players "who give a s**t" to support its crusade 5 weeks ago:
StopKillingGames is also about keeping games with always online DRM (even present in many singleplayer games today) from rendering it completely unplayable, which would also determine if it could even be sold on GoG in the future.
All of GoG’s current catalog is only possible because the trend of always online DRM wasn’t a thing yet, but going forward, we’ll need SKG to ensure GoG is able to preserve newer games as they become old. If GoG cares about preserving games, then SKG couldn’t get more in their wheelhouse. Yet they ghosted the organizer for it.
- Comment on "Game preservation only works if people care" As GOG doubles down on its commitment to saving old games, it's asking players "who give a s**t" to support its crusade 5 weeks ago:
They have the opportunity to right their wrong of bailing on the StopKillingGames campaign, but they’re likely more worried about appeasing the corpo publisher more than they are defending their supposed core mission.
- Comment on A Web Revival: the Internet didn't die, you're just not on it 5 weeks ago:
Do you know anyone who is building neocities sites and self-hosting them
My friends aren’t the type to build websites at all, but there’s plenty of self hosted simple web 2.0 sites that get decent traffic, such as Low Tech Magazine (mentioned in the video).
- Comment on A Web Revival: the Internet didn't die, you're just not on it 5 weeks ago:
Another walled garden
Not sure if you meant it this way, but Walled garden usually means ‘Closed Platform’, like a way to trap users. But the video is encouraging the construction of websites that can easily be self-hosted, which is the opposite of a walled garden.
- Comment on Welcoming Discord users amidst the challenge of Age Verification 1 month ago:
For anyone considering something similar, I’d suggest hosting a Movim instance over Matrix, as it’s far easier to set up and configure since it uses XMPP instead. Should be lighter on resources too.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
Unfortunately we’ve allowed ourselves to use proprietary venture capital built apps, which inevitably will bring with it enshittification that makes continuing to use it against our own interests, but by then the network effect makes it like being caught in a sticky web that’s hard to escape.
We can only avoid this from happening again and again by using open-source libre software that allows for self-hosting and federation, just like Lemmy and Piefed, which makes them virtually immune from enshittification.
In this case, we need to migrate our friends and family one last time to something that will let us relax almost permanently for once.
Right now, our best option for a Discord alternative is Movim, which uses XMPP as its back end, which is old, open, and proven. It has the essentials like group video calls and screensharing (without audio, yet), and is currently working on implementing discord-like channels with rooms.
The Dev has been working on it since 2010, and only receives $48 a month from their patreon. If you’d like to support the development of a truly federated, E2EE discord alternative, I’d highly recommend anyone reading this to consider helping out with a donation, if you can’t contribute with coding help.
- Comment on Why do they turn Federation into a dystopia? 1 month ago:
Star Trek is written from the perspective of post-scarcity. There is unlimited free energy, replicators that can create virtually any object from base materials, and an abolishment of money (there is no need for it in post-scarcity, as money is ostensibly just a way to distribute resources).
Rowan J Coleman explores the concepts in a 3 part series here, if you’re interested.
- Comment on Veganuary 1 month ago:
Humans synthesize Vitamin A from Beta Carotene in plants. Only a small minority of people who are genetically predisposed to less efficient conversion of Beta Carotene would need to supplement with the retinyl form (readily available in supplements)
Per the NIH:
The human diet contains two sources for vitamin A: preformed vitamin A (retinol and retinyl esters) and provitamin A carotenoids [1,5]. Preformed vitamin A is found in foods from animal sources, including dairy products, eggs, fish, and organ meats [1,2]. Provitamin A carotenoids are plant pigments that include beta-carotene, alpha-carotene, and beta-cryptoxanthin [1]. The body converts provitamin A carotenoids into vitamin A in the intestine via the beta-carotene monooxygenase type 1 BCMO1 enzyme [1,3,6], although conversion rates may have genetic variability
- Comment on Veganuary 1 month ago:
I’m not sure how you cooked your impossible burger, but personally I can’t tell the difference between those or an animal beef burger. It’s so good (IMO, obviously you feel different) that I’m puzzled why so many people say they’re waiting for lab grown meat, when we already have such an incredible, affordable plant based alternative available in most stores right now.
- Comment on Veganuary 1 month ago:
Which ones are exclusive?
- Comment on Anyone old enough to have used this before GPS? 1 month ago:
That happened a couple times to me lately as well.