• 1 Post
  • 101 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

help-circle


  • Mood.

    I’m not going to pay $45 for any game. If I’d known about the “never on sale, price only goes up” model they were using, I might have bought it back when it was $20, but I’ll just never play it now and I’m okay with that. There are literally hundreds of amazing games I already own to play, and if I had 100+ hours to sink into a game like this (I don’t, post-kiddos—for now, anyway), then I’d strike the earth for some Dwarf Fortress !!!FUN!!!, which I know I’ll enjoy.

    Or maybe finally get around to beating Baldur’s Gate 1… (I never made it past the early game… BG3 I’ll get to in the 2040s at this rate, ha ha!)

    Aside from people who just want to play football/CoD/D4/whatever multilayer game, I don’t understand why anyone pays full price for games. I’m glad they do, mind, since they’re subsidizing the development costs mean games get made, and I get amazing games for cheap.

    As a recent example, I nabbed MH Rise for cheap recently, and bounced off it. I might try again later, but it didn’t grab me. So glad I didn’t pay more than $15 CAD for it!






  • Brilliant. I should do that. I’m not great at skipping stuff to race faster, so the skull dungeon is really hard for me and I end up save scumming after most runs. I read about people getting to floor 200+, but I can barely get to 100 unless I waste a whole stack of staircases.

    Pausing time would make it a lot more relaxing.



  • Interesting seeing Hotline Miami make the list since I just watched a short video essay the other day explaining how OTXO is just a better game in basically every way.

    I’m still in the 80s working my way down the list, but I searched and OTXO doesn’t appear to be on the page.

    Edit: Conversely, I’m pleased to see Portal included instead of Portal 2. The Portal 2 goo was unnecessary and led to more boring puzzle solutions. Portal is a more pure, timeless game. And it has a lot of amazing mods… I should probably look into how to install Portal mods on the Deck…



  • Portal Pro I remember being great. So good that Portal 2 was a disappointment for me when it landed.

    I needed to cheat (watch the YouTube solution video) on a few solutions, iirc, too; not because they’re badly designed, just because I couldn’t wrap my head around the solution.

    It should be noted that a couple of the portal solutions need reasonably quick portal placement, so I don’t think it would be as good without KB+mouse. It took me a few tries to nail one of the techniques.


  • I don’t think you’re understanding how trivial this is to detect:

    Set up an open WiFi network in an area without any other open WiFi networks. i.e. almost anywhere outside of dense urban areas. Then you don’t even need to inspect traffic, just look at connected devices in admin controls. No devices should be connected aside from your monitoring device.

    There’s no way the TV manufacturers are going to risk the legal quagmire that would come from this when there’s no plausible way to keep it remotely secret.


  • … Or pay them for it!

    There’s a prolific open-source dev that makes many plugins and themes for a widely-used OSS platform. He’s quite open when asked for new features if it’s something he’s already planning on doing anyway (with no guaranteed timeline) or if it’s not. But if it’s a reasonable ask, he’ll always mention that he can prioritise its development if they fund it. He even posts his current contractor rate; it’s quite transparent.

    I think more OSS devs should be more open like that. “Yes, I can do that feature request. Sounds like about 2-3 hours work. My hourly is $120 for contract work. Email me here if you’re interested and I’ll send a contract.”


  • Super easy. Anyone who knows networking could detect new device connections on an open network they set up. I know next to nothing about networking and I could set it up in 10 minutes, 5 of which would be finding my old router in the basement.

    So I’m not going to give this a moment’s thought until someone brings receipts. It’s not hard to check if this is happening.



  • The author of the article is under the mistaken impression that bundling the “smart” features into the TV increases the price. It’s actually the opposite.

    By injecting ads and bloatware into the TVs, the manufacturers earn more money, by far, than the cost of the features. A dumb TV would cost more.

    The best solution is to decouple them; get the cheapest TV you can with the video quality/size you want, then attach your own device to stream content. I use a modified Fire Stick due to price, mostly with Stremio/Torrentio/Debrid, but there are lots of options.




  • Wireless game streaming is another reason to upgrade WiFi. I couldn’t stream anything from my wired desktop to my Steam Deck on WiFi from the ISP-supplied router. I just finished upgrading to a WiFi mesh network partly because of that… but I haven’t tested game streaming yet.

    I expect it should do great, though. My Fire Stick used to occasionally buffer even with ~1.5GB/hr content, but I just tried a 1080p remux at 15GB/hr and it worked great.