| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-10-29, 00:41 in Making interactive fiction
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 Post: #361 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 892 days Last view: 89 days |
So, after wishing for a choice-based IF engine with Markdown syntax, today I stumbled across Ficdown, which is exactly that. Write some Markdown, put special URL-like syntax into link targets to set or test flags, and off you go. Now I actually see the thing in action, though, I'm not as big a fan as I expected - in particular, it seems strange that one can only ever *set* flags, not *clear* them. Also, trying to fit a bespoke query syntax into a URL-like syntax, alongside actual links, seems a bit intricate. I'd rather have some new, separate syntax for annotating flag-requirements on text-blocks. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-11-01, 10:10 in Stupid computer bullcrap we put up with.
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Post: #362 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 892 days Last view: 89 days |
How long until somebody writes a Kakoune emulator for Emacs, I wonder? The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-11-01, 10:19 in Mozilla, *sigh*
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Post: #363 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 892 days Last view: 89 days |
Debian provides (or provided) system packages for popular Firefox and Thunderbird extensions, although I don't know how many people actually used them. I also heard of somebody who wrote a "translate this page" extension that worked by injecting the JS blob that Google Translate provides for webmasters to add to their own websites. They couldn't upload it to AMO because Mozilla forbids extensions that inject third-party JS into webpages, and now they can't side-load it either. On the other hand, I'm willing to bet that far more spyware, malware, and anti-virus "web security" extensions have been sideloaded than actual useful extensions. I wish humans weren't so terrible. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-11-06, 12:38 in The Ignoble Fate of Norton
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Post: #364 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 892 days Last view: 89 days |
As has been much publicised, after acquiring the two oldest HTTPS certificate authorities (Verisign and Thawte) Symantec got sloppy and was therefore blacklisted from running a CA business ever again. As a result Symantec have sold their enterprise security business to Broadcom, so they can concentrate on consumer security, and rebranded themselves as NortonLifeLock. If you're unfamiliar with the term "LifeLock", it's the name of a company Symantec acquired in 2017, which (attempts to) provide identity theft protection. The "Controversies" section of the Wikipedia article is illustrative. Alas poor Peter Norton. He'd be spinning in his grave, except that he's still alive. Let's all doctor a disk in memoriam. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-11-06, 14:13 in The Ignoble Fate of Norton
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Post: #365 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 892 days Last view: 89 days |
That'd be an awkward meeting, I bet. Number of movies about McAfee: 2*; number of movies about Norton: 0. I hope you're not implying that Peter Norton had anything to do with Norton Anti-Virus; that was just Symantec Anti-Virus rebadged once they'd bought Peter Norton Computing. I was originally going to say "let's all copy some files in our favourite orthodox file manager", but Norton Commander was actually written by somebody else, and merely published by PNC. *: Gringo: The Dangerous Life of John McAfee (2016), King of the Jungle (pre-production). The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-11-17, 06:40 in What are you listening to right now?
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Post: #366 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 892 days Last view: 89 days |
I think Ocarina Boogie was the first song I ever downloaded from OCRemix, when the site first got linked on Slashdot or wherever. It's very definitely A Cool Thing That's Relevant To Video Games And Music, and it's actually a fun little track just on its own. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-11-19, 12:16 in Anticipating near future [politics]
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Post: #367 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 892 days Last view: 89 days |
People in this thread talking about Trump's policies as if he has some kind of interest in or opinion of what other people do, other than whether they admire him or not. In a way, he's very nearly the ultimate democratic leader - any hare-brained idea that flickers through the collective id of the electorate, he'll act on - at least until some other, contradictory idea comes to the fore. Of course he can't poll the electorate directly, so he depends on other people's reports of what will make him popular, and since there is considerable political power in having the king's ear, those reports are sadly not as direct and unbiased as we'd like. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-11-21, 01:36 in Stupid computer bullcrap we put up with.
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Post: #368 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 892 days Last view: 89 days |
My recollection (though I can't find any sources right now) is that when somebody sends archive.org a takedown, they set a "hidden" flag in the database so they don't actually delete anything, they just don't distribute it until the copyright expires. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-11-24, 13:09 in Games You Played Today REVENGEANCE
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Post: #369 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 892 days Last view: 89 days |
A while ago Mario Kart Tour was released, the first free-to-play mobile game in the Mario Kart franchise. I installed it because I was curious, and because I've been a long-time fan of Mario Kart games (weirdly, since I hate the basic premise), and honestly it's better than it has any right to be - there's racing, and you do have *some* amount of control over what happens on-screen, and the courses are cool. Unfortunately, it's a free-to-play mobile game, which means premium currency and having to grind to unlock things (and not in the fun sense of having to *get good*, just investing time) and honestly there's a bunch of actual Mario Kart games I haven't played yet. And so I've been putting time into Mario Kart: Double Dash on the Gamecube. The two MK games I've played the most have been the GBA and DS iterations, which are the games immediately before and after Double Dash, so it's been interesting looking at how the series has evolved. Double Dash backs away from the high-skill precision driving of the GBA game, since they have decent 3D hardware and they can make courses visually rewarding instead of just viscerally rewarding. They also wanted to keep experimenting, so Double Dash adds the whole dual-driver mechanic, and changes the rules for getting a boost at the beginning of the race, and (so far as I can tell) prevents you from permanently holding an item behind you as a shield. The Gamecube version also has the most aggressive AI players I've ever seen, even on 50cc - I've never *seen* so many banana peels on the track. The DS game walked a lot of those changes back, but kept the prettiness-over-precision focus and judging by Mario Kart 7 on the 3DS and what little I've seen of Mario Kart 8, the series has hovered around that point in the design space ever since. I've also just today been spurred to start playing The World Ends With You, despite not being really keen on fashion or moody teenagers (although I am a fan of Shibuya-kei I don't think that makes an appearance). So far I've completed the tutorial and gotten stuck on the first real mission. I really dig the game's aesthetic - being set in a real place, the graphic design, the way ever screen seems to be playing pre-recorded music with singing instead of being synthesised (it's probably synthesised with voice samples for space reasons, but it *sounds* like snatches of radio music that might be played in the stores you're walking past). I'm not sure about this combat system, though; I've gotten an E-rank on just about every battle I've fought, which bodes ill. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-12-02, 09:19 in Computer Security news
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Post: #370 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 892 days Last view: 89 days |
Today I came across https://www.wicar.org/ which aims to be like the old EICAR anti-virus test file. In their own words:The name "WICAR" is derived from the industry standard EICAR anti-virus test file, which is a non-dangerous file that all anti-virus products flag as a real virus and quarantine or act upon as such. That makes a lot of sense! There's a lot of malware-filtering tools, and it's good to have a harmless test site for them, for all the same reasons it's useful to have a harmless test "virus". The wicar.org website contains actual browser exploits, therefore, regardless of search engine, web browser, filtering appliance or desktop anti-virus product you use, it should be marked as malicious. what I thought you said "harmless"! The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-12-03, 22:50 in Mozilla, *sigh*
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Post: #371 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 892 days Last view: 89 days |
On the plus side, though, from the release notes: "Native MP3 decoding on Windows, Linux, and macOS"! Although it's not obvious to me whether "native" in this situation means "native to the OS, rather than custom built-in to Firefox" or "native to Firefox, rather than depending on the OS". The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-12-04, 09:50 in Sales and giveaways
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Post: #372 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 892 days Last view: 89 days |
It's December again, which means the Yogscast Jingle Jam is on again, including the Jingle Jam Bundle - if you pay over US$30, you get Steam keys and discount codes for a bunch of stuff, but however much you give, it all goes to charity. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-12-16, 10:49 in New Realtek website... where are the audio drivers!??
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Post: #373 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 892 days Last view: 89 days |
I don't think so. "inter-core" sounds like cores talking to each other, but NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Architecture) is about cores talking to RAM. There's a limit to the number of cores you can have connected to the same memory controller, so they don't spend all their time waiting in a queue to access memory. To solve that problem, you can have multiple memory controllers, but if a core connected to controller A needs to read from a RAM chip connected to controller B, there's an extra communication delay involved. Linux' NUMA support lets you pin a process to a particular memory controller (and all the cores attached to it) as well as pinning a process to a particular CPU, which is handy if you need to guarantee every memory access will be fast. However, it does mean your process can run out of RAM even if there's plenty of room on the other controller. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-12-19, 02:52 in MSU1 for Super gameboy
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Post: #374 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 892 days Last view: 89 days |
Copying information from the Discord chat, at some point (around v100, perhaps?) bsnes changed the way it mixed multiple audio streams, from straight averaging (which implies that each of N channels can have a maximum volume of 1/N of the "real" volume) to something a bit fancier, that doesn't decrease the volume so much. bsnes plus was forked before the audio mixing update, so the low volume of MSU-1 music might just be due to that. If you can get your demo working on a more modern version of bsnes or higan, that would be a better indication. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-12-21, 20:23 in higan v107 released (revision 1)
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Post: #375 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 892 days Last view: 89 days |
byuu has released higan v107 for testing and UI feedback:
The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-12-22, 14:28 in Games You Played Today REVENGEANCE
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Post: #376 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 892 days Last view: 89 days |
This week,I've been playing a game called Forager. It's a top-down 2D game roughly in the numbers-go-up genre, a bit like Factorio, and a bit less like Minecraft: you mine rocks and kill monsters to obtain resources you use to upgrade your equipment, and to build machines that transform your resources into other, rarer resources. Those resources let you upgrade your equipment again, and build even more machines, etc. One way Forager distinguishes itself from those other games is its passive skill tree. Certain actions earn XP, fill the level-up bar with XP and get one skill point, which you can spend on a passive skill, which then reveals adjacent skills. Some "skills" are fairly tame, like "smelters work 20% faster", while others unlock the ability to build new machines or items, and some are just weird ("you can now eat rocks, ones and gems"). The other big difference is that instead of an infinite generated world, you start on a tiny island, and resources slowly respawn so you don't run out. There's a "coins" resource (you can mint them yourself, sell other resources, or build a Bank that generates them over time) which you spend to unlock adjacent islands, which gives more room for resources to spawn, and room to build things. However, the maximum size of the world is 49 islands (7×7), and each island has a Special Thing on it. For example, one island has a Stardew Valley style museum, one has a shrine that (when activated) gives double XP for picking flowers and berries for five minutes, there's dungeons and puzzles and even just "island spawns with a bunch of monsters on it". The islands are picked largely at random, I think, so you'll get puzzles and rewards in a different order every game, but they're divided into five biomes, so the Skull Cave will always be somewhere in the Spooky Biome, even if you don't know exactly where. I picked this game up because I wanted something to thoroughly distract me, and overwhelm me with strategic decisions, and it's almost perfectly that. There's always some resource that's on the critical path to the next upgrade, so you have to choose between figuring out how to make that resource spawn faster, or switching to a different goal, or just going mining for a while and hoping you get the thing you want. Unfortunately, my game hasn't gone as smoothly as I'd like. For example, I spent a very long time stuck on the skull tier, where everything requires Great Skulls to craft. I got one skull from a merchant, and found another randomly, but I needed like 50 skulls to make a complete set of gear. Eventually I invested in a passive skill that unlocked a crafting table for "ultimate magical items" and discovered that it would craft Great Skulls from ordinary bones, which I had tons of, and I resumed zooming up the upgrade tiers. Much later than that, I unlocked the Skull Cave, which had a bunch of monsters that dropped Great Skulls, and even gave me an item that would occasionally spawn those monsters around me. So the game definitely gave me the things I needed to progress, eventually -- but because of randomness and the poorly labelled skill tree, I got stuck and frustrated through no fault of my own. That said, I can see why the game was designed that way (replayability!) and I've had a lot of fun before and after that point, so I definitely recommend picking it up if you're looking for that "I'm carrying 1.3k iron ingots, 87 cooked fish, 23 flowers, and a magic potion that makes me spray lightning bolts for a minute" gameplay experience. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-12-24, 07:33 in Games You Played Today REVENGEANCE
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Post: #377 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 892 days Last view: 89 days |
When you say "this time", do you mean as opposed to previous times you've played Borderlands 3, or previous Borderlands games you've played? Is the main quest super-interesting, or do the side-quests just sound boring? The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-12-24, 10:38 in Making interactive fiction
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Post: #378 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 892 days Last view: 89 days |
In the OP I mentioned I'd been playing with Twine, and the thing I was making has gotten to the point where I'm no longer really improving it, just moving things around, so I figured I should release it and move on. It's an interactive short story called The Lost Temple of Kingara, and it's a bit weird, but if any of you have the time to read/play it, I'd love to hear your opinions and feedback. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-12-27, 12:04 in Happy holidays!
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Post: #379 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 892 days Last view: 89 days |
Posted by BearOso It's kind of surreal to be singing carols about sleighs and TV movies about snowmen, while sipping a refrigerated beverage in a tank-top with the air-conditioner on full-blast to escape from the sweltering heat outside. But since I grew up in Australia, it's been that way all my life and it seems perfectly normal. The perpetual grey-orange smoke haze is new, though, and I don't like that at all. Climate change sucks. Oh my, yes. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 20-01-02, 03:11 in Games You Played Today REVENGEANCE
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Post: #380 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 892 days Last view: 89 days |
I'll probably never own any hardware that Horizon: Zero Dawn will run on, but I've been watching a YouTube Let's Play, and it looks pretty great. Portraying current-day or near-future technology as the relics of a lost civilisation is absolutely my jam, and H:ZD is so much better at it than I could ever be, it's kind of frustrating. Meanwhile, I've resumed playing Forager after the Christmas break, and I've gotten to the stage in the game where motion-sickness kicks in. The game has all these juicy animations that zoom and shake the screen when you mine a rock or kill an enemy, and now I've begun to automate those things to the level where my screen shakes every couple of seconds, or even more frequently. Luckily, those animations can be turned off in the options menu, so I think I'll go do that. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
