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Posted on 22-04-10, 01:32 in I still HATE smartdevices (revision 2)
Dinosaur

Post: #1081 of 1286
Since: 10-30-18

Last post: 13 hours
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As I said on the Debian thread, I've saved the bad news for the smartdevices hate thread:

Due to work reasons that involve me, a generous uncle, and a shady business involving selling shovel nails to miners, I've been pretty much forced to throw most of my principles into the trash (and potentially exposing me to more rage, murderous intents, and being doxxed), I had to get a new phone solely for installing WhatsFuckingCrapp.

Spare the bleach, just kill me now.

My Alcaturd is aging faster than expected because modern webshit developers hate everything that isn't the latest iDevice (or its $1000 equivalents on Android land), and since $GENEROUS_UNCLE wanted desperately for me to get a new phone so I can get Zucked for business purposes (i.e. selling stuff elsewhere because MercadoLibre is fucking hopeless these days, and so is our society), so since this wasn't my money, I specified the following minimum specs:

- 2GB RAM (1GB means Android Go, so no go for me!)
- 4G LTE for all telcos (that includes Digitel, which I was eager for testing as I'm fed up with Movistar, and commie Movilnet is permabanned until they give me back my long lost CDMA line)
- MicroSD slot
- Headphone jack (fuck Apple and its copycats)
- Camera with autofocus
- Recent-ish Android version (so no Android 7/8/9 stuff that you can barely get support for)
- And just for lulz, a fingerprint scanner because LOLBANKS
- CPU/brand doesn't matter because I would end getting something I would hate anyway as nobody makes cellphones for people like me anymore.

After debating with a salesdroid in the first phone store we found, our options were between some A-series Samturd and a Xinniephone Redmi. Since $GENEROUS_UNCLE already owns an A-series Samturd (it's actually his backup: noone brings iPhones in public in Soviet Venezuela unless you're at the nomenklatura, heavily secured by bodyguards) and HATES IT, the choice was clear: enter the Xinniephone Redmi Note 11:

- Qualcomm Snapdragon 685
- 4GB RAM
- 128GB ROM + MicroSD slot
- Dual SIM with 4G for all the proper Venezuelan bands, including Digitel's oddball Euro 4G frequencies
- AMOLED HD display... with a camera hole
- Android 11... fucked up by Xiaomi's MIUI customizations
- The jack!
- 30W fast charger so the sealed battery can die faster because Li-ion FUCKING SUCKS and we have no better battery tech just yet!
- So many cameras I lost the count, including a FIFTY MEGAPIXEL (!!!) abomination
- A blast from the past: an IR blaster!


Had a LOT of trouble getting F-Droid to properly update the repos on this thing. Haven't degoogled it yet, but I already setup Aurora on it... after figuring out how to disable "MIUI Optimizations" as Glorious Xinnie doesn't want us peasants installing dangerous software on it, it seems (really, the "wait 10 seconds to confirm YOU ARE A GROWN UP ADULT THAT CAN ACT RESPONSIBLY AND NOT SHOOT YOURSELF IN THE FOOT" moronic security warnings are enraging, and the proof cellphones will NEVER replace Real Computers™).

Everything else is a disaster. On the flip side, I now have a cellphone that it's better than all of the PCs in this house combined... if only there was a good "respect YOUR sanity" OS for it.

Oh, and Digitel is yet another shitty telco, but surprisingly their 4G has marginally better coverage in places where Movistar 4G wets the bed. Too bad 3G (the one you're likely to find in most places) is basically unusable no matter the carrier :/

Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Dinosaur

Post: #1082 of 1286
Since: 10-30-18

Last post: 13 hours
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It's fine.

I don't need a Windows replacement because I don't use Windows for my daily stuff anymore.

I'll know my hardware is well past its expiry date the day Debian stops supporting.

Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Posted on 22-04-10, 02:36 in I still HATE smartdevices
Dinosaur

Post: #1083 of 1286
Since: 10-30-18

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Every preloaded crapp on this Xinniephone wants me to accept a goddamned EULA so it can siphon back my data to the mainland.

Even the calculator!

...I'm getting tired of saying "NO, FUCK YOU AND LEAVE ME ALONE!" to this cellphone, but I suspect my experience with the Samsungs would have been more or less the same.

Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Posted on 22-04-12, 00:33 in Mozilla, *sigh*
Dinosaur

Post: #1084 of 1286
Since: 10-30-18

Last post: 13 hours
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https://ircbot.comm-central.org:8080/seamonkey/20220410#c193723
https://ircbot.comm-central.org:8080/seamonkey/20220411#c193772
(ignore the self-signed cert warnings)

Oh boy, Tobin is still roaming around...

(Apparently all his bad blood towards Mozilla-derivative projects began years ago when he couldn't get along with some SM devs, namely frg... and it has gone downhill since then)

Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Posted on 22-04-14, 02:59 in I have yet to have never seen it all. (revision 2)
Dinosaur

Post: #1085 of 1286
Since: 10-30-18

Last post: 13 hours
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Horrible edge cases to consider when dealing with music

If your favorite artist abuses Unicode, exploits Wikipedia disambiguation pages, or uses the same names as 20 other artists, consider calling a psychiatrist. Or an exorcist. Or you may be listening to doujin music.

Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Posted on 22-04-14, 21:29 in I still HATE smartdevices (revision 2)
Dinosaur

Post: #1086 of 1286
Since: 10-30-18

Last post: 13 hours
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Why every cellphone I've owned since my RAZRs have been much worse than the previous one!?

OK, because I can't be negative the 100% of the time, here are the positive things about my Xinniephone Redmi Note 11 (vanilla, not Pro, not 5G - there are at least four or five varieties of the Note 11):

- The OLED display is simply stunning. Every computer, TV, cellphone, clock, and anything with a display should be OLED, period. It's like going back to the Good Ol' Age of CRTs, but this time with Retina™ razor-sharp pixels, and actual blacks!

- This phone is FAST. It boots far faster than ANYTHING ELSE in this house, including computers and dumbphones! Apps install in a breeze - it now takes more time to download the .APKs than to actually install them! Gotta go fast, would Sonic say if he owned such a phone... I guess I made good for sticking to Qualcomm instead of defecting to Mediasuck, Unisuck, or whatever Samsung does these days with Exynos - the big Q is evil but they do know how to make speedy cellphone SoC, and this goes all the way back to my V3m's MSM6500.

- The (main) camera isn't total garbage.

- Dual SIM with LTE for both Latam and Euro frequencies, which means you no longer need a special snowflake phone just for Digitel's eurosnowflake UMTS/LTE bands.

- 128GB ROM + MicroSD slot? YES PLEASE!

OK, enough praising. The phone is a total pile of shit, aggravated by the fact that it's pure Chinesium crapware under the hood:

- I'm FED UP with the constant nannying from MIUI's "this action is sensitive, you're not grown up enough for taking control of your own device". Fuck off with that shit, folks. We paid for the phone, it's OURS, not Xiaomi's property!

- Even after unlocking Developer Options, half of the good stuff is still locked behind a mandatory "Mi Account" infosucking lockdown. Wanna unlock your bootloader? You need a SIM card for that! Need to install apps over USB? Nope, can't do - unless you're blessed by the Party, that is! Or... follow these convoluted instructions to actually be able to test your own code on your goddamned phone. FUCK OFF, XIAOMI!

- Why setting up a custom wallpaper in Android is such a chore!? No, you can't do that from Settings, because Xiaomi wants you to connect to the Internet, accept an EULA, and use any of the wallpapers from their gallery instead of your carefully chosen .JPG already stored inside your phone! Instead, you must resort to your gallery application to be able to set your wallpaper. GOD DAMN IT XIAOMI/GOOGLE!!!

- NanoSIMs. The phone is BIG, maybe too much for comfort, yet OEMs still insist into using those ridiculously small SIMs just because Apple says so, while generating a nice revenue stream for those greedy telcos that still insist into charging $10 for a completely pointless SIM swap. At least Soviet Venezuela will be a CDMA eSIM-free land for years to come...

- The amount of bloatware on this phone is simply bewildering. Over 400 packages on the stock ROM out of the box, including:
* The usual Google suite of bloaty crapps, including the dialer and SMS crapps.
* Qualcomm's mysteryware™
* CCP Xiaomi's spyware, thinly disguised as "system preloaded apps". Why in the fuck do I need to accept an EULA and grant permissions to a frickin' calculator application!?
* Speaking of Xiaomi's spyware, this phone also ships with a bunch of Xiaomi's unremovable payment crapps that only work on India and China.
* More chinesium spyware from misc sources (including Tencent and Tik Tok)
* Of fucking course, Meth spyware: no less than FOUR Farcebook APKs (but surprisingly no Instagranola or WhatsFuckingCrapp)
* For no good reason at all, a lone Deutsche Telekom package (de.telekom.tsc).
* TWO FM radio tuners: including a hidden one from Codeaurora which is actually decent, unlike MIUI's overly minimalist abomination.

- Seriously, MIUI is among the worst UIs I've ever seen on a cellphone. From annoying notifications for enabling shit you don't want (no, for the sake of Jesus Fucking Christ, I do not want to add ANY account to this cellphone!) to pointless duplicate control panels and separate crapps for setting up basic phone services. Can't believe people PAY for this garbage in droves! Where are the sanctions against Xiaomi with all that evidence!? We nailed Huawei and ZTE for less than that!

- The fingerprint scanner (built into the side power button) is kinda garbage, a complete waste of time and money.

- No notch, but a front camera hole. Oh, and a display with rounded corners. Jonny Ive, ROT IN HELL!

...

Anyway, I've had little interest into tampering with this thing (it's a "work" phone, after all - I'm not getting rid of my Alcaturd anytime soon), but enough is enough, so I've had great satisfaction with the usual no-root debloating method. Sadly you can't get rid of half of Xiaomi's spyware, but at least now that F-Droid has decided to get along with this Note 11, I'm doing the usual replacements (Simple Mobile Tools are a godsend, and it seems I'll be forced to make a truce with Firefuxed Fenix for the sake of business)

Stuff pending:

- Ringtones. GAH!
- Finding a suitable wallpaper. Now that I have a 24000x1080+px screen, finding suitable wallpapers from my favorite Touhou characters have become challenging - this stupid pointless ultrawide aspect ratio (20:9 says my trusty Casio fx-991MS) isn't doing me any favors.
- Finish installing the usual crapps (banks, MercadoLibre bloatfest, check what am I missing from F-Droid)
- Find a way to get banned from Meth use WhatsFuckingCrapp from Pidgin without losing my sanity or getting banned from Meth.
- Try not to break the OLED display - the phone store salesdroid warned me that replacements are $75+!

Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Posted on 22-04-15, 02:39 in I still HATE smartdevices
Dinosaur

Post: #1087 of 1286
Since: 10-30-18

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Ringtones! GAAAAH!

- Copy ringtones to phone
- Settings->Sounds->tap on the respective notification sound buttons
- Get greeted by a blank screen with a very small loading animation, because in its unlimited wisdom, Xiaomi's sound gallery crapplet is the same used for wallpapers and REQUIRES Internet... on that day of the month where my DSL is wetting the bed.
- Go back, try again. After enough tries, you will see a "use local media" option on top of the online picks. Tap that!
- Pick which app you want to use as your sound provider - in my case I have at least FIVE options: the stock gallery, file manager, and music player crapps, Simple Gallery Pro, Total Commander, and something else I can't remember.
- Since Total Commander is a honest-to-God (but heavily crippled by Google as of Android 11) file manager, browse to the folder where you placed your ringtones, and pick one.
- The ringtone will be "installed" to the built-in ringtone library, so you only need to do this once per file (and if you mess it up, you'll end with unremovable dupes!)
- Now you CAN apply the ringtone! Rinse and repeat for both notifications and alarm tones.

Why this has to be rocket science, people!? Motorola, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and nearly every other cellphone OEM (excluding greedy telcos' lobotomized firmware THAT'S WITH YOU VERIZON!) had pretty much perfected ringtone/wallpaper selection by 2006. Now the whole industry has regressed so hard on this seemingly simple bit of UI/UX that we're barely one step above requiring firmware hacks just to change a ringtone!

Cellphones. Must. Die.

Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Posted on 22-04-15, 18:29 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
Dinosaur

Post: #1088 of 1286
Since: 10-30-18

Last post: 13 hours
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Behold, the ThinkPad Z15!


Two lucky finds:
- The ThinkPad is actually a T40, yet another family heirloom of sorts. Needs a new HDD, battery is dead as a doorstop, it could benefit from a Dothan CPU upgrade, already maxed out RAM and unlocked the miniPCI slot for swapping in some Atheros 802.11n love. Apparently these were the final pre-Lenovo ThinkPad designs, also love that the plastics are mainly MADE IN JAPAN.
- As for the replacement banknote: normally those God-tier low serials go for $doubledigits (and in the case of replacements, $100 is not so unlikely depending on condition). I actually paid $3 for it from my usual sources :D Extremely lucky find, considering that you won't see one outside of an auction catalog!

Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Posted on 22-04-15, 21:33 in Mozilla, *sigh*
Dinosaur

Post: #1089 of 1286
Since: 10-30-18

Last post: 13 hours
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Starting late March, Google WebComponents® is mandatory for Pixiv, not only for logon:
https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=28107

So yeah, we lost the Japanese Internet to Google too :/
In the case of SM/PM/non-Chrome-or-latest-Firefuxed, dom.webcomponents.enabled is enough to make Pixiv work again, but dunno what other features of this quasi-proprietary ever-unfinished spec they require. Also, it's a bad idea to leave that pref always on considering that it may break more sites (if they aren't already broken, that is!).

The Internet is just a "git pull" from a webshit crapcoder away from becoming the Googlenet™, yet people insist into only blaming Google and folks. Nope, webdevs are also guilty of this shitfest, either by omission (by not knowing what the fuck that fancy JS framework is doing under the hood, and updating willy-nilly without even reading the release notes, much less testing before pushing to Production) or actively willingly ("old browsers are UNSAAAAAFE DANGER MINES WORLD WAR III!!! Why don't you just use Chrome?"). Next time you're considering updating a website/webapp, STOP, use your brain, and look at the world around you, which is populated by ordinary people, not artists/"innovators"!

As a minor positive note: you can now logon to Pixiv with an ordinary Pixiv account without having to switch the whole site to English first.

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Posted on 22-04-16, 14:27 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
Dinosaur

Post: #1090 of 1286
Since: 10-30-18

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Posted by CaptainJistuce
Posted by tomman
... you won't see one outside of an auction catalog!
Or now the bBoard!

Right, you won't see one outside of an auction catalog, numismatic catalogs, and Other People's Collections!

At least on bBoards you get legacy IBMs with your rare bills, so I'll let you have that one :)

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Posted on 22-04-18, 03:05 in I still HATE smartdevices
Dinosaur

Post: #1091 of 1286
Since: 10-30-18

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For those having spotty/unstable/unusable WLAN problems with Spreadasstrum/Unisuck cellphones: before slamming the phone into the nearest trashcan, consider updating the firmware of your router/AP!

Turns out that there was nothing wrong with all those Spreadasstrum phones' WiFi (or with that ol' broken BlackBerry Torch) that roamed on my airwaves: it always was my AP! Or to be more precise: the DD-WRT build on it.

Let's get technical!
While Saki does the routing duties on This House Networks, for obvious reasons she can't do wireless. Instead, since December '11, WiFis have been under the domain of a good ol' TP-Link WR743NDv1 (which isn't even full-N, but draft-N!). Old, but I don't really need that much as 1) for serious stuff, my computers have perfectly working Ethernet jacks, and 2) this house didn't really got polluted of WLAN-capable mobile junk until 2016 or so (and even then, with a 3MB DSL anything bigger/badder/better would be a waste of everything). This Atheros-based '743 has been running DD-WRT since Day One, and only have been updated once every few years - on DD-WRT, updates are a PITA since you have to reset and redo all your settings (and no, you can't backup&restore settings between different builds, unless you want a brick!), so I tend to drag my ass on it and simply forget, so the last time was *checks firmware* Build 30432, August 16, 2016.

Normally that wouldn't matter (aside of horrible vulnerabilities on 802.11 that noone would bother exploiting in real life anyway) since for a device, a WLAN is a WLAN is a WLAN and all it has to do (after getting my WLAN password) is to blast bits back and forth on my airspace. Except for a long-gone BlackBerry Storm 9800, and more recently, every single Spreadtrum/Unisoc-powered Blu smartdevice that has visited this house (Advance L4, Zoey Smart). The symptoms are the same in all cases:

- Heavy packet loss (noticeable on pings)
- Total and complete WLAN blackout after a few minutes (actual length is variable, but in any case, no more than 5 minutes in the best case), requiring to cycle WiFi off/on on the device.

Tried tweaking EVERY SINGLE SETTING available on DD-WRT, to no avail... except for one: WMM Support. Disable that, and WLAN suddenly is stable again on those problematic clients! BUT!
Posted by DD-WRT
Short for Wi-Fi MultiMedia, is a Wi-Fi Alliance interoperability certification that provides a basic QoS "best effort" like function to Wi-Fi as well as other functions such as power saving, its a requirement & part of the 802.11n (& AC & AX) specification. Disabling WMM will result in clients (ones that strictly obey specifications which is 90% of them) falling back to 802.11a/g LEGACY rates (54M), the same way as using TKIP with WPA2 yields LEGACY rates.

So... uh, I get stable WLAN on a couple devices, at the cost of severely downgrading my connection and losing performance. Lovely. Years ago, when I tested with the Torch, I didn't bothered since eventually that phone was borrowed and eventually it left this house... and years later, I would get this craptastic KrapOS turd that won't stream a single song without dying midway. At first I thought I had got a lemon, but when testing the Zoey Smart on other WLANs, it actually worked just fine! And for that matter, that horrible Advance L4 worked fine too! (that one is still alive, BTW - it DID needed a new battery and a reflash)

You can now guess where this is going: check the router, fiddle with every setting, until ticking out the magical "disable WMM" radiobutton. And sure enough, the Zoey Smart now had stable WiFi... at 802.11g rates. I was down to two options:

- Buy a new router: I have better things on which to spend $30 (which buys me a shitty WR820N, unflashable to anything due to low RAM and craptacular Mediatek chipset that will never be supported by any 3rd-party firmware - less terrible but still crap routers are $80+, and still have unsupported Mediatek chipsets as Qualcomm Atheros seems to be a dying breed on the TP-Link universe these days), so NOPE, that's NOT happening. No, I'm not interested in OpenWRT/Tomato/[insert here your favorite router distro] - it's DD-WRT or bust for me.

- Update DD-WRT, and hope for the best: Technically those ancient routers are still supported by their builds, but on a best-effort basis, as in "YOU are solely responsible for testing, don't bug us if it bricks your device, if it breaks you get to keep both halves, patches welcome". To make things more complex, starting with build 33375 you can't simply flash over your current DD-WRT setup: you need to revert to TP-Link's factory firmware, then upgrade from there, and with every step there is a mandatory reset (unless you want a brick. Did I've mentioned that bricks suck?). And from what I've read, recent builds are on the bloaty side (just like every other router distro, except that 4M/32M devices are no longer welcome by OpenWRT and friends), so they had to lose some fat to fit into the minuscule 4MB FlashROM, while gaining some bugs in the way.

Long short story: Ended flashing to DD-WRT's "recommended" build (44715, November 3, 2020), although there are reports of more recent builds working fine for basic purposes on the '743 (as of today, last build is 48646 from yesterday!). After changing underwear for the umpteenth time this year (I'll never stop getting scared from BIOS/firmware flashing!), I finally got my '743 with a build where WMM is actually not broken, and now my Unisuck-powered Zoey Smart is happy to have its WLAN working for more than 5 minutes at a time. Dunno why only those (and old BlackBerries) are so stingy with proper WMM support (even asstacular Realsuck WLAN NICs were fine with my setup, but almost all of the wireless-capable devices on this house come from Qualcomm), but eh, that's no longer a problem here *knocks on wood*

tl;dr: try to update your WLAN AP firwmare more than every few years!

Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Posted on 22-04-25, 18:04 in Cartoons, imported
Dinosaur

Post: #1092 of 1286
Since: 10-30-18

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Heh, so Miku went from selling Corollas in 'murica to... selling train tickets to otakus?

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Posted on 22-04-29, 03:19 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
Dinosaur

Post: #1093 of 1286
Since: 10-30-18

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So it seems that airplanes have gotten the Windows 95 disease:
Posted by tomman
Also, speaking about bugged planes, don't forget to reboot your Airbus weekly:
https://it.slashdot.org/story/19/07/25/1932229/airbus-a350-software-bug-forces-airlines-to-turn-planes-off-and-on-every-149-hours


Not to be left behind, Boeing is trying hard to keep their first place at bugged planes:
https://www.theregister.com/2020/04/02/boeing_787_power_cycle_51_days_stale_data/
Don't forget to reboot your Screamliner weekly too!

The 737 MAX, 777X and Dreamliner: Boeing's trifecta for BUGGYBUGGYBUGGY planes that almost make frickin' Sukhoi look like perfection. This is just sad - please Boeing, leave Chicago behind, sack the beancounters, bring back the engineers, and give those fancypants Neos a good run for their money!


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Dinosaur

Post: #1094 of 1286
Since: 10-30-18

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Why NE1000/2000 cards weren't actually shit:
http://www.os2museum.com/wp/was-the-ne2000-really-that-bad/
The answer will surprise you: these were cheap but decent cards for the hardware of its era, and while there were awful clones (including the Realsucks), most of the times the ones complaining were the Linux users... because we got SHIT DRIVERS that nobody bothered fixing! (and now it's too late for sending in any patches, due to vanishing aging hardware that people is unlikely to use with modern setups)

AKA "if you're gonna write a driver, follow the rules by the book" (and in this case, there WAS a book!).

So yeah, avoid those cards if you plan to run Linux on your retroboxes, unless you're comfortable with the idea of building your own kernels :/

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Posted on 22-05-02, 19:04 in Upcoming game announcements/news (revision 1)
Dinosaur

Post: #1095 of 1286
Since: 10-30-18

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Not a great year for Square Enix, as it shows that they stopped caring about gamers and are en-route to become the next Konami:

- The CEO's New Year letter: "the future is blockchain and NFTs".

- Then, they said that Japanese studios should not make Westernized games (while there is some truth to this, it doesn't mean that a Japanese studio can't come with a good FPS or something that Westerners love - that's quite xenophobic IMO. A good game is a good game, no matter who made it or from where it got influenced, and this comes from a guy that absolutely despises most Western games!)

- Oh, you say Japanese should make Japanesey games? Well, if only you let them do so: just ask Sonic's father, Yuji Naka, who just nuked all bridges with Squenix (and then some) after his last project (Balan Wonderworld) imploded due to good ol' Executive Meddling. OK, Naka is no sweetheart, but man, Squenix management is plain criminal, to both their staff AND gamers!

- And in a move to advance both their goals of not caring anymore on Western games and pivoting their business model towards buttcoins and craptoscams, they just had a firesale where Embracer Group (the THQ Nordic dudes) picked nearly every foreign Squenix IP (including Tomb Raider and Deus Ex) and studio for CHEAP ($300M), with only some fire damage after a string of poorly received bad games. But don't worry, Squenix CEO is putting that cash to good use... by investing it in buttcoins/craptoscams.

Remember: this is the same publisher that now considers that people no longer play games for fun, but as a unpaid full-time job, hence the need for pushing buttcoins/craptoscams down the gamers' throats. Kiss your Final Fantasies goodbye, people. This is Konami 2.0 which we're seeing here, live and uncensored.

Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Posted on 22-05-09, 01:02 in What are you listening to right now?
Dinosaur

Post: #1096 of 1286
Since: 10-30-18

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RypOHapqCeQ

Not everyday a Touhou MV hits the ball out of the park since Bad Apple!!!... and this time it had to be one about THAT sly fox!

Fuck you very much, Tsukasa. "CON-sultant" indeed :P

Also, I'm glad the Touhou fandom still has the guts to make catchy can't-get-out-of-my-head arranges.

Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Posted on 22-05-11, 03:58 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
Dinosaur

Post: #1097 of 1286
Since: 10-30-18

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https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/05/the-music-lives-on/

The iPod is officially dead: well, Apple had pretty much pulled the plug on the dedicated offline music player devices arena about a decade ago (I refuse to consider the iPod Touch as a legit iPod - it's just a phoneless iPhone), but it's now official: Cupertino believes everybody* has fully switched to cellphones, streaming services, and Bluetooth earplugs. If you still want a phoneless iPhone, now is your last call (ha!) to pick one, as Apple will keep selling them "while supplies last".

I guess we'll never see that 1TB SSD iPod from official sources anytime soon then...

"No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."


*well, I've fully embraced cellphones as my main portable digital music players since December 2006, but I'll stick to offline files and wired headphones 'till the day I die.

Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Dinosaur

Post: #1098 of 1286
Since: 10-30-18

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Either Hell officially froze AGAIN, or Put-it-in already delivered the nukes and we're actually dead, but I can't believe this: nVidia is opensourcing their (kernel) blob!

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia-open-kernel#=1
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31344981
https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules

However, I would hold the champagne if I were you - compared to AMD's move back in its time (when they went all-in), noVideo's release is quite half-assed IMO:

- It's only the kernel driver - the userspace part remains closed source.
- It only supports Turing GPUs and newer - for previous GPUs you still need the full-fat blob, or worse, Nouveau :/ You're due for a new GPU/laptop anyway, so go cash your buttcoins!
- For now, this isn't on a upstreamable status, and won't be for a long time to come...
- Unlike AMD, they aren't releasing GPU documentation.

My opinion? Too little, too late, noVideo! If I ever buy a new computer, I will be enduring ATi driver hell instead. Or wait until Boeing Intel gets its shit together and actually releases their Radeon-killer Xe ARC GPUs on systems you can buy!

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Posted on 22-05-14, 18:21 in (Mis)adventures on Debian ((old)stable|testing|aghmyballs) (revision 1)
Dinosaur

Post: #1099 of 1286
Since: 10-30-18

Last post: 13 hours
Last view: 5 hours
After gambling $10+S&H on a bunch of used PATA laptop drives* on MercadoLibre (spoilers: major success!), the Project ThinkPad can march on: time to bring some Debian love to this classic!

- Getting this thing to boot Linux is tricky: for starters, while all Pentium M CPUs support PAE/NX, only C0-stepping Dothans do announce its support through CPUID. All Banias (such as the 1.4GHz part on this T40, quite a bit on the "WEAK" end), and B0/B1 Dothans do not. Since you want PAE for NX and being able to use all of the RAM on these things (or to be able to boot most 32-bit kernels that require PAE these days), you need to pass "forcepae" on the boot options.

- While my trusty Parted Magic stick would boot fine (after telling to force PAE), a stock Debian 11 netinst USB would hang shortly after starting the installer (and sometimes, even before!). Long short story: turns out one of the two (fake) 1GB Kingston DDR400 sticks I found on that seedy shop at Caracas is somewhat temperamental at times (and that's the replacement for another stick which failed memtest!). No BIOS setting helped this, so my only workaround was to do the install taking away the flaky RAM and replacing with with an older 256MB stick. After setup, I was able to put back the flaky stick back and it booted fine (Windows XP and Parted Magic do seem to not care either, but I am not spending another $15 on RAM and mail!)

- This thing has a Radeon 7500 (R200) discrete GPU. Don't expect wonders, as the Xorg drivers for those vintage Radeons are barely good enough for a 2D desktop, and some minimal video acceleration (remember: XAA is gone for good and EXA sucks balls for such vintage chips). Combined with the WEAK 1.4GHz Banias, it's a recipe for multimedia deception: on Windows, VLC can get smooth video for SD, and watchable results for 720p/30. On Linux... AGH MY EYES! 720p is completely out of the game, and SD is DOGSHIT. The FOSS Radeon driver is simply THAT BAD for R100/R200-based chips! There is no tunable you can adjust to boost performance, short of running really old Linux distros back from when ATi chips had buggy but speedy drivers! On the flip side, at this stage these chips are rock solid so you're not going to crash X11 anytime soon. OGL video is unusably slow, Xv is almost slideshow level, and only X11 (that is, unaccelerated) video offers mostly watchable results... as long as you don't want fullscreen, or stay under 480p! Results are marginally worse with desktop compositing on (which is now the default on MATE). I guess I should try tracking down a Dothan CPU and figure out if the extra cache can help, but I suspect the answer would be a resounding "lolno". Too bad noone made CardBus GPUs/video decoders...

- Haven't messed up too much with the IBM-proprietary bits yet. Volume control buttons on Thinkpads are special snowflakes: IBM, in its infinite corporate wisdom, implemented an extra mixer stage on ThinkPads' Embedded Controller (the Hitachi H8 MCU that makes ThinkPads so "special" when compared to your regular non-IBM laptop) which is controlled by the volume buttons, and it's completely separate from your actual audio IC/codec (in this case, an Analog Devices AD1981B AC'97 codec) - the volume control alone on your taskbar is not enough to control volume on ThinkPads! In any case, those buttons work, but won't integrate with your desktop - instead you need to install "tpb" (not THAT TPB!), so you can get a '80s-style volume OSD. Temperature sensors work fine, need to figure out fan control (on Dells you use i8kmon, wonder if there is something similar for the more lovely ThinkPads)

- If you want to get rid of PulseAudio (and on such weak machines, you do), don't forget too to purge PipeWire. Yes, it's now on Debian, although it's mostly useless for those of us not using the useless city of Wayland. As of Debian 11 "Bullseye", you need to purge pulseaudio package, and you're done.

- WLAN is solid after getting rid of the ancient Intel 2200BG card in favor of a TP-Link WN861N (which is highly desired nowadays, and you still need a modded BIOS or the "no-1802" utility to work around moronic IBM's whitelists). You can't expect anything less from an Atheros card on Linux. In fact, I did the entire setup over WLAN this time, was done after a couple hours.


Veredict: I have the slowest bento box running Linux in history, completely useless for multimedia, but hey, it's a genuine IBM ThinkPad!


*sorry, no SSD love possible on the retro-unfriendly Soviet Venezuela: while mSATA SSDs are reasonably priced, PATA-to-mSATA adapters are unobtanium, and CompactFlash cards are absurdly expensive for no good reason other than "greed".

Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Dinosaur

Post: #1100 of 1286
Since: 10-30-18

Last post: 13 hours
Last view: 5 hours
...and I blew up the speakers on the T40 after doing my video testing. Now they sound heavily distorted under ANY OS!

But if you plug headphones, those sound fine. Ah well, I guess I need new speakers too :/

I guess those fairy tales of "Linux damages hardware" might be real. Or I simply found another case of "old hardware often dies". Whatever...

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