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| tomman |
Posted on 20-10-26, 00:54 in Games You Played Today REVENGEANCE
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Dinosaur
 Post: #801 of 1318 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 9 days Last view: 3 hours |
DOOM. Yes, the original "doomy dooms of doomed doom", in all its 320x200x8bit blocky glory. First on my good ole' 386SX-40 (Real Hardware™ FTW!). It runs like ass, but it's still quite playable (what it hurts the most is not the anemic CPU, but the severe lack of RAM as my SX only has 6 megs of it, and since my DOS-fu never was strong, it implies running on Win95 which means "Welcome to Thrash City". I'm quite surprised modern PATA drives still talk CHS, but not SATA drives behind a bridge!), and thanks to my legit AWE32, it sounds glorious... even on headphones. Then, on a computer made nearly 20 years later, using Chocolate Doom (I just picked a source port at random from the Debian repos: it has that one, PrBoom, and Doomsday. Hell, they even have a source port for Doom 3!). Smooth silky fluidness, but the emulated OPL music sounds... subpar. Hooray for the death of MIDI synthesizers :/ Even if you hate FPS games (like I do), you can still have some fun with classics - a bit of blocky carnage really hits the spot every few years (the chainsaw is fueled by raw fun!), to be fair. In 1993, parents were concerned due to the realistic gore depicted on Doom. Nowadays, it looks like pixel art stuff that millenials would disdain as "oooooooooooold WHERE IS MY RTX!!!!". I'm still afraid of Barons of Hell :( Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 20-10-27, 01:34 in Games You Played Today REVENGEANCE (revision 1)
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Dinosaur
Post: #802 of 1318 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 9 days Last view: 3 hours |
Spent some time dealing with the lack of MIDI and subpar music instead of fragging blobs of pixels because while I appreciate QVGA way more than 8K, my ears wouldn't let me rest in peace with that ear-grating OPL emulation experience. tl;dr: Debian sucks, but you can get it to work. Long version: Chocolate Doom is the best pure DOOM experience, since it focuses into emulating the original DOS experience as faithful as possible, bugs and all (the proof is that while most source ports can't play the DOS-era demos, Chocolate can do it). This means no fancy OpenGL renderer, no hi-rez texture packs, no convoluted music replacements, no attempts at all to bring DOOM kicking and screaming into the 21th century (that's what we have Zenimax for!). For music, your only options are: - Nothing at all (for those guys out there that no longer have a soul) - Sucktastic OPL emulation (or if you're lucky, use one of the 3-4 PCI cards with actual OPL silicon inside... if you're willing to jump some security theater hoops because letting usermode directly talk to a soundcard is considered - GUS emulation, which requires using extra WADs, and doesn't work that great anyway - Actual hardware MIDI synthesizers (SoundBlasters are pretty much dead nowadays, but there are USB options if you're lucky) - Software MIDI via Timidity Since I can't shoehorn my AWE32 or Live! into any of my laptops*, it means my only choice is Timidity. Luckily, the Doom/retrogaming community has made a good job collecting usable soundfonts/patches you can load into your synthesizer and enjoy - in fact, the official Chocolate Doom docs give you a good starting point so you can tinker and adjust Timidity to your particular slice of nostalgia. But first, we must understand how Chocolate Doom goes all the way since your .WADs to your speakers/headphones if you choose to pursue the MIDI software path: it uses SDL_mixer, which invokes Timidity, which loads your patches, then it uses those to bring Romero/Prince masterpieces to life. Or so it should do. And here is where Debian comes to shit on your party: it seems their SDL_mixer is linked against Fluidsynth, which ships with some truly AWFUL soundbanks (if you hated OPL emulation, Fluidsynth will really make your ears bleed even more than angry Cacodemons). There seems no way to actually configure Fluidsynth to get it out of the way, or to actually use non-shitty soundfonts (every path seems to be hardcoded?), and there is no obvious way to disable it and let SDL_mixer fallback on Timidity. No matter what configuration file you set on the setup program, Chocolate will not be able to use it since Fluidsynth is not Timidity, and once again, computers are made to rebel on us :/ Let's try something else, then: right at the very end of the Chocolate Doom music README, there is a couple of lines that tells you about a supasekret option you can use to use another command to play MIDIs instead of relying on SDL_mixer - and sure enough, after enforcing the use of Timidity here, things start working as intended... more or less. There is now beautiful MIDI (as long as you've configured your patches properly)... and very annoying gaps where the music should loop! This is NO BUENO, guys and gals of the bBoards! Long short story: turns out Debian's SDL_mixer CAN fallback on Timidity (despite not directly linking to it on the package dependencies!): you have to uninstall ALL Fluidsynth soundfonts (fluidr3mono-gm-soundfont, fluid-soundfont-gm, and timgm6mb-soundfont, which are the 3 hardcoded soundfonts on Debian, it seems). No, you can't leave just one installed - ALL OF THEM have to go! (if it finds even one of those, it will start spamming your terminal with missing file errors and ear rape). If no soundfont exists, Magic™ happens: Fluidsynth will get out of the way and let Timidity take control of the party! It will still ignore your Chocolate Doom timidity.cfg settings, so you should edit /etc/timidity/timidity.cfg to point it to your desired patch set. We're done here, fuck Debian, fuck Fluidsynth, fuck SDL, and while we're at there, fuck the computer industry for killing soundcards too! Too much effort for a game I don't even love, but that's what COVIDiot-induced boredom (and the severe lack of wired broadband access) does to your soul. At least I'm no longer afraid to play Doom in levels other than EASY MODO (though I won't be touching Ultra-Violence or Nightmare anytime soon) Sidenote: Due to the recent change of ownership of Bethesda/Zenimax, Doom now belongs to... Microsoft. WE'RE DOOMED! *OK, thanks to the highly creative Chinese sweatshop engineers which are very clever to craft any kind of illegal adapters (like my $5 SATA-to-eSATA cable that should NOT exist as per the SATA specs), in theory you could plug a Live! into a PCI-to-PCIe x1 adapter card, and plug that into a PCIe x1-to-ExpressCard/mPCIe adapter (yes, they DO exist!), creating something that would rival Sega's Tower of Power in ridiculousness. For the AWE32 the options are tougher: ISA-to-PCI/USB gizmos are known to exist, but unlike PCI converters (which are mostly passive devices, except for bridgechips when applicable), those require actual brains, custom drivers, and are aimed at industrial use cases which mean they're EXPENSIVE AS FUCK, and pretty much useless for any kind of retrogaming. Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 20-10-27, 14:09 in Games You Played Today REVENGEANCE
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Dinosaur
Post: #803 of 1318 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 9 days Last view: 3 hours |
Posted by CaptainJistuce Nice~ Will try that next time I hook up my 386, thanks for the tip. Reminder to myself: make a clean DOS bootdisk for W95. Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 20-10-27, 14:27 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
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Dinosaur
Post: #804 of 1318 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 9 days Last view: 3 hours |
Your daily reminder of why Discord (and Electron crapps in general) sucks HARD: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24822755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24829635 tl;dr: those Silly Valley folks deliberately shot themselves on their foots by disabling a recently-introduced safety feature on Electron. Some random reminded that webshit is unsafe in general, found an exploit, and I'm aware that there is a shareware (!!!), closed-source, native Discord/Slack client made in C++/QT (whose main feature is proudly, "not based on web technologies"). Since I don't want to give more users to any of those Valley abominations, I won't name it here, and according to their ridiculous ToS, you should not be using anything but their glorious Electron/browser bloatfest if you want to avoid the banhammer. It's with deep regret that I see Discord/Slack killing not only forums and IRC, but also FOSS projects support channels too: apparently mailing lists and IRC are so ancient that I keep seeing FOSS groups switching to Discord for no good reason at all, other than "it works on my web browser/cellphone". It's almost as stupid as hosting YouTube downloaders on US-operated repositories, refusing to take cash, or using a cellphone only as a Facebook services terminal, but then, the world is full of stupid nowadays :/ Needless to say, if your main communication channel is a Discord/Slack channel, don't expect bug report discussion, help requests/offerings, or feedback from me, other than "stay away". I can't believe at all than a tool made for gamers to have "better voice chat" than Skype or Teamspeak is managing to take over nearly every other sensible communications channel (not already slurped by Zuckerberg&co.), and whose shining marketing feature is "custom emojis" :/ Even their monetization model is dumb, if you ask me (and their finances tell me that selling whatever the fuck is Nitro isn't very profitable) Related: List of words that the Valley is showing me to absolutely hate (aside of "UX" and "PC"): - Onboarding: "just click here to join - no brains needed!" - Friction: "I have to choose a password?!?!?!?!?! WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! TOO DIFFICULT!" *goes back to watch memes on iDevice* - Engagement: "How do we get those idiots hooked to our barely-legal drug so we can monetize them the most?" Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 20-10-29, 16:03 in Games You Played Today REVENGEANCE (revision 1)
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Dinosaur
Post: #805 of 1318 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 9 days Last view: 3 hours |
Posted by kode54 Here is when Debian maintainers lost their brains and decided to hardcode the Fluidsynth presets: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=715461 Turns out there is a way out of this sabotage: the SDL_SOUNDFONTS variable. Except that To kill Fluidsynth and fall back to Timidity: ...then edit /etc/timidity/timidity.conf and use a dir/source directive to point to your desired patch set (I'm currently using this one, which sounds decent to me). Don't bother using Chocolate's setup program for setting a Timidity CFG - it won't work :/ To use a better soundfont: Suggestions welcome! Anything that sounds as good as my AWE64 (I actually checked - mine is an AWE64, don't know why I always confuse it with an AWE32) would be nice. --- It's that time of the year, the time of the yearly Sonic Hacking Contest! To be fair, this year Contest entries on the Retro category (the only one I actually care - that is, the Gen/MD romhacks) are kinda disappointing to me: most of them focus on character swaps (which are fine, neat technical achievements on its own), instead of the usual WOW! factor from complete layout/art mods from the past. It doesn't help that most ROM hackers lost motivation and/or moved to greener pastures (doing commercial games with original IP, for example), but still, there are a few shining gems. My pick so far is this year version of Pantufa the Cat, if you play it you wouldn't believe this is actually a Sonic engine game! It feels completely different, refreshing, original, something with that WOW! I'm looking for, despite being an eternal work-in-progress with a fat chance in Hell to become a finished product. At least they banned Kaizo hacks from the Contest... but then, we have the Expo for sneaky trolling attempts (Sonic Painful World Spikes Kazio) Oh, don't forget to try this: what would happen if EA published Sonic games? Well, they would have found a way to incorporate a credit card reader into Sega cartridges :P Lovely ads, indeed. Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 20-10-30, 23:59 in Misc. software
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Dinosaur
Post: #806 of 1318 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 9 days Last view: 3 hours |
I don't consume Disney/Hollywood/whatever, at all. (I'm even on the "I don't own a TV" league nowadays, albeit a bit involuntary) Not even pirated. They don't even exist for me. Yet their angry lawyers keep fucking all over my computers! I would say "Fuck Netfix" too, but sadly they got into the anime production market too! (case in point: Little Witch Academia) Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 20-10-31, 01:20 in Games You Played Today REVENGEANCE (revision 3)
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Dinosaur
Post: #807 of 1318 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 9 days Last view: 3 hours |
This guy has a reasonable setup guide for Chocolate Doom: https://flaterco.com/kb/DOOM/ChocolateDOOM.html In fact, his knowledge base is worth a read, no matter if you are planning to play Doom on either a real DOS/W9x rig (he has endured the pains of PCI audio to find the most suitable setup... and oh boy, I didn't knew that DOS games and PCI audio really don't mix!) or a source port (do you want Doom or something better than Doom?) I ended downloading some of the common Creative/E-mu SB soundfonts (the 2/4/8MB ones used by AWE32/Live!/Audigy, CTxMGM.SF2), plus the original 1MB AWE32/64 ROM soundfont (usually found as 1mgm.sf2). Also, GeneralUser GS (found an old version back from my MIDI playback tinkering days with my Live! cards), a couple Roland-"inspired" soundfonts (SCC-1 and SC-55, which supposedly was the original MIDI gear used by the folks at ID). Fluidsynth works nicely with anything I throw at it. FluidGM is something I'm promptly purging from my systems, it sounds like you're inside a metal garbage can! Don't know how accurate are the Roland ones, but I'm liking the SCC-1 soundfont. The Creative/E-mu 8MB font is also a good pick to my ears. I'm also keeping the EAWPATS/Timidity patches, as they also sound reasonably OK to me. I guess from this point on, it's just matter of testing, and actually playing the damned game. Why in the hell am I dangerously stepping into audiophile territory just for Doom!?!??!? Those cheesy enemy sound effects haven't aged that well: zombies that howl like dogs when they die, or imps that have a pig complex when roaming around... but I'll take those instead of whatever hyper-realistic sounds ship with whatever is the latest gorefest of the week from the AAA FPS leagues :P Almost interesting fact: aside of Solitaire and Minesweeper, my first PC videogame (when I actually got a PC at home, back in 1998) was actually Doom 2, which was setup by the guy that gave me my first computer lessons. Back then I never got past map 2. I was 11 back then, and didn't feared shooters neither despised them. Even today, over 20 years later, I can barely make past map 3 :P But then, I've spent way more time in original Doom than in its sequel. The computer guy also showed me the coolest cheatcode ever (back then): good ole' IDKFA. Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 20-10-31, 19:11 in Mozilla, *sigh* (revision 1)
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Dinosaur
Post: #808 of 1318 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 9 days Last view: 3 hours |
In this episode of "The Dismembering of Mozilla"... https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/10/mdn-web-docs-evolves-lowdown-on-the-upcoming-new-platform/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24931862 Remember MDN? After the CEO realized she could earn more money by sacking the documentation guys, whoever is left at MDN has to led the next step on every successful Valley project: adding value by bringing more insanity to your product, of course! The most notable feature is that they're farming out the MDN docs contribution to GitHub (which currently is in shaky grounds with the entire FOSS community after the youtube-dl drama, except for SV corps that don't give a damn, as usual). Now it seems that if you want to contribute by editing a wiki page, you would have to learn Git (and git gud with Markdown), because they're "pivoting" to a PR model instead of "let documentation guys use WYSIWYG editors as they have done always". Remember, despite MDN docs being aimed at developers, we developers SUCK at writing docs! This is why we let other people write our goddamned docs based on what we tell to them about how things work. But nope, that's not how things are done nowadays in the post-PC era. Now everybody must code, hence learn Git and craft your docs using markup codes, like a man? Oh, and they're adding more complex hipster crud to their fancy new platform. And they use Pokeymanz analogies to introduce their post, because webdevs are totally into Pokeymanz nowadays. They're also trying to get rid of localized documentation, because the only language that matters is English, of fucking course. Butbutbut EVOLUTION!!!! Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 20-11-01, 15:13 in Games You Played Today REVENGEANCE
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Dinosaur
Post: #809 of 1318 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 9 days Last view: 3 hours |
First videogame ever: Super Mario Bros. (from the SMB/Duck Hunt 2-in-1 pack-in), on a legit front-loader NES - my only cousin back then got one as his Xmas present back in 1992 or so, and we spent those days watching Mario fall into bottomless pits. I would meet fate with the Sega Genesis one or two years later... First PC videogame: Win95 Solitaire, on my uncle's Pentium box sometime around 1997 (I still have most of the parts of that PC, although the PCChips mobo is now busted, and the 2GB Seagate HDD suddenly died this year), then Minesweeper, then Pinball, then some random simple games from whatever shovelware CD-ROM his computer guy had installed into it. First legit PC videogame: Doom 2, circa August 1998, on my shiny new Pentium something (can't even remember if it was vanilla or MMX) box, running a leaked pre-release Win98 beta (the fancy new HTML Help files were still in English!). I had limited PC gaming exposure between 1998 and 2001, between that shiny new Pentium box being a victim of our shitty electricity service (both the original 4GB Samsung HDD and half of the 16MB RAM died shortly after purchase!), and a severe lack of access to software (no Internet, shareware magazine CD-ROMs were uncommon and somewhat expensive) and computer skills (I initially thought "PowerPoint" was a fancy name to something related to electric stuff, not a program I would despise a decade later, so I was afraid to just "click and run"). My initial days of doomed dooms of doomy Doom were very short-lived. I used my computer (when it actually worked and could get booted!) mostly for Word and my initial experiments with software development instead :) First emulator/ROM: Sonic 1 on Gens, ~August 2001 or so, shortly after I got hooked to The Wired™. "Wait, what you do mean that there were other Sonic games for the Genesis!?!?!? WTF, Nintendo had a "Super" Nintendo too?!" First Linux game: GNOME 1's Samegame? From a SuSE 6.3 free magazine CD-ROM sometime around 2002. First Steam purchase: Waveform (October 2012, IIRC), and only because I needed a game that wasn't from Valve for testing the Linux version. (My first three Steam games were gifts from a friend: both Portals and Taxman's Sonic CD) Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 20-11-02, 23:51 in Misc. software (revision 3)
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Dinosaur
Post: #810 of 1318 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 9 days Last view: 3 hours |
GiggityHub's answer so far: "Please stop reposting DMCA'd code, otherwise we will have to ban you and we don't really want to do that!" Well, I let the MS acquisition slide, as it was not a big deal to me. But it's now the time to burn those fuckers. Time to delete my account then (I have nothing of interest there: a few bugreports and the lone PR I've done in my life, for a program I don't even use nowadays) Unfortunately the options suck: Gitlab is also USAian, self-hosting involves money nobody wants to spend, EU is MAFIAA's bitch, and China/Russia.... ugh, despite what the keyboard warriors/closet anarchists/sureofnothings of the world suggests, I prefer to fight the MAFIAA in court and lose rather than hosting a single include/import sentence on a CCP-controlled server, where Comrade Pooh can shitlist my code AND fuck up my "social score" (whatever that means) at will. Nope, Tor is not the answer either! Another good reason to nuke your GiggityHub account: their latest batch of hipster webshit updates broke the site for anyone not using Chorme/latest Firefux (which means site now renders all broken on Seamonkey and others). They don't care about fighting the Blink/Webkit monoculture anymore, and even if your alternate non-Chromium browser sourcecode is hosted there, they don't give a fuck. Yes, Pale Moon devs are feeling the sand in their privates - last time I bothered checking, they were consider a switch to self-hosted Gitlab. UPDATE: Come get my fucking ass, MAFIAA~ Not #DeleteGiggityHub just yet (as I've said, my profile is basically a placeholder), instead I'll let you send the lawyers to Soviet Venezuela, maybe that would be my golden chance to leave this shithole: with an extradition order! Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 20-11-06, 17:35 in Internet numbers bragging thread
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Dinosaur
Post: #811 of 1318 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 9 days Last view: 3 hours |
After TWENTY TWO months, I finally had to cave in, scavenge some hard currency ($50! You can buy like half a cow with that!), and pay the CANTV Mafia™ to rescue my goddamned phone service: Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 20-11-07, 01:17 in (Mis)adventures on Debian ((old)stable|testing|aghmyballs) (revision 1)
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Dinosaur
Post: #812 of 1318 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 9 days Last view: 3 hours |
Kernel 5.8 just landed on Buster through the magic of backports: - It fixes the 2D fuckery on R600, so I'm back to having a non-broken desktop, yay~ - It also breaks the nVidia blob because everybody at both fronts are a bunch of anti-user assholes, of course. The fix? Install the DKMS package from Testing - despite the obvious warning, it works fine, and it incorporates the much-needed 5.8 build fixes. Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 20-11-07, 16:45 in Misc. software
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Dinosaur
Post: #813 of 1318 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 9 days Last view: 3 hours |
Posted by wertigon Gitlab is still located on the USofA, so not an option if you want to stay the hell away from the copyright cartel. People have been talking about Gitea, but that one is Chinese, so you're trading enemies. "Host yourself" is nice... if you can afford it, and as long as your hosting is not in either America, Europe, or China. Then, the last option is So yeah, everything sucks once you analize your options. Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 20-11-08, 01:09 in (Mis)adventures on Debian ((old)stable|testing|aghmyballs)
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Dinosaur
Post: #814 of 1318 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 9 days Last view: 3 hours |
After reading this article, and reviewing a bit what the hell is this Wayland thing (apparently it's a weird trainwreck of the Troo UNIX® Way™ and the "it's ooooold, better not learn from the past!" mindset), my opinion on Wayland went from a mere "meh" to a firm "I'm staying on X11 for the foreseeable future". Now I know why GDM stutters on my I6400, yet the MATE session is fairly smooth (even with software composition enabled on this ancient R500 GPU): GDM runs on gnome-session, which actually boots into Wayland! (according to htop). So... all these years I have been using a little bit of Wayland without even knowing. Too bad the Wayland architecture is a complete mess (now every DE has to bring everything but the kitchensink, unlike the X11 bloaty way of "we provide some reasonable base services like a clipboard"). And since modern, user-facing large open source software projects are ruled by monkeys in steroids... I'm not dropping DANGER MINES UNSAFE X11 for quite some time to come - It Just Works For Me On My Machine™. I'm too old for experimenting with half-baked software these days, y'know. Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 20-11-10, 18:43 in Computer Hardware News (revision 1)
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Dinosaur
Post: #815 of 1318 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 9 days Last view: 3 hours |
PSA: If you have an HP printer (no matter the tech), immediately disconnect it, destroy it physically with extreme violence, then incinerate the remnants. If possible, call an exorcist afterwards: https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/06/horrible-products/ (injket: "Ink as a Service/IaaS", or when "lifetime" stops being "for as long as the device works") https://kevin.deldycke.com/2020/11/revert-hp-printer-ban-on-third-party-ink-cartridges/ (laser: Nintendo-style toner lockouts, but worse) I've had nothing but trouble with printers, but HP are Hell itself. AVOID. Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 20-11-10, 22:42 in Computer Hardware News (revision 1)
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Dinosaur
Post: #816 of 1318 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 9 days Last view: 3 hours |
Posted by CaptainJistuce To be more precise: the ink was free if you printed up to 15 pages a month. Go over that pagecount and you're automatically moved to the next tier, which is not free but still supposedly cheap. Now that HP killed your printer, your <=15 page/month plan is "upgraded" to $0.99/mo. The whole "ink leasing" program makes sense... for corporations, where said plans also include other consumables (even paper!), and more importantly, on-premises tech support (if your printer breaks your biz starts losing money, so you would expect that $OEM dispatch a technician with a fix real fast). For those of us at home? Just buy laser, people. Toners don't dry, and they last pretty much forever. The higher upfront cost is well worth the trouble. Buy laser from anyone BUT HP, and ensure your printer NEVER reaches the wide open Internet (there is no good reason for it, unless you want gratuitous DRM, or West Elbonian script kiddies mining buttcoins and printing actual butts on your laserjet) Having said that, my laser printer (a Konica-Minolta magicolor 1600W AKA Delcop CL3005W) has been out of service since the replacement toners not only were garbage (all but the black toner leak - these are supposedly original "Delcop" supplies, but in fact they're refurbished crap as Delcop are actually nothing but a reseller that rebrands everything they sell), they even managed to kill the chip on the cyan toner, TWICE! (It's always the cyan cartridge for some reason!) Now the printer refuses to print, even in B/W. In the meanwhile I'm using a borrowed monochrome Dell 1110 (a rebadged Samsung ML1610, also sold as a Xerox Phaser something), which is yet another turd: it refuses to recognize the toner sometimes (these use glass fuses instead of actual chips), and it rejects any print job that it's even moderately complex (despite being a shittyass GDI raster printer!). Still, they're not at the same level of HP hell I had endured in the last years when I still was part of the local workforce (never forget the CP1025nw that not even HP wanted it back when it broke, they instead sent a replacement that also broke!) Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 20-11-11, 00:41 in I still HATE smartdevices (revision 4)
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Dinosaur
Post: #817 of 1318 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 9 days Last view: 3 hours |
BANKS! CELLPHONES! GAAAAAH! Yes, it's that time of the year, when banks ensure your life is as miserable as possible. And cellphones empower them to fullfit that mission. Remember last time when I was dealing with some mobile payments app which had some stupid native bit which Aurora failed to install and forced me to pull the app from another (rooted) device? Thankfully Aurora has gotten smarter and split APKs are no longer a problem (they're still a bad idea, but I digress), but today's pile of suck doesn't involve installation troubles. No, it goess deeper... The story starts an hour ago or so, I was dicking with another Puyo Puyo-related crapp, and some shady Soviet crackware. Since I trust nobody, I always keep an "adb logcat" console open with my phone tethered when doing those kind of installs (Spoilers: I chickened out, and this specific Puyo quest ended being a lame Solitaire clone with annoying login prompts, not worth the download). I cleaned up everything, rebooted the phone to ensure I had not let the Soviets in... and then, I saw THIS: Wait, WHAT?! I thought I had safely defused all and any traces of the AT&T-preinstalled Fuckbook trojan! A look at my app managers effectively confirm that the Zuckerborg is "not installed", so this shit had to came from somewhere else. And if you scroll down, here comes our next hint: /data/user/0/com.bancoactivo/lib-main So here is our suspect, the mobile payments app from this stupid bank. Yes, we have banks with really silly names, in this case, a bank whose slogan is literally "It moves with you" (spoilers: they don't - their ATMs in this city have been out of service since early '19, and they just closed one of the two local branches prior to COVIdiots-19). Their mobile payments crapp has been by far the WORST piece of shit I've used so far, and it only gets worse with each update: - Initial release: It couldn't even get payments done! - Update 1: Cool, you can actually pay people! It had some minor quirks, but nothing THAT bad, really. - NEW AND IMPROVED VERSION TWO POINT ZERO: Bloated to hell and back! The login screen no longer scrolls, so good luck typing your password on this thing. - NEW AND IMPROVED VERSION TWO POINT ONE: Even more bloat (but it now has native notifications which tell you when someone sends you money, because the SMS from this bank actually never arrive). - NEW AND whatever 2.2: It stopped working recently with a "Push valido1" error (whatever that means), but on the flip side the logon screen now scrolls again - Latest version (2.2.23 as of today): The "Push valido1" error is now gone... but the crapp now takes FOREVER to start (last time I tried to use it, it took well over one minute to reach the logon screen - I wish I were making this up, but I was actually trying to pay someone else) The reason of all this bloat? Facebook, of course! (React Native, actually... but those idiots also brought in the Fuckbook SDK for no good reason!). Plus a pile of hipster frameworks which bring the app install size to ~157MiB on MY device, making it one of the heaviest apps on my shitphone (only Firefux, the Google Play Services spyware, and VLC are heavier, and the latter is due to VLC insisting of having its own media database for my >7000 song collection. But then, FF is an actual web browser, VLC plays nearly every media file format known to mankind, and the Google bits are a collection of slimy tentacles, while this "Pago Activo" shitware only lets you... send money to strangers). Check the stupid by yourself. They can't even make up a proper identity for their digital signature:  Yes, this is a fail as ridiculous as a bank using Let's Encrypt or self-signed certs... oh wait. Please tell "carlos" from "ti" (that's Spanish for "Idiot Turd", I guess?) that he should stop pretending a bank is a college internship, kthxbye. And yes, all of this crapfest happens in the middle of yet another "the PoS ate my money again" paperdance ritual with this EXACT SAME bank, because fail always ship in pairs. (Actually on this specific bank they don't make you go to the nearest branch, just spend two hours on the phone and email them the PoS receipt, if you have one. And here comes the trifecta: Hotmail blocked my account from sending mail because they thought I was a robot sending spam since I rarely send mail, and when I do, I actually use a proper email client and not some webshit bloatfest, so the sekuritah theater was invoked... and I'm still waiting for a code over SMS that will never arrive thanks to Movistar. Yay me) This bank is not alone in its DLL fuckery: let's recap the bunch of mobile payments app I have installed on this phone (Yes, I really have that many bank accounts, but that's because our banking system is a house of cards, therefore you need to have your eggs in many baskets. Back in the good ol' times opening a new bank account was easy - you just needed a job, and some money. Not today, because banks over here have become closed private clubs, except for a certain gub'mint-owned bank): - Mercantil: about 10 native libraries, but amazingly the app itself is not a bloaty pig. Uses Kony framework, which apparently ships with its own build of V8 because JAVASCRIIIIIPT EVERYWHERE!!!! - Banesco: No blobs! This is the one that lets you make small payments without having to login. In general this is the least sucky one from all banks I've tried so far... when it works! Oh, it doesn't like rooted devices that much, but it doesn't go beyond a simple logcat warning, thankfully.... for now. - Plaza: I thought this bank had forgotten they had an mobile payments app, but last week they shipped a v2.1 update, for the first time ever! This update got rid of the useless SQLite native driver, bringing down the total of native blows to ZERO. Too bad it's yet another canned Cordova HTML/JS "app" :/ - Activo (the one detailed on this post): UGH. A React abomination, complete with the Zuckerborg spybits. - Venezuela: The flaghship state-owned bank from the Bolivarian Revolution™ surprisingly doesn't have a mobile payments app. Instead, you're supposed to pay over SMS (unsafe, but not because of what you're thinking!) or using their hipster Web 3.0 online banking site which now believes everything is a phone, while you enjoy communist propaganda when entering and leaving the site. If only we could have the awesome tech from Japan contactless payments (FeLiCa/Suica and friends), no bank and no app needed - just any phone! Even a dumb one would do. But I guess this beats whatever non-interoperable clusterfuck they have up at the Land of the Liberty *shudder* BTW: These couple of handy apps from F-Droid were used to unmask the stupid: - apps_Packages Info: WOW! Not only this lets you know more about permissions, signatures, services and the like, it lets you invoke most activities built into any app! Plus more. Must have. - CPU Info: Not only it lets you take a look at your system resources, it also tells you more about your apps, including native library names. Also very handy to have. F-Droid makes more palatable having a smartdevice. Almost. Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 20-11-12, 00:24 in I still HATE smartdevices (revision 3)
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Dinosaur
Post: #818 of 1318 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 9 days Last view: 3 hours |
PSA: DO NOT BUY BLU PHONES. They're $AUNT comes to me with her latest buy, a $40 garbage-tier Blu Advance L4 (because his previous Advance L2 met its doom with water). Apparently Bleugh found a SoC maker that could make even crappier sub-basement junk than Mediatek, as the Advance L line features Spreadtrum chipsets. Combine a famelic ARM SoC that would be a better fit for dumbphones, a highly starved ration of RAM (512MB for Android, FFS!), and a supposedly "debloated" Android build (Android Go This L4 specimen had been behaving unbearably slooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow in the last weeks, following a OEM update which shipped months ago. SLOW AS MOLASSES, if not worse. My 386SX with Win95 feels far faster than this vomit. Even routine acts like answering a call or reading a SMS became infuriatingly difficult, if not flat out impossible! The phone would feel too hot to touch, the tell-tale sign of an app gone amok, but which app? Rebooting the phone didn't helped. Clearing caches did nothing. This phone has nothing but the basics (Android Go suite of apps, WhatsFuckingApp, the customary mobile payment crapps, a "duplicate" Calculator app -more on this later-, and the sole non-Google Blu preload, Opera Mini), so there was nothing useful to uninstall. Anyway, once I got $AUNT to remember her Google credentials (protip: if you tell a normie "Google account", they would feel lost, panicked. You have to teach them that Gmail is more than just email if they own any Google-powered device!), we tried the nuclear option (factory reset), which DID helped... for a few days. Today, she comes back to me with her phone - she was visibly pissed off because every time she opened "the Google" (Chrome), several tabs would automatically open with a bogus website that she never visited in first place. Clearing Chrome cache/data didn't do squat - every Chrome startup came with the same two tabs loading the exact same site, "enflower.info", trying to eat her precious mobile data. I entered in "oh fuck, not another Sality" mode. Since I now have the luxury of having a working Internet connection at home, I quickly got this turd plugged into "adb logcat", but I found nothing useful. Next time I tried was to google the "enflower.info" domain, and that's where I hit https://support.google.com/android/thread/52913024?hl=en https://forums.malwarebytes.com/topic/237033-androidtrojanfadebj-on-system-apps/ My enemy was just in front of my eyes: turns out that the L4 was another victim of Blu's contaminated batch of system updates, where their complete lack of supervision over their production lines meant that something as sacred and delicate as a ROM upgrade got infected with the China Pest™. This affected more expensive phones (like the Blu Studio G), but there is nothing about the L4 since this is a CHEAP PoS where nobody gives a damn and they would just junk it and buy something else. Now you know. How to get rid of this shitware? Dunno if there is root for these turds (they're not Mediateks, and Spreadtrums have no love from the modding community since these are not the kind of "cheap" they're looking for). But remember that you can safely uninstall system preloads without the need to root. This is not only good for defusing the Zuckerborgs, it's also useful to neutering China Pests™ - in the upgraded L4 ROM, these are the virus-laden crapps you need to kill: => com.android.awsme => com.android.feplay.server => com.android.system.ups => com.anroid.calculators21 The latter is not a typo - the package ID actually says "anroid" - that's a HUGE red flag, and this is the source of that "duplicate" calculator that I saw earlier... a calculator that requires Phone and Contacts permissions! What. The. FUCK!? Also remember that you will need to redo this every time you factory reset the phone since this is only a user-level uninstall! If you don't get rid of those little bastards, they may download and install more spyware behind your backs, but since this is a $10-in-parts (at best) phone, the result is a nearly bricked device instead. But then, I would not bother, and just bin the phone for your own safety! This is not the first time this Miami-based brand is caught with their pants down, emulating a Huawei. They pretend to care, but anyone that doesn't closely audit their firmware updates is to not be trusted at all. Unfortunately Blu is a very popular brand down here in Latam, yet their users are completely unaware that under the hood they're nothing more but more Chinese scammers! Welcome to the shitlist, BLU Products! Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 20-11-12, 15:48 in Upcoming game announcements/news (revision 2)
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Dinosaur
Post: #819 of 1318 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 9 days Last view: 3 hours |
The next console generation has just arrived, COVID or not! First on iFixit's trusty dismantling table: the Highlights: - Overkill is the name of the game. The cooling game, that is! Looks like both Sony and MS are playing it safe to prevent another wave of overheating-related RMAs. - Look at that bigass 130mm single fan! (made by Delta, which is "God-tier" on the PSU enthusiast arena) It's also surprisingly serviceable - you just have to void your warranty to do so. BOO! - VEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRY unusual PCB sandwich! Heatsink->PCB->"center chassis" (aka more heatsinking)->PCB->shield->PSU, all held together with a cute black rubber band. - MS actually reused many Xbone components on the Sex... including (in a first) the optical drive, the very same PLDS DG-6M5S featured on the previous generation. Most likely they did that because 1) nobody else is making optical drives these days other than PLDS (Phillips/Lite-On) and HLDS (Hitachi/LG), 2) it remains unhacked as of today, and 3) it lets them save money. If your ODD breaks, you should be able to use Xbone replacement-- oh wait, we forgot that those drives are married to the motherboard, and since their security is still broken, you need to perform PCB swaps on those (which sadly involve soldering, and if the reason your drive died is the PCB, you're fucked) - The internal SSD is -surprisingly- a (mostly?) vanilla - The controller is basically the same as the Xbone controller, but with an extra "Share" button and a redesigned D-pad (do Xbox D-pads still suck?) - The AMD SoC clearly says "PROJECT SCARLETT" on the die laser engraving marks, instead of just "Microsoft Xbox". Cute. - There are solder points for a CR2032 battery holder, but no battery is supplied with the console. Does it means that would I need to reset the clock every time there is a power outage or the console is left unplugged for more than a few minutes?! - The internal PSU case looks like a car ECU :D Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 20-11-12, 23:14 in Misc. software
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Dinosaur
Post: #820 of 1318 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 9 days Last view: 3 hours |
Posted by MysticLord Ah well, here are some of your options. Didn't knew SourceForge had Mercurial, but then, who uses SF these days? All the kool kids left that dumpster fire when the ads (and continuous ownership changes, each new owner being worse than the prior one) rotted its foundations :/ Posted by MysticLord Seamonkey. Aside of PM, it's the last browser with a SANE, non-braindamaged UI still standing, and it's still straight Gecko under the hood. There is Waterfox, if you can stand the Asstralis disaster and still want compatibility with XUL addons. Lynx/Elinks are still kicking alive, it seems, same for Dillo, but forget about the perks of the modern web. Unfortunately most modern webshit only caters to Chrome and its clones, so half the Internet will look broken on our "obscure" browsers :/ Case in point: GitHub, which despite being the host for many of those obscure browsers sources, don't care at all for anything that isn't Blink or recent Firefox :/ Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
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