| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-12-12, 08:58 in Terminal colour schemes
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 Post: #61 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 889 days Last view: 85 days |
Apparently Microsoft has finally changed the Windows 10 terminal colours from the traditional Windows 3.1 16 color palette to something a bit more readable. Unfortunately, GNOME Terminal doesn't exactly make it easy to set a custom palette. There's a lot of cool colour schemes in the world, but while every terminal has the same basic colour settings, there's a bunch of weird colour-scheme formats; it seems like there's a great opportunity for somebody to write a tool to convert between them. Preferably one that doesn't involve downloading shell-scripts from the internet and automatically running them. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-12-12, 09:25 in Soulja Boy Launches Game Console...
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Post: #62 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 889 days Last view: 85 days |
If modern pop is the accessible, exciting descendant of classical music, rap is the accessible, exciting descendant of poetry. It's not about melody and harmony, it's about intricate rhythms, metaphors, and double (or triple) meanings. Go listen to Rap God by Eminem, then explore the high-school English class dissection to learn about all the references and layers of meaning. It's also worth watching an analysis of the rhyming scheme; check out the way he switches between repeating some set of vowel sounds then switching up to a different set, then returning later for emphasis. After all that, you might not enjoy listening to rap, but hopefully you'll agree that there's at least some tracks worthy of respect. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-12-14, 00:10 in Sales and giveaways
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Post: #63 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 889 days Last view: 85 days |
GOG's Winter Sale is on, and they're giving away copies of classic adventure game Full Throttle Remastered. You can also get Fantasy General (a classic DOS-era turn-based strategy) if you by anything, and Everspace, a very pretty space-themed shooter. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-12-14, 07:23 in Mozilla, *sigh* (revision 1)
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Post: #64 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 889 days Last view: 85 days |
There's a bunch of "reasonably functional" GUI based rendering engines, like Dillo and NetSurf, freely available. They have not been taken over by fascists, nor been forked by major corporations. They just fell way, way behind on the compatibility treadmill, so they work nicely with 80% of the websites on the Internet but fail horribly on the 5% of websites people care most about. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-12-16, 02:27 in Games You Played Today REVENGEANCE
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Post: #65 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 889 days Last view: 85 days |
A while ago I played through Fallout: New Vegas and enjoyed it immensely, so I figured I should get around to playing the other non-Bethesda games in the series. With the Fallout Fixt bugfix mod, the game works pretty well in Wine and I've played a few hours so far. It's interesting to see what parts of the game carried over to New Vegas, like the stats and perks, and to see dramatic changes, like turn-based third-person combat becoming real-time first-person, or the way moving from one town to another was originally watching a dotted line crawling across a map with random encounters, and wound up as actual gameplay. Unfortunately, although the game works *pretty* well it doesn't work *perfectly*. Apparently Fallout is from that late-MS-DOS-early-Windows era when it was OK to just spin the CPU while waiting to draw the next frame, and as a result this old 2D game is using most of two CPU cores (I guess it spawns a thread?), causing my CPU to get hot and my motherboard to start beeping temperature warnings at me. I guess I need to blow dust off the heat-sinks again, but it annoys me that I should have to worry about CPU usage on a 23-year-old game. I tried running the game pinned to a single CPU core, but the game wound up playing at about half speed, so that was no good. I found a program called "cpulimit" that would limit a process to some particular percentage of CPU usage, which sounded great... but apparently it worked per second, so if I set it to 50% it would run at full speed for half a second, then pause for half a second. Maybe I'll just play in very short bursts... The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-12-16, 09:18 in Games You Played Today REVENGEANCE (revision 1)
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Post: #66 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 889 days Last view: 85 days |
> Also most games that use a wait loop don't cause the CPU to heat up much, since it's barely a work load. Modern applications that need to wait for something to happen will have code like: However, this power-consciousness is a relatively new development; in the bad old days CPUs couldn't power down, so there was no good reason for applications to call `sleep()` and a few good reasons not to, so they did things like: I spent a few minutes today creating a patch for the CPU limit tool, teaching it to do its limiting in smaller chunks. Once I told it to use 16ms chunks (about a frame at 60fps), the game ran a *lot* more smoothly. Still a little bit gritty, and occasionally it would ignore a mouse-click because I happened to click within the 8ms window when the app was asleep, but the audio is fine and the game is more than playable. Unfortunately, it seems that the "cpulimit" tool is woefully unmaintained (pretty much no issues or pull-requests have been touched since 2015). Debian's "cpulimit" package is apparently a competing project really named LimitCPU, which doesn't have a public issue-tracker. Its last update was in 2017, though, so maybe it's a bit more lively... ACTUALLY TALKING ABOUT THE GAME NOW This is not actually my first run-in with Fallout 1; I watched a YouTube Let's Play of a low-int, melee run years ago, and I also tried to play it on my laptop once (bad idea: the game relies pretty heavily on right-clicking and is therefore not trackpad friendly). This time I went a bit easier on myself and picked the agility archetype rather than trying to roll a character completely from scratch, and it's going pretty well. I was worried about the turn-based combat, but it turns out that as long as you only aggro one at a time, you can walk up to a radscorpion and plug it in the face with your starting 10mm pistol before it does much damage. Cave rats are harder to hit, but they also deal a lot less damage. Three swipes at 47% to-hit is *usually* enough to finish them off in a single round of combat. After finding Shady Sands, I explored Vault 15 and did the radscorpion cave quest without much issue. The social side of things is more surprising. My expectation was that exploring the raider camp, or the Skullz HQ would be risky... instead, most people are pretty chill and will talk to you and let you leave, as long as you don't actually draw your weapon or insult them to their face. On the other hand, I expected that if anybody was going to be aggressive, I'd have a chance to talk them down, or at least apologise and run away. A couple of times now I've talked to somebody politely, only to get a response like "now you die!" and then all the NPCs attack me at once and it's time to reload a save. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-12-18, 09:22 in Mozilla, *sigh*
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Post: #67 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 889 days Last view: 85 days |
Today I came across a tweet from Chris Peterson, "technical program manager" at Mozilla:YouTube page load is 5x slower in Firefox and Edge than in Chrome because YouTube's Polymer redesign relies on the deprecated Shadow DOM v0 API only implemented in Chrome. You can restore YouTube's faster pre-Polymer design with this Firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-classic/ I'm not normally a fan of this kind of "cling to the past" addon, but I installed it to try it out, and wow, YouTube really does load noticably faster. I had a look at the extension's github repo, and so far as I can tell, it works by setting a "opt out of redesign" cookie in each request to YouTube, so it won't work forever, but it's also unlikely to break things or hurt your privacy. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-12-18, 12:47 in Board feature requests/suggestions
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Post: #68 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 889 days Last view: 85 days |
Posted by Nicholas Steel The host part of a URL has to start with //, yo: dark theme. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-12-20, 03:19 in Declarative mount points? (revision 1)
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Post: #69 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 889 days Last view: 85 days |
1. Mount your filesystem the way you want it. 2. Run "mount" (or consult /etc/mtab), find the line representing the filesystem you just mounted, and copy it to the clipboard. 3. Set the $EDITOR environment variable to an editor you're comfortable with. If you like the GNOME editor gedit, use: $ export EDITOR=/usr/bin/gedit 4. Edit /etc/fstab in your favourite editor with: $ sudo -e /etc/fstab sudo will copy the file to a directory you can write to, launch $EDITOR to edit it, and copy it back when the editor exits. 5. Paste the output line you copied from "mount" at the end of the file 6. In the fourth field, which has a bunch of comma-separated flags probably including things like "rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro", add an extra comma-separated flag "user". Make sure there's no extra space around the commas! 7. Save and exit your editor. Now you can mount and unmount your filesystem with "mount /path/to/mount/point" and "unmount /path/to/mount/point" or "mount /path/to/device" and "unmount /path/to/device" without root privileges, and without having to remember all the special options every time. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-12-23, 06:13 in I have yet to have never seen it all. (revision 1)
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Post: #70 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 889 days Last view: 85 days |
It's a pretty common jargon term in the context of systems that store data in more than one place. For example, let's say you run a web forum (like this one) that grows and grows and grows. Eventually, activity increases to the point where there's just not enough time for a single computer to record everything that happens while also answering everybody's requests about what's going on. I might try to solve this problem by having two computers, and telling the front end: "whenever you make a change, write to both backend computers, but when you want to read information, ask one at random". Each backend computer still has the same write load, but the read load is halved, so it can still be a net benefit. Unfortunately, this is very fragile: what if the front end disconnects from one of the back end computers while it's trying to write, so the write goes to one computer and not the other? Once this starts happening, the two backend computers represent subtly different parallel universes, drifting further and further apart until there's so many differences it's not practical to figure out what the "real" data should be. An engineer who as built (or seen) a system like that will, in future, try very hard to make sure that for any given piece of data there is exactly one place to store it, and all the other places it might be found are clearly marked as secondary caches, and can easily be dropped and recreated from the designated "original" data, and might even create regular procedures to drop and recreate caches just to ensure no subsystem's local data ever drifts too far. That one place where trusted data lives is often called the "source of truth". It's not a metaphysical, spiritual thing, like the "source of all truth", it's just a shorthand for saying "if the invoice archive disagrees with the billing database about what a customer owes, we always trust the billing database since we can recreate the invoice archive any time we like" The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-12-25, 01:21 in Happy holidays!
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Post: #71 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 889 days Last view: 85 days |
It's just before Christmas lunch for me in Australia, but I'm sure the rest of the world will celebrate something sooner or later. ;) The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-12-28, 11:58 in Happy holidays!
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Post: #72 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 889 days Last view: 85 days |
Tomorrow's image better be a Sonic The Hedgehog screenshot, or I'll be revoking your Video Game Nerd licence. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-12-28, 21:19 in Sales and giveaways
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Post: #73 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 889 days Last view: 85 days |
Today GOG is giving away SOMA, an underwater-themed horror game. Not my cup of tea, but hey, maybe somebody here will like it. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-12-31, 08:53 in Noble Causes
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Post: #74 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 889 days Last view: 85 days |
In the same way that we have a thread to talk about giveaways and sales, I thought maybe we could have a thread about donation drives, patreons, and other noble causes people might like to support. In particular, rare or unusual ones - everybody knows when Wikipedia is looking for donations, but it might surprise people to know about archive.org, or some smaller, even more niche subject. Please try to keep things somewhat in the bailiwick of this forum's usual content: emulation and preservation yes, anime nerdery maybe, a GoFundMe for veterinary bills probably not, unless it's like CaptainJistuce's dog. My submissions: The Internet Archive is having a 2-to-1 donation drive right now: if you donate $5, a generous supporter will add $10, making for a total of $15. The Internet Archive runs the Wayback Machine, an online archive of nearly every version of every website on the Internet. More relevant to this forum, they've also funded a lot of work on porting MAME and MESS to JavaScript, allowing thousands of arcade games, console games, home computer games and other software to be played in the browser. A lot of those games are also available for download, and even games that aren't downloadable are being preserved on the Archive's servers, and they intend to hang onto them until the copyright expires. The Geek Critique (Patreon) is a YouTube channel focused on reviewing and discussing classic games, what makes them work, where they fall down, and where they improve on each other. These critiques are *detailed*, sometimes running to an hour or so per game, but are still pretty fun and interesting. People on this forum might be interested in watching Donkey Kong Country or Super Metroid. Also, Friend Of The BBoard Covarr occasionally crops up, so keep an eye out for that. Software Freedom Conservancy is a non-profit that provides legal services for Free Software projects - setting up a non-profit foundation, managing donations, organising conferences, and license enforcement. The projects they support include Git, Mercurial, QEMU, Boost, Homebrew, Samba, Wine, and many others. Right now they're having a 1-to-1 donation drive, so if you donate $5 somebody else will match it for a total of $10. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-01-01, 05:52 in amethyst (text editor)
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Post: #75 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 889 days Last view: 85 days |
Posted by wertigon You should totally check out Kakoune. Kakoune is to Vi/Vim as Plan9 is to Unix: the best ideas, concentrated, polished, and extended. It's got multiple cursors, it's got regexes, it's built for integration with other tools.. it's more powerful than Vim, but with a much smoother learning curve. It's not for everyone, but at this point I can't imagine switching to a different editor unless it's one I write myself. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-01-03, 10:16 in [higan] WIP news
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Post: #76 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 889 days Last view: 85 days |
Just a heads-up for anybody who's keeping track of higan WIPs. As of today's WIP, I've made the continuous integration system build on Ubuntu LTS instead of Debian Stable, because byuu would like to start making use of the improvements available in more recent versions of GCC. This is not a promise that Ubuntu LTS is a "supported" platform; Debian's likely to release a new stable version this year and the next Ubuntu LTS won't arrive until 2020, so we may swap back eventually. But for now, don't bother trying to build higan on Debian Stable, or older versions of Ubuntu, or RHEL, or... The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-01-03, 11:28 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
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Post: #77 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 889 days Last view: 85 days |
MarbleMarcher, a simple game that demonstrates real-time ray-marching of 3D fractals, with physics. Think of it a bit like Marble Madness, but with ridiculous graphics. Apparently it needs OpenGL 4 and I only managed about 20-30fps on "potato graphics" mode, but apart from the speed it worked pretty nicely in Wine. There's a PR to make it more portable, but the usual discussion and bike-shedding ensues. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-01-03, 23:38 in Various copyrighted stuff is finally becoming public domain
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Post: #78 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 889 days Last view: 85 days |
Posted by CaptainJistuce I've heard the theory that since the last time the copyright period was extended, copyright lobbyists saw the amount of energy that was directed against things like SOPA, and the whole mess around net neutrality, and decided not to pick that particular fight. I hope that's true, but I really have no idea. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-01-05, 02:00 in Mozilla, *sigh*
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Post: #79 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 889 days Last view: 85 days |
Another reason to turn off "allow webpages to choose their own fonts" in your browser. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-01-12, 21:13 in bSNES beta
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Post: #80 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 889 days Last view: 85 days |
His recent move, his new text editor, and now he's trying to add Neo Geo Pocket Color emulation to higan. I believe it's pretty stable, especially if you build from the latest higan/bsnes WIP, which has some bugfixes over the last public beta. As for why v107 hasn't been released, byuu hasn't said. I suspect he started NGPC emulation to get back in the swing of things with something comfortable and fun instead of the difficult and draining work of hunting down obscure bugs, but the NGPC itself seems to be a bit difficult and taking longer than expected. I guess we'll see how it goes. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
