Pro tip: if you have a physical copy of a game and it’s also available on Steam, try registering the CD key. (Obviously doesn’t work if the game doesn’t have a CD key. Or if the publisher is a dick. looking at you, EA)

eat the food that’s already in the fridge

That is such a perfect crystalline out-of-touch rich-person take that it has to be a bait. Right? …Right?

Eclipse

Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.

Will probably need to check this out.

Joke’s on you, Microsoft.

First of all, I already have Game Pass, so you don’t get any new sales.
Second, if I open the settings app in Windows 11, it just straight up crashes. (Can access the other tabs, e.g. through desktop customisation. But if I go to the front page, it crashes.)

It was broken by the update that supposedly added some other ads. But I’ve not seen them! I had to disable the “recommendations” in start menu because it made the start menu not work at all (due to the aforementioned crash, same deal).

This actually really sucks, though. Windows Store apps do not update themselves, Xbox services stopped working (due to being unable to update WS games), and I don’t know if Windows Update works or not. I guess I need to reinstall when I get arsed to.

I miss my SoundBlaster Live! card. Excellent sound quality. Last used with the last computer I built, in the late-mid-2000s. That was the second computer I had that had on-board audio, and I just didn’t bother with on-board audio because I just straight up assumed it was going to be shit. Unfortunately it stopped working at some point, along with the GPU (I suspect a static electricity fuck-up on my part, or something) which didn’t matter all that much because I was mostly using the system as a server at that point.

(I’m going to build a new NAS server from ground up later this year, and I’m contemplating getting an external DAC for it for use with musicpd. Wonder if there’s still SoundBlaster branded DACs, or are they gone? …Oh they’re still around!? Good.)

Photographer here. You’re pretty much spot on. The reason for why this happens has got to do with three reasons, two of which are pretty hard to overcome:

1. Wide angle lens, short focal length. You can’t fit a long focal length lens on a phone, because apparently no one wants a super thick phone these days. To get photos of the Moon with any reasonable detail you need a pretty decent telephoto lens (I get fairly good results with my 200 mm prime and so-so results with my cheapo 300 mm zoom)

2. Resolution. So not only can you only fit a small lens in the phone, you also just can’t physically fit a large sensor behind it either. You have a tiny lens which passes through a tiny image on a tiny sensor, so phone makers have long since hit the physical limits.

3. Control software. Photographing the Moon is a special occasion as far camera automatics is concerned. The Moon is a bright object. It reflects daylight, dammit. Robot brain cannot comprehend this. In the nighttime, camera automatics scream “Aah! High ISO! Long exposure! Wide aperture!” You need to be able to tell the camera you really want daylight ISO and daylight exposure time and daylight aperture. (usual rule of thumb: ISO 100, 1/100 seconds, f/11) Now, the software in phones tries to usually approach this by letting you specify scenarios, but even the vague “night mode” is hit and miss for me sometimes. Fortunately this is something that is usually easy to rectify, because it’s a software issue. (Open Camera for Android is pretty sweet, gives you full manual mode.)

I’m suddenly having flashbacks of the whole SCO fiasco. And people older than me probably have flashbacks of the BSD/System V lawsuit.

I mean, this thing is fun to argue about, until you remember people used to argue about this in court.

Debian’s Firefox is Firefox ESR, or Extended Support Release. It’s behind the bleeding edge, but gets security updates.

If you want the bleeding edge Firefox, you can add Mozilla’s own APT repository and install it. Doesn’t even conflict with Debian (firefox-esr vs firefox, it even uses a separate user profile by default). Instructions are on the Firefox download page somewhere.

I remember people joking about this just after the first LotR trilogy trailers/promo stills came out. Damn I feel old.

I mean, C is a high level language? Now, sure, C isn’t a super expressive language and every C statement compiles to very few assembly instructions comparatively speaking, but it has a whole lot of stuff that assembly doesn’t have. Like nice loops and other control structures and such, and not worry about which processor registers are used.

There’s still a few sites I deploy changes to using ssh+rsync. …which is made considerably easier by the fact that it’s just a static website generated with Jekyll.

I admit, I was speculating on the headline. However!

The pictured specimen is a captive one. Not really one subject to avoiding predators or being disturbed.

The ectotherms do a lot of strange things for thermoregulation.

Bonus speculative factoids:

• A pancake tortoise hatchling is called a Morsel
• A pancake tortoise adult is called a Flapjack
• A pancake tortoise group is called a Stack

I have no way of verifying this, of course. English language doesn’t have a governing body, after all.

Oh no. You know shit is really terrible when they cannot even afford to communicate at 8 bits. It’s 5 bits Baudot code. Capital letters only. They actually had to pay extra for @, #, and $. Thankfully, by 1870s, % was part of the character set. My heart’s with anyone who can’t just blast UTF-8 out wherever they can.

(Edit: In case you’re wondering why it has a weird gif attached to it: The Memelord, Musky Elon, has decreed that you can actually attach a shitty random gif FOR FREE. So of course any cash strapped institution will do so.)

large, easily readable font

Ah, but readable by whom? I have a bar code font here. If you can’t read it you’re clearly not nerd enough.

Also, putting the Ten Commandments in classrooms will only turn the kids into sarcastic, blasphemous little fellows. …I mean, more so than they already are.

I prefer this version: Wikihistory

When I was learning about GIMP key shortcuts I was like “Ctrl+A selects everything, Ctrl+Shift+A deselects everything. Makes sense.”

And then I went to most of the other apps. “Ctrl+D? Well it’s one less keypress, but… WHY?”

To be fair, I get it now, I’ve used plenty of image editors and I remember the keybinds wherever I am. Just that I sometimes find it annoying that The Other Software hasn’t adopted logical keybindings.

(I find it particularly annoying that a lot of image editors try to be fancy and sophisticated and Photoshop-compatible and think it’s at all appropriate to use Ctrl+NumpadPlus and Ctrl+NumpadMinus for zooming. Just use what GIMP uses! NumpadPlus and NumpadMinus. It’s not hard! What are you using the plain plus and minus for, anyway? Absolutely nothing! I just checked, I need to use Ctrl in Affinity Photo. Plain plus and minus are useless. I see you. …oh I can just rebind these. Done.)

I’ve been using GIMP since the very dawn, I use plenty of other image editors for variety of reasons (Affinity Photo, DxO PhotoLab, ArtRage, Clip Studio), and I have no problems with the UIs in any of them.

Yet every time I use Adobe software I’m like “why is it doing this? Why is it designed this way? Who thought that was a good idea? This is stupid.”

Why would I want a whole circuit to be cut because of a single device fault

Dunno, if I have a fault in my home, I want it to be spectacular.

A couple of years ago I literally had massive blood pressure and walked like 2 km to go buy a box of fuses.

Burning two fuses, I figured out one of the extension strips was bad.

If I plug something in and half of my apartment goes black, TWICE, and needs a fuse replacement each time, maybe that thing needs to be tossed anuway. I’m no electrician, I can’t troubleshoot a power strip. It has served its years. Bye.

JavaScript is powerful

Old joke (yes, you can tell):

“JavaScript: You shoot yourself in the foot. If using Netscape, your arm falls off. If using Internet Explorer, your head explodes.”