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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 28th, 2023

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  • I suspect that there is “palm check” turned on for your touchpad. This is designed to keep you from accidentally moving/clicking the touchpad by brushing it with your palm while you are typing.

    Look for a “palm check”, “palm rejection”, or “disable touchpad when typing” setting in your touchpad utility. As far as I know, these are all roughly the same thing.




  • Agreed. I strongly dislike Elon and think he is a thin skinned trust fund baby who is destroying Tesla and already destroyed Twitter. I wouldn’t be surprised in the least to find out he is using sock accounts to praise himself… but in this article all I see are people making accusations without solid evidence. Yes, it appears he banned the guy accusing him but we already know that Elon will ban his critics whether or not those critics’ accusations are real. There is nothing here showing that the account is anything but one of his braindead fanboys.

    It’s one thing to take these accusations and try to find solid evidence. It’s another to treat the accusations as solid evidence itself. Let’s be better than the conspiracy theorists.



  • Someone bought a pallet of returned products and found this as one of the returned products. So what?

    It is important to note that this pretty useless concoction of non-working parts – dressed up as one of the best graphics cards available to consumers in 2024 – wasn’t sold as a new model. It was received by an NWR customer in a pallet deal from Amazon Returns.

    We can’t know for sure, but the product received by NWR, apparently from an Amazon pallet deal, may have been an Amazon return where a faulty Franken-graphics-card was returned and someone kept a good working one. The outward description of a cracked PCB and melted power connector might even suggest another level of deception used to return this switched product.


  • Here is an idea for testing whether a stainless carafe vs glass lined makes a noticeable difference for you:

    1. Set up a water bath at whatever serving temp you prefer for your coffee. A quick search’s says this is somewhere from 140-150f. If you have an immersion circulator (used for “sous vide” cooking), you’re golden for this. Otherwise, you’d have to use a pot of water on the stove with a rack in the bottom to keep your coffee vessels from touching the bottom. then keep adjusting the stove to maintain water temp… which would be a PITA.

    2. get two clean vessels with lids, one stainless, one glass. You could probably get away with using plastic wrap and a rubber bands for lids in a pinch. Preheat the vessels with water.

    3. pour freshly brewed coffee into each vessel, put the lids on, and put them in the water bath for a while (1 hour?).

    4. have someone pour you a coffee from each vessel into identical coffee cups. They need to keep track of which is which. And, of course, you shouldn’t know which is which.

    5. Taste. Can you tell a difference? Which one is better?

    6. repeat until you’re tired of running the test and are sure your answer is solid.


  • Great post, thanks! Looking at the pictures makes me feel like I must have played a different sierra war game using the same engine back in the day. It all looks very familiar, but I’m pretty sure I never played this.

    I think there is a typo for you to fix; it sounds like the following should say to not just grab the best weapon:

    Be careful, especially as a Confederate player to grab whatever the best, most high value weapon is within reach as the more expensive weapons tend to have higher rates of fire, which translates into more expense to keep the unit supplied with ammunition. Running out of supplies will turn the finest repeating rifle into a glorified club and make the unit easy pickings.


  • Ambrosia probably provided me the most hours of gaming entertainment over the 90s. They published Mac software and, if I remember correctly, most of their games were shareware and the non-paid versions were pretty well featured.

    I wonder how many hundreds of hours I played Escape Velocity and Escape Velocity Override. Those were some absolutely amazing games and they supported plugins (mods) and had a thriving mod community.

    For the 90s mac users, you’ll probably recognize a lot of their games (listed on the Wikipedia page). Here are some from the 90s that stand out to me:

    Maelstrom

    Chiral

    Apeiron

    Swoop

    Barrack

    Escape Velocity

    Avara

    Bubble Trouble

    Harry the Handsome Executive

    Mars Rising

    EV Override

    Ares

    Escape Velocity Nova




  • Can we meaningfully say that performance has improved over time when games are getting more graphically intensive and wasting all that potential? I would say a Nintendo DS running Tetris has more performance than a PS5 running that new Bethesda game

    Yes, we can. Gamers and computer nerds have been measuring performance for decades. For example, see https://www.userbenchmark.com and https://www.digitalfoundry.net.

    You could develop a benchmark around the DS version of Tetris, I suppose, but that doesn’t seem like a useful benchmark to me.

    The rest of your question seems to be a value judgement that graphically intensive games are “wasting all that potential”. Kind of ironic considering you appear to be asking for objective ways to measure performance.


  • Optical drives were a major bottleneck in every gaming system that used them. They were convenient because they offered a lot of data storage for cheap, but the trade off was that games performed worse than they could. The fact that consoles have moved off of optical storage and onto fast internal storage is a boon to people that care about performance. That may be a sad situation for you, but a lot of people find it to be a good thing.





  • MrZee@lemm.eetoGaming@beehaw.org*Permanently Deleted*
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    2 years ago

    Three thoughts:

    1. I wonder if you would still have this take if you played a newer, high quality AAA game on a high end setup. I don’t mean to imply that your mind will definitely be blown — really don’t know — but it would be interesting to see what doing so would do to your opinion.

    2. Gaming is about entertainment. There is no denying that better/bigger/smoother/more immersive tends to add to the entertainment. So devs push those boundaries both for marketing reasons and because they want to push the limits. I have a hard time seeing a world in which gaming development as a whole says “hey, we could keep pushing the limits, but it would be more environmentally friendly and cheaper for our customers if we all just stopped advancing game performance.”

    3. There are SO MANY smaller studios and indie devs making amazing games that can run smoothly on 5/10/15 year old hardware. And there is a huge number of older games that are still a blast to play.