Blender. I feel pretty confident in saying that there is simply nothing like it in the commercial world. Its feature set is unreal; its like the swiss army knife of 3D modelling programs. I can't say enough good things about Blender. It has replaced so many secondary programs in my workflow and is slowly dominating to become my entire workflow.

It used to suck to use in the late 2010s and then work was done to overhaul its space-shuttle cockpit interface, and now it actually feels concise and usable. I freaking love blender now. Big time blender fanboy right here.

I dont get the hysteria, personally.

I came here to escape the crowds, not migrate with them.

You can take my steamtroller when you pry it from my cold dead hands. Fucking love that thing. Not just for gaming either, couch computing is all possible via the steamtroller. LOVE IT.

Wow, thats some wild hyperbole there.

Ensign Sonya Gomez over here thanking the replicator

TNG "Q Who?"

SONYA: Hot chocolate, please.

LAFORGE: We don't ordinarily say please to food dispensers around here.

SONYA: Well, since it's listed as intelligent circuitry, why not? After all, working with so much artificial intelligence can be dehumanising, right? So why not combat that tendency with a little simple courtesy. Thank you.

Its fun with minimal bullshit.

Adafruit was rolling through runs of ~70 per day for a while. First come first served. Dunno if they still are. I'd suggest setting up a stock alert with them.

I snagged one for my Beepy. They were so strict about scalpers they made me set up 2fa so they could verify my account.

All mac computer lab (rev a/b iMacs), locked down with foolproof. No problem; bring a zip drive and boot from it by holding down option at startup. Use resedit to edit the extension for foolproof and remove all its resources. Extension no longer works.

Reboot into a completely unrestricted finder. Good times.

Agreed. I also see them all over youtube videos and stuff and I just can't keep reading/watching. Its not like an ideological thing, i don't hate generated art. I just find it so distracting.

Videos like that I'm always amazed the creator even bothers uploading. I'd be so fucking embarassed it would never see the light of day.

But I guess its sunk cost fallacy. Gotta get that content out there I spent a week working on. I guess I can appreciate that. Theres also something to be said about being honest about your fuckups. I was so embarassed for him I noped out of that video so I dont really know how it ended, but I dont recall there being much humility about it?

I love old consoles... but old media (carts, cds/dvds) not so much. Flashcarts have been a revelation for me. I'm happy to help out the collectors out there by lowering the demand for original cartridges for my NES or gameboys.

And honestly its a much purer and more fun experience than an everything emulator where you spend most of your time setting it up and then deciding which game of all the games ever created you feel like playing right now. But I do also enjoy setting up emulator devices be they handheld or set top, and playing on them. I'm not a snob, it's all good stuff and its a great time no matter what your choice, tbh.

GIMP really needs its Blender moment.

Wow. What a question. Its hard for me not to be dismissive.

I'm going to have to go with Mario 64 by a country mile.

Appreciate the thought experiment though.

Yeah I noticed that part too and just sort of randomly started equiping stuff. Usually I'm lost in RPGs so I'm just rolling with it.

(woah I dunno why I made a wall of text but here it is)

Yeah i'm rocking muOS on my 35xxSP (I hate that name everytime I have to type it), and its pretty dang great. In not much of one for the curated library experience with like lush game covers and cool flashy layouts so I dont have much insight to offer there. I downloaded a Star Trek LCARS theme and that was good enough for me.

MUOS has had no problem reading roms off the main boot SD card (which thanks to their rom directory rules is super grab and go, select a rom, select a core your first time and you're off) is really seamless. You can set favourites etc its very intuitive with on screen button guides. By just launching retroarch on its own you can load roms off the second SD card even if its not formatted to their ROM directory rules which in my case is good because me second SD is just my mass storage card and isn't organized, so its a bit more of a manual Retroarch process to play but not problem for me.

The SP hardware is fully supported, there is lid close detection and you can tell it how you want that handled, I have it set to save my game state and power down after a set time. My play sessions are typically 3-5 minutes long when I have a brief moment to myself (job and family = gaming atrophy) so its nice to just close it up when I am needed and not have to worry about powering down etc, then when I power it back up again it does take a minute or two to boot but then instantly brings me right back to the game and state I was in when I left. Very nice and it saves me having to constantly charge a dead device I forgot to power down.

There are some omissions like bluetooth audio, but I've never really had a good experience with bt audio and emulation on handhelds in general so its not glaring for me. I make do with wired headphones if I need them, but the audio response is very quiet. Not sure thats MuOS fault. I think there is also support for BT controllers, but I've never tried that. Nor have I experimented with HDMI out or the like.

The team making muOS are pretty cool and seem like they have a good vibe. Recently they announced they were actively making changes to the firmware to block a third party application that automagically downloads roms, and it caused some discord drama. I get their motivations, and their desire to protect their work from unwanted ninty litigation, it just kinda seemed like an over correction to me. Just one parasites opinion though. I don't think they are being dicks, just looking out for their hard work and I respect that.

On the side of general purpose computing theres a number of convenience apps built in, an MP3 player, a video player, some file management tools, a terminal. Theres also an integrated backup and restore tool if you want to nuke and pave. There's also a web based file server if you want to transfer files over wifi which has been SUPER handy.

On the whole I feel muOS has been a really good experience on the ANBERNIC RG35XXSP and if you're on the fence about trying it consider this a recommendation.

You need to calm down.

I wish Eric had given us pebble v2 instead of beeper, honestly.

Jeeze. Sorry to hear that. Love mine. Maybe the quality jumped with the 2+ 🤷‍♂️

Because I want more storage.

Marathon.

It was this thing. Ages ago. https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-gear/camping/earl-rugged-revolutionary-tablet/

You write like someone who is really handsome.

I bet you're handsome.

Some of us never forget. And the path it paved for the greatest trilogy in gaming (for Mac users anyhow).

Somewhere in the heavens they are waiting...

The Earl Tablet.

Please excuse this attempt from a mere technician.

The waveform on the far left is the electrical signal fed into the rectifier. It illustrates a current that starts at zero, then reaches its full positive amplitude, then comes back to zero, then reaches the full negative, then back to zero. This represents an AC or alternating current. This is the way electricity comes out of your wall, usually.

DC or direct current is instead just a constant horizontal line. Ideally no change in the current. This is what we get from batteries and is used in most of our smaller devices like computers and smartphones. So naturally its handy to have a device that "adapts" the AC to DC. A common part of AC to DC Adapters is a rectifier.

The diagram in the center of the image is the schematic of a full bridge rectifier. It shows the two wires that feed into the rectifier on the left, these are then split into an arrangement of diodes represented by triangles with lines at their tips. Diodes essentially only allow current in one direction. The line is representative of a "direction" of the flow. The particular way these diodes are arranged means that no matter what kind of signal is fed in it will never produce a negative voltage at the output.

By using this arrangement we can feed in the AC signal and sort of flip the negative of part of that signal so the waveform looks like the one on the right. You can see that the waveform now is only above the line representing zero.

This is however only one step in the process of a power regulation and so as others have pointed out its not as simple as it may seem. Usually a transformer is used to step up or down voltages, and those are not designed to be used with DC and I believe could be damaged?

I wish I had known about this game back in the 90s. What a sleeper hit. Easily in the top ten Gameboy games imo.

I always just figured it was a port of the arcade game. Imagine my shock after the first few levels it turns into its own amazing game with some zany puzzle platformer mechanics.

I ended up buying the cart because it was just too good not to have a copy of.

Before it closed, the Brantford Computer museum here in Ontario had an amazing collection of machines. My wife took my friends and I there for my birthday one year and oh man what a trip. They had everything on display, from common systems like the c64 to really rare ones like the Unisys Icon. All up and booted, ready to be played with. But despite all these ultra rare systems the one that caught my eye was the Apple Pippin.

I grew up an insufferable mac fanboy (now reformed and agnostic), and as a kid I had heard tons about the pippin, but it was so obscure and terrible that I was sure I would never get to play one IRL.

But there I was, smile on my face, playing Super Marathon on that crappy pippin. I had the time of my life that day.

Thanks for everything Syd. RIP dude.

Money.