thouartfrugal

@thouartfrugal@lemmy.world
2 Post – 39 Comments
Joined 6 months ago

A longer term fix is to soak the whole key pad sheet in Fuelite (Petroleum Spirit)

Dummy here. Reads to me as a regional brand name and an ambiguous generic term. Would soaking in naphtha work?

For ZSH and SSH I just speak the letters: Z-S-H, S-S-H. Sudo as "SUE-do" "SUE-doo".

One I wonder about is xrandr. I say "EKS-rand-ur", have heard others say "eks-R-and-R".

edit: for sudo long vowel. Also I tend to stress the H in ZSH and SSH.

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First time a political ad got me to laugh (in a good way):

Harris (...) got [transnational gang members] sentenced to prison.

Trump is trying to avoid being sentenced to prison.

The article's a good read. It's not about the first game from 1987.

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Will probably check it out as I count myself among the Black Isle/Obsidian aficionados. Didn't see a link to the mod in the article. Bit of a let-down that Yesterday does not seem to implement the 3D Jefferson Engine as was seen in the Van Buren tech demo, but props to these modders all the same!

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Right you are; this one's a PVM-8043MD. Looks like it lacks the 16:9 mode, manual degauss and tally light. I believe MD signifies "medical"; removed the cover and there is some shielding around the deflection yoke.

Thank you for mentioning that model number. That page has some good troubleshooting info relevant to the white balance problem I'm seeing with this one. Will post something nice if I can fix it!

Brave friend of mine went into Forest Conservation and Firefighting, got calf muscles big as cantaloupes!

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Over my head body.

Cthulhu, is that you?

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$ echo "$((2#01010010)) $((2#01100101)) $((2#01100100)) $((2#01110010)) $((2#01110101)) $((2#01101101))"

82 101 100 114 117 109

Reads 'Redrum' in ASCII. A reference to The Shining, I suppose. If there's a joke it's lost on me, sorry. Was kinda fun spending 10min decoding that, though :)

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Profoundly nightmarish was mine, here are the highlights:

Go to take LSD for the first time with some friends at the seller's house. Just about the time the effects are taking over I realize I met the guy once about ten years earlier, when as a stupid kid I accidentally shot him in the face with a pellet spring pistol.

Bit later, on top of feeling ashamed, regretful, worthless, helpless and out of my mind I'm becoming very nauseated so I go to the front porch. In a brief moment I see another guy I hadn't seen in years walking by on the sidewalk, and reach my hand up to wave at him. As my stomach empties he freezes in his tracks, mid-wave as his smile of recognition turns to shock.

Working as a Field Service Technician can sometimes mean being alone for hours on the road in between bouts of installation/service/training/etc.

Do you consider yourself a partisan? The pervasive notion that there are "two sides" and you must be on one of them, it results in ordinary citizens viewing one another with suspicion and fear. It's a useful lie that serves the interests of those who would foster division in order to maintain the cultural status quo.

Not calling you out in particular. Just that I think about this every time something is posted that perpetuates this false "our team, their team" narrative because it's a powerful, insipid tool of oppression against the common person. True, people differ on contentious issues, sometimes irreconcilably. But if we are made to view one another as dyed-in-the-wool adversaries over that, we will fail to discover our common interests much less promote them through solidarity.

Not denying that the two major political parties in the United States do hold seemingly unassailable dominance in major elections like the one we're entering, largely due to determining winner by first-past-the-post. And yes, sadly it's very often the case that a meaningful vote will support one of those parties. But it doesn't have to be this way forever. In fact, I will be able to vote for city office candidates by ranked choice starting this year!

Sorry for the rant. Not an expert. Just a dude who wants to love his neighbor.

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You've gained karma!

Just an old hobbyist here. Often I count myself lucky having grown up when a state-of-the-art home computer was a Commodore 64. Rightly or wrongly, I believe it's quite possible for one human being to completely grasp what that machine is doing from the moment the power switch is turned on through to the end of running a complex self-written program. Not that it's at the heart of your question(s) but that's where my curiosity started. In those days any user had to know just a bit of the BASIC programming language, even if just to list the contents of a floppy disk or to load a pre-written program. I am always astounded at what people with much more dedication are able to do with a C64 to this day in the demoscene. The more generous among them make their discoveries digestible to mere mortals at sites such as codebase64.org. That's a kind of comfort zone for me. Getting into something like a 386 PC and I start to feel overwhelmed. Maybe consider dipping back a bit into history if it sounds appealing?

As to semiconductor fabrication, I found this unconventional book by Clive Maxfield to be very helpful in clarifying some things I was curious about.

Some excellent stories from the heyday of MOS Technology in the first in this book series by Brian Bagnall. That's the company that produced the popular 6502 family of 8-bit CPU that powered machines from Apple to Nintendo and many in between. Also where the custom chips were brought to life that formed the heart of the C64. One excerpt I often think back on were engineers laying flat on raised creepers, cutting the layout of their CPU-to-be out of huge sheets of vellum.

5 - Do we have to join Intel first or something to learn how most of the things work lol ?

May not be as far-fetched as you think. I've worked in Intel's semiconductor factories, and Micron's, and some others whose names aren't widely known but whose products made things like the iPhone possible. Not cause I'm well-educated or have any particular talent, just that in a volatile marketplace such as this one there are ebbs and flows in demand for headcount in entry-level positions. Draft up a resume highlighting your critical thinking skills and willingness to learn and watch the recruiters from the staffing agencies fill your email inbox. I've had the good fortune to learn such processes as photolithography, thin-films, dry/wet etch, metrology, planarization, die sort (test), and on and on. Whether you'd like to operate the semiconductor tools, push the production metrics or maintain the equipment there just may be a need for you somewhere today.

Is it required to give them useful data? Thinking of using an old smartphone with bogus personal info, single-purpose email account etc.

Fun, spooky, action-oriented*, skeletons, bats: Temple of Apshai from 1983 on the Commodore 64. About two minutes fifteen seconds into the video you'll see and hear its unique spooky atmosphere.

*for a role-playing game of this vintage, anyway.

The monitor had two obvious problems at first: yellow tint and rainbow patterning. Quick pass with a degaussing coil took care of the latter. Hooked up a composite lead and threw on my low-quality DVD-R copy of my VHS copy of my NTSC Reference Laserdisc and made some quick adjustments to the monitor; results below:

sharpness

monoscope

color bars

SMPTE bars

To make this post somewhat more relevant to the community:

Street Fighter II (PC Engine) Blanka Stage

Street Fighter II (PC Engine) Blanka Stage

Street Fighter II (PC Engine) Guile Stage

Street Fighter II (PC Engine) Guile Stage

Street Fighter II (PC Engine) Ryu Stage

Street Fighter II (PC Engine) Ryu Stage

Street Fighter II (PC Engine) Zangief Stage

Street Fighter II (PC Engine) Zangief Stage

The colors in the game look different in these pictures; hard to make them accurate. But it looks good in person. (edit: better camera settings, more colorful game)

Was reaching for my blue filter to set Color/Tint when I remembered this monitor has a "Blue Only" feature; pretty neat! Surprisingly, adjusting the Screen control on the flyback transformer seems to have more effect on the white balance than on the contrast. Still, had to maximize the Blue Gain control on the PCB and on the front panel to get the white balance close as possible for the time being. Heck, I might not actually bother with it much further; it looks pretty good. Will have to try the RGB inputs.

This one baffles me: leaving a huge gap when stopping a vehicle at a traffic signal. Ordinary intersection in flat terrain, I'll pull right up to the marker/crosswalk/vehicle ahead:

|=|[::]

Sometimes see other drivers a bit back. OK fine, maybe it's alright. Suppose it's good in the event of a stopped rear-end collision, to protect pedestrians/vehicles in front:

|=| [::]

But what's with this nonsense? Is it just me? I don't remember seeing this earlier than the last ten years or so. Not a sensible safety gap, no. I'm talking two, three or more car lengths of space! Nowhere near the inductive loop sensor:

|=|<---------->[::]

This is without any property entrances on either side, mind you. That I could understand since it leaves a space for traffic to pull out, or in from the oncoming lane. This just seems to occupy space for no purpose other than to reduce traffic density on one block and increase it in the trailing block (?).

Completely baffled; what am I missing? Where did this come from? Is it just me? Even worse is when I stop my vehicle behind theirs and then they creep forward a car length or two, making me look like a dummy.

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Try playing Sonic the Hedgehog some more and expressing how it makes you feel.

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Said what I came to say better than I probably could have. Loved anime in the '80s-'90s before I knew what it was called. Found the visual styles to be quite striking and the cel animation special effects like backlighting very appealing. As a pre-teen/teen it was novel to see animated features dealing with darker subject matter.

Very little interest nowadays apart from visiting traditionally animated features I missed back then. Don't find digital animation appealing in general. Plus my tastes in stories and dramatic elements have shifted quite a bit from back then, and to me anime represents something very specifically Japanese the nuances of which seem to be lost on me.

Another facet: couldn't tell you how many Lemmy communities I've blocked because they almost exclusively feature posts of images of stereotypically over-sexualized anime girls/women(/cyborgs/demons/etc).

Ooh, I see there was a series DVD release of Mighty Orbots (1984). I have to rate that show as some kind of peak anime, being a lovely collaboration between Japanese and American studios.

Not sure how many knew about "Compact Mode", but when that quit so did I. Was once as simple as appending ".compact" to the end of a Reddit URL to switch to a nice, simplified interface without ads.

Thought it was odd to call this a sequel to an "NES classic" considering Shadowgate originated on the Macintosh, but judging by the screenshots in the article it seems the authors indeed decided to implement an interface very similar to the one Kemco developed for their NES port. Interesting choice! Having played the Mac-like Amiga port and the NES port I do prefer the controls of the latter as they better suit the use of a keyboard or gamepad.

The music in the NES port is very memorable to me as well. If Beyond Shadowgate will feature sound, I would hope that cues are taken from the sound of the NES and the prior composer's work.

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Congrats and mad respect! Was reading some of the details in your comments in the other thread. A function generator is definitely on my want list, along with a CRT analyzer (if I happen to find a deal on a good one).

In my opinion Days of Future Passed ranks right up there with Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Pet Sounds in terms of innovative use of multitrack studio recording.

The Moodies' next album In Search of the Lost Chord has been living rent-free in my head since about age five when I started spending much of my time wearing my dad's headphones and going through his album collection.

Thank you for the insight. Having little understanding of the purposes of CAPTCHA beyond what is implied by the acronym, I would be concerned if what seems implied in this comment thread were actually true. Clearly there's a bit of tongue-in-cheek, but it seems reasonable to me as a layman that some implementations could produce data usable to train autonomous driving systems. I realize it's possible there's no simple answer to my original question, and wouldn't be the first time I've overthought something.

I imported this game when it first came out and it's been one of my favorites. Very interesting to think about how the strengths of the Genesis vs. the PC Engine could be used. So far it looks like it's aimed at graphical fidelity. The PCE had a wider color palette from which to select and could display more colors simultaneously, but I don't think Rondo really pushed those capabilities. Konami did some really nice parallax routines in this game for the single background graphics layer on the PCE. Those effects are much more common on the Genesis with its multiple hardware layers. Curious as to how the "extra power" could be used if werton opts to explore that. The FM cover tune sounds great, looking forward to hearing more!

What blew me away in the video was the costume change. Was that in the original all this time? I know what I'm playing today!

That one gets me too :) If I'm on foot I often consider just hopping up and walking across the hood.

edit: Actually there is one circumstance in which I will drive past the crosswalk and stop: green-signaled left turn where oncoming traffic has right of way. Stop past the crosswalk, complete the turn when the way is clear. It's legal where I live, at any rate.

Macross often draws me back even if for nothing other than the outstanding music.

Came here looking for the tensor tympani rumble cause I know it well; not sure what your thing is! If I notice sounds going quiet on a flight I'll pinch the nostrils shut and make an exhalation effort till I hear a pop in each ear, then sounds are normal. Almost like the reverse of yours.

One of the last of the many great shooters on the PC Engine is the one-or-two-player Ginga Fukei Densetsu Sapphire.

Played the DOS version to completion, enjoying every bit of it. Then the TurboGrafx-16 CD version with its satisfying cinematic reveal of the big plot twist. Really wish I could play more games like this!

Not calling you out personally, Lauchs and I do apologize if it seems that way. Just that reading in your question the usage of "your side" and "the other side" brought to mind once again the fact that many people I know have come to view politics a team sport. Didn't decide anything about your beliefs.

I'm as old as my tongue, and a little older than my teeth.

With you one hundred percent – Devil's Crush features one of the best and longest tunes on the Turbografx-16!

In this study, were the terms "conservative" and "liberal" self-applied by the subjects? People do adopt those labels for themselves, but I would urge careful consideration before doing so. Where they can be useful in describing one's position on a specific issue, when applied directly to the person they are needlessly reductive. Exactly the sort of thing that facilitates the mental assignment of oneself or others into an imaginary camp on one side of a false dichotomy.

The essence of what you are saying makes sense to me, and I do understand those terms are routinely applied to people both by themselves and by others. But your post, though well-meaning also serves to perpetuate the "conservatives vs. liberals" view of political discourse. I realize I may be Sisyphus under the boulder here, but it's my challenge to the United States political duopoly.

In my high school we had several of the Compact Macintosh models and I remember using them in two classes. One was English where we used a word processor. The other was more interesting: some sort of computer literacy course where we wrote HyperCard programs on the Mac.

Apart from the HyperCard stuff I found the courses and Macintosh computers quite dull. Maybe because I had been using Amiga computers for years at this point, and knew "The Fastest Apple Mac is an Amiga" (piped).