tuckerm

@tuckerm@supermeter.social

Here to talk about fighting games, self hosting web apps, and easy weeknight recipes.

My mastodon account: @tuckerm
My blog: https://tuckerm.us

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tuckerm ,

I know that Telegram has a lot of users, so I'm not describing all of them here. But I've noticed that it seems especially popular among people who kind of like to "play pretend" as underground hackers. You know, the kind of person who likes to imagine that the government would be after them.

This mudslinging feels like more of a marketing campaign than anything else. An info op that will work well on the Telegram users who like to imagine that they have outmaneuvered all the info ops.

tuckerm ,

Or "things you possess," either. I remember being told (maybe in a college class, but I don't remember exactly) that you can be compelled to give up the key to a lock, but not the combination to a lock.

As the Internet Gets Scarier, More Parents Keep Their Kids’ Photos Offline ( getpocket.com )

Here's a non-paywalled link to an article published in the Washington Post a few days ago. It's great to see this kind of thing getting some mainstream attention. Young children have not made an informed decision about whether they want their photos posted online.

tuckerm OP , (edited )

That looks cool, I hadn't heard of Circles before. I want to check it out now. I'm curious if it somehow keeps your data private from the server owner. That feels like the missing feature in most federated, privacy-focused social networks.

Side note: looks like it's made by Futo; I hadn't realized they were working on something like that. I've been using another one of their apps, Grayjay for almost all of my mobile Youtube viewing lately. It works great.

tuckerm OP ,

I haven't heard anything bad about Grayjay before; what's the issue with it?

tuckerm ,

Yeah, this is a ragebait headline (and I'll admit that it caught me). This is actually in line with what you see on Android and most Linux distros. It's also likely that Microsoft doesn't want you to easily change from Edge, but still. This is better than allowing an application to silently change which applications open things on your computer.

tuckerm ,

This blog post is pretty buzzword-heavy, but Penpot is a legitimately great tool. It's used for UI design and layouts. I've seen a couple of open source projects use a self-hosted Penpot instance for working on and discussing new designs.

Figma would be the most popular, proprietary example of this type of tool. I'm not aware of any open source competitors besides Penpot.

edit: It's like Google docs for web page layouts or app layouts. The animation on their homepage is probably the best way of showing what it does.

tuckerm OP ,

It sounds like the answer to "can I run this application on RISC-V" is very dependent on what the backend for that application is. What's the backend stack for your websites? Are they static HTML sites, or do they have other components? Someone else mentioned that they built postgres and mariadb Docker images for RISC-V, but I don't even know which programming languages can be compiled for RISC-V right now.

Do you run anything on a RISC-V processor? ( supermeter.social )

Lately I've been really liking the idea of having something hosted on a RISC-V machine. RISC-V is a non-proprietary instruction set that is a competitor to ARM. The idea of having a something running on an open source operating system, running on an open standard CPU, served from my house, gives me a warm fuzzy feeling....

tuckerm OP ,

That looks so cool. I was completely unaware that there were desktop motherboards with RISC-V CPUs. I thought they were all still SBCs.

tuckerm OP ,

Wow, thanks! That's fantastic. I hadn't even thought about the fact that Docker images will have to be recreated for RISC-V, but it sounds like some of the most important parts of the stack are useable already. Nice to see that nginx works -- I was leaning towards moving my blog to a RISC-V SBC, and it's just a static HTML site.

tuckerm OP ,

That is very cool, I hadn't heard of that before. I have never done anything with a microcontroller, but I'm thinking about it for RISC-V. It sounds like that might be one of the better ways of getting a RISC-V device in practical use, until more software packages become available for a full Linux machine.

tuckerm OP ,

A homemade RISC-V fightstick? This is combining all of my favorite things! I bought a leverless controller recently (an SGF Bridget).

I'm only vaguely familiar with microcontrollers, but I know there are libraries out there for using an Arduino to make a mechanical keyboard or fightstick. Is there something similar for the CH32V305?

tuckerm ,

When I was maybe five years old, I was with my parents at the grocery store, and there was an advertisement for Reba (a TV show starring Reba McEntire) on those little plastic sticks that you place on the conveyor belt to separate your items from the other person's items.

I have absolutely no idea why I have remembered this fact for so long, or even why it stuck out to me as a five year old. But there was an INCH of space available, and someone had the business idea to slap an advertisement on it.

tuckerm ,

I agree with your point, but I also agree with the parent post as well. Advertising and tracking can be considered separate issues while also both being bad. I'd also say tracking is almost always bad, whereas there are advertisements that I think are perfectly fine.

People have been talking about how manipulative advertising can be long before targeting individuals was possible. (Like Joe Camel.)

But I also think that there is a whole new level of maliciousness to these highly-targeted ad services that can show you specific content based on a personality profile, formed about you by aggregating data across many different areas of your life. It's related to advertising in general, but takes it to such an invasive extreme that it's worth singling out on its own.

tuckerm , (edited )

Basketball courts too, newly added in the last couple years. There's one sponsor logo physically printed on the court, and one that's digitally added for the TV broadcast (tailored to your location, of course).

I was watching a game a few weeks ago and the superimposed logo kept screwing up. It was moving with the camera instead of being fixed on the ground, and sometimes it wouldn't be cropped around the players, it would just go on top of them. It was kind of amusing. They removed it after a few minutes.

tuckerm ,

The progress bar screen during an AMD driver update. Cycles between ads for video games, ads for CPUs, and a "how are we doing" survey.

tuckerm OP ,

The original video already had a bunch of quotes (like that one) that have lived in my head for years. This remake just added, "Mum pisses in jars!" to the list. :D

tuckerm ,

The first distro I used would be CentOS, followed closely by Gentoo. CentOS was installed on the computers in the computer lab in college, and Gentoo was on the computers in the library. I think I went to the computer lab first. I'm probably biased against those two now, since every time I was using them I was banging my head against the keyboard trying to get some programming assignment to work, or desperately finishing a paper before midnight. :P

The first I installed and used myself was Ubuntu, which I still use. I just bought a System76 laptop, though, and I'm debating if I'll just go with Pop OS or switch to Debian.

tuckerm ,

Similar story for me, too. I'm not in the game industry, but Morrowind is the game that made me realize how great a game could be. It got me really into gaming, which made me want to be a game developer. I ended up not becoming a game developer, but that's what got me on the path of learning to code, so it certainly affected my life.

I remember waking up early on Saturday mornings so that I could play Morrowind for a bit before my parents woke up. A friend and I would take turns playing as our different characters after school. Before that I had played Sonic the Hedgehog, Wolfenstein, and Duke Nukem -- and those were fun -- but Morrowind put you inside of a story, a really good story, that took place in a world that felt completely real.

While it's too bad to see that The Elder Scrolls 6 likely won't deliver that same kind of experience, I'm sure games like Baldur's Gate 3 are filling that role for kids today. There are still people making inspirational virtual worlds, and players are still being changed by them.

tuckerm ,

My last phone before getting a smart phone as a Motorola Razr, and man that one was so satisfying.

tuckerm ,

It does look cool! I'm worried about that too, though. I would only be buying it for the "snap it shut" action, and it's more expensive than any other phone I've owned. The original Razr was premium for it's time, but that was when "premium phone" meant $300.

tuckerm ,

Every time I hear about this problem, I get that one part from the song Love Shack stuck in my head.

🎵 Your what?!?!
TEEEEEEEEEEES-LAAA!
...rusted

Love shack,
Baby love shack 🎵

tuckerm ,

Always sucks to have more tech layoffs.

The article mentions they're "decreasing their investment" in Firefox Relay, which is a service for creating burner email addresses that get forwarded to your real email address. It's honestly the best spam-prevention method I've ever used. If Mozilla decides to axe that project, I hope the Thunderbird team can somehow pick it up. Seems like it could be an opportunity for some recurring income for them.

tuckerm ,

I don't think I've ever seen them ask for donations as visibly as Wikipedia does. Sometimes there's a small banner at the top of their website with a donate button. Currently, if you go to https://mozilla.org and scroll all the way down, there's a "Donate" link in their footer.

Seems like they're always kind of subtle about asking for donations -- I wonder if they think that if they pushed for donations harder, it would just make more people use Chrome. (On the other hand, there is no real alternative to Wikipedia, so they can do the big banner once a year.)

tuckerm ,

23andMe was always a product with a very small upside and absolutely massive downside. Best case scenario, it's a neat little thing to learn about yourself. Worst case scenario, it's a massive opportunity for discrimination and blackmail.

Completely unrelated: for some reason, on kbin, the thumbnail for this article is the thumbnail for this youtube video, and that is a cooler thing than 23andMe by far.

Billy Mitchell has surrendered ( perfectpacman.com )

Billy Mitchell didn't win his defamation lawsuit against Twin Galaxies. Not only was Billy not in a position to get a financial settlement, Billy's cheated Donkey Kong scores were not reinstated(as he's claiming), and his claimed Pac-Man score from 1999 is also not on the main scoreboards. What had happened is that the score is...

tuckerm ,

I read that as "surrendered to the authorities" and I thought WOW there must have been some Billy Mitchell developments that I was not aware of.

tuckerm ,

Microsoft's initial departure from Microsoft-brand peripherals meant it would only focus on more expensive, higher-end designs worthy of Surface branding.

They're saying this like we didn't all just read an article about the official Xbox toaster yesterday...

tuckerm ,

Very nice! Also, I don't think I've seen a build with 3D printed keycaps before. Looks great.

downloading gmails

my gmail account is full, most of the space is emails. I tried to download them through “takeout” and it has an option that says hey let’s split this up into 2GB chunks. And you select that and it sends you one 12GB .mbox file regardless. The 12GB download keeps failing and now it says you’ve already downloaded these...

tuckerm ,

I'm sorry I have nothing helpful to add, other than congratulating you on the achievement of filling up a Gmail account. That is impressive.

Google should send out awards for that. Like, if you get a Youtube play button for having 1 million subscribers, they should give you some kind of "I'll get to it later" button for having 1 million unread emails in your inbox.

tuckerm ,

Yeah, this is perfectly consistent with the idea that people don't want to read AI generated news at all.

The title of the paper they are referencing is Or they could just not use it?: The paradox of AI disclosure for audience trust in news. So the source material definitely acknowledges that. And that is a great title, haha.

tuckerm ,

I never played the classic "Quest" games that Sierra made, but they published a bunch of really good ones from other developers, too.

I remember their logo coming up before each of the Half-Life, SWAT, Tribes, and F.E.A.R. games. I was always like, "dang, someone there knows how to pick 'em."

tuckerm ,

Yeah, I actually haven't seen the nag screen in a couple days, whereas I was seeing it often last week. Whatever updated circumvention uBlock has figured out, it's working just about perfectly.

YouTube once again ahead of uBO on Firefox; fiddling with the extension settings not working this time and DDG search is useless ... anyone got ideas?

Pretty much the subject line. uBO has successfully blocked the nag screen enough times that I can’t play anything at this point. No preview loads, and the play button serves no function. I’d really prefer not to have to find content on YT, copy the URL and use Piped/Invidious, but this ongoing escalation is steeling my...

tuckerm ,

I've noticed that the nag screen never shows up in a private tab. In the last week I've gotten in the habit of right-clicking a video and choosing Open Link in New Private Window. It's not very convenient, but it has been working.

tuckerm ,

I don't want to jump to conclusions, but that does sound like a very possible explanation.

Poo. I was hoping DDG would keep LLM-generated summaries out of their UI.

tuckerm ,

It showed me the same thing, but after searching again a few times I'm now seeing a summary of the articles on their homepages.

Side note: I've had a weird bug a few times with DDG lately, where it showed me results for current events that were completely unrelated to what I was looking for. I searched for something like "10 inch chef's knife" but the results were as though I had typed "US house of representatives speaker." This has happened maybe three or four times in the last two weeks.

tuckerm ,

Obsidian is great; I was a happy user for a couple years. But I recently switched to Logseq and I think I'm already liking it more, and it's because of something Logseq doesn't do.

Obsidian lets you write a full markdown file, so step one is deciding how to write something down. Is it a nested list? Or a table? Or headings and subheadings with paragraphs?

In Logseq, everything is a nested list. This feels like a limitation, but I've been preferring it. The decision is made for you: you're going to jot this information down as a list. So then you just start writing it.

People often tout that Logseq is open source, and while that is great, IMO there is also a design consideration that makes it better. Pretty much any kind of information you want to write down can be represented as a nested list. Doing it that way keeps everything simple, consistent, and more searchable. (Logseq's built-in querying feature seems to be more powerful than Obsidian's Dataview plugin, although I can't say much about it since I haven't really played with it yet.)

Both Obsidian and Logseq save (kinda) standard markdown files, so if you spend a lot of time in a plain text editor, you can still use that. You don't lose anything by editing a file in a separate editor -- they will both parse and re-index the file next time you view it in the respective app.

tuckerm ,

Obsidian is reaching market criticality so I’m expecting enshitification any time now.

You could be right, but I'm not 100% sure of that. From the article:

Keeping the team small and spurning outside investment is Obsidian’s way of avoiding incentives that might lead the company astray.

If they can stick to that, they can avoid going downhill. The main driver for enshittification is big shareholders that want the company to keep growing -- shareholders don't care about stable profitability, they need growth for their ownership stake to increase in value. If Obsidian is profitable now and they're fine with just keeping it that way, they can make it work.

tuckerm ,

...I’m pretty sure every feature in obsidian can be done in emacs.

It definitely can. Unfortunately, I was the only emacs user on my team at work, so switching from org-mode to something that used plain markdown files was beneficial. There's a network effect here -- sharing notes is valuable.

Also, since Obsidian (and Logseq, which is what I use now) both use save plain markdown files, you can still edit your notes in emacs.

Honestly emacs is pretty decent for almost every text related task and many non text related tasks as well.

For sure, emacs is still my favorite operating system. :)

tuckerm ,

I have not heard of cherrytree before, I'll check it out.

List of specific video game communities on the Threadiverse, feel free to comment with more ( kbin.cafe )

When I mean “specific,” I mean things like something dedicated to a certain genre, a certain video game, to gaming suggestions, to asking whether you should buy a certain game… anything that isn’t just one catch-all for any video gaming topic. So I’m not including the various !games@instance or !gaming@instance links....

tuckerm ,

@fightinggames

^ I started that one a while ago, with the idea being that the fighting game community loves its gameplay clips, so we shouldn't fill up other instances with gameplay clips and cause storage problems for other servers.

I haven't promoted it (or even posted much to it yet) because I only just barely got the file storage worked out last week, but it works now so I'll starting trying to get it active. Plenty of space for gameplay clips and pictures of your arcade sticks, what with Mortal Kombat 1 coming out soon and Tekken 8 not long after that.

tuckerm , (edited )

I'm hoping for a Steam controller 2. I've been using a PS4 and PS5 controller ever since they discontinued the original Steam controller. The gyro on the PlayStation controllers works great, but the touchpad isn't useable (or even reachable) like the Steam controller's trackpads were.

I've been thinking that would be their next product ever since they released an official dock. Seems like the two make sense together.

edit: OK I just read the article and it's probably not a controller. :( It's something with a 5Ghz radio in it, meaning it connects to wifi. A controller with a wireless dongle would only be using 2.4Ghz.

tuckerm ,

That's what I've been doing as well, only using the Steam Controller for strategy games. That means I don't use it much these days (which is too bad, since it's a great controller), but I since it can't be replaced now I figure I'll only use it for the games it really needs.

tuckerm ,

Absolutely; if I buy Starfield it'll be like a year from now. But all the hype around it has reminded me that I haven't played NMS for a while.

X4 is another space game that I've been wanting to get back to.

tuckerm ,

I don't have an 8bitdo Ultimate controller, but I have several of their other ones. They all work for me over bluetooth when I pair it with my PC and then use Steam to recognize the controller. They show up as a Switch Pro controller, meaning Steam won't be aware of the back buttons (I'm guessing you need to use 8bitdo's software to do that). But you can remap the regular buttons and the gyroscope in Steam's UI. If you use xinput mode, then you are limited to the controls on an Xbox controller, so no gyroscope.

That does mean you need to use Steam to launch all of your games, even if you bought them elsewhere, but Steam has a controller-friendly interface, so I prefer to do that anyway.

edit: Bah, I just saw @mp3's comment. Too bad that their Ultimate controller doesn't work like their other ones, that's a big step backwards.

Dragon Age: Origins walked so Baldur’s Gate 3 could dash ( www.techradar.com )

Baldur’s Gate 3 isn’t the first successful attempt to marry cinematic aspirations with the traditional branching narratives and simulationist world-building of CRPGs. 2009’s Dragon Age: Origins had a very similar mission statement, offering a spiritual successor to BioWare’s earlier Baldur’s Gate titles long before...

tuckerm ,

Oh man, I loved playing Dragon's Age: Origins. I had a sort of "unexpected companion" when I played through it in college.

I was a computer geek; I had a gaming PC. My roommate was in a frat and had an Xbox 360. The only games he ever played were Call of Duty and Madden.

One day he came home with a copy of Dragon Age for the 360. He said, "This seems like a game you would know about. One of my fraternity brothers lent it to me. Have you played it?" I had just bought it a few days earlier but hadn't played it yet. Of course I'm expecting Call-of-Duty-Madden-360 roommate to hate it.

Later that week I was going to party and he was staying home -- a reversal of how things usually went. I got home very late, very drunk, expecting 360 roommate to be asleep. But no, there he is, playing Dragon Age. As soon as I walk in he says, "BRO I'M IN THE DWARVEN CITY HOW FAR DID YOU GET CHECK OUT THIS SKILL I UNLOCKED FOR ALISTAIR AND DUDE THERE IS A DOG."

We played through the campaign on our respective machines over the next week, sharing tips and strategies along the way. It was great.

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