confident_inept

I've been using a somewhat low-spec PC to play games and for general desktop usage. Finding stuff in this form factor, that you can guarantee will be well put together and worth the money is a rarity.

Highly likely this could replace my desktop, as I don't need something much more powerful, just with more modern hardware. I don't do much AAA gaming and nearly game in my Steam library would run on this just fine. My regular daily computing needs can reasonably be satisfied with the compute power of a Raspberry Pi. I can swap flatpak based immutable SteamOS with plain Arch without losing the advantages (i.e. custom hardware settings integration) that one might sacrifice doing so on the Steam Deck.

This is going to be a no-brainer for my next upgrade.

I'm really curious to see if these still rely heavily on resizable BAR. Putting these in old computers in linux without reBAR support makes the driver crash with literally any load rendering the cards completely unusable.

It's a real shame, the single slot a380 is a great performance for price light gaming and general use card for small machines.

If you look at their previous devices this company's whole shtick is having weird, quirky, or niche features. The MicroPC had a dedicated serial port on a device released in the 2010s. People often buy these devices for the whimsical nonsense they do.

I've purchased and used a number of the GPD products and even contributed to the Arch Linux wiki on the various small caveats of the devices. They generally have good (community) linux support quickly after launch. Build quality is decent as well.

If you're looking to get any GPD device, it's best to wait a few months after launch and they will be on the used market for a decent discount. Lots of early adopters buy these and ditch them because they aren't flawless, but they make fun toys.

Is there anyone who can break down the advantage of something like this over a typical open source model? I read through the page and FAQ for fair source and still don't quite grasp the angle here other than making software less free for a temporary amount of time.

Directly filing your taxes in the US was currently mail-in only until this pilot originated.

Intuit and the likes have lobbied with their millions to make sure the average citizen can only e-file with a few select proprietary options and it has been that way for as long as most anyone remembers.

This opens the gates for what might be (I didn't look much into the site) an easy way to e-file directly with the IRS.

I had an AMD APU setup that I used for a while as a light gaming rig. I'm impressed to see these chips continue to grow in capability and be offered at reasonable prices.

I'm curious how the FOSS video driver for these fares on Linux. The newest discrete cards have random full system lockups and driver crashes that make them unusable for anything that stresses the GPU.

Emulation aside, the Steam Deck has been compared to the Switch in some capacity or another in almost every single review I have ever seen of it. While I wouldn't think it's had any negative impact on Switch sales, it's a absolute fact that the Deck can emulate a multitude of games at performance parity or better than the Switch itself. The deck is constantly lauded as an emulation powerhouse and the Switch appears frequently in the discourse.

Emulation legality aside, Nintendo would certainly be the company I would expect to pressure Valve for a case against enabling and abetting piracy given their history of legally attacking perceived "competition".

I'll add LOVE (https://love2d.org) to that list as well. Very powerful and flexible game framework,

Currently working on developing a game in Minetest (https://www.minetest.net/), it is also scripted in Lua.

What a good story, and a good mindset to have. A great deal of learning comes with failure and I've learned to look forward to messing things up over the years.

I recently started painting models. I wasn't happy with the brush look so I went with airbrushing. Thinning paint to the correct consistency for the tool is a pain. Priming parts is not only required but time consuming. Testing products and finding brands that produce good results is a headache. I learned the hard way even a mild topcoat can keep your work from getting destroyed by just touching it.

I had my first successful paint job just the other day. It's not perfect. I threw out three complete failures getting to this point but I have learned so much about the process and gained an appreciation for just how hard it is for all those people on Youtube to get it right.

I have a short tuta.io address that always gets odd looks when I spell it out to people, who tend to react weirdly when not hearing a major domain when typing in an email address.

Anecdote aside, I've had several people not receive my emails at all, some I've been able to actually test, using Tutanota for outbound messages. I've created or helped create Teams accounts for others several times in the past and have never run into anything like this with any other provider. Microsoft is setting a precedent by singling out one provider. I hope it's not a sign of things to come. Virtually all email is de-facto controlled by a Microsoft/Google duopoly.

I looked into running a personal email server on a home machine once and was put off by how many people told me my messages would be undelivered without numerous hoops to jump through.

What a mess.

I'm not terribly interested in podcasts but I do love seeing what people create, so I gave it a click... and then couldn't back out to HN.

Why is your site back-button trapped?

Glad to see PS1 style rendering that simulates the affine texture warping side effects of the console. The original Playstation was very much not designed with 3D in mind, lack of perspective correction on textures lead to the aforementioned warping.

Vertex coordinates were rounded to whole integers, giving that hallmark polygon jiggle effect from the rounding that 'snapped' them in place. The complete lack of a z-buffer also lead to lots of z fighting, as the system rendered polygons strictly in the order they were calculated.

At a very young age I ventured into taking apart my personal computer to better understand it. When I was in my early teens I could build a whole computer with off-the-shelf parts without any help. My older peers would poke at me for being some sort of "tech wizard" because computers were something a lot of the older generation didn't grow up with at the time. I would take every opportunity to show interested parties just how straightforward it was that I did; Certain cards fit in certain slots, cables only fit in one way, and there were a few internals you had to be a little more careful with than others. Many of those people were surprised to see just how simple "building a computer" was, more akin to building Lego than something that needed a college degree and high amounts of technical skill.

Code boot camps tend to be a bit one-dimensional and only give the students a slice of the basics, most often including setting up a work environment and focusing on lessons that produce immediate results and/or feedback. People interested in software development don't realize how easy it can be to get started making small projects, often needing their hand held at that critical entry point. Boot camps can help lift the veil of mysticism and show that software development isn't sorcery.

You can crash people quite easily in game without any mods by just loading an overly-complex avatar. There is the content gating system, but quite a few people just turn it off, hence the crashing.

I have a separate Windows machine I use for all of my gaming, including VRChat, that does not touch my Linux network or any of its files. I started doing this around the time Windows 10 came about because I didn't want to take a gamble with what any of these "security" implementations would do. I tried VRChat because it's free and works with and without a VR headset.

Modded clients aside, it's fairly easy in VRChat to have an avatar with too many performance hitting effects that can outright crash other players on lesser hardware in PC worlds. I've heard anecdotes of the Quest version, while receiving recent improvements, is also prone to crashing on mixed PC/Quest worlds. To be fair, the default view settings are aggressive enough to cull the more offensive avatars (for both performance and moral objections ) back to a safe default and it can be adjusted to taste. Avatars are also graded by their performance impact and you can see a full spec sheet of their polygon counts and various performance metrics right within the game.

They do a decent enough job providing good defaults and the content is gated in a way you can individually whitelist people and specific avatars/worlds as you experience them. There is a global "Trust Tier" system that allows you to move up the ranks by racking up play time and friend count, new players are tagged as visitors for a long enough time that it's not too hard to weed out bad actors. I don't believe I've encountered any modded clients personally but I will be interested to see what kind of effect this has in the in-game world.

In my opinion the rules increase in complexity in order of release, with Queen's Garden being by far the most complex. Depending on how much complexity you like, it's a linear scale in my opinion. All four are fun and they are soon to release a special edition of the first game that is chocolate themed.

Any of the four Azul games. They are all loosely based on each other and the rules between them have similarities even though all four are a completely different experience. They fit that great middle ground of being simple to play but have strategic elements for those that want to be competitive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azul_(board_game)

The GPU shortage is at the initial stages of being over, largely due to multiple facets of the cryptomining implosion that are right around the corner.

I still can't yet walk into a Best Buy or local electronics store and get one off the shelf, and online prices are still jacked above MSRP.

We'll see real action 6 months to a year from now.

This stuff is still incredibly easy to do to this day. I was the general manager of a retail office store chain and we would frequently have calls come in forging fake complaints but asking for the district or regional manager's first and/or last name. The attacker would then call another store in the region claiming to be "Mr. Head Manager".

Most associates knew or had seen the names (they were required to be posted in the break room) but often times never met the people in question. The attacker got associates and other shift/associate managers to do everything from giving up secure information on the registers to ring up gift cards.

It was happening two to three times a week in our district at times despite weekly training and conference calls on the subject. Some people are just born to be duped.

I'm a previous owner of a few Pine products but I just can't get even a little exited about any of their hardware anymore for most of the reasons you mentioned. Pine supporters will point out that their site claims they don't develop or support software and while that is actually true, their entire software stack is held up by a handful of people doing the work for little gratitude and no pay.

It's quite a shame how much better their hardware could be if they hired someone to do the in-house work for stable OS support on any of their devices.

All of the Pine64 stuff is like this and it's detestable.

I had a RockPro64 for a while that I had tons of trouble getting to work for almost these exact reasons (largely thanks to uboot). Got rid of my Pinebook Pro for similar reasons.

Pine64 makes tons of interesting devices then relies almost 100% on unpaid post-consumer-hobbyist interest for any usability outside of a hacked together barebones ecosystem. Even their unique PineTime, which has been out for some time, is at a barely functioning level and I have zero hope for the PineNote at this point.

I really wish they cared about more than spinning out flashy hardware and patting themselves on the back.

It's 2022, can we please stop saying 'pwned'?

Sure, I'll take the karma hit for this comment.

We get several of these stories every year. It's news if something makes it out of a laboratory and even into prototype production.

Do these articles do anything to help spur research or draw interest? What's the point?

That project is outdated, and doesn't have drivers for pen displays.

I have a Huion Kamvas Pro 16 that I struggle to get to work with Arch. There are multiple projects out there on Github that have slapdash python drivers with various degrees of functionality. The previous most functional one is no longer in development. I was unable to successfully get OpenTabletDriver working even though it is a supported device. Multiple monitors? Forget it. I had to run the pen display on its own to even have a chance.

Wacom stuff almost always just works.

I really don't want to pay triple the price for (in most cases) a lesser functional device than the competition that is Huion, XP-Pen, etc. Can't wait until the day some form of kernel driver is available.

Thank you. That website and article were a train wreck.

I had no idea that ship was still stuck. I guess now they have to dismantle it in place? What's process here?

It's not even a matter of having his work backed up. He still has the code. He no longer has access to the entire Google ecosystem and there is absolutely no other viable alternative for mobile.

Lots of people like and use Google. For me, I've moved away from their services for email and communication. Their tendency to launch a new project with tremendous momentum and support only to suddenly and without warning cancel the whole project (looking at you Google Wave) combined with their Orwellian level of control over the internet as a whole was the one-two punch that put me off entirely.

The duopoly of having Apple and Google control the entire mobile universe is gut wrenching. This developer is now unable to develop for millions of phones based on an algorithm deciding they were a bad actor and Google likely won't be compelled to care, a drop in the vast ocean of their concerns.

There aren't any alternatives for commercial or monetary apps. I've taken to using finds on f-droid for mission critical mobile applications but that's just not viable for most people.

I think the game not having an online component is one of its charms. Simplicity in nature and execution is the obvious goal.

Have you seen the leaderboards of any online game lately? They usually get wrecked by cheaters and defeat the whole purpose.