I’m with you. In fact I’ll say even retro operating systems were better (no bloat, no spyware, easy to understand/configure/mod/hack around), as well as retro Internet (no Javascript crap, no browser fingerprinting/tracking, simpler HTML, super easy webdev) and retro computing (no soldered-on components, PCs were more modular and easy to repair)… heck, planet earth in general was better back then. We’ve been on a downwards spiral since the 2000s. Everything sucks now.

You could make yours a Geocaching app with fog-of-war. They’ve got an API for third-party apps too, so it should be easy enough to develop, and actually fun to play.

If you’re feeling ambitious, add some RTS elements like from Age of Empires - eg if you add someone as your ally, you can share their line of sight. Finding certain types of caches, or POIs, increases your resources (gold/stone/food/wood - maybe visiting Pizza Hut gives you extra food lol). And with these resources, you could build virtual structures like castles etc. Other players could spend resources to take it down (but they need to be physically at that location), and you could spend resources to defend your building.

Kinda like Ingress basically, but with medieval/RTS elements and geocaching thrown into the mix. How’s that for a challenge? :)

That’s incredible. Your son has far, far, more patience than I ever did. I still haven’t managed to clock most of the games I grew up with, such as Dangerous Dave, Prince of Persia 1 & 2, Wolf3D, Doom 1 & 2, Crystal Caves, Aladdin, Lion King, Jazz Jackrabbit, Mario (NES), Pokemon Red (GBA), Crash Bandicoot (PS1)…

Every now and then I try to clock one of those old games, but then I get stuck and/or lose interest, and move on to something else. Even among recent games, I spent over 400 hours playing BotW and only managed to do two of the divine beasts. I also have over 200 hours in TotK and still haven’t gotten to the first major spirit quest. Similarly, got several hundreds of hours in Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim, but never actually completed any of those games.

I think the only game that I recall beating would be the Bio Menace trilogy - which I finally managed to complete as an adult, and that too thanks to DOSBox’s save states. Oh, and Diablo II too, it someone had the perfect mix of action + story + game length, to keep me interested till the end.

Honestly I’ve no idea how people manage to stick to one thing for so long and see it thru till the end, without losing interest or getting distracted by something else.

Given the current pace of development, how long would you reckon it might take them to get rid of the bugs, at least, the annoying game-breaking ones? I don’t mind incomplete content, but game breaking bugs is something I don’t have the patience to deal with. Like, I made the mistake of pre-ordering Cyberpunk - dropped it on day one cause of the bugs and didn’t touch it until three years later, when it was finally in a playable state (for me). Just wondering if Star Citizen would reach that sort of bug-free stage within the next couple of years.

It’s not in the opposite order, it’s just flipped around in the photo lol.

Looks like this might work: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005094002506.html

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If it’s just for personal use, why not just use Tasker? Judging by what you’ve written, it could be easily done without needing any Android coding experience.

But Bethesda could very well release a Skyrim Extra Special Edition in the interim, and fans will lap it up, no doubt. Jokes aside, there are many large fan-projects in the works which fans are looking forward to, such such as OpenMW, Skyblivion and Skywind, not to mention more “normal” mods for Skyrim itself, so I doubt the interest in the franchise is going away any time soon.

I’m one of the foolish ones that actually pre-ordered the game. Was super hyped for it too, did a countdown till midnight so that I can start playing at launch, and I even live streamed it (and also had a few other streams going on two laptops). Took the day off to play the game as well.

The clock hit 00:00 and less than 30 minutes into the game, I ran into my first bug. I stuck was in a dialog loop and couldn’t get out no matter what I tried, so was for forced to load an earlier save. Then I got stuck somewhere else, or something funky would happen. I’d never been so utterly disappointed in a game until Cyberpunk came along. So anyways, I was so put off by it that I’d decided not to play it any further, until they patched it all up. So the first patch came along, but this time I decided to read the reviews first - still plenty of bugs. Thought I’d wait for the next one, noope, still buggy. And the next one. And the next. And then I decided to ignore the game completely, until not only they fixed the bugs, but also added QoL stuff into the game. Like better AI, better peds, better driving etc. Make the city more immersive. I mean, I had waited for so long, so might as well wait and play until it’s at it’s best version.

So, not only will I not play now, nor when 2.0 comes out, I’ll play it only when Phantom Liberty is out, and will enjoy the game, for the first-ish time, the way it was meant to be played.

Assuming of course that Phantom Liberty isn’t a dud, but having learnt from my previous experience, I might wait a bit after it comes out and see if they release a post-launch patch or something first.

Never again pre-ordering a game… unless it’s a Zelda.

The exciting part here is the shell, not the insides. Indeed the Intel boards aren’t that great for gaming, but once Framework start shipping the AMD boards next month, this thing would become a real contender to the Steam Deck, ROG Ally etc. Load up something like ChimeraOS on it and you’d get a near-Steam Deck like experience.

To be fair, that’s the case with Linux and laptops in general right? Unless you’ve got a mainstream/popular model (or a brand known to work well with, or officially supports Linux), issues like sound, battery life and even suspend, wifi etc are fairly common. Which is why one of the most common Linux questions (besides “which distro”) is “which laptop”.

Depends on the hardware. If it’s an x86 then that’s most certainly a yes, if it’s an ARM then YMMV.

Just get a monitor. The only real difference between a monitor and a TV these says is the lack of a speaker, and “smart” stuff. But TV speakers suck anyways so you’d be better off using a soundbar regardless.

Awesome, thank you. Guess that’s my weekend sorted. :)

Finished Mass Effect 2 and loved it

Did you play it on PC or console? If it’s the latter then how were the controls? I’m planning on getting it on console, but I suck at playing FPSes with a controller.

humans have been trained to imitate the guttural grunts and shrieks of gray langurs, a type of large monkey that can scare away the smaller kinds that tend to invade city officials’ residences or disrupt state visits.

This weekend, the impersonators will take on a fresh challenge: keeping monkeys, which often evade guards by swinging through tree canopies, from barging into venues for the Group of 20 summit of world leaders, the first to take place in India.

I bet “monkey call impersonator” would look amazing on a CV. Can you imaging applying for a job and going thru an interview though?

Those look yummy! Also, thanks for the reminder, it’s spring here, perfect time to grow some chillies I reckon.

Katamari Damacy - The objective is to roll a ball-like thing called a katamari, to roll up objects, and make the katamari bigger and bigger. You can roll up anything from paper clips and snacks in the house, to telephone poles and buildings in the town, to even living creatures such as people and animals. Once the katamari is complete, it will turn into a star that colors the night sky. Sounds weird, but it’s super fun, trust me. Plus, it’s soundtrack is kickass.

I did the TV -> projector swap last year, got myself a 4K projector that sits above my bed and projects a massive 100" image on the wall opposite my bed, and it’s awesome. I’ve got my PS5 and Switch hooked to it, and I’m currently living the dream of being able to game and watch movies on a giant screen, all from the comfort of my bed. Some games really shine on such a screen and you see them in a new light, like TotK, Horizon series, Spiderman etc and it’s 100% worth the switch, IMO.

Now I also have a regular monitor - a nice low latency QHD 16:10 monitor with HDR, hooked up to my PC, which also uses a 6600 XT btw. Main reason I use this setup is for productivity, running some PC games that don’t have console equivalents, plus the colors look much nicer compared to my projector. Maybe if I bought a laser projector and had one of those special ALR screens I could get nicer colors, but all that is way beyond my budget. Although these days I’m not on my desktop as much as I used to be (I also have a Ryzen 6000 series laptop that I game on btw), I still like my desktop because of the flexibility and upgradability. I also explored the option of switching to a cloud-first setup and ditching my rig, back when I wanted to upgrade my PC and we had all those supply chain issues during Covid, but in the end, cloud gaming didn’t really work out for me. In fact after exploring all the cloud options, I’ve been kind of put off by cloud computing in general - at least, the public clouds being offered by the likes of Amazon and Microsoft - they’re just in it to squeeze you dry, and take control away from you, and I don’t like that one bit. If I were to lean towards cloud anything, it be rolling my own, maybe using something like a Linode VM with a GPU, but the pricing doesn’t justify it if you’re looking any anything beyond casual usage. And that’s one of the things I like about PC, I could have it running 24x7 if I wanted to and not worry about getting a $200 bill at the end of the month, like I got with Azure, because scummy Microsoft didn’t explain anywhere that you’d be paying for bastion even if the VM was fully powered off…

Anyways, back to the topic of CPUs, I don’t really think we’re at the cusp of any re-imagining, what we’ve been seeing is just gradual and natural improvements, maybe the PC taking inspiration from the mobile world. I haven’t seen anything revolutionary yet, it’s all been evolutionary. At the most, I think we’d see more ARM-like models, like the integrated RAM you mentioned, more SoC/integrated solutions, maybe AI/ML cores bring the new thing to look for an a CPU, maybe ARM itself making more inroads towards the desktop and laptop space, since Apple have shown that you can use ARM for mainstream computing.

On the revolutionary side, the things I’ve been reading about are stuff like quantum CPUs or DNA computers, but these are still very expiremental, with very niche use-cases. In the future I imagine we might have something like a hybrid semi-organic computer, with a literal brain that forms organic neural networks and evolves as per requirements, I think that would be truly revolutionary, but we’re not there yet, not even at the cusp of it. Everything else that I’ve seen from the likes of Intel and AMD, have just been evolutionary.