they are doing things you couldn't dream of over on Facebook.
(guitar pedal made of a fax machine CCD chip)
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Greg
@greg@icosahedron.website
mastodon 4.6.8Vell, Greg’s just zis guy, you know?
461 Followers
91 Following
44 Posts
Joined August 28, 2022
Website:
friend pointed out "Shrek is older than the Department of Homeland Security" and I just sort of did this for a while
@sinvega@mas.to based partly on your MOO3 retro for RPS I reinstalled the game (first time in 20 years) and gave it a fair shake, and you're right - w/ the benefit of time it's admirable for having at least tried SOMETHING new, even if every neat new idea is undercut by some other system that doesn't quite work. Like the "sweet spot" colony thing, which makes diff planets desirable for different races (instead of just "Terran best") and hints at the idea of sharing systems with a different race... except that's a strategically terrible idea and you need to oust neighbors ASAP. Or the many small events which add charm, except it's quickly a flood of noise you must tune out!
I did come around to liking a lot of the automation and it was noticeable which parts DIDN'T have it, like the spy interface, where my agents would die and no governor was keeping replacements trained for me... only noticed when my tech started getting stolen a lot
something you know, something you have, something you are, something you see, something you ate yesterday, something you believe, something you regret,
One of my friends went to #Grinnell College (Iowa) and talks occasionally about "Plans", a text-only social media site for Grinnell students / alum that functions as a sort of blog, message board, essay hosting, etc.
The name confused me for a minute, until they sent me this link to a history of Plans - and it turns out it's older than the Web! Originally it referred to a social system of users on the school's #VAX machine, where you could stage a .plan file and use the "finger" command to read messages "posted" by others. And then they retired the VAX, so Plans moved online!
Anyway, it's a neat read about the novelty of using a shared #UNIX system back in the days before the Web.
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@davidrevoy@framapiaf.org I did a work presentation during an AI "hackathon" just a few weeks ago, where I presented my (all human) efforts and then explained that my coding companion was a rubber duck. QuackGPT has many benefits - it is environmentally friendly, inexpensive, water-proof, and comes in a variety of colors. I even taped a little paper necktie onto mine mid-presentation to upgrade him to "agent" status.
ooo eee ooo
@jonschwenn surely you could've done this without the AI slop
oh well, just unsubscribed. sorry about your follower numbers or whatever
installing node.js on my raspberry pi 1B+. i'm sorry, little guy
Paging @dosgameclub@dosgame.club / @Tijn@dosgame.club / @rnlf@dosgame.club - after 30 years we finally got a new version of Machiavelli: the Prince (?!?) Andrew at HDI, who previously patched up Emperor of the Fading Suns for a 1.5 patch, has taken another look at Machiavelli and brought some much-wanted QOL improvements.
https://holistic-design.com/machiavelli-the-prince-enhanced-now-in-stores/
Pretty incredible to see this game get some love after all these years!
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Ah that's funny. I found the same user I got one of the files from, re-downloaded it, checked, and ... yep it's damaged.
Our Discord group doing an "as it was published" read-through of "The Count of Monte Cristo" is back in action - Dumas took a six month break between parts 2 and 3, long enough for us to forget about it, until the channel lit up on June 20 with the newest installment :P
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@SnoopJ@hachyderm.io so was westwood online's XWIS, the lobby for c&c, red alert, etc
https://medium.com/sean3z/xwis-wol-game-server-protocol-b2a3457bd06
Tried to play Seven Kingdoms: Ancient Adversaries multiplayer last night - but without reading any instructions or manuals, it's pretty inscrutable, and I just died to peasant rushes repeatedly.
However, the game over "score screen" was pretty funny, because it reads just like the "Our Blessed Homeland / Their Barbarous Wastes" meme
Tried out #Evennia with some friends yesterday - it's a popular #MUD / #MOO / #MUCK / etc construction set - we bounced around the tutorial world a bit and tried creating objects / rooms to play around with it. Seemed like an OK starting point but I wished it was more "opinionated" - there's a lot of class inheritance and Python needed to add functionality, which the authors assume you'd want to customize for your game in ways they couldn't predict.
But, idk, I wish that either it took some firmer stances on things (e.g. why am I allowed to teleport into another player's inventory? yes, "any Object can be a container for more Objects" is a theoretical design idea, but cmon really?) - OR - I wish it shipped with more "batteries". Would have been nice to have e.g. a stock object with a "use" verb that fires a canned phrase, instead of having to code that. Or one that teleports you, or a "clothes" you can "wear", and so on.
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@TechConnectify@mas.to Shoutout to Biden's Infrastructure Bill, which (among many other things) provided grants and incentives to ISPs to build out broadband access in underserved areas. We live in a semi-rural spot in Arkansas (not farms, but populaton-sparse with big lots) and our options like yours were 12mbps DSL, flaky fixed wi-fi, or cell towers a long ways off. Last year a super-local company came and buried fiber lines _everywhere_ and we pay less now for excellent, reliable Internet - and they claimed some of that grant money as a reward. Would never have happened otherwise.
I think often about how the government mandated telco lines to everyone in the past - "it won't pay back" was simply not an option. We have the ability to do these things right now - it's not hard! it's not complicated! - but what's missing is the people in power to just DO IT.
Naturally, the rural broadband incentive was deliberately ended in 2025.
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@dwardoric@chaos.social @Tijn@dosgame.club Yes (though you get it by re-buying the game) - https://store.steampowered.com/app/2799350/Emperor_of_the_Fading_Suns_Enhanced/
Fixes a bunch of issues, balance changes, makes the Church actually do something!!!, adds a couple new maps, and exposes a bunch of knobs for modders
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@jacqueline@chaos.social I believe it is way more common than we know - something about this stuff hammers people's brains in a way that we (society) are not prepared for. And these are folks who should know better! They work with computers, they know it's just matrix multiplication in there! But knowing about it, I guess, provides to immunization to being taken in by its sycophantic mirroring language.
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@jacqueline@chaos.social r/MyBoyfriendIsAI is a cautionary tale, but I have a friend mentioned seeing a girl on the bus asking ChatGPT to give her a pep talk before going on a date. Just, everyday random people, getting taken in by the illusion that the computer is giving of being more than a computer. I truly think we're not aware of how many people are being swayed by all this. It's gotta be more insidious than just the worst cases we see in the news.
Stumbled across "Whispers in the Moss" today, a JRPG written in QBasic that uses a unique ANSI art style. The author had been working at it sporadically for about 12 years but finally shipped it in April 2024. A really neat find!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETpK9IJlacA
I also liked this write-up from the author about their experiences trying to publish on Steam / do marketing / sharing sales numbers etc
https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieDev/comments/1rvasgj/i_spent_12_years_making_an_ultraniche_qbasic_jrpg/
Whispers in the Moss | Retro JRPG with beautiful textmode aesthetics | Steam, GOG, Itch.io
@shodansafari@infosec.exchange dudes rock
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@0xKaishakunin @maehw I was sad to discover just now that http://mysqltuner.pl the single-purpose domain that used to just give you the MySQL-Tuner perl script, has lapsed
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@Willow hmm reading some of your other posts, suggesting software may be further down the line from where you're at.
You need something to run it on - there has to be a machine, somewhere, either one you own or one you're "renting" (real, virtual, whatever). And you need a domain name. These are good first steps.
So the first question is:
- Do you want to host this thing out of your living room / etc on a spare laptop or raspberry pi or etc? (You will need: a public IP address - which depends on your ISP)
- Or do you want to host it on someone else's machine (real or virtual) - which comes with "guaranteed" uptime, IT service, etc. but you may end up paying for it
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@joshbressers@infosec.exchange curious how many of those "more than 1 maintainer" projects is actually just "one maintainer, plus a guy who sent in one commit to fix his build problem 9 years ago"
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@dirkdierickx@mastodon-belgium.be that github profile image is not filling me with confidence
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@daniel_gonzalez@neopaquita.es @PCMag@mastodon.social What black magic is this??? How does it know what I've installed and where to find updates?
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No ada1 errors in dmesg, smartctl shows no errors either. Stress tested a bit by copying some gigs of files back and forth via NFS to see but everything hashed the same too. Praying they were bad files from the peer to begin with, though I may give a few hours to memtest86. I'll be more paranoid going forward :)
Speaking of which, maybe about time I get around to those backups I always intended to set up and never did...
Mac Classic folks - I'm using Basilisk II for emulating an app on Mac OS 8, and it runs too fast (CPU bound animations). I'd like some utility I could run in the "background" that just busy loops to eat cycles - similar to Mo'Slo for DOS/WIN back in the day. Does one exist?
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@64kb@icosahedron.website @moh_kohn@mastodon.scot obviously the new hires / maintainers should be thinking of Chesterton's Fence - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_fence - HOWEVER I think that if you can also include test benchmarks, documentation or tools to make it easy to demonstrate that the fence is still valuable, then the new maintainer can prove it to themselves. Else it might sound like preaching! It's good to re-evaluate every so often and make sure what you're doing is still worth doing. Make it simple to do so.
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@jwz@mastodon.social also, RIP to Jeffrey Ray Roberts, aka The Laziest Men on Mars, who passed away in 2011.
https://www.quisenberryfh.com/obituary/1270757
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@supertux@floss.social you should try SuperTuxKart, it's fun! It's on APT. It's literally on Yum. It's on SourceForge with ads. It's literally on Pacman. You can probably find it on DNF. Dude it's on Zypper. It's a Portage original. It's on Snap. You can play it on Snap. You can go to Snap and play it. Log onto Snap right now. Go to Snap. Dive into Snap. You can Snap it. It's on Snap. Snap has it for you. Snap has it for you.
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@maehw @0xKaishakunin Oh! I guess they were suffering some temporary outage this morning.
@quasi_crystals@mastodon.social man door hand hook car door