CalcProgrammer1

CalcProgrammer1, 10 months ago

If you have to panic because a competitor makes a good game maybe you should reconsider why you’re a game developer in the first place. If it’s not to make the best games you can make, you shouldn’t be a game developer. I’m guessing the developers panicking aren’t the ones who pour their heart and soul into every game they make.

CalcProgrammer1, 10 months ago

You could. You would need some sort of dock for HDMI/DP output but you can run just the motherboard by itself, though you would also need cooling. If someone made a fitting heatsink/fan you could make a little case that has a built in USB C hub and turn the motherboard into a mini-PC/console pretty easily.

When I was repairing my broken motherboard after my failed RGB mod I tried powering up the motherboard by itself with a dock and display and it booted up just fine. Would be a good repurposing of that board since the thing that died was related to the built in game controller and that isn’t needed on a console. If Valve or iFixit sold replacement motherboards I’d replace my bodged repaired board with a new one and repurpose the bodged one for a console.

CalcProgrammer1, 10 months ago

Ooh, look at this beautiful vast open world! Let’s go explo-YOU DIED

YOU DIED

YOU DIED

YOU DIED

CalcProgrammer1, 10 months ago

Elden Ring was the correct answer, but I don’t disagree. I just played BOTW and am now playing TOTK. Up until you get a few heart container upgrades it might as well be Legend of Zelda: Darkness of the Souls.

Once you get to the second row of hearts, it’s a much easier game though.

CalcProgrammer1, 10 months ago

As long as you regulate the output of the solar panel down to 5V then it should be doable. If the power bank supports USB PD charging you can get a USB PD module or car charger that takes 12V in, regulate the panel voltage down to 12V and power the PD module.

That said, solar panels are not going to provide consistent voltage due to clouds and shadows and such. That’s why pretty much every solar system has at least a small battery to buffer the output of the panels. Since you’re just charging a power bank it’s probably not a big deal.

Also, any large panel will be completely wasted charging a USB power bank, so you should just get a small 10-15W or so panel. A power bank won’t charge much higher than that at 5V.

CalcProgrammer1, 10 months ago

Awesome that we now have cheaper options for the Deck. With competition from other handhelds starting to encroach on the Deck’s lower price territory (at least the 512GB model) it’s definitely good to see. I was hoping they would refurbish all the RMA’d Decks and not just recycle them. I had to send my original Deck in because of a firmware bug that made the CPU lock to like 1W TDP but it was otherwise in flawless condition. They replaced it with a brand new unit. Hopefully units like that are ending up as refurbs now.

CalcProgrammer1, 10 months ago

Only the people who provide content for profit tbh. For the original focus of YouTube, which was simply to provide the ability for the collective “you” to post videos and share them with the world, it’s fine. The problem was, like every platform that provides a financial incentive to do anything, it gets gamed by those seeking to profit off of it and devolves into a corporate hellscape.

Ignore the monetization aspect and, other than the ads (which can be blocked by uBlock at least for the time being), it’s still a fine platform.

CalcProgrammer1, 10 months ago

Probably fixed RMA units. I had to RMA my original June 2022 Deck because it got stuck in some permanent low TDP mode. Otherwise the hardware was still in great condition. If they were able to somehow reflash the firmware to fix this issue it would be like new. I’m sure there were others RMA’d for this issue or minor internal hardware issues that could be fixed. If there were fan issues hopefully they put new fans in as part of the refurbishing process.

CalcProgrammer1, 10 months ago

I tried to play on Vulkan with my Arc A770 (Arch Linux) and it just black screened. With DX11 it played at around 60fps with VRR (dips down to the 50s) at 1440p.

CalcProgrammer1, 10 months ago

If you preferred old.reddit, there’s mlmym.org (which you can also self host if you prefer) and it replicates old.reddit’s interface almost exactly.

CalcProgrammer1, 10 months ago

Look up Calam Arch Installer. It’s an installer ISO for Arch (using official Arch repos) that uses the Calamares installer which is the same installer Manjaro uses. It makes Arch easy to install, I’ve used it for all my Arch installs.

CalcProgrammer1, 10 months ago

ARM UEFI exists, it’s just not very common like it is on PCs. Technically, every x86/x86_64 PC has its own custom bootloader that describes the peculiarities of the given hardware/motherboard, it’s just that the standard has been that every x86 machine ever made (barring a few Android Atom tablets) comes with a BIOS/UEFI bootloader built in that standardizes the boot process.

On ARM, it is possible to UEFI boot (and some ARM bootloaders provide varying degrees of UEFI boot support - Tow Boot on the PinePhones uses UEFI for instance, there is one available for RPi 4 as well). However, since ARM devices are mostly phones and tablets running Android or single board computers (often provided with no software at all) they usually don’t come with a UEFI compatible bootloader. Hopefully this will change, or at very least second-stage UEFI capable bootloaders become more widely available to add UEFI capabilities to devices with Android bootloaders. U-Boot does have some UEFI capabilities and is commonly used for single board computers that don’t have a built in bootloader.

CalcProgrammer1, 10 months ago

The Deck can output up to 4K 60Hz with the right dock, so the picture quality is not going to be limited by the supported resolution of the Deck. What will limit the picture quality is that SteamOS by default runs games at 1280x800 or 1280x720 for 16:9 external screens, regardless of the actual selected resolution. It will upscale games rendered at 720p to whatever the actual output resolution (1080p or 4K) is. There is an option in the per-game settings in the SteamOS UI to set the resolution for each game. If you pick Native, it will allow the game to render up to the screen’s native resolution for a full-quality image, no different than you would get on a normal PC. However, the Steam Deck’s GPU isn’t very powerful compared to a desktop PC so you aren’t going to be able to push most games that high. A lot of older titles and 2D games can run fine at native 1080p on the Deck though.

CalcProgrammer1, 10 months ago

Same. Digg was the first site I frequented, then migrated to reddit with the v4 exodus.

CalcProgrammer1, 10 months ago

Arch

…btw

CalcProgrammer1, 10 months ago

Good luck installing your drivers on a fresh copy of Windows if your network card didn’t come with a physical installation disc, because if you have to download your drivers without a network card you’re going to have serious trouble.

There was a time period where it was absolutely easier to set up a fresh Linux distro than a fresh Windows install, because the Linux distro could use your Ethernet card to download drivers even if WiFi didn’t work but Windows couldn’t use either of them.

CalcProgrammer1, 10 months ago

The best way to lemmy is mlmym.org on LibreWolf. Works great on Linux phone and has the same old.reddit interface I’ve used for over a decade.

Why waste space on single-purpose apps when you have a browser. Also, websites can’t track you or waste resources when you aren’t actively using them like apps can.

CalcProgrammer1, 10 months ago

Should be easy enough to hear over the sound of my audio not working!

/s (my audio has worked fine for over a decade)

CalcProgrammer1, 10 months ago

The best Lemmy experience is mlmym IMO. It’s pretty much a 1:1 recreation of old.reddit and it’s the interface I am comfortable with.

CalcProgrammer1, 10 months ago

• postmarketOS and the people porting Linux to phones
• Panfrost devs
• Nouveau/NVK
• Yuzu (to get better Intel Arc support on Linux)
• Libraries I use in OpenRGB

I already donate to one of the libraries I use on GitHub sponsors, also the box86 developer and a few others. I am donating to the UVTools developer as it was cheaper than paying for the shitty proprietary software subscription for my resin printer. I’ve donated to pmOS in the past as well as Debian and Arch.

CalcProgrammer1, 10 months ago

If LPL is the monster, no door will stop him

CalcProgrammer1, 10 months ago

In Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, a “blood moon” happens every 3 or so in-game days. This is a cutscene where the sky turns red and the blood moon comes out. When this happens, all monsters you have killed in the world come back to life.

CalcProgrammer1, 10 months ago

Also, publishing on F Droid is free while publishing on Play Store requires a developer account which costs money. Charging for the Play Store version makes sense if the dev even wants to offer it on a paid storefront. The free and FOSS option is free so I’m happy with that. I dislike when ALL options to acquire binaries of a FOSS app are paid but charging for the version on the pay2play store is understandable.

CalcProgrammer1, 10 months ago

As long as you pay for a blue checkmark, sure.

CalcProgrammer1, 10 months ago

Yeah, I think this might be the best for PeerTube. Instead of federating to the point of copying the actual videos to each server, just copy the metadata/thumbnails. That way all of the videos on all federated servers on the network show in each instance’s list of videos, but when you actually click on a video it requests an embedded player from the original server that the video was hosted on rather than on your local instance.

CalcProgrammer1, 10 months ago

Unlockable bootloader, removable battery, headphone jack, being assembled with SCREWS rather than GLUE.

CalcProgrammer1, 10 months ago

PinePhone with keyboard case!

CalcProgrammer1, 10 months ago

Spot on, my daily driver is a PinePhone Pro with keyboard case. It ticks all the boxes. It also covers the “physical keyboard” feature which is a few comments down.

It has its downsides, but it’s a full fledged Linux computer in my pocket. What’s not to love?

CalcProgrammer1, 10 months ago

I like the moon in the background and I like that it is stylistically similar to the Firefox icon. My only complaint is the eye, not really a fan of the swoosh effect on the eye.

CalcProgrammer1, 11 months ago

I’d rather have brands host their own Fediverse spaces than have official subreddits. For brands that are truly toxic they can be fediblocked from all the major instances, but generally I would only recommend that for extremely offensive brands.

It seems more official to run your own forum anyways. This wouldn’t be much different than companies running regular forums except now you could interact with them from an account you already frequently use on other platforms. It would make it a lot easier to interact with than registering an account just for a brand-specific forum (that you then have to remember to visit occasionally if you want to follow discussion).

CalcProgrammer1, 11 months ago

True, I guess I don’t know how this works when it comes to federation. From what I understand, federation works by mirroring content from one server on another (so your local server has a copy of the remote communities, you interact with them on your instance and it then uploads any changes back to the original instance).

Does this mean that mirrored communities work as archives? If the original instance goes down, can you still browse the copy of it on any other instance that federated (and interacted) with it?

CalcProgrammer1, 11 months ago

PinePhone Pro for the mobile side. The schematics are available. I quite like mine, especially with the keyboard case. It’s basically a pocket laptop.

CalcProgrammer1, 11 months ago

It’s been a few months since I tried it on my Mac Mini M1, but HDMI audio didn’t work last I tried. It was kind of a big deal since I use it as a TV PC.

CalcProgrammer1, 11 months ago

I hate Google too, but if they are proper open specification formats and aren’t encumbered by patents, why does it matter that Google created them? Open format is open format regardless of its creator.

Do these formats have some DRM capability or other nefarious reason to avoid them or is it just because they were created by someone we don’t like?

CalcProgrammer1, 11 months ago

Quarter tiling is huge on a 4K screen. I use a 4K screen when I’m doing YouTube programming videos sometimes and want to have OBS, a camera preview, an HDMI capture preview, and sometimes an app I want to put on screen open at the same time and quarter tiling is great for this. I currently have to use an extension to get this functionality on GNOME, but it would be awesome to have it built in.

CalcProgrammer1, 11 months ago

Works nicely as a phone distribution though (in the form of postmarketOS).

CalcProgrammer1, 11 months ago

I have a 15 year old laptop that can still browse the web and play YouTube videos just fine because PC is a standardized platform with an open standard bootloader and a BIOS/UEFI system designed to abstract the hardware so the OS doesn’t have to be tailor-made to the hardware. Mobile devices are absolute shit in this regard. Why does the OS have to be specifically built to target one particular device?

It shouldn’t. End of question. This applies to Android, ChromeOS, and Apple devices equally.

I’m glad mobile Linux is starting to take off and there seem to be some standards emerging around ARM booting, even if it is still an absolute shit show compared to the standardization of UEFI/BIOS on x86/x86-64. I know some ARM systems can UEFI boot but it’s few and far between still so most devices still need a tailored kernel at least. That said, ARM Linux doesn’t need the entire freaking stack tailored to a device like Android and iOS do.

CalcProgrammer1, 11 months ago

Yeah, Windows 11 is a bad example of supporting old hardware because Microsoft stupidly and maliciously requires secure boot and TPM2 just to lock out otherwise fine hardware from using Windows 11. You can run Win11 without secure boot or TPM2 with mods, the hardware is perfectly capable.

Or just put Linux on it. Linux runs on damn near everything because it’s designed to run on damn near everything. There’s no profit motive to only support Linux on the newest and shiniest devices like there is for Apple, Google, Samsung, and even Microsoft (who sells most copies of Windows preinstalled on new PCs).

CalcProgrammer1, 11 months ago

A decade or more of kids growing up with shitty toy computers instead of real computers will do that. Mobile OSes, in their ridiculous pursuit to dumb down the computing experience, have dumbed down the computer users.

There seems to be a sweet spot in age where you grew up with actual computer experience. Young enough to actually grow up with computers in your household and school but old enough for those computers to not be toy mobile crap.

I’m very glad mobile Linux phones exist now. Having a real computer in my pocket rather than some awful imitation of what a computer should be is refreshing. I always wanted a pocket computer as a kid, but then when it actually happened it felt nothing like a computer unless you hacked it.

CalcProgrammer1, 11 months ago

Exactly, bootloader locking should be downright illegal. If EU wants to make phones last, they need to mandate that you can unlock the bootloader (WITHOUT bullshit like having to get an unlock code from the manufacturer). Want to lock it down for certain software features like payments, etc? Ok, fine, I can live with that, so long as I can unlock it if I so choose and keep all HARDWARE functionality intact.

On another note, the manufacturers should be upstreaming and mainlining their drivers in the Linux kernel. ChromeOS and Android are both built on Linux, yet they keep all their hardware support in forks and branches that are left to wither and die rather than submitting those changes upstream. Only a select few ARM SoCs have mainline support. If the companies would just put a bit of extra effort into doing things right rather than the shitty hack jobs they do now to get products out the door as fast as possible, we could have a much better ecosystem around old phones. Of course, the shittiness is by design.

CalcProgrammer1, 11 months ago

Yes, why have we as a society allowed Google of all companies to take over something as important as public education? It’s downright dystopian.

CalcProgrammer1, 11 months ago

5 years is shit. People have been conditioned over the past 10-15 years to think that the mobile way of doing this is the correct way. Before that, your PC was an open system that you could upgrade and update until it was incapable of running the latest software due to hardware limitations (not enough RAM, GPU API level, processor extensions, etc). These days the mobile companies have convinced people that none of that matters. The software is so intrinsically tied to the hardware that even if the hardware is not much different to the new hardware, the new software won’t work.

A 15 year old PC can still do a lot of work on a modern OS these days. Why can’t a 6 year old phone? Because the people who want you to buy a new phone said so.

CalcProgrammer1, 11 months ago

Code in VSCode

UI in QT Creator

Build with qmake

Commit with git

Push to GitLab

Run jobs with gitlab-runner

Deploy AppImage, deb, rpm builds with Docker

CalcProgrammer1, 11 months ago

mlmym.org for me

CalcProgrammer1, 11 months ago

IIRC you can disable it entirely with Group Policy Editor which is only available on Pro. I think there was a hack to enable it on Home so you could make Defender shut up once and for all…at least until the next Windows update that reenables it because Windows doesn’t care about your configuration.

CalcProgrammer1, 11 months ago

There’s never a bad time to switch to Linux! The best time may have already passed, but the second best time is now!

CalcProgrammer1, 11 months ago

Let’s compromise and use both!

CalcProgrammer1, 11 months ago

Install fresh copy of Linux OS on a new device. Install the apps I know I need like browser, code editor, etc.

Use device.

Realize “oh crap I forgot to install X!”

Install X

Repeat until all X have been installed.