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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • Hall effect joysticks would be great. The rest I don’t really count; obviously, better performance/bigger screen would be an incremental improvement, but I don’t need it. The OLED screen is plenty big enough.

    I (personally) would never use detachable controllers and wouldn’t want more moving parts that could break. Haptics and adaptive triggers I don’t care about improving. For sound, I prefer headphones for when I want “good” sound, too, so that wouldn’t make a difference for me.

    Even hall effect joysticks are only going to matter to me if my current joysticks break or develop play.

    I really do think the current OLED is amazing.



  • I’m not really sure what’s not perfect with the OLED already, lol. Maybe a second USB-C port would be nice, so we could charge it while using a non-hub device, or use a cheap hub to add even more controllers? That’s a minor, incremental improvement, though.

    It could always be smaller/thinner/quieter, I guess, but I can’t think of anything I’d really want to change with my Deck. I have lots of minor pain points with other tech, but I literally can’t think of anything with the Deck, so I’m curious if you have any specifics, or if you’re just trusting that Valve has put some real thought and research into this and will surprise us with design changes for the better that aren’t obvious.



  • Eh, for most things, sure. I’m right with you for most media, but there’s a lot to be said for confining content when it’s part of the cultural zeitgeist. Ain’t nobody talking about Game of Thrones now, and it’s only 6 years old, not even a decade.

    With any sort of piracy setup, almost all mainstream media is incredibly easy to get within a few hours of release, and most “Long Tail” content can be found pretty easily, too. If it’s so obscure that you still can’t find it, then that’s likely a good indication that you’re solidly pushing into indie content that hardly earns any income, so they could really benefit from us paying for their content.

    We do try to make sure indie content creators get paid, though. For example, Kindle Unlimited is pretty amazing for us. My wife and I share an account, and we read so voraciously that authors get paid out about 10× what we pay for the service. Maths out roughly like this: ~30 books/month, on average, at ~1¢/page (actual pages, not Kindle standardized e-reader pages, which are only half a page), at ~250-300 pages/book is $75-90/mo, and we pay for 2 years in advance at I think $7ish/mo.

    But I’m totally with you on games. I spend lots on videogames, but almost entirely for indie game bundles at $1-2/game, typically. I have literally thousands of games I’d love to play going back decades, so I don’t need the latest releases unless it’s a game I’m super excited for.



  • Bluetooth headphones do this, too. It’s infuriating. Let me turn off battery saver mode, god damn it! (I assume this is on the headphones, not on Android, though?)

    For some reason, TalkBack triggers this, too, so most Bluetooth headphones are useless for that purpose. Something in a recent update broke TalkBack in the Kindle app so it won’t read continuously the “old way” (that worked) and instead uses “continuous reading mode” that pauses just long enough to put Bluetooth headphones to sleep every sentence. And I don’t think Google cares because Amazon has implemented their own TTS system in the Kindle app that’s slow as fuck for anyone used to speed reading with TTS, but it’s the way everyone is recommending now for Kindle. I’ve switched to pirating books so I can read them in Moon+ Reader instead, since it works.





  • oh, shit:

    The main one I see is if you need to install some proprietary VPN client it gets annoyingf

    You’re right. I have a crappy work-supplied Windows laptop that has exactly that installed. It would be nice not to need to boot into that when I need to work on the server from home, but it’s not a deal breaker.

    No other specific non-web-based software is needed for work, aside from the aforementioned OneDrive and Excel 2024.

    Edit: Your last paragraph is exactly what I’m asking about; I’m capable of doing slightly involved tinkering, but it would need to be something that I can Google Fu through each step of someone walking through most of the steps. I don’t know it at all well enough to go completely “off script” and just tinker with confidence.

    It sounds like you’re suggesting that going for something mainstream and getting it to work for games is likely a better option, particularly for someone with limited Limits experience?



  • Thanks for the reply!

    A few thoughts:

    I was thinking Win 10 EOL won’t matter if the VM has no Internet access. Linux would sync the files for me, so the Windows VM can just run Excel (and maybe Word, since I’m setting up Office 2024 anyway) using the files synced by abraunegg’s onedrive, so it doesn’t need internet access. (Assuming there’s a partition format that works well for both Windows and Linux that I can use for onedrive, which I assume is a “solved” problem by now—i remember this being hard 20 years ago.)

    And his package apparently works in Fedora 42 with docker, which I assume should work fine.

    But yeah; maybe what you’re suggesting makes more sense. And that VM definitely would need web access, then, so Win 10 is a non-starter. The database work I do is likely easier in Linux, but that’s likely easy enough to get data files out of the VM for just that work, I would expect.

    Another question now comes to mind; I’m going to look this up now; how hard is it to copy/paste between Linux and a VM? Edit: As I’d hoped, this is also apparently a solved problem and sounds easy to configure.



  • Hit the nail on the head.

    Millions and millions of print books are destroyed all the time, and very rarely is anything of value lost. Libraries, thrift stores, and used book stores get inundated thousands of books donated to them, most of which nobody wants. Unless you, personally, are going to take on sorting, transporting, and storing dozens of duplicate copies of books in poor condition, and have some purpose for them (presumably?), then get off your high horse about the destruction of bulk-purchased used books.

    Individual copies of mass-published books are not precious. Only rare books are important for preservation. And, even then, digital copies are much more practical for long-term storage than physical books. Anna’s Archive’s preservation project as a shadow library is only possible because data storage is very cheap, infinitely replicable, and practically free to transport.