Tootfinder

Forgetting to update my bleeding edge linux distro in over 2 weeks feels like a death sentence for my PC.

I got one of the nice new Xbox/PC/Android/iOS-compatible 8bitdo controllers and it's been great for Xbox, but I just cannot get it to pair with my Quest 3 :( It sees it, I get a pairing prompt and then just an error that it failed to pair. Sigh.

I need to reinstall windows on my PC but first I need to mess with the bios since I’ll be going to Windows 11 🥲

"But Macs are bad for gaming"
Me [playing a game on my Mac that won't run on my Windows gaming PC despite that it should]: "Aha"
(The game is Fez btw. And yes it works fine on Macs despite not even saying it was released on macOS on the Wikipedia page; maybe someone knows when it was released and could update that page.)

Easy Fox, the developers behind a free, AI-powered game demo on Steam,
has been forced to take out a bank loan
as more players tried out its title.
The game, called
"Teach My Little Sister How To Drive",
uses Google Gemini to listen to your voice commands
and generate responses,
with ChatGPT serving as a fallback system.
In its latest update, Easy Fox said that the number of players trying out the game has grown over 20 times, which…

Free Steam demo runs up $1,000 daily AI bill and forces devs to take out bank loan — studio eyes local hardware models to escape cloud limits as cheaper automatic fallback AI models create problems, game uses AI to process your voice and build responses
The devs didn't expect the game to blow up during its demo phase.

Moved Shoko off my main PC onto my "media server". \o/
Currently runs:
- Plex* (might investigate JellyFin in the future).
- Komga*.
- Shoko.
* Media itself located on my NAS, hooked up via CIFS until I can stuff HDDs inside the thing itself... Not gonna happen soon with current prices tho.

So I've been trying to figure out why #Bluetooth doesn't work on my PC, but works on my laptop. I was wondering if I have messed up the configuration or something.
Finally, it occurred to me that I can plug the same dongle into the laptop. Yep, the dongle's crap.
No clue where I got it from anyway. Probably some dismantled computer, or a family member buying crap.

For some while my ability to play records has been somewhat theoretical, with my turntable plugged into my PC for easy ripping, but not playing. Now fixed and I have the exquisite pleasure of: rain outside, record on loud, read a book.
And yes, getting it to work did somehow involve a Games Workshop carry case, what of it?

Since Feb, my PC has been having issues that have proved difficult to nail down the root cause of. Now, at least partially as an "excuse" for why it's taken me till now to finally figure it out, we bought and moved into this fixer upper manufactured home in Feb. So I've been pressed for time.. fixing it up, heh. Also around the same time I finished putting in the "final" upgrade (what with PC part prices, it might really be the final one) with a 9800X3D.
So,…

BBC Master 512 in DOS Plus; GEM, Turbo Pascal ( the 6502 Welcome panel). The video on the Master 512 is a bit odd - it's not got enough VRAM to be able to do normal PC modes, and it's not got the character gen to do hardware text (except teletext which is no use to the PC side). It was DOS Plus not MSDOS so some stuff was touchy. Hmm only thing I'm missing is the mouse, it might be in the loft somewhere.
I also need to try a PI RGB thing, my LCD doesn't like some st…

I fully understand iPad kids now. I picked up an onn Android tablet because somehow Wal-Mart of all places has actually reasonably specced tablets somehow for $200.
The Android apps that have a tablet layout are just legitimately better, there's just so much more you can do at once that it feels more like a PC. Emulation is better than my phone too, plus it just legitimately feels better for any kind of media content be it Twitch, social media, or streaming video.

Playing Void Strangers on my Void Linux PC.

I like my physical PC release of GTA V, btw 😁🥰

I've been alternating between drawing (Procreate) and sculpting (SculptrVR, GravitySketch, OpenBlocks, Shapelab) for my #EatPoopYouCat turns and last night did a quick search on the #MetaQuest store to see if there's any scultping apps I haven't tried.
Holy shit, this

Clayground: VR Clay Sculpting on Meta Quest
Sculpt, paint and animate clay with your hands on Meta Quest, no PC needed. Layers, symmetry, lattice, splines and stamps, in VR or mixed reality. Then export GLB or OBJ for Blender, game engines and 3D printing. Free, made by an independent artist.

The idea is selling my iPad and Laptop, and buying a 360 laptop on its place
The 360 laptop would substitute the iPad AND most of the Laptop use, allowing me to have my laptop features when in college too (my current laptop is too heavy so I only use it when traveling, at home I have my PC)
Tho I'm also looking into a Steam Deck to substitute the gamer part of the laptop
If I'm able to sell both for a good price and find a good deal for the 360 laptop, the final price should be around the same

My friend now we are in business...
This IBM PS/2 Model 30 286 has been giving me fits. Specifically, the floppy drive.
* I broke the head off the original trying to clean it
* The replacement is for a different PS/2 model.
* The floppy adapter to allow "normal" PC drives didn't work
* I swapped the non-standard floppy cable
* It would read only 720K disks
* Found someone online with exactly the same issue. These machines need specific mod…

I installed Windows XP on my AMD Athlon X2 64 pc. I installed Windows Vista a few months ago (after trying other operating systems) because that is what it was on many years ago and what the oem os is. It is just too slow on Windows Vista to be usable. So I installed Windows XP. I had Windows XP on it before but I went to try Vista but Vista is too slow.
Now I am back on XP and it is perfect. Especially with the Zune theme it looks so nice.

This #Dreamcast project looks super cool https://bsky.app/profile/eliasdaler.bsky.social/post/3mu6awwwmoc26

Long time no see.
Lots of things going on personal life as always.
Anyways, here's a small project I did these days.
I've been reprogramming BIOSes with `me_cleaner` to remove/disable the Intel Managament Engine from my homelab's motherboards.
#bios #intel

So streaming ain't gonna work well until I can upgrade the OS kernel, or get to the front of the Steam Machine queue.
Streaming a flat-screen game from the gaming PC to a theatre-screen in the headset seems to work fairly well though.
Not much actual point in my room that already has a massive projector, but maybe if you shared a space I guess?
You can of course download your flat-screen game and play it on the bus too. It's using the pass-through so you ain't blindfolding yourself to local thieves.
There is a web-browser of course. Chromium. Visited my VR site, which has an embedded 360/stereo player that works on Quest: Doesn't work here. Just does a full-screen-in-the-theatre-window mode. Can't turn it even so it's just looking forward.
Presumably better web-browser VR API stuff is on the way.
As a stand-alone VR machine though, it is is working well so long as you download the game and for those that actually work.
Doom doesn't. but Alyx on-device looks great. Loads fast, no frame-dropping, and the game is great. See some detail suddenly being filled in sometimes. Like a chunk of screen comming into focus. Suspect that's the foviated rendering? Maybe. Or just normal LOD, who knows.
Played Metro Awakening VR for ten minutes. Haven't played that before. Pretty nice looking game.
Seems like Pistol Whip in particular is more clunky than I'm used to for no particular reason. Maybe they'll release a Frame-optimized version later.
The sound is definitely not as good as the quest either. Less bass response. The quest you really feel it when you pistol-whip someone, the clunk of their armour. Not so here, just a little speaker-click.

I taught a PC-lab earlier, where one of the examples contained a €-sign.
Wandering around the room, I noticed more than one student had googled "how to enter a Euro sign"...
AltGr-4, mostly (except on my laptop where inexplicably it is accent-key/=/C)

Uh, #Linux #AMDGPU folks managed it. The 7.2.2 kernel somehow manages to break saturation control on my TV. I mean, the kernel on the connected PC, not the TV. I have no clue how or why it would be able to do that, but the TV is ignoring the saturation slider and running at full saturation, making my eyes bleed.