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I recall feeling with adventure games that I was really exploring a world, and it was a really cool feeling. Hitting arbitrary dead ends was like getting the door slammed in my young kid face and to this day I’m real wary of the genre. Nowadays if a dev does something assholish to a game, it’s just a dev being an rear end in a top hat. You can generally rely on a mod or community pressure to set things right. Back then, it felt like a betrayal.
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Aug 21, 2019 04:43
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Or the tale of the baby toy for grown cubicle dwellers, the Fidget Cube: https://medium.com/@jobosapien/real-vs-fake-the-infamous-case-of-the-quickly-copied-fidget-cube-9b26a6161b36 quote:The Fidget Cube campaign did mention copycats, but I didn’t realize it was this egregious. quote:What you have to understand is that China is very good at quickly and cheaply manufacturing almost any good you can think of, especially if it’s a simple product with no internal circuitry or associated software, which the Fidget Cube falls under. e: welp that's a bad example of what the poster above was demonstrating. Still amusing. My main fidget toy is a knockoff Rubik's Cube, which have had knockoff copies made since the 1980's. They sell really bad ones at dollar stores. doctorfrog has a new favorite as of 23:30 on Aug 25, 2019 |
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Aug 25, 2019 23:25
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Peanut Butler posted:me, I do, else my phone won't last all day
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Aug 27, 2019 04:38
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I have a Sansa Clip at the moment (sans the clip, which exploded when I dropped it one day), and I hope it runs a good long time, so I don't have any pressing need for one at the moment. I guess I sometimes miss the days when electronics sorta revolved around the AA/AAA battery. Anyway, if I really wanted one, I could still get a Sony voice recorder, many of their cheaper models run on a NiMH AAA, included. They play MP3s just fine and connect as a USB drive.
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Aug 28, 2019 21:20
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Rexxed posted:I appreciate the mp3 player chat because I had a couple, and old mp3 players are kind of neat, although at this point my sandisk sansa which I got in 2008 and still works perfectly is only technically obsolete due to having small internal storage. My first mp3 playing hardware that wasn't my PC was the Creative Nomad II. I still have it although it no longer powers on. Those SmartMedia cards could hold so much data! I could fit an album or two on each one. The microSD card is in frame to show the difference in size. I know SmartMedia was as lame as hell but I always liked their connector thing. It was classy.
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Aug 29, 2019 01:26
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ReidRansom posted:I've seen Bentleys far newer than the 80s going cheap as chips. They don't seem to have any resale value, here in the US, at least. Relatively low mileage (50-60k) 10 year old cars going for like $30k-$40k. A doctor of some kind in the office complex I work at has a Bentley that I bet is something like this. I'm not sure what because I don't care enough about cars to have that sort of knowledge, but also because he laboriously puts a car cover over it whenever he takes it to work. content: Some other article somewhere led me to an obscure alleyway from the days of shareware: mp3pro. http://www.rarewares.org/rrw/ctmp3pro.php This was a codec that would transcode your existing mp3 files into lower-bitrate mp3 files that still sounded pretty good. I tried it out a couple times when I was smuggling music from my work computer to my home computer on 100MB Zip Disks. This was just as Napster was getting started, and I had a computer with dial-up American Online + a 28.8 modem. Only thing was, you had to play back your mp3 files on an mp3pro player. doctorfrog has a new favorite as of 19:17 on Sep 8, 2019 |
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Sep 8, 2019 19:14
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Mr.Radar posted:My cheapass dad bought an RCA Lyra MP3 player on clearance that played MP3Pro files as well as regular MP3s. It only had 64 MB of storage so you pretty much had to use MP3Pro format to fit even a single album on it without absolutely murdering the quality. It had an SD card slot but all our cameras and stuff were CompactFlash back then so we didn't get any SD cards until long after we'd forgotten about it. That'd be one of these (linked from the mp3pro web page): https://web.archive.org/web/20050711232639/http://mp3prozone.com/products.htm I really like the late 90's pocket electronics look of the RD1071, before/as things were getting all colorful and ergonomic.
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Sep 8, 2019 23:55
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I used QuiteRSS for a bit after Google shut down Reader, but it just seemed to underline how much dang work it was to go through RSS feeds. I had way too many. Now I can't even remember most of them, so I guess they weren't that important. I have never seen a compelling reason to use Twitter for anything that would overcome the compelling reasons to avoid Twitter. gpodder, an open source podcast downloader I used after finally getting sick of iTunes, will also work with plain RSS feeds, but with around 100 or so feeds, it's really slow. It will, however, let me stream (most) YouTube videos so I never have to go to YouTube again.
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Sep 23, 2019 08:02
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I read The Caine Mutiny a couple years back, and one of the naval officers' jobs was to manually cut and paste updates to their manuals and code books, which they picked up when they came to shore.
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Oct 5, 2019 21:36
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Trabant posted:This is pretty neat: However, I hated the date feature on pictures and always made sure it was turned off on the one camera I had that used it. Kinda feel bad for the poor humans who had to glue those millions of mirrors and whatnot into place.
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Oct 14, 2019 08:03
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9gO01pyv24
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Nov 11, 2019 09:27
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Last Chance posted:
Oh, hey, I use his hipster brother in law  I wish I had the choice of sticking it between stations, because the darn thing uses the power cord as its antenna and sure has some trouble locking on a station.
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Nov 26, 2019 07:23
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I have a 2015 Honda with a CD Player in it, but it also plays off of a flash drive. When I drive my five year old around, my music selection becomes... not my own, so there's a CD-R with MP3s I can quickly toggle to for the My Little Pony soundtrack, without hunting for it on the slow-rear end piece of garbage that is the car's music player interface. So yeah, I burned a CD-R in the last six months, but danged if I could do it now: I have no idea where my spare CD-Rs are.
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Dec 6, 2019 04:09
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Unperson_47 posted:Wouldn't it be a better idea to have a silent 5 second or so song named 00000000.mp3 or whatever? I had a '95 Camaro, the OEM CD player's "shuffle" option would just play the same non-default order for a given disc (i.e., 9 4 2 6 7 8 1 5 3) every time. Not sure if it did the same "shuffled" order for all discs, but it seems likely: wouldn't it be about as easy to program a different shuffle order per-disc as it would be to program "true" shuffle? On the other hand, a pre-set shuffle is just a hard-coded play order.
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Dec 7, 2019 08:42
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I have a car with an mp3 player option. Though I don't agree, a lot of folks would consider mp3s to be obsolete technology. I use it. My old car was old (2002), and a 64GB mobile jukebox is a fantastic delight to me. Here are the things I have to overcome to get mp3s to play properly on this car that is six years old:
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Feb 27, 2021 04:11
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Sure. I just like to play albums all the way through most of the time.
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Feb 27, 2021 04:49
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Cojawfee posted:Does it at least let you skip tracks by using the fast forward? Yes, it's a "normal" head unit installed standard with the car, so it has the features of a generic music player (skip, shuffle, etc.). Mp3 management just seems to be something of an afterthought. Shuffle will (shockingly, considering) shuffle a single folder's contents (recursive selected sub-folder shuffle = no) or the entire directory structure. I will say this: copying things over to the USB drive used to be a major pain. I'd copy them over, then use mp3tag to apply a baroque folder restructuring so I could browse by Genre/Artist, and another program to truncate folder and filenames. I Googled/figured out how to use foobar to export a shitload of albums by genre and artist, and apply a truncated subfolder structure in one go, while avoiding the 700 folder problem. code:Then BulkFileChanger. Frankly, I'm surprised I managed to cobble a process together. vvvvv ah, my bad doctorfrog has a new favorite as of 06:09 on Feb 27, 2021 |
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Feb 27, 2021 05:47
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JnnyThndrs posted:I have an old truck with a cassette player in it, so I bought a cassette - shaped MP3 player that sends the audio into a tape head and uses MicroSD cards. This thing is really cool to me. Does it pause when the "tape" isn't being spooled?
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Feb 27, 2021 06:08
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Crap I just noticed the tiny little Shrek face. In my mind's eye, I can see a youthful William Shatner asking it whether it's safe to leave town yet, and waiting, filled with anxiety, for a straight answer.
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Mar 24, 2021 21:12
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that ftp just points to ftp.iomega.com it's probably just a site that a robot made here's the link ftp://ftp.iomega.com/english/dvdrwfirmware-w32-x86-a110.exe it probably doesn't work
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Jun 20, 2021 06:22
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nostalgic for that old Micro$haft Winblows Internut Exploder anger
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Jun 21, 2021 08:55
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the pipe is largely an extension of his beard
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Jul 7, 2021 04:16
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Compaq had that roundish, pinky beige design that really set it apart from the slightly less roundish, beigey beige PCs. Goddamn computers took up so much space. I bought and assembled a monstrously complex $250 corner desk to hold all of my PC's stuff. When I moved I discovered it wouldn't fit through my bedroom door. doctorfrog has a new favorite as of 05:45 on Oct 21, 2021 |
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Oct 21, 2021 05:29
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https://i.imgur.com/jpOK5Bu.mp4
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Nov 28, 2021 18:33
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I miss pixel-sharp interfaces and icons, so sharp you could cut a finger on 'em. Mac OS 8 Copland, bb4win, pixel fonts, all that stuff that had to die because everything got all soft and round and decadent and scalable to high resolutions. e: I know blackbox for windows is still (maybe?) limping along, but I just never got around to fiddling with it in Windows 10.
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Mar 13, 2022 22:44
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Trabant posted:Apparently serious attempts at designing spacesuits: I had an old obsolete middle school science textbook prominently featuring the bottom one. I love that design so much, it's like a little yurt that you wear.
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Aug 23, 2022 19:22
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That moon suit put dryer duct technology ahead by at least 3 years.
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Aug 23, 2022 23:23
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IMO messing with scalers and not worrying too much about 'em is part of the fun of retro gaming. These days I usually use xBRZ when I can or good old Normal4x, but sometimes I'll use a dreadful CRT filter for the heck of it.
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Aug 25, 2022 03:10
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lobsterminator posted:I keep my Steam library mostly on the "Only show installed games" and "Sort by last played" mode. And I only have a handful of games installed at any given time. Works for me. I have similar problems if I see a huge list of games. I also just write down on paper when a game sorta intrudes itself on my mind when I'm working or bored, it seems to forestall distraction (installing it, looking it up online, etc.). "Okay, you thought of Game. Write its title down and you can maybe play it later." I almost never play it later. It's admittedly a weird thing to do, but I and my environment have trained my brain to look for distractions and it helps with training it the other way. I'm at a place where looking at a game on a list--on a screen, or on paper--isn't paralyzing, it's satisfying. Not in a "I've accomplished something" sense, but in a "I've acknowledged the need for distraction or fun" sense, enough so I can do something else that I'd rather do, or have to do, that's less immediately rewarding.
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Oct 7, 2022 21:50
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Dick Trauma posted:What sort of technology would be in those goodie bags? At first glance, I was like, "Why would there be any toy, much less a flip phone toy, that depicted someone in Star Trek TNG medical operation room scrubs?" 
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Oct 15, 2022 02:43
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The one good thing about going to the DMV was hearing the dot matrix printers
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Nov 7, 2022 18:40
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There has to be a parody video of these where the restoration doesn't work very well and there's an extended ASMR sequence of a restoration of a bespoke antique pistol, followed by an off camera gunshot.
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Nov 29, 2022 19:33
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By popular demand posted:Even the voice actor sounds uninterested click to hear "hm! have plenty of time to play with myself."
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Jan 10, 2023 20:03
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Just give me a Johnny Cab. Robert Picardo n' me just chillin through traffic on the Bay Bridge.
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Jan 14, 2023 23:41
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uber_stoat posted:i don't think this thing is "failed" but maybe obsolete in a certain sense. whatever it is, it's fukken badass. Blog post for this (if you don't like reading on twitter): https://www.righto.com/2023/01/inside-globus-ink-mechanical-navigation.html
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Jan 24, 2023 20:29
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I'm generating some tones using Audacity as an impromptu hearing test, out of curiosity and terror. I tried a YouTube hearing test (for entertainment purposes only), and here's their scale: 8000hz (everyone) 12000hz (under 50) 15000hz (under 40) 16000hz (under 30) 17000hz (under 24) 18000hz (under 24) 19000hz (under 20) Now, I couldn't hear past 12000 on the YouTube video, but I got a nails-on-chalkboard response all the way up to 18000. 19000, nothing.
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Apr 10, 2023 21:06
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namlosh posted:That’s hilarious. They’re showing a picture on the screen while the rest of the tv is off. The way those work was to watch tv you had to open that huge ugly brown console thing. The top part was hinged on the front and opened to lay flat on the floor, extending the thing by like three feet and having a mirror angled toward the screen. Then with a switch, the 3 crt projectors (RG and B naturally) at the bottom pointing back would turn on, hit the angled mirror, and project on the screen. Holy moly, I remember seeing these in stores a very small child. I was confused by the fold-out part, like, was that a little couch you could sit on to watch the TV or something? What if you liked your own couch better? I think I had it figured out by the time I saw a second one, though, and I was mesmerized by the fat round projector things, having identical video images on them. doctorfrog has a new favorite as of 06:51 on Apr 24, 2023 |
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Apr 24, 2023 06:48
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Snake Maze posted:And what about those luddites who refuse to use a teleporter? “Oh I’ll just cross through literally every point in space between me and my destination instead.” What a bunch of losers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUXKUcsvhQc
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Oct 26, 2023 05:06
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let's see the back of it (assuming it's all plugged in and functional)
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Nov 15, 2023 22:16
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they see me rollin' i be jackin'
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Feb 24, 2024 03:01
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