• 9 Posts
  • 71 Comments
Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: March 4th, 2024

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  • Joke’s on you, Microsoft.

    First of all, I already have Game Pass, so you don’t get any new sales.
    Second, if I open the settings app in Windows 11, it just straight up crashes. (Can access the other tabs, e.g. through desktop customisation. But if I go to the front page, it crashes.)

    It was broken by the update that supposedly added some other ads. But I’ve not seen them! I had to disable the “recommendations” in start menu because it made the start menu not work at all (due to the aforementioned crash, same deal).

    This actually really sucks, though. Windows Store apps do not update themselves, Xbox services stopped working (due to being unable to update WS games), and I don’t know if Windows Update works or not. I guess I need to reinstall when I get arsed to.


  • I miss my SoundBlaster Live! card. Excellent sound quality. Last used with the last computer I built, in the late-mid-2000s. That was the second computer I had that had on-board audio, and I just didn’t bother with on-board audio because I just straight up assumed it was going to be shit. Unfortunately it stopped working at some point, along with the GPU (I suspect a static electricity fuck-up on my part, or something) which didn’t matter all that much because I was mostly using the system as a server at that point.

    (I’m going to build a new NAS server from ground up later this year, and I’m contemplating getting an external DAC for it for use with musicpd. Wonder if there’s still SoundBlaster branded DACs, or are they gone? …Oh they’re still around!? Good.)


  • umbraroze@lemmy.worldtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldThe moon
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    6 days ago

    Photographer here. You’re pretty much spot on. The reason for why this happens has got to do with three reasons, two of which are pretty hard to overcome:

    1. Wide angle lens, short focal length. You can’t fit a long focal length lens on a phone, because apparently no one wants a super thick phone these days. To get photos of the Moon with any reasonable detail you need a pretty decent telephoto lens (I get fairly good results with my 200 mm prime and so-so results with my cheapo 300 mm zoom)

    2. Resolution. So not only can you only fit a small lens in the phone, you also just can’t physically fit a large sensor behind it either. You have a tiny lens which passes through a tiny image on a tiny sensor, so phone makers have long since hit the physical limits.

    3. Control software. Photographing the Moon is a special occasion as far camera automatics is concerned. The Moon is a bright object. It reflects daylight, dammit. Robot brain cannot comprehend this. In the nighttime, camera automatics scream “Aah! High ISO! Long exposure! Wide aperture!” You need to be able to tell the camera you really want daylight ISO and daylight exposure time and daylight aperture. (usual rule of thumb: ISO 100, 1/100 seconds, f/11) Now, the software in phones tries to usually approach this by letting you specify scenarios, but even the vague “night mode” is hit and miss for me sometimes. Fortunately this is something that is usually easy to rectify, because it’s a software issue. (Open Camera for Android is pretty sweet, gives you full manual mode.)








  • Oh no. You know shit is really terrible when they cannot even afford to communicate at 8 bits. It’s 5 bits Baudot code. Capital letters only. They actually had to pay extra for @, #, and $. Thankfully, by 1870s, % was part of the character set. My heart’s with anyone who can’t just blast UTF-8 out wherever they can.

    (Edit: In case you’re wondering why it has a weird gif attached to it: The Memelord, Musky Elon, has decreed that you can actually attach a shitty random gif FOR FREE. So of course any cash strapped institution will do so.)





  • Most common mouse problem I have is that grime gets in the wheel and it acts up or seizes up. (Cleaning wheels is also a huge headache with newer mice.) Buttons rarely quit working. …except on some of my Logitech mouses, sometimes the buttons just started going funky or died. My Microsoft wireless travel mouse has kept working for years. I have an Microsoft Intellimouse Optical from early 2000s that I still use with Raspberry Pi, no problems.


  • Sharing screenshots and video captures.

    The only place where I tried to use it was on Xbox back when Xbox One first came out, and I didn’t like the way it worked back then, so I didn’t really use it much. It didn’t send the actual media to Twitter, it posted a link to the file, and Xbox screenshots got deleted after 30 days. If I wanted to properly post it so that the media was actually hosted on Twitter, I had to save the full res media anyway.

    (In fact actually saving full resolution Xbox screenshots used to be needlessly difficult. Only much later they added a way to save screenshots to OneDrive, which occasionally worked, and only very recently they decided they don’t bother with the Xbox screenshot hosting at all and auto-upload everything to OneDrive.)



  • Hillary was hardly alone in that. Can’t find the exact video, but the point of the video that Jimmy Kimmel platformed Trump, with the guise that the show was “apoliticial”. The video argued that that was not the case. The broader argument: “If you’re atheistic, you denounce the existence of gods. If you’re polytheistic, you acknowledge the existence of multiple gods. Now, if you acknowledge the views of all political candidates going your way, you are not apolitical. You’re polypolitical.”


  • The whole “The_Donald was a FBI honeypot” is a pretty strongly persistent urban legend. And obviously false. Surprises me how many people thought that was legitimate.

    Ask yourself: Shouldn’t there have been results sooner? Would FBI (or whoever) have left an obviously dangerous forum open for honeypot purposes for years and years? If this really was a honeypot operation, wouldn’t they have made arrests as soon as they could? And if this really was the case, shouldn’t we have the details by now (FOIA requests or whatever)?

    Of course not. US law enforcement would have immediately involved themselves if there were any credible threats posted there. But they don’t really do much about festering pits of far-right radicalisation. It was left open with the full approval of Reddit admins. Can’t really claim ignorance on their part either.