rozodru

For stuff like the SNES it wasn’t a big deal. just open the console. cut out the plastic peg and you’re playing Japanese SNES games. a grade school friend of mine at the time showed me this. His Dad travelled to Japan for business all the time and would bring back SNES games for him. His dad tried playing the games in the US SNES but noticed that the games wouldn’t slide in correctly. then he saw that on US SNES cartridges there was a notch in all the cartridge cases while the Japanese cartridges didn’t have this notch. Looked inside the console and sure enough there’s a plastic peg sticking out that lined up with the US cartridges. so he figured “what if I remove the peg?” sure enough once the peg was cut out the US SNES could play Japanese SNES games. That was Nintendos region lock prevention, a plastic peg.

For the PS1 a local comic shop was selling chips for it. bought a chip, my dad took the PS1 and chip into work with him one day and got his buddy to solder it in for me. worked like a charm.

For the PS2 I just ended up importing a translucent blue PS2 from Japan. it was just easier that way.

For the Dreamcast literally just had to get a boot disc and you were good to go.

I started playing Minecraft last week for the first time ever. I’m 43 years old. It’s fun. it’s a lot of damn fun. I can just do whatever, build whatever, farm, and I don’t have to interact with anyone if I don’t want to. I’m having a blast with it.

For years I just dismissed it as a little kids game and at this point I’m kicking myself for not trying it sooner.

I think the “using it as a diary” claim is just an excuse/her attempt to get out of it. MORE than likely it was a prompt asking Claude the best way to shoot up a sheriffs office.

yup if something went wrong with Windows you might as well just try to fix it based purely on hopes and dreams or pray to whatever god you believed in that there was someone who knew the answer in some random IRC room. the “troubleshooting” crap on the MS website was absolutely worthless. and chances are the site would just timeout on you before you could actually find anything.

I had completely forgotten just how awful microsofts websites were back in the early 00’s. Gates saying the site kept timing out or would go down all time is very much true and happened with everyone. Microsoft’s website would CONSTANTLY time out. downloading ANYTHING via microsoft was an absolute crap shoot if it would actually download or not.

I remember having a computer in the late 90s that only came with Netscape. In order to play games like X-Wing vs Tie Fighter online more easily than direct IP connection to someone you had to use Microsofts Internet Gaming Zone. in order to use that you HAD to have Internet Explorer, it wouldn’t work with Netscape. So you’d have to spend an entire day downloading IE and MOST of the time the download would time out or crash so THEN you had to use a download manager to prevent you from losing progress on the download for when Microsofts site would go down which again, was constantly. updating the OS was even more painful as again Microsofts online service would always go down.

If you think Microsoft is bad now, man it was A LOT worse back in the day for reliability.

i don’t even use menus anymore. it’s slow. heck I even hate using the mouse these days. We had the right idea back in the 80s and early 90s by running everything via the command line. it’s faster. Now to open stuff I just use a launcher. it’s faster to type what I want to run then it is to use a mouse to go find it in a menu.

building a browser from scratch is just an insanely difficult task to begin with. Building a browser from scratch tailored to each specific platform instead of doing something like QT is just idiotic. There’s a very good reason why the majority of todays browsers are forks of Chromium or Firefox and why very few are their own from scratch. Building a web browser is probably one of, if not the most, complicated bits of software to build other than building an OS from scratch.

I’m not a fan of Kagi, I can’t justify paying for a search engine especially after honestly trying it and getting mediocre search results. I was optimistic about Orion but after following the development for awhile I knew it wasn’t going to pan out. they spread themselves too thin on that project and it sows further doubt for Kagi overall.

I’ve also been trying to find more physical media lately. I’ve also recently gotten into “retro tech” for computers and other things. I’ve seen a huge uptick in that lately. It’s fun to go back to PCs I used to use in the 90s and early 00s and get them working again. and in most cases, all the parts and stuff still work just fine. I’ve started going to shows and small conventions for retro computer stuff and seeing what other people are working on and restoring is awesome. Seeing people getting old 30+ year old computers working with modern-ish Linux is really cool.

I just finished a project rebuilding a PC with parts from around '97 and '98 that is currently running Windows 98. thing booted on the first go after everything was put together. zero issues. Also because of this stuff I’ve learned to fix motherboards and finally, after decades of promising myself to learn how, I’ve learned how to solder. that stuff is fun. repairing motherboards and other various boards, switching out chips and capacitors, its REALLY fun.

“it’s mind-boggling”

well there’s your problem and your answer. if you have no idea why this could be you’re the reason we aren’t going to the US.

only “big” release I can think of for the PC is WoW Forever.

reminds me of Tom Waits in “Coffee and Cigarettes”

The beauty of quitting is, now that I’ve quit, I can have one, 'cause I’ve quit.

this has been happening since…well…forever and it hasn’t radicalized the population yet. Unfortunately this won’t do it either. us peons are kept in our place by design. there are so many institutions, policies, rules, etc stacked against us to prevent us from radicalizing and rioting and placing the 1% head’s on pikes. I could stand on street corner with a megaphone yelling that we need to kill the rich, we the people need to take back what’s ours, and try to rally people to my cause but we all know I’d be viewed as a crazy person and/or arrested. Potential leaders to lead a radicalized people are promptly put down.

Serfdom never went away. it was repackaged.

from a sys admins perspective it’s painfully easy to deploy across hundreds of machines. NixOS is declaritive and immutable. you can take one system configuration of NixOS and throw the same config on as many machines as you want. packages, dotfiles, whatever are all replicated the exact same way on each machine. You can lock all the packages/apps, configs, kernels, etc to a specific version therefore a sysadmin may only need to upgrade the lot once a year. if a user some how breaks their system it’s as easy a fix as rolling back to the previous generation with a single menu option.

So basically say you have your computer and you want to replicate your exact setup to hundreds of other computers. with NixOS it’s as simple as setting up a git repo for your nixos config, pushing to it, installing nixos on every other computer then cloning your repo to all the machines and rebuilding. done. now you have hundreds of other computers that all behave and work the same way your computer does.

If something needs updating or a fix needs to be rolled out all a sysadmin has to do is fix it on one machine, push the change, pull it for every other machine and rebuild. done.

you completely missed the point. it was an example of how quickly things have changed for us and the fact we have to teach the older generations these things and we also have to teach the younger one the same things too. Most previous generations had to simply teach the younger. We on the other hand had to teach multiple generations. Thus, we’re tired.

Xenogears
Wip3out 3
Cyberpunk 2077
EVE Online
Quake 3 Arena

As a millennial I’m tired and I think many millennials and younger GenXers feel the same. We’ve had to live what seems like multiple generations within our lifetime. We went from like 3 channel tv to cable tv to satellite tv to streaming tv. we went from dial up phones to cell phones to smart phones. we went from having no computer, to a computer, to a laptop, tablet, and screens on everything. we went from no internet to dial up to cable to wifi. We went from being told that we need to learn this and that in school or we won’t get a job. that we needed to learn all this maths cause we’ll never have a calculator in our pocket to carry around. having to write cursive cause thats how we’ll always write in the future. that we MUST go to college in order to get a job to suddenly it no longer matters and we’re in debt up to our eyeballs.

We had to teach our parents all this crap and now we also have to teach the younger generations the same stuff too.

We went from everyone we know having a house by the time they were our age to now we have to keep paying rent or live with roommates.

We’re tired, let us have a drink.

honestly surprised they haven’t done so already. I don’t think Xbox has ever been profitable for Microsoft, like, ever. From day one in 2001 the thing didn’t make them money. and while the 360 did well it went through so many hardware revisions due to the overheating/RRoD issues. After that I can’t even tell you what the thing was called or which one was which. I don’t even know anyone today that owns an Xbox as all my friends who still play consoles either have a PS5 and/or Switch.

Trump looked at the playbook of Ontario Premier Doug Ford and said “yeah, that’ll do”

Doug pulled the same shit with the Ontario Science Centre claiming the roof was going to cave in at any moment. Several major snow storms and rain storms later and the roof is still intact.

So why did Doug do that? just like Trump, they hurt his feelings…and he promised the land to his buddy mafia associate developers.

so what? whoop de doo. maybe hold someone, anyone, accountable and enforce it.

the US is just one big dog and pony show that’s full of nazis.

remember folks if celebs can’t get clean drugs, neither can you.

man I used to do cocaine in my 20s and I’m glad I stopped. probably would be dead by now.