I still remember guides saying to go into BIOS and disable Hyper-Threading or any additional cores if you wanted to play specific mid-2000 games. Then when that wasn’t going well, the guides had ways to select core affinity.

I specifically remember Unreal Tournament 3 that would crash with a “Negative Delta Time” error since the secondary thread could process a frame before the first thread and cause time to flow backwards. The more things change, the more they stay the same. haha

do people actually buy those? I honestly thought they were some kind of money laundering thing. I’ve never once saw one sell.

If using era-appropriate hardware, I wonder if you could use archived Kubuntu repos to upgrade one at a time until it’s a modern Linux kernel.

I’ve been holding onto OG Lawnchair faaaar too long. I wish the updated version would land on official F-Droid already.

I don’t know if it changed, but when I started looking around to replace my set about 2 years ago, it was a nightmare of marketing "gotcha"s.

Some TVs were advertising 240fps, but only had 60fps panels with special tricks to double framerate twice or something silly. Other TVs offered 120fps, but only on one HDMI port. More TVs wouldn’t work without internet. Even more had shoddy UIs that were confusing to navigate and did stuff like default to their own proprietary software showing Fox News on every boot (Samsung). I gave up when I found out that most of them had abysmal latency since they all had crappy software running that messed with color values for no reason. So I just went and bought the cheapest TV at a bargain overstock store. Days of shopping time wasted, and a customer lost.

If I were shown something that advertised with 8K at that point, I’d have laughed and said it was obviously a marketing lie like everything else I encountered.

Wasn’t always the case (I think it changed within the past two years), but upon doing research on when it changed I stumbled on this gem.

I’m pretty sure that was implemented a while ago. My install of VLC from F-Droid started showing up in Play Store’s update list.

It couldn’t update since the signature didn’t match, but Google knew about it and included it anyway.

The first thing I did when I migrated was look for foobar2000, as I knew it rivaled Winamp in compatibility. Couldn’t find a Linux client. Only Windows/Mac. Unfortunately it looks like Audio Overload went Mac only, but the legacy 2.0 version is still available for Linux so I might give that a try.

A combination of PSF/NSF/2SF/USF, various PCM streams, along with stuff like VGM, GBS and SPC.

Winamp. It’s the only audio software that supports tons of game audio formats.

I got it running in WINE, but file association has been a pain and every single time WINE launches my system locks up for a good 30 seconds.

What’s IPX?

I once asked my college professor of computer networking to explain IPX to me and this was the response I got.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallica_v._Napster,_Inc.

I get my media from the local library and buy the ones I enjoy.

This combo even got rid of something that was ADB blocked in Android 14.

So one of the gotchas about stopped/disabled apps is that other apps can still call and launch them. I frequently saw my apps pop back up even after being disabled, since I used SuperFreezZ to monitor them. https://f-droid.org/packages/superfreeze.tool.android/

The alternative to that would be an ADB disable. IIRC it takes the app away from userspace completely. It doesn’t touch the system-level though, so a factory reset will bring it back.

If you can’t handle setting up ADB and it’s hoops, there is an app combo that can set up a bridge and run the ADB disable for you: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/io.github.samolego.canta/

The real fun started with Android 12. Google introduced the ability for some preloaded apps to avoid being disabled and prevent ADB shell disable.

This is such bad news. I’m sympathetic to content creators who have to step on eggshells to please the algorithm/advertisers… But this?

Yeah, this is not that. We all know who this is for.

That’s the fun part. They come preinstalled!

No, after Brave installed a service level running VPN without my consent, and continued to reinstall it silently every background update even after removal, it’s a bad browser. That’s what malware does.

Comparing two companies with poor track records doesn’t make them good companies when compared to each other.

exactly. Thank you.

Back in 2012 an affordable $40 flash drive was 1GB. Now $40 gets you a 512GB.

$90 would have netted you a 2GB full-size SD card. Now you get a 1TB MicroSD with adapter

$80 would get you 1TB in spinning rust in 2012… now, with $80 you get… 1TB or if you stretch the budget a little, 2TB. But what if you own a bunch of games like Ark Survival Evolved that take up 435GB of space? Shell out $649

Back when I bought the 1TB, I installed the entire steam library I owned onto it. Now I can’t get more than 6-7 new titles installed. I’m ignoring how insanely fast drives have gotten over the years, but my complaint is storage.

EDIT: For the sake of comparison outside my complaint of SSD sizing, spinning rust at $80 today is just 4TB at a lower 5400rpm instead of 7200rpm.