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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • takeheart@lemmy.worldtoGames@lemmy.worldThe N64
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    5 months ago

    My family still has one but the image quality is terrible on modern big screen TVs because

    1. It’s stretched out and native resolution of N64 is already tiny by today’s standards.
    2. Unnatural aspect ratio unless you can set black bars somehow.
    3. Modern displays have sharper pixel separation and colors don’t ‘bleed’ into each other as much which kinda helped the rough polygons of that era.

    The result is a picture that is both sharp and blurry at the same time and gives me head aches after an hour or so.


  • takeheart@lemmy.worldtoGames@lemmy.worldThe N64
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    5 months ago

    Ok, now that you mention it: I think the difference is that (at least in my region) the PlayStation was sold with a memory card included. Standalone memory cards for it were cheap. N64 came without a memory pack and they were more expensive.

    IIRC PS also had a more granular slot size (eg gran turismo takes up 1 slot while final fantasy takes up 3 slots) while on the N64 it was large and fixed (each game takes up one large slot even if that slot doesn’t use up all the data).

    In hindsight that has me wondering why they didn’t go for dynamic slot size 🤔. Maybe because a save file could grow over time and they wanted to ensure that you could always overwrite/update?



  • takeheart@lemmy.worldtoGames@lemmy.worldThe N64
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    5 months ago

    It surely has its technical flaws but that’s not what mattered to most buyers. Most people bought it to experience fun games and on that end it delivered. remember that at the time gaming was still breaking into main stream society and 3D games were on the frontier both technically and design wise.

    Games like Ocarina of Time and Mario 64 really contributed to the design patterns of how 3d games could look like. Back in the day you simply didn’t have as many choices when it came to hardware. What really hurt its game catalog was that apparently it was hard to program for. Who knows what other games we might have seen if the barrier had been lower.

    Speaking of the controller: yes, it wasn’t so good and the center joystick tended to wear out too quickly. Rumble pak was a fun gadget and really added to the immersion. What was terrible on the other hand was that the console lacked internal storage and many games would require you to purchase an additional memory pack (which slotted into the controller). That wasn’t just a technical deficiency but felt very anti consumer.





  • You bring up a pretty good point. Whenever I have a personal document that could go into multiple categories (eg a travel insurance certificate can go into travel, insurance, or finance folder) I place it in all 3 at once with hard links. What’s more is that if I intuitively first search for a document in place A but it’s actually in place B I simply place a link in A for the next time.

    Before I learned a bit about file systems I didn’t even conceive of such a thing being possible; precisely because the folder metaphor had imprinted upon me the physical world constraint that things can only be in a single place at once.




  • takeheart@lemmy.worldtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldDual booters be like
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    6 months ago

    So what’s the difference?

    My intuition is that directory is the older term and refers to something existing on the file system while folder can be that but also includes “virtual folders” that group together different files from across the file system like when photo manager shows you categories like ‘recently viewed’ or ‘taken in 2023’.



  • takeheart@lemmy.worldtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldKtitle
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    7 months ago

    Funny. Your observation made me think that for the purpose of finding stuff it’s most efficient to have a perfectly linear distribution across all letters. Ie if there is 26 letters and I type out a single one I’m precluding 25/26 applications.

    Of course the application menu uses fuzzy search meaning it looks at the whole string not just the beginning and also crawls through meta data and tags.

    Still for searching it seems most efficient if a language uses all letters evenly 🤔.


  • I actually have a brother inkjet printer which works reasonably well under Linux. Inkjet printers in general are troublesome, so there’s a cap on how well they can work under any operating system.

    I could never figure out though how to receive faxes and the return receipts for sending them directly on the PC. There just seems to be a lack of modern, user friendly apps for this. I’m certain it’s possible but the technical expertise is just beyond me.

    And yes, I still use fax when communicating with government agencies. My country is a backwater when it comes to digitalization and faxes provide legal certainty just like registered mail. But unlike registered mail they cost next to nill.


  • I appreciate the Arch wiki much, even as a layman Kubuntu user. It explains some background concepts pretty well which aren’t typically coveyed in man pages which dedicate themselves to individual commands and their syntax. For instance I’ve read about home folder encryption or how signals get converted from keyboard presses to symbols on screen. It’s not perfect when it comes to writing style and coverage sure, but it’s a valuable compendium to have in addition to everything else.