What are your experience?

My last “real” Windows experience was with WinXP and every time I have to touch Windows at the PC of a customer, which happens sometimes when the stars align, I feel like the first human that ever walked the earth.

I have no idea how people get any work done on a system that is constantly nagging for attention, popups, restrictive Enterprise environment and non descriptive error messages. Nothing in this world seems to make sense or is presented in a unified way. Every dialogue or sub system seems to be it’s own isle stemming from another decade of tech. The experience for someone who is simply not used to Windows any more due to missing exposure is horrible.

Heck a Mac feels alien to me too but in the end that’s still a system I could deal with given some time.

Mebbe I’m spoiled by stuff like systemd, PipeWire, Wayland, btrfs and all that candy we get nowadays on a Linux desktop. I’m not even talking about privacy or FOSS principles at this point. Just the fact that the system doesn’t get in my face with ads or AI or “very important reboots” seems to be a revelation in 2024.

We used to pipe all sorts of 💩 to /dev/dsp just to know how it would sound 🤓

Thanks to GitHub this wonderful article, that made me opt for another domain for my recent project a year ago, is now… drumroll under an .io domain too: https://tamouse.github.io/blog/politics/2019/10/02/why-is-the-io-domain-problematic.html

Irony much.

The situation is really bad for consumers. Even with a Pi-Hole and a dumb TV and something like a Fire TV stick (they tend to send lots of telemetry too and apps like Toggo will nag you to oblivion to consent to data mining - if an app asks at all that is).

I’m slowly building up a Jellyfin library and yeah I jumped the hoops to find a non-smart TV. Wrote about it at https://beko.famkos.net/2022/11/27/on-non-smart-tvs/ and settled with a https://www.homex.eu/u55nt1000.html that ticked all my boxes:

☑ cheap affordable ☑ 4k (UHD) ☑ dumb non-Smart ☑ HDMI ☑ 55″

No idea about it’s tuner though[1] alas it’s not really any longer available in any market space today and I hope it will not die on us any time soon or the quest to find a new one starts again 🤓

[1] We’ve a decent external receiver that does all the work and HDMI juggling but even that thing is on the WiFi for software updates and in-house streaming but from what I can tell it behaves at least, which is probably just because it’s old by now.

Nö. Das war pervers teuer. Und das noch von nem Laden, der nur Zeug verkauft, was sonst keiner wollte xD

I’m not even sure why this was in one of my drawers at all. Stumbled over it randomly today and was confused by this initially because somehow “VR” is marked with “brand new shit” in my head. I should know better but kinda forgot all about it.

pew pew. pew pew pew. :D

Heh, during that time I only toyed around with cheap anaglyph 3d glasses. I totally love that Elite Dangerous still features such a mode to this day 🤪

Huh. Never heard of her. Sounds like something I’d binge :D

Heh, probably for the better 🤣

Say… how far on the dark side of the moon am I living if I never heard about this streamer before? xD

I get the charm of a console for gaming. Just switch it on and go. Still prefer a PC at the end of the day though. For once my preferred genres are very unrepresented on consoles and since I dabble in DIY I do not have that level of freedom on a console or mobile phone. Well, do some extend. Fiddling around with key remappers that hijack on the accessibility system is horrible. Anyway, I enjoy tinkering and this is not really something consoles are known for, no?

This said it is very amazing that I can just e.g. fire up Waydroid nowadays, connect an X360 controller and play AmongUs with the little one on my Linux PC. That level of possibilities is mind boggling.

Quite an impressive list (together with the other posts). And here I thought I was a space nutter (thanks Beyond The Frontier!).

Missing the slug throwers Diaspora: Shattered Armistice and House of the Dying Sun though. The former is an Open Freespace mod in the BSG verse with a great campaign, the latter a rather short but still very nicely done pew pew that shines especially on sound effects (and I guess VR but I didn’t try that). Both do TrackIR though (and I even hacked together an OpenTrack provider for the native Linux version of FSO).

❤️

I wonder where my 04 install went xD

dunno, it’s for the flowers 🤷

Smol update here too: Made a tiny demo video show-casing the cockpit in action in Elite Dangerous 🙃

Pick your poison:

https://tube.tchncs.de/w/1nokGf66oWj34EdMvxYbSn / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXofGR4GRLk

Just slaughtering pirates (wasn’t in the cockpit for months) but you get to see it from a first person perspective this time because I strapped the camera to my headphones 🙃

This. They are also known as “arcade buttons”. Everything you want to really smash :D

Huh? Rebirth and X4 do run natively, yes.

Minus some details like head tracking but I am needling em about this again and again so there is hope and the workaround is okay-ish 🙃

I even fired up Beyond The Frontier (for the lolz) via Wine and even that worked 🤪

No idea about $$$ and if they even ship to your location but I got my hands on a Backforce One Plus for 500€ and that thing is day and night compared to my last. Arm rests are a little bit wobbly but the rest… dead gods I hope it lasts for the rest of my life.

That’s from someone with a lot of back pain for… reasons.