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Cake day: June 23rd, 2025

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  • I watch his videos from time to time, he stays quite up to date when it comes to the underpinnings of modern software engineering. Mind you, just because he retired doesn’t mean he stopped tinkering and building. By all accounts he is still poking around in a number of projects and contributes his fair share of expertise. I’m not a fan of him not outright calling out Microsoft for their bullshit, but I do respect the sheer amount of expertise he brings to the table. Calling him out of date, particularly with the level of understanding needed to make something like a task manager, doesn’t seem fair.


  • despoticruin@lemmy.ziptoRetroGaming@lemmy.worldVectrex Mini
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    13 days ago

    That’s kind of it though, the lines being drawn one at a time, in real time, you just can’t emulate that. You would need refresh rates in the thousands of hz to make it look even close to right, and that completely ignores the persistence of vision effect.

    Believe me, I tried. I explored damn near every possibility on 6 months of salary, it boiled down to an FPGA clone hooked up to a custom CRT driver and that still had issues with how it would look because the Vectrex uses an unhinged aspect ratio. If your tube isn’t the right shape all of the graphics get messed up because the system draws on a polar plane. It’s a fucking mess, I really wish people would stop trying to emulate it and just put the cash into making a proper tube. Would save actual engineers a lot of headache.


  • despoticruin@lemmy.ziptoRetroGaming@lemmy.worldVectrex Mini
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    13 days ago

    It’s always Vectrex too. I had a customer that was obsessed with getting one emulated, he just refused to understand that, fundamentally, vector graphics are incompatible with raster. No matter how I tried to break it down that a CRT was a necessity, that raster would always look wrong, that nobody develops a good vectrex emulator because you can’t emulate the graphics…

    Grifters gonna grift I guess.


  • Hmm, I think as a DM I would roll an arcana check to see if the wizard would conceivably have heard of radiation from arcane studies. It’s reasonable to assume people with arcane knowledge would be the first to hear about the strange metal chunks that everyone keeps dying around. One of them would have had to have come up with a word, if not some variation on “death cursed”



  • The magic comes from hardware more than software, as others have mentioned you want a good burner to do the rips.

    Sorry for the rabbit hole, but media archival is its own can of worms that would take hours to dive into, so in general you want an Asus DVD drive that’s internal, manufactured between 2004 and 2010, supports 52x CD speeds, doesn’t have light scribe, and has the DVD-RW logo on the front bezel. Those are usually the magic drives, and you are generally going to need modified firmware to do some of the more bizarre reads. The Asus BW-16D1HT does Blu-ray and multi region discs, for just DVDs look for one of the DRW-**** drives without light scribe (they have a laser assembly that is higher power to write with, but usually doesn’t have as clean of a signal in exchange, not the best for rips)

    From there the software depends on your specific workflow. If you are just trying to recover clean disc rips then dd or ddrescue are going to be your friend. Get a disc image, mount it, use the data from the image instead of the disc. For archiving just the media look into MakeMKV, FFMPEG, and Handbrake for ways to encode the DVDs and audio into friendlier formats. Ffmpeg specifically can be scripted very easily and does audio just as well as video, it is the gold standard for transcoding media.


  • Again, the issue is the scar tissue. Even if it didn’t develop into a cancer it will give you nasty COPD, gas exchange doesn’t happen with scarred lung tissue. Look at silicosis, potters lung, popcorn lung, and the plethora of other occupational diseases that are caused by particulate matter damaging lung tissue for examples of what asbestos would do without the cancer




  • Reddragon, and just pull parts from goodwill mice, they send you extra Teflon pads with the mouse so you can open it and keep the pads nice. Switches are just switches, they are standard sizes, and the cords usually use standard plugs, worst case you swap some pins around to match. Insanely easy to take apart, and cheap enough to not worry about breaking.

    They are cheap as hell, but they have good tracking sensors and are really comfortable to use.


  • Second best. The best is actually the reddragon one that’s $20 on Amazon.

    I have used every mmo mouse on the market (currently on a scimitar elite, it’s the one op has but silver not yellow) and they are all decent mice, but each has a fatal flaw except the reddragon.

    G600 click switches are awful and double click after weeks of use, I had to replace them twice, the final time with the switches out of the red dragon. That was fine for close to 10 years, but the side key caps fall off, they are barely glued on.

    The scimitar has an awful encoder on the scroll wheel, I had to open the mouse to pack it with Vaseline to get it working properly, and disassembling the scimitar is a nightmare.

    The reddragon has bad software, but it’s also supported by open source options for remapping and RGB, so it’s one flaw was by far the easiest to fix.

    The g600 was the most comfortable to palm, but the side keys are in an awkward spot to palm the mouse, the scimitar is nice for the adjustable keypad, but it moves with time and tightening it too much will break the mouse. The red dragon has an odd texture on the far side, very rough, but otherwise the best for a claw grip.



  • No, because that’s not how the matching works. Stuff in your data partition, as well as app data, is signed with those keys and hashed to the device. All of those bits do that hash on their own, and they all have to match up. When you change the main system partition then it’s signature has to match with the one generated when you set up your phone initially in the data partition.

    Basically you have to have access to the data partition to disable the checks or change the signature, which needs your pin/passcode/fingerprint, and if you have that you don’t even need the phone, you dump the data partition and unlock it in an emulated android environment and exfiltrate data from there as if it was the original phone.

    I also want to reiterate: A locked bootloader does not stop anyone from dumping your phone, emulating it, and brute forcing it, completely bypassing any rate-limiting on password attempts. By the time a bootloader lock even comes into play you can consider your phone completely compromised.


  • People here are also missing one part of the android security model. Yes, you can overwrite the system partition arbitrarily while leaving the data partition intact with an unlocked bootloader, that’s how updates work.

    However, the moment you make any changes to that system partition it won’t match the developers signature and the apps on the system will throw an absolute fit. Look into building your own lineage ROM and flashing it over an official build, it’s an entire process that requires your data partition to be unlocked (ie. phone booted and pin entered) to keep your data, even without making changes.

    Realistically it isn’t insecure, if you set a passcode your data is encrypted and if someone mitm attacks your rom you will immediately notice stuff breaking all over the place.

    The whole bootloader locking is purely vendors trying to force you to buy new phones every few years instead of the user backporting security patches indefinitely, not any practical security for the end user.