I think I’ll be popping this onto my wishlist. I’ve been slowly trying to 100% complete V-Rally 2 for the PS1, as the game is a childhood classic of mine that I never completed and I’ve been enjoying it (when the physics don’t bug out that is…)

I probably should have clarified that the 14m number was the estimated number of Californian residents that have Android phones as per the article, but my comment was moreso me overanalysing a joke.

Even if it were split evenly across the estimated 14m residents, it only comes to a grand total of $22.47

I’d definitely say the cameras on the Pixel 4a looked unique for their time, but the rest of the phone was very same-same otherwise. I did like the corner cut out for the front camera though.

My current phone (Pixel 7a) has the camera visor, but even then the whole thing is very same-same again.

I have a soft spot for the iPhone 4/4s as I saved two 4s devices from ewaste a couple years ago through work and I personally think it was peak iPhone. The thick premium sandwich of glass with aluminum frame, the weight and heft, it felt stocky and sturdy, it was one handed, the back glass was easily replaceable.

The rest of my phones in history weren’t remarkable for their looks though in my opinion. So my answer is the iPhone 4s

I learned about them two weeks before they lost support, wanted one really bad and I’m glad I had only just bought a phone already (Pixel 7a) otherwise I would have bought it only to then look up the update cycle and see it was about to be discontinued.

That being said, reviewers noted at the time that the multitasking on Android was a bit clunky, which may have been an opening for a custom ROM to come in and improve this.

Seems convenient, I never really felt assed to install and set up additional tools but this being built into the Steam client would make this kind of thing more likely for me to use.

That being said 95% of my games are going to be bottlenecked on my RTX 2050 anyway (paired with an i7-8700 that’s still holding strong)

Had a colleague who went on leave and had probably $50 of lunch in the work fridge.

New admin assistant says we have one work day to get our stuff out so she can clean out the fridge, and his stuff was all tossed.

If they’d given more notice, we probably would’ve had time to get our stuff out then ask whose food that was, and realise it was old mate’s.

Part of the reason why I take good care of my little 24" dumb TV. It’s on the lower end (poor viewing angles, absolutely no adjustment on the legs) but I still have a use for it, so I won’t be replacing it.

The other concern I have with smart TVs is because manufacturers basically install a smartphone SoC, the TV’s lifecycle is now the same as a smartphone. Most people probably won’t connect a new smart TV box to their discontinued, laggy (thanks to bloated apps) smart TV, the completely functional unit just gets replaced.

We need regulation to be able to unlock these devices and make available the firmware drivers so that after the manufacturer stops support, the community can continue it (and obviously for us hackers, we would strip the system of all telemetry)

Hang on, core memory unlocked.

About three years before that, a neighbour set up a WiFi network but had open authentication on it.

I remember seeing it on my little EEE PC and connecting to it. I remember completely not knowing what it was, if it was going to cost my parents data money, or if I’d otherwise get in trouble for using it.

I had friends on the same street as me, so I showed them this WiFi network and they weren’t really sure if it would charge my parents or not either.

I had been playing a game that came on a shareware disc called “Wild Wheels” (later learned that was the publisher’s name of the game, the actual name was BuzzingCars) and it referenced ceebot.com as a place to download more demos.

Well, that was the first website I ever visited and I downloaded a 26MB setup for Colobot, an RTS first person space exploration game that had you literally program robots to complete missions. I was still so anxious that there’d be some massive bill in the mail (hence the setup size still being burned in my head) so that was all I downloaded.

And oh boy did I play the shit out of that, and I attribute that game to why I still enjoy computing and programming today.

First internet experience for me was 2013 as a child. Back then our home connection had a usage cap of 10GB, but the ISP hosted a “free zone” website that contained a bunch of cartoons and mirrored ABC (Australia) content.

We would watch YouTube videos together as a family because the bandwidth was considered that previous and laugh at those fail compilations and whatnot.

Otherwise about a month or two into having internet, I realised that this would open me up to online gaming, and I excitedly put Mineplex’s IP into the cracked copy of Minecraft that I had on a USB from school, only to get an authentication error because I hadn’t bought an account. Managed to stumble into some Dutch server that was cracked and despite the language barrier, had tons of fun trying to work out the game.

Edit: that Dutch server was on a server list and I remember being mindblown that when I was on, the website would update to show that I was playing and my username was there. “A website with my name on it? I must be famous!”

On the topic of Sonic Unleashed, I played it as a kid on the Wii and actively disliked it because it just seemed sad and freaky to see Sonic effectively become mutated.

To give some idea, back then I had no internet so whatever games we had, I always gave a good go and I’d always play even the most mediocre of games.

We also had Sonic Colors and that game just felt the total opposite: very positive, lots of eye candy, arcadey, very much enjoyed it as a kid.

Some 20 years later and I’m speaking to a Sonic fan and they bring up how they’ve played every single game including Unleashed, and it was the only one they hated, which made me realise I’m not the only one.

To answer your question, I’d say Shrek for the Xbox - I did enjoy Shrek 2 more than the original game as a kid, but I also didn’t mind the original either.

Once I had internet, I saw plenty of references to the original game as the butt of jokes and an example of what games should not be, and honestly those criticisms were valid.

I’ll be revealing my nationality with this one, but Wheatbix and Milo (chocolate malt usually for milk drinks) is something apparently no one else I’ve met has.

Before I moved away from dairy entirely, I couldn’t stand the taste of plain cow’s milk and adding Milo helped with the wheatbix severely.

Agreed - the end of the article does state compiling untrusted repos is effectively the same as running an untrusted executable, and you should treat it with the same caution (especially if its malware or gaming cheat adjacent)

Well that’s certainly no light read - I’ll admit that I’ve only read the first six sections of the document for now

The crux of it that I could see was the initial repo that was backdoored contained a malicious Windows command in the PreBuildCommand field of .vbproj file

My initial thoughts would be that it might be advisable for build tools to confirm any defined build commands with the user when it detects a command not seen before?

I suppose otherwise the argument could be made that if you’re downloading and compiling code that is backdoored, if you’re not checking .vbproj or equivalents, you’re probably also not auditing any source code either and you’re being pwned either way.

I wouldn’t think so - it depends on your priorities.

The open source and offline nature of this without the pretenses of “Hey, we’re gonna use every query you give as a data point to shove more products down your face” seems very appealing over Gemini. There’s also that Gemini is constantly being shoved in our faces and preinstalled, whereas this is a completely optional download.

From the FAQ of stopkillinggames.com website

Q. Aren’t you asking companies to support games forever? Isn’t that unrealistic?

A: No, we are not asking that at all. We are in favor of publishers ending support for a game whenever they choose. What we are asking for is that they implement an end-of-life plan to modify or patch the game so that it can run on customer systems with no further support from the company being necessary. We agree that it is unrealistic to expect companies to support games indefinitely and do not advocate for that in any way.

I paid an extra $20 to extend the warranty of my $150AUD gaming headphones from 1 to 3 years.

Just over a year of owning them and the microphone boom broke. I never used the detachable microphone but the arm itself was rattling in the headset, so got it replaced at the retailer.

It’s been about 12 months since then, and I may need to take them back at some point again soon as the plastic has fractured right where the headphone cup attaches to the band. It’s not completely broken but its not far off

Yeah I completely agree when you put it that way. I’ve been doing this for the desktop web apps that I used to have installed (Discord, Spotify, Teams) accessing them via a browser instead.

I’ve been meaning to tidy up my phone anyway so I’ll give the mobile Web UI a good go.

Why is it that you don’t use 3rd party apps? I have no issue with Jerboa and have used it extensively, but I’m mainly wondering if there’s something I’m missing with 3rd party Lemmy clients.

For desktop I’ve been getting playlists I like from the web Spotify UI, then using spotdl to download them.

On mobile I’ve been trying out Kreate (YouTube Music frontend) and so far it’s not bad. It doesn’t have a real algorithm but I tend to browse by genre until I land on a playlist, or go to a song I feel like and hit Song Radio. UI is still a bit clunky in my opinion but it has worked so far for me otherwise.