Ben S. / is on Nostr

Dad. Software engineer. Gaming / electronics / computing enthusiast (especially retro). Xennial suburban white cis het ex-religious SJW. I microblog my way through old games a lot (especially CRPGs).

Pronouns: He/Him
Location: King County, WA, USA
Occupation: Software Engineer
Now Playing: Rust (2013)

Last Notes

2024-09-14 19:32:58

Streaming services / media players put subtitles in the dead area of the letterbox instead of over the content challenge (level: impossible).

2024-08-13 20:08:26

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so if it's a niche hobby project then there's no point bothering to support Linux, because it's not worth anyone's time to push through the friction of the package maintainer cathedral.

2024-08-13 19:43:33

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my software depends on third party libraries. Users may not have those at hand. They may not even have development tools installed, since they may not be developers. You're not seeing past the cushy bubble we exist in as developers.

2024-08-13 19:37:23

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so if a game server admin who is not a developer wants to run my stuff on Linux, they have to convince a distro package maintainer to produce an ongoing formal release of my hobby stuff? That sounds terrible for both of us.

2024-08-13 19:22:12

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is this a symptom of people wanting to deliver one binary instantiation of their stuff that works on the widest possible array of Linux instantiations?
As a hobbyist C++ developer, I have NO idea how I could release something that would ever be useful to non-developer Linux server admins, because there's no way I'm going to navigate a massively heterogenous set of distro runtime environments, packaging ecosystems, hardware architectures, etc.
For Windows I just provide one .exe file!

2024-08-12 19:20:49

Just saw this headline under "positive news": "9-year-old sells lemonade to help pay for dad's kidney surgery"
This is not fucking positive or heartwarming, it's dystopian!
It's utterly horrible that we've decided that allowing people to become billionaires is more important than universal access to lifesaving medical care.

2024-08-09 01:31:12

Twitch is such a bumbling platform that the same Applebees ad that I'm forced to watch every 5 minutes has a 50% chance of returning me to a blank screen instead of the stream I actually wanted to watch.
At this point, running in a browser with uBlock Origin and a Twitch adblock script is essential just for making the site usable lmao

2024-06-15 18:06:02

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wow, that's a bin full of nostalgia right there lol

2024-06-15 15:49:15

""Now that Apple has a free, built-in Passwords app, is there a future for the third-party apps that defined the space?" - it scares me to think that people are willing to let themselves get locked that deeply into a single corporate proprietary ecosystem.
I've been super happy with Bitwarden as a free cross-platform FOSS solution. This actually freed me to switch browsers at will, as I was originally using Firefox Sync.

2024-05-10 01:43:01

"Superhero movies ruining cinema" discourse aside, it's exciting that we're getting a second go at a Silver Surfer + Galactus movie. Seems like too much to cram into a first MCU Fantastic Four film, though.
Hopefully they won't chicken out on how Galactus gets depicted like 20th Century Fox did with their version. Doesn't have to be true to the comics, but at least give us something nominally anthropomorphic ffs.

2024-04-27 17:45:15

Interesting that MS-DOS 4.0 source has been released. I think that's the only major version from 3.x onward that I never used!
Our 286 came with DOS 3, and both that and a later 386DX got upgraded to DOS 5. The 486DX4 got DOS 6 before upgrading to Windows 95.

2024-04-27 01:25:54

Game modding tool instructions: "Put the installer almost anywhere on your computer and run it to install assets"
Me: "Well, most of this modding stuff tells you to put it in the game's Mods folder, so I guess I'll do that" *click*
Game modding tool instructions: "DO NOT PUT THE TOOL IN THE MODS FOLDER!"
Me: "Oops" *cancels, moves, restarts*

2024-04-13 04:29:21

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I should mention that while reviewers are gushing over the show, I don't think it's really top-notch sci-fi on its own. However, I *would* definitely recommend it to fans of the games, and also to anyone curious about the universe.

2024-04-13 04:27:09

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doh, you're right - will edit.

2024-04-13 04:24:22

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It's odd that the only mutated beings we see from the games are ghouls and rad-roaches, and the only other mutated creature we see at all is a new thing that gets explained.
Ghouls were introduced well, including the potential to go feral.
Robots are underrepresented, possibly due to production costs, or reserved for future story flavor; only a demented Mr. Handy makes an appearance.
Anyway, I hope season 2 happens. The ending teases a New Vegas connection, which would be interesting.

2024-04-13 04:20:33

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I'll also say that they did a much better job than Bethesda at portraying the Brotherhood of Steel, which is particularly important since the TV series is set in the same area as Fallout 1/2/NV. They're not evil, but they're definitely not the good guys Fallout 3/4 made them out to be either.
NCR is the closest thing the franchise has to "the good guys", but of course they have their own flaws.
Speaking of factions, the show sets up Vault-Tec as the "anti-faction faction" which is funny.

2024-04-13 04:15:20

So the #Fallout TV adaption turned out fine... It definitely builds on Fallout 2 & New Vegas canon, while also introducing a major new spin on the franchise's backstory. It's a bit of a stretch, though.
I don't understand the relationship between Vault 4 and Shady Sands, when the latter (and subsequent NCR) was founded by folks from Vault 15 (Fallout 1 & 2 lore).
They also left a lot of mystery in Muldaver's and Howard's respective backstories.