Notices by Tim 🎮 (timixretroplays@digipres.club), page 2

Sound works with no fettling. Plugging my wired headphones in works as expected, and it was also a snap to pair a set of Bluetooth headphones and those work too.

Youtube video performance is not great (either whatever tiny Intel GPU this has is worse than I thought, or there'll be a properietary driver I need to find and manually enable), but getting sound hooked up was totally fine - a relief, since Linux generally has (had?) a pretty bad reputation for this.

Also the moment this thing was on my wifi network, it'd found and set up my printer. That's just as automatic as Windows, but the fact it also did this in the live session *while installing the OS* amuses me. A Linux live environment on a USB stick has so much more utility on its own than the Windows 10 installer does.

@vxo "fashionable though it may be, please do not wear the backup media outside of the office"

@foone phew, thanks

I needed a FAT-formatted flash drive to scan stuff to and this was the closest option to hand. That's normal, right?

I think I'm becoming utterly disillusioned on tech stuff lately. I'm hugely aware of the "you like stuff you grew up with" and "you have less patience for stuff as you age" biases, but even so...

Streaming is shit.
Searching is shit.
Researching is shit.
Shopping is shit.
Troubleshooting is shit.
My phone is shit. Autocorrect, touchscreen keyboards, Bluetooth, AI, Android Auto, Spotify, all shit.

It's not even capitalism or consumerism, I'm just tired of arguing and fighting with things I own.

It's Friday night, it's cold outside and I'm still working on that whole social life thing, so here's a long rambly thread about the 15-pin PC gameport and its historical significance, because it's something I want to practice writing about at length (if anyone was silly enough to give me a PhD for something, it'd be for this nonsense).

Feel free to mute this thread if that's not your thing - or if it is, bookmark it for later, or prepare to be en-knowledge-ified!

#retrocomputing #retrogaming

@foone @NanoRaptor I shall combine the two via hyphenation and become Timothy Sidewinder-Thrustmaster, Manette de Jeux and Dark Prince of the Gameport Era

@NanoRaptor to fit this account's theme, it would have to be Sidewinder as IMHO that's the coolest word ever used in conjunction with a gaming controller, but it'd be shouted over the cacophany of people yelling "Thrustmaster!"

@foone does it absolutely have to be one contiguous sheet, or could it be made up from individual tiles of smaller ones? Is this for some kind of planning purpose or do they need to be seamless for aesthetics? Thinking of the approach I took with my 3d printed pixels, I'd probably experiment with printing a ton of gridded pages in A4 while heading to the shops for foamboard and a decent guillotine - that way you could also precisely set/control the size of each square.

@foone I could play Commander Keen with this

@foone time to dig out the Standard Galactic Alphabet font

@foone @NanoRaptor more technology should be named for its ancestral heritage. USB is now the High-speed Gameport Interface

@foone @vxo best easter egg hunt

@foone are you being spied on from the 1800s again?

@foone ok, I kind of want to buy this and make an arcade cabinet but for text adventures with it

I'm proud to announce the first public release of #Thrixels, my system for #3DPrinting pixel art! After several months of work, I think it's finally ready to inflict on other people - please give it a go if you're interested, and let me know how you get on with it.

https://www.printables.com/model/843125-thrixels-a-system-for-3d-printed-pixel-art

Boosts, suggestions, and any other feedback would be highly appreciated!

@3dprinting@techhub.social @3dprinting@a.gup.pe

@foone @cinebox @helvick IMHO the worst part of most wireless input devices is that they aren't Unifying or some similarly solid protocol. Bluetooth's great when it works, but confoundingly awful where it doesn't. Logitech should've licensed Unifying to everyone else forever ago and turned it into a reliability USP. (Did you know USB3 devices put out enough RF interference to screw with low-power 2.4GHz stuff plugged in near them? Try a short USB extension cord, it'll change your life.)

@foone you could approximately test this at an aquarium with an underwater tunnel

@foone at some point I'm going to properly research EDID and set up command line scripts on my main PC and a little keypad to quickly switch my monitors to different inputs digitally. I hate having to dig around in menus with crappy invisible controls to do it