I actually haven’t ever built a computer that didn’t boot on the first try. The closest I came, somehow, was my cousin’s PC. I got it all built, I pushed the power button, and nothing happened. A quick glance around the case and a chuckle later, I pushed the Reset button and the power light came on and it booted to the BIOS.

You know, I made a bit of a hobby out of Arduinos and Raspberry Pis, which use similar connectors, so those never bothered me. The ones that always make me cringe are those USB 3.0 ones with the heavy inflexible cables, the big stiff plastic plug, and the delicate little pins. I cringe every time I plug one of those in.

I’m especially talking about smaller utility programs, like a USB stick formatter. If Gnome even has one of their own, it’ll be an empty window with a single button in the top bar that says “Format Drive.” There will be no choice or indication as to the name, the format, or perhaps even which drive to format. Turns out it will always do the removable drive that was mounted first chronologically. What the pity fuck do you mean you want to format a USB drive while your external backup HDD is attached? Who could ever want to do that? Oh and it’ll be carefully designed to be unusable if you use any theme but light Adwaita. If you want to do something specific, open the terminal and use dd.

KDE’s USB stick formatter will include several different wiping algorithms, you can key in a custom string to fill the empty drive space with with unicode support, settings for physical disks and solid state memory, the weird features of SD cards, it’ll support formats only used by Sun Solaris and OS/2, you can specify a maximum write speed, and it’s got a full set of drive encryption tools built in. All of this is perfectly themeable, but the UI elements are crammed a little too dense and not quite lined up right so it has a little bit of amateurish Windows 98 jank to it.

Cinnamon’s USB stick formatter will be somewhere in the middle. It lets you choose which drive to format, what name to call it, which of about 8 formats to put on it, whether to do a “full wipe”, and that’s about it. Made in GTK for Cinnamon’s design language, it looks straightforward but competent, like it’s from Windows 7. Does what almost all users need, almost all of the time, without getting in the way. The only snag I can think of is likely the Cinnamon menu’s fault: They provide a USB Stick Formatter, and a USB Image Writer. And it will switch places in the order it presents so you can’t memorize “for the formatter, type “USB” and hit enter, for the writer, type “USB” press down and enter.” They use the same icon so you have to stop and process the written language to get the app you want.

Is there any part of Gnome that isn’t “minimal and not distracting?” In my experience, the ideal Gnome applet is a blank window with no features, only a burger menu that only has the About info and a button that says “Do Nothing” in the top bar.

To quote Brian Lunduke, because the GPL is viral and functioning systems licensed under the GPL have been published, if a future Rust-based MIT version of Linux ever comes out, we can just “Fork it, then we’ll have our own Linux.”

“Goodbye” used to mean that, though we’ve started to take it to mean “our relationship is permanently severed, I expect to never communicate with you again in my life.” Which, kind of amazing we felt the need to have a word for that.

“Twelve ninety-nine, first window.” is what usually happens. I’m not the kind of dork that repeats it as “One Two Decimal Niner Niner.” The ham bands are full of geezers that’ll happily play that game with me if I want.

So, per the Pilot/Controller Glossary, “OVER” means “My transmission ended; I expect a response.” Because the communique at the speaker is finished and I don’t expect a response, “OUT” would be more appropriate, meaning “Conversation is over, I expect no response.” Though on the air you’ll often hear “Good day” which isn’t in the P/CG but I think is nicer.

I use a dishwasher. It’s easier and uses less water.

I’m a pilot. At a drive through, I read back the price as a matter of reflex.

Stop, I can only get so hard.

I don’t think there are any negative connotations to the original Steam Machine. They weren’t successful, but in a way that was okay. They weren’t widely sold, and what most of the gaming public got out of the Steam Machine project was the Steam Controller, Big Picture Mode, and the Proton compatibility layer. Most Windows gamers didn’t notice, it was a major boon to Linux gamers, and then they came out with the Steam Deck which has been a genuine success.

I’m surprised nobody posted the xkcd comic. I think Randall had ImageMagick in mind (he names it in the alt text) but it applies to ffmpeg as well.

I always appreciate the girls who go to conventions cosplaying as PS1 era Lara. It’s not a difficult costume to source, you need a pale blue tank top, brown shorts, brown boots, fingerless gloves, a little backpack, the pistol belt with the huge square buckle, and half a shoebox.

Star Trek needs to be taken away from Paramount while it still has a good name.

At this point my laptop is just my away mission machine and a backup. I do just about all my computing on a desktop PC these days.

My x86 tablet exists almost entirely so I can have a running copy of FreeCAD in my wood shop.

Mechanical/civil engineering software, music production, and digital art. Those are the big ones.

I always figured that the Master Sword should have been unbreakable, just a mediocre weapon against normal enemies but very powerful against Malice’d enemies. Like it should have been a 10 sword when not glowing, and 100 when glowing. Because the Master Sword is Sting now.

I don’t think that’s true. Take Little Rocket Man, that achievement is a special challenge run that encourages people to replay through the game, probably after they’ve beaten it naturally, and then they see that achievement in the list and they get some more fun playing through it doing this weird thing.

Subnautica’s achievements are pretty much all on the critical path, only two (launching a time capsule during the end game sequence and hatching a cuddlefish) are reasonable for a first timer to not do. These serve more as useful metadata for both players and the developer. For example, the achievement “Get your feet wet” stands at 88.7% of players have gotten that achievement. 11.3% of players have played Subnautica but haven’t gotten into the water? You can look at the achievements in the order a player would probably do them, and you can see where players tend to fall off, and in fact it makes 100% sense to me why it does where it does. If a lot of players start the game and get early achievements, but there’s a sharp drop in the mid-game where players fall off, maybe you need to look at the mid-game, especially if it’s an early access title like Subnautica was, or you can learn from how players interact with this game and apply that knowledge to your next one.

Breath of the Wild does it both wrong and right.

Weapons in BotW are almost like ammunition. A given sword or club or whatever does so much damage per swing, and will last a certain number of swings, so it represents an amount of damage you can do to an enemy. This system is at its best when you break a sword over an enemy’s head, pick up his weapon, and then keep beating him with that. Problem is, there’s only so cool weapons can get. Players that want to work hard to get a really cool weapon don’t really have a way to both play with it and keep it around. Hell, the Master Sword breaks and grows back.

BotW does it right with shields. Shields have a use case, and an abuse case. If you do a perfect parry, your shield takes no damage. Same thing happened in Skyward Sword, if you abused your shield too much, it broke. But if you used it correctly, it wouldn’t break. If you built use cases and abuse cases for weapons, for example, bashing a sword against an enemy’s shield would wear it out, but striking soft flesh wouldn’t, that would reward players for learning the combat system by giving them a way to keep their coolest swords around.

TotK…Youtuber Skittybitty did a 3-hour takedown of that game and I could add at least two hours of my own criticism.

Eh, these can be implemented well or badly.

Look at Subnautica’s achievements. There are seventeen total, seven of them are triggered by events required to beat the game, 5 are triggered by non-required but main path “players will do this” story beats, and 3 are “engage in a major advertised featuer that are technically possible to skip.” The last two are “play with this little bonus feature we included.”

I’m quite fond of a couple achievements for Half-Life 2 Episode 1 and 2, which are basically challenge runs. “The One Free Bullet” which challenges the player to beat the game having fired only one round from a gun (the crowbar, grenades, rocket launcher, crossbow I think, and gravity gun don’t count as “bullets”) and Little Rocket Man, an achievement for carrying a garden gnome from the beginning of the game all the way to the end and placing him in the rocket.

Possibly my favorite achievement in all of gaming history has to be in Portal 2. At the beginning of a chapter, PotatOS says “Well, this is the part where he kills us.” And you land on a platform surrounded by spikes and Wheatley says “Hello! This is the part where I kill you!” And then the chapter heading reading “Chapter 9: The Part Where He Kills You” flashes on screen. And then you get an achievement for “The Part Where He Kills You: This is that part.”