Notices by Nazo (nazokiyoubinbou@urusai.social)

@NeonPurpleStar Does this mean what I think it does? (Trying to touch them while they're hot or something?)

I was just inspired to dig through some PS2 stuff as I started rebuilding a new drive for my old PS2. Did you #retrogaming fans know that there is a Phantasy Star 1 remake on the PS2 known as "Sega Ages Phantasy Star Generation 1"? It seems to have gotten... quite a lot more enhancement than the recent remake released on modern consoles. As in they put quite a lot of work into it.

Why on earth wasn't this reused when they did the recent remakes? If they worried people wouldn't like the enhancements they could have made it a toggle or something. I mean... the work was already done, why throw it away?

It looks like the second game got a similar treatment I think.

It seems there are fan translations for these two entries as well.

@jdacee One interesting alternative to normal VPNs if you're determined to go with free might be to use tor. There is a service available that can connect the whole system through the TOR network. Of course, this tends to be very slow, but it's even better privacy-wise than a VPN.

As others have said, you really need to be very very careful with actual free VPNs... Honestly, I'd argue that a VPN is something that you probably shouldn't do free since that puts a company with very low level access to your data that has a vested interest in profiting off of you in a position to... find a way to profit off of you...

@dalias I feel like having to log into a few sites is definitely worth the improved security/privacy/etc.

But I'm sure there are more extreme reasons some people may not be making the switch.

Just, I worry the main reason is most just don't know it exists...

@dalias Though certainly better just to use Ironfox, this is great for those who are for whatever reason not doing so.

@thomasfuchs Every time I watched those CSI shows I wanted to rip out hair when they started just magically enhancing grainy crappy low grade tapes from cheap garage cameras or etc and could somehow pull a tag number from that. Meanwhile, even this many years later than when those shows first started presenting this magic, actual companies putting actual money into this struggle to deal with the necessary detail to get anything like that.

I think maybe I missed that particular Columbo. A local station was airing them a while back, but I guess I haven't seen it because I don't remember that.

@captainarcee @Oregon_Pacifist I imagine you can do it the other way around — find a case for your favorite device in that color.

But yeah, modern phones require a case since they're designed to be big rather than to fit in human hands so no one has a grip on one anymore...

@p_balduino @alice I mean EVENTUALLY there will be poison. The only question is will there be within the time period or not. Sure, depending on the half-life and a bit of luck it could be years. But it could also be a nanosecond...

I feel like that's not worth it no matter how nice the box is.

@alice Yes kitty, but... Poison... It's... not worth it...

@diazona @RamenCatholic I keep running into so many movies that just to me scream "this is what Monsterdon needs to watch!" but I guess there's no official way to submit something?

I ran into a real doozy of a great one for Monsterdon a little while back on Tubi too. We're talking low (none) budget, fighting cultists, apparently some sort of ... ninjas? A training montage, a magic sword that the dude just tosses aside at one point and just, well, everything was so badly done in all the best ways, rofl.

@diazona @RamenCatholic @Taweret No. I posted about it under the Monsterdon tag some time ago, but it may even have been long enough ago that the post has self deleted by now. It was... a pretty low grade movie, lol. Probably an indie self-insert.

I never heard of "Turkish Star Wars" but I bet it still is higher budget and better quality than this thing was, rofl.

EDIT: Ok, this is funny. I searched and searched and searched on Tubi and I couldn't find it. Finally I gave up after like 30 minutes of searching.

And there it is on my screen after I gave up and posted that...

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099498/

Empire of the Dark. Wowee it's a bad movie, but the good kind of bad, lol.

@astraleureka @TonyJWells @va3wft @ai6yr Agreed. Pretty much every Casio watch of that entire general time period was reliable, kept good time, and ran forever with just the original battery.

I never had to replace the battery in any of my own, so now I start to wonder. Could it be that it was more an issue of batteries eventually degrading and leaking than them running out that lead to replacements? I guess to some extent it could depend on alarm usage (if you used a bunch of alarms instead of once a day or something) but all in all they really lasted forever on those things...

@TonyJWells @astraleureka @va3wft @ai6yr I actually turned on the hourly chime (on purpose for regularity and easier keeping up with time in general) and it still lasted forever with that on, lol.

@ai6yr @TonyJWells @astraleureka @va3wft There seems to be just a whole retro scene built up around watches like these. It's less visible, but I ran into it a bit when I looked into some stuff like those watches with the little radios built in. (If you really want to see something neat, look those up!)

There was even one (by Casio I think even) that had a TV. Sort of.

Another interesting model from that time period can connect to a computer, but as far as I could tell all it really did was store strings. Nothing nice like some sort of programming or anything.

@Oregon_Pacifist Pfft. The Unreal Tournament games were always better. I will die on this hill.

@svavar @thomasfuchs I mean, to be clear, I do think security issues should be updated against. The current version of RHEL is 10 and the last release of RHEL 5 was in 2014 — more than ten years ago — so Amazon AWS making the decision to stop supporting it is very sensible and frankly anyone using a base that old should have counted on this happening by now. (Even if this is mostly internal, it's still kind of asking for trouble for the OS itself to be that old in something that may potentially be a hack target.)

Actually, I think you demonstrated my point on the other end. It was a setup that lasted — more than ten years...

I think this whole topic is just discussing slower update paths where you don't get small, poorly tested updates every other day, not "don't update ever."

@thomasfuchs :anyathis:

This. So much this! People think software (and hardware too btw!) ages fast. Like milk. The most many people will hold onto any piece of hardware seems to be something like two years.

There's such an obsessive need to always have the latest of something that it turns into a "move fast and break things" situation all too often. Software developers keep making fast changes and everyone acts like if there is an update it must go out now now now and people must apply the update yesterday. (Note I'm not talking about actual security updates here. I'm talking about "there was a typo in the about page and also we changed the open dialog to use a custom API that only works on some systems" stuff.)

Software should be stable! Hardware should be stable!

@darkling @thomasfuchs And before someone comes in nitpicking that components like capacitors, batteries, etc do age and really really old devices do eventually stop working, I will state clearly I don't mean nothing ever ages at all, just that it's not the way people treat it. People buy new phones, PCs etc on almost a two-year cycle. Some even less! Hardware doesn't age that fast. You can still use a ten-year-old PC for most of the stuff everyone does today in fact. Some games/etc will have issues or require exceptionally low quality settings, but it's hardly a "nope, throw it in the trash" thing.

I wouldn't expect a 30-year-old PC to run today's software well, but I do expect a five-year-old one to at least run normal software well enough to not be trash.

@darkling @thomasfuchs Hardware doesn't age that way though.

I have a DAP from something like 2008 or so that still works today. Still sounds great on quality headphones like my Sennheiser HD650 too. It could play more than just MP3 files too. FLAC, OGG Vorbis, WMA, and I think M4A AACs (need to test that last one.) It sill powers on and it still holds a charge. It didn't rot and I won't be throwing it away just because it doesn't have bluetooth or something. (If I wanted that I could buy a bluetooth transmitter, but I don't really.)

But I don't even think we're arguing devices from decades ago should still be usable. It's much simpler. Hardware should still be reasonably usable for a reasonable number of years. More than just two. And "usable" doesn't mean great. Just not trash.

@svavar @thomasfuchs Firstly, to be clear, the OP isn't saying "no updates ever!" The point here is slower development and update cycles where more testing is done and more focus on stability. Less "move fast and break things," more "move slow and fix things."

Second, a lot more than you think can be done with those things! I literally play DOS games today via DOSBox-Staging for example. A decent modern setup running a VM can probably still work with a lot of those systems. IMO the issue there is they get too caught up on never changing anything. They bought IBM 5150s in 1980 or whatever, so today only get parts made for a 5150.

There is a balance to be had, but people seem to only go extremes on one side or the other instead.