addie

Can't remember any particular performance problems with ET - it's no more flickery than any other 2600 game, sound plays fine, screen changes when you fall in a hole are prompt, all that kind of thing. Now, utterly bizarre and unintuitive gameplay, yes; it has that in spades. Also quite unfinished, but Howard Scott Warshaw only got five weeks to develop it so I'm prepared to point the blame at Atari for that.

BTRFs, which has advanced filesystems features like snapshots, data integrity checks, and scrubbing, is a less performant filesystem for databases than filesystems that don't have these features, like EXT4, F2FS and XFS. No shit, Sherlock. At least compare it to ZFS or something.

If you are storing files that you care about, use a filesystem with integrity checks. If you require high database performance, it'll probably be happier using a whole partition, if not just a whole pile of disks, and be allowed to get on with it. If you are driving nails into a wall, do not compare the performance of different screwdrivers for the task. And so on.

Were Pabst moving beer for someone else? If it was their own stuff, surely the headline should be "40,000 pounds of piss water inside" instead.

If you're sharing the driving, then maybe. If you're on your own, then a ten minute break every couple of hours is sensible anyway, and so recharging isn't inconvenient. Good maps and accurate range monitoring is more important than shaving off a couple of minutes. And having all the chargers be working, ofc - standard operating practice is to have a couple of them just be frozen up, to waste your time.

Main problem that we have (UK) is that most of the places that have fast chargers are in shopping estates on the outskirts of towns, and they largely serve pretty shitty coffee, and may or may not have toilets.

Outlook is lousy, but what gets me is the fact that basically all "email, calendar, rss and chat (maybe)" apps are pretty bad. You'd think someone would have implemented something better by now.

Excel is perfect, PowerPoint doesn't need to be any better.

Word is a terrible text editor and its layout algorithm is lousy. You can make better-looking documents by converting markdown to html and then applying some css; modern browsers have much more sophisticated styling options than Word offers as "styles". You can make much better looking documents with Latex, which is pushing fifty years old now.

Both ways let you edit text files in a superior editor (which should be Vim, of course - the most superior editor). Collaborative working and revision history with Git, which runs none of the risk of Word just randomly deciding to shit itself when those features are enabled.

Fine - Word can retain a "compatible layout" mode for all those ancient documents where people have paginated by pressing enter 17 times exactly, and the line-breaking, hyphenation, text colour etc. algorithms cannot be updated. But for the rest of us, let's push things forward.

We do get a lot of German tourists coming to visit the northwest of Scotland - quite often a queue of campervans with their fancy license plates queuing up in Inverness. You can be stood on top of a mountain in the northern highlands, and not see any evidence of another human being from horizon to horizon. Which is also terrifying in a way - the traditional "Land's End to John O'Groats" cycle does include quite a long way away from civilisation if your bike decides to have a mechanical.

German tourists always most welcome here, ofc. Even more welcome if you bring some konigsberger klopse and some robust dunkelbiers with you; will swap you for whisky, we've got loads.

It lets you "add game", but then gives you the choice of Linux / Windows with a Wine version / browser, and you have to put in the path.

So for example, in Lutris I could have "every Zelda game" or "every Castlevania game" as a filter. Castlevania needs MSX, NES, Gameboy, SNES, N64, DS, PSX, PS2, and Wii emulation; and one of (Steam, or PS3 or X360 emulation) to be reasonably complete.

I suppose I could create a Linux shell script that daisy-chains into the correct emulator, but that would be quite clunky compared to Lutris, which is still pretty clunky. And I wouldn't be able to filter to that, nor sort them by release date.

Just for gaming purposes, having a unified front end that:

• lets you start an application with the arguments it needs, whether to use a specific Wine folder, or start an emulator with the right arguments

• lets you tag up each application with some custom arguments - genre, date, and so on - and lets you filter and sort by them

• lets you configure each app with their own box art or whatever as an icon

• keeps some gaming-related metadata; hours played, whether you've finished it, ...

Essentially, Windows 3.1 Program Manager for the 21st century. Lutris did that quite well. Heroic doesn't let you add custom stuff, it just integrates with store fronts. RetroArch has the old-school Linux problem of "all the functionality you need, plus all the functionality anyone might ever need, plus all the functionality that no-one needs, all arranged seemingly at random in dozens of menus".

Lutris scripts were great - just having the required winetricks commands to get something obscure working was awesome, but packaged up in a useful way along with art and metadata was handy. The front-end being "only what you need" was good as well. Shame it's gone off the rails a bit...

Support for Linux has to be explicitly enabled, it's not on by default. Even when it's enabled, it causes complete bullshit. For instance, I can't use all of my CPU cores when playing Elden Ring - EAC isn't compatible with so many, have to disable some so that it can start.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1245620/discussions/0/597412189643679711/

It does just fine for claiming the free games and then otherwise ignoring the Epic store, which is perfection. Think I've installed about one out of fifty or so I have available, but the important thing is that Tim doesn't receive a penny.

Fine Young Cannibals?

What a shame - Netflix have given up on doing anything at all imaginative, and have fallen back on making Harry Potter and FIFA games, chucking everyone else to the wolves.

In some ways, having someone with a head for business would appear to make sense for a gaming studio. You could look at most of the announcements from eg. Obsidian or Double Fine on their intention to make 'Scope Creep: The Video Game', guaranteed to release massively over-budget to critical success but modest sales which will put the studio into a lot of trouble; and think that someone holding the purse strings, keeping the creatives from their worst excesses, and vetoing any really stupid ideas would be a clever idea. Unfortunately, this role always seems to go to dumb-arse dipshits without a single thought in their heads.

Would appear that an Indie Studio of three people might be ideal - Suspicious Developments, Team Cherry, Cuzzillo/Boch/Foddy have put out some great stuff recently. Small enough to stay focussed, and also small enough to put in a few years of polish without running up crazy bills. Seems like Night School, being four people, was just a bit too big.