I actually disagree there. Might be showing why I don’t work in high end product design lol, but I think as a pro model you can go a little crazy on the weight. You can probably save some thickness from under the camera bump somehow if you redistribute whatever can be displaced from under there, which would be easier in a thicker phone. Like any PCB that doesn’t need to be directly under the optoelectronics could be redesigned to go around some of the camera stuff, which would eat into the battery. But that wouldn’t be a problem when the whole thing is a mm or two thicker. 220g is probably not crazy. 250g would be pushing it. 300g would be unreasonable unless they have some real high tech stuff in there to show for it, like some kind of force touch or possibly a 3.5mm headphone connector.

The thing is heavy. I have a heavy case on it as well, go figure. I must admit though, in the past I used to drop my phone on my face. Now I make the split second effort to dodge if I drop it. But the weight makes it feel premium. Sure, the dad test is psychological, but that doesn’t mean it’s not important.

I think switching the back from all-glass to something else would help drop the weight slightly, but at this rate it’s just that there’s so much in these phones. Between the battery, the slabs of glass, the complicated cameras, you’d think fitting a headphone connector wouldn’t be so hard.

They have deployed an AI reply system into the comments, probably to make up for the decrease in traffic that could hurt their IPO.

I don’t think it even needs to be them for it to be a huge problem. People have been automating the process of gaining karma to sell accounts for years and years, I would imagine this process is accelerating with the rise of LLMs and the bottom falling out from under all the mod tools.

In Lebanon, “Handy” means a cordless landline.

The weird part for me isn’t that the corrections are online. It’s that the whole book isn’t a searchable help page with all the errata patched away.

I actually found this because I was following a guide that needed Process Explorer to find out which damn program was catching my controller before DS4Windows was.

It was Firefox, specifically the Stable Diffusion WebUI for some reason.

You’re telling me you don’t like putting on on your most ridiculously offensive Yeehaw Hollywood American accent when asking your phone to set a timer?

Alternative way to think about it: 10% of people are insufferable assholes. Do you want them to be happy with what you say?

The guy’s name was David. In the game, you’re chasing after an inventor who crossed different parts of the world, building giant pinball games on fields. You’re following in his footsteps, fixing the pinball games that have fallen into disarray using the lessons you learned.

Googling a little, it seems like that was a different game called Pinball Science, also by David Macaulay. So I definitely had both, probably got them both around the same time. I vaguely remember the setting for TNWTW being an island with different buildings with different themes of things to discover.

Those disks were super hard to get where I was, too. I live in Lebanon. My parents moved heaven and earth to get me quality entertainment, and the older I get the more I realize how much effort they put into making me a cultured kid.

Now I really need to spin up a VM! I also want to waltz around Beaumaris Castle in Encarta, and check out all the stuff in Encarta that I didn’t know to appreciate when I was a kid.

There’s more than just that to it.

I recently downloaded it so I can save some um research content for later research (I’d been off Reddit for maybe two weeks at this point, I wasn’t going to hurt my pride if I saw the app for myself). When I refreshed the front page of my research throwaway, all the posts were hidden and replaced with new ones. Refresh again, those are gone too, replaced by three or four stragglers. Final refresh and there’s nothing on the front page. They’re practically begging me to go to their algorithm page (popular?). It looks like an A/B test they’re doing, and it looked like others were annoyed at this from the feedback I saw on the official mobile app sub. It was an A/B test with no toggle or anything.

Normally, in an app made to give the user a good experience, this should be a feature you turn on and off. I remember a ton of people swearing by some kind of post hiding system, so, sure, this is definitely a plus for some people. But I’ve refreshed my Reddit home page for over a decade now. Don’t make it misbehave all of a sudden.

Their app, with all its bloat, can have some nice features. For example, during my research session, I was swiping through an album. When it was finished, it swiped into the next post. At first I didn’t like that, but a few posts later, I liked it, I got the hang of it. Decent navigation feature, fine. This isn’t so bad.

I tap into another part of the app a different sub I think, and now the only direction I can scroll is downwards, and instead of showing me the next (image) post, it shows me some random popular vertical video from a different subreddit. Literally just TikTok navigation for Reddit. Which again, would be completely fine, if it was a button I could tap to enter this mode, but not just haphazardly switching between different navigation UXes so that the app can quantify which one makes me see more ads. Fucks sake.

I didn’t even want to download their app, and the one time I find a new feature that I don’t hate, it gets turned off within the same session to serve me a feature I specifically don’t want. I don’t think vertical video is the death of the human experience, but it sure as hell isn’t for me, and it sure as hell is the last thing I want out of a site like Reddit.

These A/B tests infuriate me. I open Instagram every once in a blue moon, and I absolutely despise scrolling down my feed and seeing the same information displayed ten different ways in less than a minute. On one post, the likes counter is bold, on another, it has profile photos, on another, it’s an accented color… like that’s worse than just picking the worst option in my opinion.

But that’s the thing. No first party app will ever be designed to have a good UX first and foremost. That’s secondary. What’s important is their meaningless metrics that make the site worse, so they can charge more for ads (even if they make the site worse for paying users…). I understand that they’re trying to appeal to new people over on Reddit, I genuinely believe there’s nothing wrong with that. But if I stumbled upon it now for the first time, I’d think it was hot unusable garbage, and I would not have guessed this is site would have been my literal front page of the internet™ for over 11 years in another life. Probably would just assume it was a porn site with a weird news aggregator attached.

Oh yeah. I remember this. You learn lessons and then apply them to build a pinball system, at least in the sequel, creatively named The New Way Things Work. I spent years on all kinds of edutainment software made by these guys.

I genuinely believe that our generation got some kind of golden age for interactive educational stuff. DK/GSK were releasing banger after banger, I believe I’d still enjoy these as an adult! The virtual museums just speak to me, conceptually. I don’t know what similar stuff came after, but all the software I see young kids interacting with now is ad riddled digital nonsense sludge. Even the stuff that should be more than just entertainment.

All those old DK CDs should be available on the Internet Archive, by the way. Just need to finally get around to setting up a damn Windows XP VM and I’ll be looking through a lot of these with fresh adult eyes.

“Guys I know the instructions say I can use any odorless cooking oil, but is there anything wrong with just buying the $89 Apple oil? I want to have a matching set”

I’m sorry if this goes against some instance/community rule and if so please just tell me - but where does one find reliable ROM packs? I only ever used EmuParadise back in the day (as I still do - but don’t tell anyone!)

Not an amateur producer at all, but a few years ago I was listening to a lot of YouTube mixes while working. Lofi stuff might be cookie cutter elevator music to you, but I loved some mixes over others. I got attached to some of them, and discovered a ton of artists that way. These were single, long videos with many tracks each.

My heart sank when I started finding some of them turn into broken links. I figured out YouTube-DL and got to archiving. I found some reuploads of playlists I liked such as the wonderful Morning Coffee by the amazing SoulSearchAndDestroy (the lead song, damn fine coffee by mtbrd, is one of my favorite lofi tracks ever). Other playlists have been lost to time.

Sometimes I skim through my archived playlists to find a song I can remember in my head, and sometimes I don’t find the song, and it’s possible that I will never find it again. Again, silly for this to happen with lofi of all things (one of the most dispassionate and almost disposable genres of music).

I still think YouTube is unmatched for music discovery. Yes, you’re clicking on songs for “bad” reasons such as the thumbnail or recognizing the curator’s channel, but it worked pretty damn well for me.

Are there any plans at all for a traditional app? I understand that there is an appeal to keeping things completely free from any App Store shenanigans, a certain freedom that comes with web apps over native apps.

Have you played the MediEvil games?