dual_sport_dork
@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world
- Comment on Anyone here have a Qidi? Need help fiddling with the firmware 13 hours ago:
If your Q1 is anything like my previous X-Plus or current X-Max 3, pretty much all of the routines you can run from the touch screen are macros that are defined in your printer.cfg on the machine itself. This is just a text file full of gcode and you can dick with it freely without having to reflash the firmware. The only “fun” part will be figuring out which one of the custom macros it is, since Qidi doesn’t always give them a readable name and they tend to make them random looking numeric strings. I’ll have to take a look at mine when I get home and ensure that the filament load/unload/runout routines are located there, but I’m pretty sure they are.
You can directly edit your printer.cfg through the Mainsail interface within the Qidi Slicer or you can SSH into the machine and get a terminal via which you can mess with things directly (username mks, password makerbase).
- Comment on The story of a crazy Half-Life 2 bug, as told by former Valve dev Tom Forsyth (Mastodon thread) 2 days ago:
You can deflect leaping headcrabs this way (or block them with a held object, although this causes you to automatically drop it afterwards) but as far as I know it deals no damage to enemies.
- Comment on The story of a crazy Half-Life 2 bug, as told by former Valve dev Tom Forsyth (Mastodon thread) 2 days ago:
Apparently Valve experimented with melee weapons early in development, but intentionally decided to cut them because of the perceived lack of impact and weightlessness of held items, but the main thing was that playtesters kept getting their long melee weapons snagged on stuff. Alyx notably does not allow your hands or held items to intersect with other objects, nor does it let your hands get too far away from your body’s position to prevent shenanigans. If you unexpectedly hook your crowbar on a door frame or a table or something you’ll find yourself inexplicably leashed to it after walking a couple of feet and then not be able to find your hands.
This article goes into some detail. Apparently the crowbar specifically was removed to prevent players from assuming they were Gordon Freeman, despite the constant stream of evidence to the contrary. But it doesn’t seem like too much of a leap to replace that with Alyx grabbing a random length of pipe or chunk of rebar or something from the multitudes of trashed urban environments she traverses throughout the game.
Anyway, as soon as modding support was opened up for HL:A the first things that inevitably appeared were about 4,987 mods that added the crowbar back in. So it’s an easy enough wish to fulfill, if that’s what you want.
- Comment on The story of a crazy Half-Life 2 bug, as told by former Valve dev Tom Forsyth (Mastodon thread) 2 days ago:
I like this one:
Also, whacking the manhacks with your crowbar goes from being a panicked flailing in flatscreen, to being an elegant one-swing home-run hit in VR.
It makes me like the fact that there are no melee weapons in Half Life: Alyx even less, though.
- Comment on Hyundai car requires $2000, app & internet access to fix your brakes - what the actual f 2 days ago:
“All” digital tech?
I don’t think most people realize that any powertrain new enough to even have fuel injection is going to be a “computer vehicle” in some capacity. How are you with carburetors?
- Comment on Microsoft finally admits almost all major Windows 11 core features are broken 3 days ago:
Windows 98 SE, maybe. We didn’t gain much traction there until about Win2k or XP.
Windows 98 in its original flavor didn’t even support USB mass storage devices out of the box without drivers. Hands up everyone who remembers having to carry around one of those tiny driver CDs that came in the box with every single Sandisk Cruzer for a couple of years? Yeah? How quickly we forget.
- Comment on When it comes to nukes and AI, people are worried about the wrong thing | It’s more subtle than Skynet. 4 days ago:
As already thoroughly explored in the apparent documentary “99 Red Balloons,” in 1984.
For fuck’s sake.
- Comment on Microsoft AI CEO pushes back against critics after recent Windows AI backlash — "the fact that people are unimpressed ... is mindblowing to me" 4 days ago:
In terms of Windows 11? You can move the start button back to the lower left corner in the settings, but you can’t stick it to the sides or top of your monitor nor resize it like you could do in previous versions. Even Windows 95 supported all of the above.
The functionality is still there, mind you, and you can do it via registry hacks or third party tools. Microsoft just saw fit to remove the option for the user to do it themselves for some inexplicable reason.
- Comment on Microsoft AI CEO pushes back against critics after recent Windows AI backlash — "the fact that people are unimpressed ... is mindblowing to me" 5 days ago:
I’ll bet I can make your left eye twitch.
Are you ready?
A “large” amount of information.
Bitch, my computer has 128 gigabytes of RAM. It’s a tiny god. The fact that I have as many as 100 cells copied to the clipboard (which is the threshold that triggers this stupid message, if you’ve ever wondered) is not even a rounding error. I’m sure this was marginally important in 1982 or whenever this was first coded into Excel, but today my computer could lose an entire megabyte of memory or maybe even ten down between the couch cushions and neither of us would notice.
There is still no setting to disable this dumbshit message.
- Comment on Evolution at its finest! 5 days ago:
Be sure to stick an AR500 plate between your saddle and the mine as well, so you can enjoy a free added speed boost when you flak your enemy without scorching your buttcheeks.
It’ll totally work. I saw it in a cartoon once.
- Comment on If it were possible to travel back in time and manipulate events, we could take a book back in time and publish it before the author historicallt does... as a prank... 5 days ago:
Regarding She-who-must-not-be-named, somebody already kinda tried it, it didn’t work because the fomrer was already in possession of large sums of money by that time (and the challenge was kind of spurious anyway) and then everyone forgot about it.
- Comment on Evolution at its finest! 5 days ago:
- Comment on [deleted] 5 days ago:
Posted directly, no. Not anymore, anyway; there was a bright and shiny albeit very short period early in .world’a days when you could upload a video instead of an image and it would take it and work. I imagine the admins disabled this for obvious reasons.
You can still post an animated .gif, though. I do it all the time.
- Comment on If Microsoft ended Windows 10 support, why is it still getting updates like every other day? 6 days ago:
Pro or Enterprise? Or even better, Enterprise IoT LSTC? The latter is going to get security updates until 2032.
And those enrolled ($61) in the Extended Security Updates program get one more year of security support (not feature updates), and the various Enterprise versions will continue to get updates for up to another seven years, depending on the version.
Microsoft didn’t stop updating Windows 10 and they won’t for quite some time. They’re simply no longer offering those updates to most users of the consumer versions of Windows.
Windows Update can also hand you updates to your drivers independent of the support status of your copy of Windows. For instance, if you install a copy of Windows 7 even today it will still pull driver files from Microsoft.
- Comment on Me when Valve releases a phone 1 week ago:
Steam Deck: Already runs Linux.
GabeCube: Confirmed it will run Linux.
Steam Frame: Confirmed it will run Linux.
Obviously Valve has made no overtures whatsoever towards making a phone. But if they did, what on Earth would lead you to believe that it wouldn’t run Linux?
- Comment on Uh oh: Ubisoft postpones its quarterly financial report at the last minute and halts stock trading 1 week ago:
Or consistently fail to make Beyond Good and Evil 2 for several decades.
- Comment on Valve Announces New Steam Machine, Steam Controller & Steam Frame 1 week ago:
I do too, but I’d highly doubt it will. It’s well known that Meta sells every headset at a loss and funds the expenditure via revenue from their gargantuan advertising and spy network, specifically to squeeze out competitors and make it harder to enter the VR market as a newcomer. Zuck Zuck still thinks all the prime real estate in the metaverse is going to be his, because he only read the first half of Snow Crash.
- Comment on Valve Announces New Steam Machine, Steam Controller & Steam Frame 1 week ago:
Insufficient pedantry detected.
The PC platform is an extension of IBM’s Personal Computer architecture, which was not a description of what it was so much as it was literally the brand name. It’s long since been forgotten that this is now a shorthand, and the full name of the platform arguably out to be PC Compatible. Unless you bought your machine from IBM, anyway, which these days would be quite the trick.
Being PC compatible was a big deal back when the original PC was also a big deal. Probably slightly less so now, since it’s the assumed default.
It should go without saying that the original IBM PC, model 5150, did not run Windows… Because Windows did not yet exist. It didn’t even necessarily run the then-nascent PC-DOS provided by Microsoft, because IBM also supported running CP/M and and UCSD Pascal on it.
The whole Windows-as-default thing didn’t happen until well after the appeal of the PC specification had escaped containment at IBM and x86 had handily taken over the desktop computing world.
A personal computer is basically anything you can stick on your desk (or lap) and doesn’t require hooking up to a mainframe to run. But a Personal Computer, capital P and C, implies an x86 compatible platform with architecture designed such that it is technically still capable of running all those decades old 8086 programs and operating systems. (Just, several orders of magnitude faster than their designers ever envisioned, and probably only by sticking your UEFI BIOS in legacy mode first.)
- Comment on Valve Announces New Steam Machine, Steam Controller & Steam Frame 1 week ago:
FYI, technically Meta/Facebook had already owned Oculus for something like five years before the original Quest came out. They just started getting really blatant about the branding shortly after that time, probably to acquiesce to Zuck Zuck and his huffing of his “metaverse” crack pipe increasingly frequently.
- Comment on Happy Day to all who celebrate 1 week ago:
It’s from the Watchmen comic:
- Comment on Crappy filament? 1 week ago:
In that case who knows what it was. This is one of those rare instances where it’d be awesome to have a flame spectrometer.
- Comment on Microsoft confirms Windows 11 is about to change massively, gets enormous backlash - Neowin 1 week ago:
That was never actually an official statement. It was an offhand comment by some staffer that didn’t carry any legal weight nor accurately describe the internal trajectory for Windows in any way. As much as we like to poke fun at it regardless.
- Comment on Steam Hardware [new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and VR headset Steam Frame, coming in 2026] 1 week ago:
It could be either given that Alyx ended on a cliffhanger that ties it back to the original series. They’d better come up with something, or else they’re going to have another riot on their hands.
- Comment on Steam Hardware [new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and VR headset Steam Frame, coming in 2026] 1 week ago:
It was pretty janky. I received a download code for Half Life 2 in the box with my Radeon 9800 Pro several months before the game was actually released. I didn’t have a lot of use for Steam before then, but I installed it anyway and my account is so old that back when the account IDs were still numeric and sequential, mine was four digits.
- Comment on Valves first title with a 3 in it 1 week ago:
I still have my boxed copy of the Orange Box on a shelf. It still sees use because every once in a while I get embroiled in a Kids These Days type of conversation and I need a prop to wave around.
- Comment on Breaking: Google is easing up on Android's new sideloading restrictions! 1 week ago:
As opposed to what, buying a viable phone from those other guys?
What other guys?
At minimum a stampede of people moving to iPhones should theoretically cause Google to shit enough of a brick (providing capitalism actually works as advertised, and for the record I am trying like hell to keep a straight face as I type this) to correct their behavior in an attempt to win some of those users back.
Because at the end of the day most consumers are consumers, not nerds, and if neither platform is going to allow you control over your device and they’re both privacy nightmares you’re not much worse off with an iDevice if you plan on owning a smartphone in the first place.
- Comment on Steam Hardware [new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and VR headset Steam Frame, coming in 2026] 1 week ago:
Eyy, Reverb gang.
Apparently there is third party support in Linux under Mondao but it still seems pretty developmental and I haven’t had the time to mess with it yet. I’m still clinging to mine as well, because at least for now it still works and I’ve blocked Windows from rug-pulling my WMR app. I’m sure that’ll only last until the next time I need to reformat and reinstall in a couple of years.
- Comment on Crappy filament? 1 week ago:
If you still have the length of filament you cut off, you can verify your temperature theory pretty easily by loading it up temporarily and trying increasing nozzle temperatures until you get it to extrude. That spool of filament may have been contaminated by having a couple of pellets of the wrong stuff in it. Plain PET (rather than PETG) is most likely, I think, and that stuff won’t extrude until you wind your nozzle up to probably about 240° C.
It might have been a diameter issue as well, but I’d doubt it. My printer’s drive gears can still grab objects that are quite a bit smaller than the prescribed 1.75mm filament diameter, and if the stuff were so thin or thick it wouldn’t feed I think it’d be quite obvious to the naked eye. I imagine this is the case with pretty much any modern printer.
- Comment on Steam Hardware [new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and VR headset Steam Frame, coming in 2026] 1 week ago:
Valve’s strategy here seems to be to build physical inertial tracking into the controllers as well. They both have an IMU built in which presumably gives them a pretty decent ability to guess where they’ve been moved in physical space even if they’re outside of the cameras’ field of view. I don’t know if anyone has accurately assessed how well that works in this case.
- Comment on Steam Hardware [new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and VR headset Steam Frame, coming in 2026] 1 week ago:
The only other major PC oriented inside-out system, Windows Mixed Reality, allowed controllers and headsets from all brands participating in the program to freely intermix. I’d doubt Valve would be dumb enough not to also follow this path, if there are ever successive iterations of this hardware.
