dual_sport_dork
@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world
- Comment on The Circle of iLife 8 hours ago:
Your video player “can” account for latency if you configure it correctly which I imagine the majority of people don’t do, and simply put up with it. Ditto with your music playback always lagging 1-2 seconds behind your control inputs. I have never used a media player on any platform that automatically figured out audio latency. Maybe the iDevices do if you pair them with Airpods, I don’t know; I don’t own anything Apple and I never will.
It also matters for music production, and makes life a lot more pleasant for audio/video editing. Plus, latency is just annoying in any setting.
- Comment on The Circle of iLife 9 hours ago:
And also no latency. Even expensive Bluetooth headphones and earbuds have crap latency. The systems that don’t are either proprietary and not widely supported (e.g. aptX) or expensive 'phones-and-dongle arrangements that must always travel in a pair and still don’t compete on latency with a pair of dollar store earbuds.
- Comment on The Circle of iLife 10 hours ago:
We’d love to, but manufacturers keep trying to force them down our throats. And when we express a different prererence or use case a bunch of trolls feel the need to pop out of the woodwork and tell is that no, we’re actually wrong and our use cases don’t actually exist.
How about you all don’t worry about what headphones other people wre using?
- Comment on Don't worry about it 12 hours ago:
Zoomer Parker will not lug around an SLR camera in the next reboot; he’ll simply be a drone operator.
- Comment on Sony Music Among Parties Pushing To Cut Off Internet for Pirating Customers — Supreme Court Asked To Intervene 12 hours ago:
Hell, most of the major labels post tracks themselves to sponge up that sweet ad revenue. You can just use the tool of your choice to download the audio straight out of it if you decide you want to keep it for later.
- Comment on Sony Music Among Parties Pushing To Cut Off Internet for Pirating Customers — Supreme Court Asked To Intervene 12 hours ago:
I also haven’t forgiven them for trying to sue people for simply watching the Geohot video, or removing alternative OS functionality from the PS3, or for trying to reinvent MMC/SD memory cards in a different shape and charge more for for them. Hell, I still haven’t forgiven them for SonicStage.
I won’t buy anything from Sony for any reason. I don’t care what it is. I made damn sure my most recent camera purchase wasn’t a Sony, no matter what the reviews said. That’s because they pissed me off 20 years ago and haven’t demonstrated any improvement in behavior since. Nerds have long memories.
- Comment on Stepping up from Tinkercad but to what? 5 days ago:
Yes, but OnShape is only “free.” FreeCAD explicitly allows you to retain ownership of your own work, without requiring it to be percolated through someone else’s cloud servers.
I will go back to carving things by hand out of stone before I rely on cloud based design tools.
- Comment on Happy Easter from the POTUS 5 days ago:
Based on the popular trope of Hispanic guys hanging around outside of Home Depot (or other American big box hardware stores) every morning looking to get picked up as day laborers.
- Comment on Stepping up from Tinkercad but to what? 5 days ago:
FreeCAD all the way.
The commercial CAD packages are all subscription schemes at this point which are designed around the dual purpose of extracting as much money as possible from businesses and nickel-and-diming hobbyists to death. The megacorporations that own them are actively evil and doing business with them should be avoided at all times.
Blender is not a CAD tool. You can bully it into kinda-sorta doing something that resembles CAD work with plugins, but that’s not what it’s for.
Sketchup is about the same caliber as TinkerCAD and LibraCAD is 2D only.
That leaves FreeCAD.
- Comment on In the not too distant past this was a thing 6 days ago:
I’ll bet you it does, but you’ll need to put a new battery in it.
- Comment on In the not too distant past this was a thing 6 days ago:
I bought it on Dealextreme back in the day, which was kind of the precursor to our current Aliexpress/Wish/Temu/Shein arrangement. It’s therefore possible that it is a knockoff (or a knockoff of a knockoff?) but the fact remains that it was absurdly cheap, is fully mechanical, and against all expectation and reason it continues to function and also keep pretty good time. It’s actually just a hair fast, and requires me to knock a minute off of it about once per week.
If you’re not squeamish you can get a thoroughly generic – or perhaps heavily “inspired” by some particular name brand – wind-up timepiece from any of the usual suspects for pocket change. $10-20, and other poster in here mentioned they bought theirs for $5.
- Comment on What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts? 6 days ago:
There probably actually isn’t an alternative. Whatever piece of software you might otherwise use to encode or convert video is probably using ffmpeg behind the scenes anyway.
- Comment on In the not too distant past this was a thing 6 days ago:
Nice. It is astounding what you can get for just a couple of bucks, and even more astounding that they genuinely work.
- Comment on In the not too distant past this was a thing 6 days ago:
I just took a look. They do still make quite a few mechanicals but they have indeed shot up in price. $80-90 nowadays, it seems.
My old one is definitely mechanical. I wind it up every morning.
- Comment on In the not too distant past this was a thing 6 days ago:
It’s also approachably yet suspiciously cheap. I think I paid $20 for this close to 15 years ago, and Sinobi is apparently still at it making mechanical watches in the $30 range.
This one does two things: Tells you the time, and does so while not needing batteries.
- Comment on In the not too distant past this was a thing 6 days ago:
If we’re doing watches today, here’s what I’m rocking lately.
I stopped using my Garmin smartwatch because they finally fell into the enshittification trap and recently tried adding AI slop and a subscription scheme into their watch app. That’s a big old nope from me, dawg.
- Comment on Given how paintball guns work, could you swap paintballs for a waterballs? 1 week ago:
Marbles are too inconsistent in diameter and most of them are too small for paintball guns, and certainly wouldn’t chamber or feed right. What’s more likely is that these punks were using one of the myriad crop of nylon or aluminum “jawbreaker” ammo sold online these days specifically for use in paintball guns.
In addition to the dubious legality of this sort of thing if you actually did light somebody up with a hopper full of them, for anyone considering these for deterrence of ne’er-do-wells in the night, I’d give it a second think only because mostly what you’ll accomplish is holes in your drywall and denting up your own stuff.
- Comment on There's no such thing as a wrong number any more 1 week ago:
Some dude named Tyrone apparently had my phone number at some point before I did. For a couple of years at first I got a sporadic but persistent litany of calls before I managed to finally convince all of his debt collectors, parole officers, and/or babymommas that this was no longer his number.
It sounds stereotypical, but it’s true. I thought somebody was pulling my leg the first time.
Anyway, I don’t answer my phone for anyone who isn’t on my contacts list anymore. If I don’t know you, you don’t need to be calling me.
- Comment on There's no such thing as a wrong number any more 1 week ago:
I’ve posted this story in various guises before, but back in the '90s a friend of mine had a dedicated phone line for his modem (yes, this was before residential broadband of any stripe was readily accessible) which was the inverse of the local Dominos Pizza. Like, ###-###-0101 vs ###-###-1010.
Tons of calls from a wide cross section confused, stupid, angry, and belligerent would-be pizza seekers arrived at the telephone he had plugged into that line, and many many more must have gone into the black hole of the perpetual busy signal.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
We had to constantly remind people not to leave their disks on top of the monitors in those days, because on some models the degaussing pulse was enough to erase a floppy disk.
I was also proud of my ownership of a large speaker magnet which had a highly directional magnetic field, and could cause tube monitors and TV’s go all paisley from about 20 feet away. I kept it stuck to the back of my steel garage door when not in use to keep it well away from all monitors, disks, and tapes.
- Comment on What's a cancelled game you really miss? 1 week ago:
It’s a great trio of games (Legends 1 and 2, and the Misadventures of Tron Bonne) with quite a bit of depth and if you ask me a fantastic art direction for their time. The one thing I will say is that the controls did not age very well. You get used to it after a while. These games predate modern dual-stick movement and aiming and use the shoulder buttons for strafing. I think the Playstation versions are superior due to the increased number of buttons available on the controller.
- Comment on 'Oh god': There's a buried Steam help page that shows how much money you've ever spent on the platform, and you may not want to know 1 week ago:
It is now. It wasn’t at first.
It was part of the Valve Orange Box and that was a big deal at the time. There was also a huge deal of whining from people who paid for it when Valve announced they were changing it to a free to play model.
- Comment on Given how paintball guns work, could you swap paintballs for a waterballs? 1 week ago:
Sure. But even if I were the pigs, I think I’d find $80/5000 more palatable than $400/500.
I think most of their simunition crap is .43 or .40 caliber anyway. I’d doubt too many serious operators are doing force-on-force training with hobbyist .68 caliber markers.
- Comment on Given how paintball guns work, could you swap paintballs for a waterballs? 1 week ago:
I find MCS’ comment about “for applications where you can’t afford case after case of paint” to be especially hilarious here, given that these are consistently damn near a buck a shot even in their bulk 500 round pack, (80 cents a shot in that case) but you can nab a 5000 round crate of top flight Valken Grafittis for $80.
Anyway, I use reballs for testing marker or fucking around in my garage since they don’t mark anything unless you put a dent in it, and they can… often… be located again afterwards, washed, and reused.
- Comment on Given how paintball guns work, could you swap paintballs for a waterballs? 1 week ago:
As others have stated, this is indeed already something that exists.
I’m here to go on record to point out something that most people seem not to know about paintballs, which is that their “mess” is intentionally made of materials that are washable and readily water soluble, for obvious reasons. I’ve seen a lot of hyperventilating coming from certain individuals over the years about youths supposedly being able to permanently vandalize things at a distance with paintball guns and therefore they should all be banned. This is fiction. Rest assured that anything paintballs will do to your stuff can be cured by simply rinsing it down with your garden hose.
(This is obviously notwithstanding suitably motivated individuals from rolling their own ammo out of whatever-the-hell. A paintball gun will dutifully send downrange anything round and roughly .68" in diameter, with varying degrees of success depending on the density and/or fragility of the object in question.)
- Comment on What's a cancelled game you really miss? 1 week ago:
To be fair, they haven’t managed to put out a whole hell of a lot that’s actually compelling in the intervening years that weren’t rereleases. “Hey guys, DAE remember Resident Evil 4? The good one? We just re-re-re-released it. And some old Megaman games you already have. Full price!”
- Comment on What's a cancelled game you really miss? 1 week ago:
Megaman Legends 3.
“We cancelled it because the fans didn’t show enough interest or act like they wanted it badly enough!”
I think a sizable fraction of the world’s population is still salty about that, and it’s been 14 years.
- Comment on American Truck Simulator is adding a road trip mode where you drive different vehicles, 'say, a powerful pickup or even a sports car' 1 week ago:
Definitely not. Test Drive Unlimited 2 leaps to mind, which while it certainly had racing events and racing related content in it, you could also just drive around doing nothing in particular as much as you wanted.
There are several other racing oriented games that nevertheless had open worlds and you’re never actually forced to race anybody in any of them, albeit usually at the expense of sacrificing any game progression and thus having a rather limited vehicle selection. Need For Speed Underground 2 and Forza Horizon, for instance.
- Comment on Every time you eat, you're trusting many strangers to not have tampered with your food 2 weeks ago:
Relatedly, never abuse your pizza delivery driver. He has unsupervised access to your food, and he knows where you live.
- Comment on Proton 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, just wait until you get a load of the number of things called “One.” Here’s a hint: It’s a lot more than one.
