umbraroze
@umbraroze@lemmy.world
- Comment on What Fediverse services do you use? 12 hours ago:
Mastodon, Pixelfed, Lemmy and Bookwyrm. They all seem to cover most of my social media needs which (in all other cases beside Lemmy) can be described as shouting in the void and being happy if someone else is there too.
- Comment on Spent half an hour on it. Felt good. 2 days ago:
I never got such a survey. Guess they figured that bunch of people would cancel the subscription in the month before an announced price hike.
- Comment on Spent half an hour on it. Felt good. 2 days ago:
SQL is an Old Language of Ancient Power. You have to write the keywords in all caps.
(Fortran is basically the same, but it’s rarer. Lisp is too, but you don’t need to capitalise everything, as the Ancient Power is contained in the parentheses.)
- Comment on I am from a different millenia 1 week ago:
“…and ripping that CD was annoying, because you then had an over long last track with the secret song, and you had to split the tracks manually and come up with tags on your own, or…”
(Seriously, the only reason I listened rarely to the last song in Halo CE soundtrack was because of this.)
- Comment on Kindle Is Making It Harder to Switch to Rival eReader Brands. 2 weeks ago:
And Calibre, a third party software for managing ebooks, has a plugin to crack Kindle files.
Unfortunately currently broken for the latest version of Kindle for PC, which switched to a different encryption scheme. It also uses KFX file format that nobody likes, which fortunately can be converted to EPUB with another plugin, but de-DRMing doesn’t seem to work right now.
- Comment on Amazon’s killing a feature that let you download and backup Kindle books 3 weeks ago:
Previously, you could just download the books on the Kindle for PC, use a random decoder software or install a plugin for Calibre, and boop, decoded books, readable in Calibre, can be converted to EPUB.
For ssssssome reasonnns I’ve been looking at how to do the same thing again, but apparently you need an old version of KfPC because the new one uses new encryption/file format that hasn’t been sussed out yet. Weirdly enough, even with the newer app, I’ve still been able to download a bunch of books that didn’t have DRM to begin with, but of course Amazon doesn’t exactly advertise if a book is DRM-free anywhere on the store page.
Also weirdly enough this quest of mine actually started last year when one Finnish ebook store was closed down, but that was less of a problem. I just downloaded all of my purchases as unencrypted EPUBs. Guess the local publishers are less dickish, worst thing they asked for was watermarking.
- Comment on Why was there a pro-Hitler, Holocaust-denying ad on X? 3 weeks ago:
Well, duh, where else would a pro-Hitler, Holocaust-denying ad be?
- Comment on Laws only matter if you're not rich. 3 weeks ago:
There’s actually a bunch of journals that have Open Access (making the articles available for free, usually under Creative Commons licenses). That at least eliminates the cost for the readers.
However, that’s not a guarantee the OA journals don’t collect publication fees, or even that the fees would be smaller than on non-OA journals. Fees range from “just trying to keep the lights on” to “same ol’ grift, but ostensibly nicer to the reader”.
Also, starting a new journal is always a bit of a tricky process in that you obviously want the people to trust in the journal and starting from total zero makes it harder. There have been a bunch of journals that were outright scams and OA obviously won’t fix that.
- Comment on Freed At Last From Patents, Does Anyone Still Care About MP3? 3 weeks ago:
I have boatloads of MP3s and at least they can pretty much be played by all imaginable software and hardware imaginable, and since the patents have expired, there’s no reason not to support the format.
MP3s are good enough for its particular use case. Of course, newer formats are better overall and may be better suited for some applications. (Me, I’ve been an Ogg Vorbis fan for ages now. Haven’t ripped a CD in a while but should probably check out this newfangled Opus thing when I do.)
- Comment on Tutle 1 month ago:
Turtlie! Ancient shellmaster! Aww.
- Comment on Frog's Gift 3 months ago:
Anyone remember the early days of Musk’s Twitter takeover?
“I don’t know what this ‘microservice’ nonsense is, I’m gonna remove it”
“…Sir, everything is fucking broken now, could you please stop messing with the system”
“Ur fired lol”
…Expect more of that.
- Comment on It's fire... Maybe concerning but fire still 3 months ago:
Why hello! 🙋🏻♀️
I think I saw some quip by Linus Torvalds about how Finland has such long winters with nothing to do, so it’s no wonder we have so many great information technology nerds.
- Comment on Half-Life 2 is currently 100% for its 20th anniversary 3 months ago:
[old woman memories mode]
I remember registering my CD key of HL1 on Steam and was surprised when they gave me the expansions for free. Cool, because I didn’t have them.
I remember buying The Orange Box on Steam. I remember it because Steam gave me a warning because I already had Portal - it was free at some point. Was a bit miffed when TF2 went free to play later on.
And I somehow still haven’t played HL2 on Steam, I think? I played it about 1/3 way on Xbox 360. Played the shit out of Portal on 360 though.
- Comment on critical latex mod 3 months ago:
Does PDF actually allow some objects to be invisible on screen but visible on print? Because that’d be cool.
It’s 2225. Archaeologists discover yet another long forgotten university library storage facility. Inside, they find stacks of Elsevier journals that have never been opened. They then find puzzling coffee stains that somehow appear to be result of the printing process, and conclude that the cultural significance of these markings was probably lost to the ages.
- Comment on Cyberpunk 2077 released in December 2020. Almost 4 years later, what is your opinion on it? 3 months ago:
A solid game in its current state. Probably one of the best games of the decade for me, just not in top 5. Has that “once you start playing, suddenly it’s 3 hours later” factor. Extremely atmospheric world design. Lots of great writing too.
Now, it does have the annoying thing that it sometimes keeps reminding me of games that did some aspect better. For example: Vehicle physics feel completely hokey. (“Man, I wish I was playing Saints Row 3/4”) Can’t really go exploring everywhere, would have loved to explore more rooftops and such. (“Man, I’ve got to get back to Mirror’s Edge”) Not exactly a prime stealth game in accordance with the laws of the art form. (“Man, Deus Ex was the shit, got to play it”)
- Comment on Fitness app Strava gives away location of Biden, Trump and other leaders, French newspaper says. 4 months ago:
I have a sports watch and the corresponding fitness app. I can confirm. “Sitting on one’s ass at the restaurant” is not a fitness activity. HOWEVER. Some of my activities (e.g. walks) do terminate near fast food jonts. …I dread what that kind of data analysis would yield on a major political figure.
- Comment on Reddit is making sitewide protests basically impossible 5 months ago:
Moderators will now have to submit a request if they want to switch their subreddit from public to private.
But do they have to submit a request if they tell the audience “fuck it, this is now a sub about X, we’ll remove everything that’s not about X”?
…In fact, fuck any particular topic - if the mods approve of it, every subreddit can actually be about whatever people think it should be about, now that we think about it. If the mods don’t do it, will the admins do it? The answer is: Highly unlikely
- Comment on I hope you don't have any plans this evening. 5 months ago:
Never mind the old flippediroo of the day and month. What I want to know is why is there a dash in front of the date. I thought the separators went between the things to be separated.
- Comment on Mozilla exits the fediverse and will shutter its Mastodon server in December | TechCrunch 5 months ago:
I’m, like, yeah, some of the stuff Mozilla has done has been worrying, but I’ve seen far worse happen to some other open source projects and their corporate branches.
I’m not worried about Mozilla projects’ future. If LibreOffice survived corporate calcification, I see no reason why Mozilla projects wouldn’t, if the push comes to a shove. But the thing is, in my opinion, push hasn’t come to a shove yet. There’s red flags at best, which is a cause for concern, but that’s it.
- Comment on The air begins to leak out of the overinflated AI bubble 5 months ago:
Have any regular users actually looked at the prices of the “AI services” and what they actually cost?
I’m a writer. I’ve looked at a few of the AI services aimed at writers. These companies literally think they can get away with “Just Another Streaming Service” pricing, in an era where people are getting really really sceptical about subscribing to yet another streaming service and cancelling the ones they don’t care about that much. As a broke ass writer, I was glad that, with NaNoWriMo discount, I could buy Scrivener for €20 instead of regular price of €40. [note: regular price of Scrivener is apparently €70 now, and this is pretty aggravating.] So why are NaNoWriMo pushing ProWritingAid, a service that runs €10-€12 per month? This is definitely out of the reach of broke ass writers.
Someone should tell the AI companies that regular people don’t want to subscribe to random subscription services any more.
- Submitted 5 months ago to retrogaming@lemmy.world | 0 comments
- Comment on Facial Recognition 6 months ago:
I had taken a photo of the pile of junk in my home.
AI facial recognition in ACDSee swore it could pick up my father’s face in the jumble.
I feel like I was visited by a ghost.
Rest in peace, dad. (sigh) No, I know you would not approve of this mess and would tell me to hurry up and clean the thing up.
- Todd Howard's exclusive 1,000G Xbox achievement appears after years of secrecywww.trueachievements.com ↗Submitted 6 months ago to games@lemmy.world | 6 comments
- Comment on I just wanted to take a moment to enjoy how clean the web can be 6 months ago:
Did someone say… cookies?
I can just tell that whenever Twitter’s user interface has weak attempts at humour, it was put there during the previous ownership, and that just makes me sad.
Like when you delete your account the final message says “#Goodbye”, I was tearing up, thinking, like, shit, Musk really fucked everything up, did he?
- Submitted 6 months ago to retrogaming@lemmy.world | 0 comments
- Comment on A quick 600 DPI scan of my favourite non-chelonian ninja. 6 months ago:
The song that made me a metalhead. Didn’t know SID could do that much epicness. 🎸⚡
My fave remix is by Lukhash - though there’s one pretty damn radical remix that I need to hunt for later because it predates YouTube. Also, Matt Gray’s own remix of the song is pretty epic and trippy!
- Submitted 6 months ago to retrogaming@lemmy.world | 6 comments
- Comment on perspective 6 months ago:
Somewhere in late 2000s I saw one of the most mind-melting GIFs I’ve seen that compared the Solar System objects to the largest known stars at the time. This kinda reminded me of that.
- Comment on LaTeX Master Race 6 months ago:
One of the reasons I love XeTeX, because it just spits out straight up PDFs and you can use any OpenType font. I can just typeset everything in Garamond, like how things are supposed to be typeset, dammit.
- Comment on I didn’t know geese can own cars 7 months ago:
No, can’t have been written by geese. Geese cannot read or write, they just straight up honk.
This is a clown car. That’s the most reasonable explanation.
