DarthYoshiBoy

I've dabbled with Linux on Mac hardware a couple of times and I've got to say that Linux DEs generally hew closer to Windows conventions than Mac ones and I found using the Mac keyboard with Linux to be a dreadful experience without the fact that the chiclet keyboards are the worst shit I've ever put my fingers on.

I very quickly snagged a standard mechanical qwerty 104 key with brown switches and cursed every moment that I had to use that abominable keyboard built into the stupid MacBook. Apple seems determined to do things different for the sake of different as much as they possibly can and trying to adapt all their nonsense to the Win/Lin way of doing things made my life worse in numerous ways (most DEs have great remapping for keys and such, but it gets messy fast if you've got apps from different paradigms.)

I'd very much recommend against going out of your way to get a Mac keyboard for using Linux unless you enjoy fighting against things. But hey, if that's your kink, then a Mac keyboard with Linux would be my recommended way to go.

The original Game Boy Color has a screen that is only 160 pixels x 144 pixels at a 6bit color depth. That color depth means it can keep track of 6bits of color information for each pixel (technically the GBC screen CAN display 15bits of color information, but it's limited in software to 6bits absent certain tradeoffs.)

This isn't exactly how it all works, but I'm going to just do some quick and dirty math really quickly that sorta simply illustrates how this works. To adequately display a 60fps image on the GBC display at the 6bit color depth of the screen, we'd need to be able to process 23,040 pixels (each with 6 bits of color data) every 60th of a second. To simplify further, there's 138,240 bits of data to process every 16.6ms just to "drive" the display, or put another way 138,240 bits of data to process to ensure that the display gets all the information it needs to build a complete picture every 60th of a second.

So for a 1600x1440 display, you're looking at 2,304,000 pixels, and the Analogue Pocket has a 16bit color depth, so you're going to need to be able to process 36,864,000 bits of data every 16.6ms to "drive" that display.

Getting a GPU/CPU/FPGA that can handle 138,240 bits of data every 16.6ms is a fairly easy task these days. Getting a GPU/CPU/FPGA that can handle 36,864,000 bits of data every 16.6ms is also a pretty easy undertaking these days, but it's much more power intensive and it's going to cost a bunch more. All of which is beside the shader calculations the Pocket adds in to do things like emulating the pixel fade of old LCDs or other effects that further emulate the properties of the original displays which requires further processing.

The tradeoff is that you can build a more detailed image with all those extra pixels, but you're going to pay for it both in electrical power spent, heat generated, and costs sunk.

Honestly the 1600x1440 screen on the Analogue Pocket and the ability to drive it is what you're paying for when you buy it.

There's not going to be a device that can drive all those pixels at less than the Analogue Pocket's price for some time yet. Sure, none of the Game Boy systems used anywhere near that many pixels, but the fact that the Analogue Pocket screen is so ridiculously pixel dense it can emulate the original attributes of the OG screens from the devices that their FPGA is mimicking means you're going to pay a premium for that (or any) device doing full hardware replication at that level.

Honestly seeing the Analogue Pocket emulate the way that the original DMG GameBoy screen pixels seemed to slightly hover over the background (slightly casting a shadow) was mind-blowing. You can't get that unless your screen actually has those original pixel attributes or you've built a display with enough resolution to emulate what those characteristics looked like. See: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/PXL_20211213_155424062.jpg (Seriously, zoom in and notice the mimicry of the shadows under darker pixels, it's just crazy to see in person.)

I'd recommend that you get these ones, but you can pick them up plenty of places that aren't Amazon too, just make certain you get the ones made by Gulikit, any others are probably as cheap as your originals and you'll have to come back and replace them again in short order. The Gulikit ones use Hall Effect sensing rather than resistive contact pads that will eventually scrape down and break.

That kit at Amazon comes with all the tools to do the job and as the sticks are Hall Effect based, they'll theoretically never drift unlike the ones that ship with Joy-Cons straight from Nintendo.

iFixIt has the process for doing the work: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Left+Joy-Con+Joystick+Replacement/113182 and https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Right+Joy-Con+Joystick+Replacement/113185

The 90/90 rule strikes again!

They had to have seen the writing on the wall at least a year or two before they brought this to market.

I seem to remember that at about a year before launch there was some reporter (Jason Schreier?) who had an inside tip that they were changing some stuff in the face of the realization that GaaS were not the money maker they were thought to be once upon a time, but the tipper also said that they were too locked into the GaaS paradigm to make the sort of meaningful changes that would salvage the experience. I don't think there's any rescuing this one if they knew they were in trouble a full year before delivery and still couldn't shape it up into a product worthy of attention.

I’m on the other side, why use either?

Microblogging is a great format for following creators. I don't need your life story to know that you've got a new album, a new software release, a new security vulnerability, a new video, a new tour, or a new comic. The shortform communication forced by Mastodon or Bluesky is perfect for that. It gives enough room to share those quick updates, and that's about it. Replies are also kept succinct which makes parsing those for relevant context or side info similarly simple.

I originally got into Twitter because it was the update channel for when new Cyanogenmod releases dropped and I stuck around because following the right security professionals made it so that I could learn about a new CVE within seconds of its filing rather than having to wait for a news site I visit to catch wind of it and write something up. Which in turn made my job easier because I knew what systems we'd need to be patching well before that info bubbled up to my bosses so I could already have a head start on the work before the ask reached me officially.

These days, microblogging (at least with a straight chronological follow feed) more or less achieves what RSS used to back before everyone suddenly decided about a decade back that it wasn't worth maintaining an RSS feed without Google running Reader or some crap. By way of example, ~20 years ago I had 13 comics that I followed via my RSS reader, today only 5 of those creators still have RSS feeds and a couple of those seem like they're on life support for how they seem to infrequently pause updates for a few days at a time. All of the RSS feeds that are gone have moved to microblogging of some sort for updates, and I'd rather they use something open than the likes of Twitter (which I left at the first whiff that Musk was buying the place) or Instagram (which I have never used because it's Facebook and I don't do Facebook.)

Let’s not even get started on how stupid people sound when they talk about skeets and toots.

Yeah, I'll agree there. I call them posts wherever they reside. It's what they've always been, it's what they'll always be.

My suggestion would be to reframe your thesis. Rather than consuming content, change your perspective to one where you are appreciating art.

The world is vast and full of amazing things, you don't need to feel like you're wasting time when you dedicate that time to appreciating art that you love. There are books, games, movies, short form video essays, podcasts, and all sorts of things that are real expressions of the human experience from different angles, which is what art is, and there's nothing wrong with appreciating that art, learning something from it, and growing your understanding.

Unless you're harming yourself or others by enjoying the art you enjoy, just keep on doing it.

That said, if you really want something else, gaming is (IMO) a great way to spend some time, tabletop or video. Learning a programming language is another one and can lead to very fulfilling paths where you can make things that you enjoy and easily share them with others.

For everyone wondering why anyone would use Bluesky when Mastodon and/or the Fediverse is around.

I have to ask why not use both? All the tech people I followed on Twitter went to Mastodon almost immediately when Musk bought the site, while most of my personal friends on Twitter were not willing to leave because they thought Mastodon was too techy and Bluesky couldn't replicate the network of people they valued from Twitter. That said, slowly over time as the invites came rolling in for Bluesky, my personal friend circle has been willing to move to Bluesky while they still wont touch Mastodon and honestly it hasn't harmed me in the least to use both. It's actually sorta nice to have the tech stuff in a separate bucket from my personal connections.

I'm not super hopeful that the AT protocol ever expands beyond the single site it is now, but I will be fully happy to launch my own instance and keep my personal contacts if that day ever comes, and if it doesn't, I've still got Mastodon to fall back to where I'm pretty happily established but for the lack of the people I know IRL.

I'll be honest, I could sometimes find a helpful answer there, but for about the last 2 years it has taken 3 reloads of a page at least before it actually loads any content, otherwise it just sits there at a plain white page showing their logo and I usually give up rather than try to get lucky with a page actually loading.

How the fuck this headset weighs over 600 grams?

Because plastic isn't a premium material. Apple users expect fancy alloys with glass everywhere, Apple can't very well show up with a plastic headset and ask $3500 for it, they need all that extra weight to convince people that they're getting a premium ~~VR~~ ~~AR~~ SPACIAL COMPUTING device that is unlike anything ever done before. It's all part of the grift.

I'm a reformed VR enthusiast and I have got to say that it's all a hell of a gimmick, but it's just a really neat gimmick. Without any hard-light tech or something to make stuff that you can actually interact with it's all just Wii-mote waggle style nonsense that abstracts things that should be button presses into complex motions constrained by physical reality that our computers/keyboards/mice/controllers allow us to escape.

Banning Social Media FOR KIDS. Is just a quick means to spy on what ADULTS are getting up to on the Internet. Right now if you don't want to ID yourself to go see cat pics/videos on Instagram/TikTok, you can just sign up for an account and go searching for cat pics/videos. With this bill, if you want to go find cat pics/videos on Instagram/TikTok in the state of Florida, you'll have to submit a government ID to verify that you're not a kid, and I'd believe for about as long as I can breathe water that the linking of my real identity/government ID with a social media account will have no negative real world outcomes.

Cybersecurity is something that almost nobody takes seriously. I used to say that nobody takes it seriously until they're hurt by their poor cyber hygiene, but these days the insurance policies pay the same either way so companies/people still do the bare minimum and call it a day.

I'd much rather pay a VPN provider to be out of that jurisdiction than ever give anyone anything that concretely ties my online persona to my actual identity and it's just incredible that lawmakers so fundamentally misunderstand how this all works that they don't know it's that easy.