wizardbeard

wizardbeard, 2 days ago

Outlook has “rules” you can configure to route incoming mail into different folders and mark as read (if you have access to their web client, configure the rules there so they run even when the desktop client is closed).

I know Google’s web interface has similar features. If it’s not built into Thunderbird then I’d be shocked if there wasn’t an extension for it.

wizardbeard, 2 days ago

Not 100% of the time. My job is pretty much “I’m building what we need to do it the better way, you have X months to get ready. If you have objections talk with my manager. He can get legal or information security to tell you that you aren’t special enough to get an exception.”

wizardbeard, 2 days ago

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wizardbeard, 3 days ago (edited 3 days ago)

So… to be clear… your response to someone saying that Democrats are fucking up by thinking “but have you seen him?”… is to double down on “but but but, have you seen him!!!”

Trump needs to be in a prison, but this shit is directly how the DNC is continuing to shoot itself in the foot with a significant chunk of the population.

wizardbeard, 2 days ago

It absolutely confounds me how Christianity has become a stereotypically right-wing thing when in the context of the time Jesus’s actions are mostly that of a radical progressive who amassed such a following that the power structures of the time had him killed.

Like how in the hell can you run around hating homosexuals and immigrants when you account for the company Jesus kept in the context of the time? Only if you completely fucking ignore it.

My wife’s grandfather was a pastor, and a saying that has passed through her family is “On the day of judgment, there’s going to be a lot of Christians facing a very unhappy surprise”.

Signed, former apostate who has found his way back to being an incredibly frustrated Christian.

wizardbeard, 4 days ago

Not every protest is met with direct force. There’s plenty that are dismantled from the inside using tactics developed in the sixties to divide and weaken idealogical movements! Shit literally documented in intelligence agency standard procedure documents for dealing with large scale idealogical movements and breaking them apart.

Then you just sprinkle some direct force here and there as a treat!

Occupy Wallstreet was poisoned in its crib through infiltration by external forces causing confusion, internal disent, and loss of direction. That is the one “conspiracy theory” I don’t think I will ever be able to let go of.

Intersectionality and identity politics were long overdue, but there’s no way in hell that their rise from the ashes of OWS was a coincidence. Give the socially concious public something else to latch onto for a while so the 1% can shore up their defenses and power structure while the people at the bottom squabble over very important but far less impactful things.

As important as everything else is, the largest determinant of life outcome is money, almost entirely overlooked in most discussions about gender and race.

wizardbeard, 4 days ago

You can pirate, or if you want to do it the “right” way, you can sign up when there’s something you want to watch and cancel when there isn’t.

wizardbeard, 4 days ago

Shitty people love indoctrinating children.

Religion, much like many idealogical groups, gives an easy place for assholes to find confirmation of their own shit ideas, and a shield of “righteousness” and “I’m doing it for their own good” to hide behind lest the dying gasps of their withered conscience interrupt them.

There’s plenty of secular belief systems along these lines as well. Many racist groups like skinheads, neonazis, and the KKK spread through indoctrination of children (parents passing beliefs to children) and appeals to young people as “the solution” for the confusion and isolation they feel growing up.

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I’m Christian, I feel that the ten commandments are some of the best secular life advice the bible has to offer, and this mess is complete and utter unmitigated bullshit.

No if ands or buts, whoever was involved in this clown show of a law deserves to be instantly stripped of any governmental or education system titles or powers and banned from holding any position of power for life.

Any religion, belief system, or idealogical concept worth anything should be capable of standing up on it’s own.

wizardbeard, 4 days ago

One of my biggest disappointments with my neighborhood is that the otherwise effectively non-existant HOA came down on someone with a beautiful “cottage garden” style space in their front yard. It was traditionally wild local flowers and it wasn’t unkempt by any stretch.

I think they just disliked that so much of the person’s front yard wasn’t grass. Or there was some petty personal beef going on.

It’s even more ridiculous when we have a “community beekeeper” with hives in the back of some of the community open spaces. We have people with vegetable gardens in their back yards (hell fucking yes) when it’s explicitly against the HOA rules (I ain’t no snitch). But god forbid someone have well kept local wildflowers and mulch as half of their front yard.

With my yard layout I had hoped to do the same with my front and side yard.

wizardbeard, 4 days ago

Yo ho yo ho a pirate’s life for me

wizardbeard, 4 days ago

Don’t get me started on how many fear mongering articles keep making it to the top with comments about “Microsoft adding anti-features with no way to disable them” or “Microsoft will just reset it with the next update anyway, why bother” because people can’t be bothered to take 5 minutes to skim through the settings app. Learned helplessness.

I get the frustration that it’s necessary in the first place. I get the frustration when it’s something that needs to be fixed through the registry or group policy because that’s not straight forward.

But the sheer amount of false information being parroted by people who never took the time to look into configuring their own device is absolutely absurd.

wizardbeard, 5 days ago (edited 7 hours ago)

So… probably would have been better to ask in a piracy community/instance. Not sure of the rules in this community.

That said, google NoIntro Archive, or search for NoIntro on archive.org

NoIntro is a group that collects file hashes (unique fingerprints) of known accurate and good rom files for games. There are people out there that use those hash lists to compile rom sets with all the rom files in them.

You can generally find NoIntro rom sets on torrenting sites, but the most reliable and safe source lately has been from people uploading those sets to the Internet Archive (archive.org). You can dig down through the zipped folders and individually direct download what you want, you can direct download the whole set, or you can torrent it from archive.org (this is probably the option you want).

NoIntro primarily covers cartridge games. For disc systems I believe you’d be looking for sets from the Redump group.

wizardbeard, 5 days ago

Bleachbit is the open source, non trash “replacement” for CCleaner

wizardbeard, 5 days ago

Wow, meme necromancy

wizardbeard, 5 days ago

There’s some security researchers that have done this before as well, and some “grey hats” that reportedly used this technique to get Google to route traffic away from them during their commute by spinning up a whole bunch of phones in their car like this.

wizardbeard, 5 days ago

It’s a skill like anything else. It comes easier to some, harder to others, and it can be improved through repeated effort, exposure, and experience over time.

Small talk is a good low risk situation that can give you opportunity to practice.

Also, not living in the same place too long so you don’t build up a reputation of being awkward and oh god they know they all know I’m just a hairless chimp in a human suit why did I think this was a good idea oh shit oh fuck what do I say–

“I’m doing good, how about you?”

wizardbeard, 5 days ago

Yep. People underestimate how much money you can save by just… not buying new furniture. Thrift shops and hand me downs from elderly family members downsizing make up the overwhelming majority of the furniture in my house.

Do I sometimes wish I could have a different style? Sure. Do I want it bad enough to spend hundreds of dollars on it? No.

The only exceptions is stuff you rest on. Chairs, couches, beds. Don’t skimp on those or your body will hate you even more than usual.

wizardbeard, 5 days ago

would just

Farmers have been rotating crops for hundreds of years man. Corporate farms rotate crops too. Step down off that soapbox for a moment.

The whole joke is that the person in the image would have made fun of the idea in ancient times, killing the food supply of early civilization and setting us all back by thousands of years.

wizardbeard, 6 days ago

Musicbee is a pretty good Foobar alternative.

wizardbeard, 6 days ago

He’s Gabe Newell, the founder (and I think still CEO) of Valve Software.

Former Microsoft employee that started up a small game studio in the 90s. They took the Quake engine, modified the balls off of it, and used it to make Half Life, an FPS game that revolutionized the landscape forever with things like real time in-engine cutscenes that wove the story in through the gameplay, and through how advanced the enemy AI seemed. It also featured a ton of miniscule details requiring some clever coding to pull off, which really added to the atmosphere.

They also made the Steam gaming client, Portal, Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress, Counter Strike, Dota 2.

He’s not involved with the day to day much anymore. Pretty much retired in (I think) New Zealand now.

Very nice guy by most accounts. Was still responding to fan emails semi-regularly around 2010, and was one of the main voices in the dev commentary features in their games up through the Orange Box (Half Life 2 Ep 2, L4D, Portal, TF2).

wizardbeard, 6 days ago

He founded Valve primarily with his own money and has ran it for most of it’s existence, allowing them to release games that were regularly groundbreaking.

Half Life brought us advances in AI, in simulating complex details like animal food chains, in making story part of the gameplay through seamless in engine cutscenes, in “seamless” level transistions. It nearly single handedly killed tje genre of arcadey “doom/quake likes” for literal decades.

Half Life 2 further heightened the bar of story in games, graphical effects, reconstruction of real faces in games, facial animations, mocap for games, and was one of the first well done use of a “modern” physics engine in games. There were news articles about the great leap forward it represented in tackling the “uncanny valley”.

Portal’s, well… Portals were groundbreaking. Left 4 Dead created the co-op horde shooter genre, further advanced AI with the “horde director” concept of an AI orchestrating the placement/amount of enemies, and was one of the first large scale examples of well done contextual dialog. Team Fortress 2 revolutionized the class based team shooter genre, and unfortunately popularized microtransactions for skins/unlocks forever. Half Life Alyx is the first “VR first/only” full length triple-A game.

There’s the Valve Index, pushing forward VR tech. The Steam Deck, pushing forward handheld computing (at least in terms of build quality/price/ease of use).

They bought the rights to Dota, the original Warcraft 3 mod that was the very first Moba game, and made a sequel to it. CounterStrike was one of the vanguards of the original rise of eSports and it’s latest sequel is still a major player in that scene.

Without all of their Source Engine games we wouldn’t have Garrys Mod and the huge cultural impact that it’s still having on the internet. Source Filmmaker brought 3D animation with effectively anything you could import into Garrys Mod into the hands of the masses, which has also had a massive impact on internet culture.

There’s a hell of a lot of reasons to love/respect Valve, and by extension it’s founder, besides just Steam.

wizardbeard, 7 days ago (edited 7 days ago)

If by “only so much” you mean every BS thing in OP’s image, sure.

To be clear, you can turn off all web content in the search menu/start menu search.

wizardbeard, 7 days ago

Sounds like your IT team messed up the setup. In their defense, Microsoft doesn’t make it easy to set it up well.

A “good” setup hides all this shit from the end user. All your “library” folders (Documents, Desktop, Pictures, etc) can be invisibly made into OneDrive folders. Still save your shit where you normally do, navigate in the file manager like you normally do, no lag for changes you do locally to show locally, minor lag (like 1-2 minutes) for changes to propagate to OneDrive itself (and other machines you are currently logged into). Just now everything is backed up to the cloud.

wizardbeard, 7 days ago

Solo IT/Dev? I’m so sorry.

wizardbeard, 7 days ago

If I remember right, Noice started offering paid subscriptions to stream higher quality sound files from a central server. I just rolled back my install to the last version before that change (looks like 2.5.6) and disabled updating.

I’ll have to check out soothing noise player!