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.

I never come up from my dungeon to talk to accounting. I send a precisely formatted, detailed, and concise email that they inevitably only read half of.

I’d rather have a paper trail anyway.

No one will buy it where, though? Probably not in the US, I’ll grant you, where scooters have always been a tough sell.

I’ll theorize that a big part of that is because our states are all stupid, and they insist on classifying anything with an engine greater than 49cc the same way as a full motorcycle and thus demand that anyone who wants to ride one must get a full M endorsement on their license with all the hassle that entails. Most people are not willing to do that, and those who are decide they may as well just get a “real” motorcycle while they’re at it. 49cc is not practical for intercity travel around here, only intracity use, which means it’s no surprise that in big cities (or sometimes beach towns) is basically the only place you ever see them.

Well, and at my house. We’ve got a Honda Metropolitan in the stable.

I think if this sort of thing is going to gain any kind of traction, our various governments both state and federal need to pull their heads out of their asses and raise the scooter/motorcycle division from 49cc to 126cc.

It’s not even. The data integrity algorithm is really kind of crap.

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.

“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?

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.

Shoot the dictator and prevent the war? But the dictator is merely the tip of the whole festering boil of social pus from which dictators emerge; shoot one, and there’ll be another one along in a minute. Shoot him too? Why not shoot everyone and invade Poland?

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner.

The only distinction is where a society draws the line on when violence can begin, and against who, and why.

It’s been insinuated by various outlets that the Steam Frame will be able to sideload .apk apps from the Quest. I don’t believe we’ve seen official confirmation of this yet.

Alexandrite reduces the thumbnail to this:

…Master Oogway?

There is indeed an owl sitting on his head.

Like many things in life, the same concepts that apply to motorcycles apply to bicycles. Having enough power on tap to just get the hell out of the way of crazy people is always beneficial.

Regarding the inevitable whining that will ensue about “dangers to pedestrians,” which the article also briefly touches upon, if your vehicle can go the same speed as car traffic you should not be operating it on the sidewalk in the first place. You should be operating it on the street, just like a motorcycle. That eliminates the pedestrian angle, or at least reduces it to the same magnitude as existing vehicular traffic. Just to name one example out of many, nobody cries about me riding my FZ6R down the sidewalk because I don’t.

As already thoroughly explored in the apparent documentary “99 Red Balloons,” in 1984.

For fuck’s sake.

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 the taskbar itself 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.

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.

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.

And setting upperbound limits on input length. Because if you expose it to users, it’s not a matter of if some joker will insist on entering precisely 4,294,967,297 bytes of random data into it to see if they can crash your shit, it’s a matter of when.

Also, an important message to everyone in the Lemmysphere: This one’s got Jeffrey Combs in it. That should be good for a sale right there.

The TLC NAND chips used in most commodity memory cards these days are only good for something like 1500 write cycles per cell before they are prone to wearing out and coming back with errors. The difference between a dedicated SSD and a dinky memory card is partially the amount of extra space reserved for relocating data as the memory cells wear out, of which a consumer MicroSD card typically has little (on expensive ones) or none (on cheap ones).

I’ve heard it said, or rather seen it written, that some TLC NAND can endure “up to” as many as 3000 write cycles, but everyone is cagey about the true number and most consumer grade card vendors are tight-lipped about what kind of chips are actually in their products. So in other words, if you’re just scarfing a cheap card off of Amazon or from Microcenter or whatever, don’t expect ironclad longevity.

The one thing with flash storage writes that’ll bite you and it’ll bite you fast is logging. Unix-like systems love to incessantly write little one line additions to oodles and oodles of log files all the time, and if you want to extend your poor overworked little SD card’s lifespan you can dabble in turning some of that stuff off, once you’re positive you don’t need it for troubleshooting.

There also exist high reliability cards sold for industrial embedded applications, which will use lower capacity SLC but be able to endure upwards of 100,000 write cycles (per the marketing literature, at least). Expect capacities to realistically top out at about 64 gigs and for a single unit at that capacity expect to pay north of $100 for the privilege. It may be more appealing to use an NVME SSD at that rate and connect it with USB adapter or a hat.

Interesting to see where this leads, but I’m not terribly excited about this yet. The article mentions, but doesn’t necessarily explain, how these are supposed to work with pancake lens assemblies — only that they propose that they are. One of the major problems with those is light loss, which is the stated reason Valve went with LCD rather than OLED for the Steam Frame. LCD brightness can be fairly trivially increased simply by… well, making the backlight brighter. LEDs, on the other hand, largely provide their luminance as a function of the surface area of the die. If you make them smaller it also makes 'em dimmer, and there isn’t any mention of whether or not TCL has somehow managed to overcome this. That may explain the rather underwhelming bump in panel resolution.

Option B is just to drive them harder, which is probably not a great plan for an OLED panel’s already finite lifetime. The blue subpixels die first, then the greens, then the reds…