“Vamos a playa” by Righeira carries a lightweight, upbeat tune that vacationers might hum on the way to the beach. But the Spanish lyrics reveal that it’s about the devastation left behind by nuclear armaments. And the schism between trying to live an ordinary life whilst having a nuclear Damocles sword waver over your head. That it became such a world wide hit makes it all the more ironic. I love it all the more for it.

Lovely, I tried the decky plugin for this before but it was somewhat unstable and also caused games to slow down while recording. I wonder what the storage requirements will be for recording, let’s say, a buffer of three minutes at all times? 🤔

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OK, thanks for the hint. I just found out that you will only be prompted to update if you:

1. power everything off (shut down deck completely, don’t just sleep it)
2. remove all peripherals connected to the dock (except network cable if you use that for your connection)
3. start the deck
4. if there are any updates for the the dock, they should show in the options of gaming mode

here’s to hoping the updates will allay the display issues

I vaguely remembered it offering me updates when I first set the dock up (purchased the dock much later then the deck). I’ll make sure I have the latest version.

It’s quite relevant if you consider that coal mining is concentrated to a much smaller area really. Besides the destroyed habitat, the pollution, the dangers of sinkholes and the cost of renaturation you also have to contend with rain and ground water constantly filling in the mining pits.

Don’t know about the UK but in West Germany’s Rhein-Ruhr area, a former coal mining hotspot, the energy used to operate the pumps that keep the water out will eventually be greater than the energy gained from burning all the coal. Can’t find a source on the quick but I think it might have happened already. Of course it’s not a simple subtraction as all that energy was used to generate more infrastructure and capital that can now pay for the pumps. According to this German source their operation costs around 300 million euros yearly which gives you a rough idea of just how expensive that is.

Good to know. It was a common problem with XCOM 2 for me.

Whenever possible I tried to get around this distorted audio noise after resuming from sleep by first opening a pause menu and then sending the deck to sleep. It seems to occur less the less audio channels are used by the game engine at the moment that you sent the deck to sleep.

Can we appreciate #7?

Ideally you’ll adjust both in game settings and deck settings for each game with in-game settings taking precedence as they give you access to fine tuning custom tailored to that game. The deck settings are great to tinker with when you want longer battery life especially. If it’s inside the dock and charging while you play you needn’t worry much about optimization (frame rate limit, heat limit, half rate shading, etc.) and can leave it at the sensible defaults.

The Steam Deck per-game control layout is very helpful for games that don’t come with native controller support or those that don’t let you rebind controls inside the game itself.

I don’t own the games you mention, so I can’t suggest specifics but my general way of setting up a game is:

1. install the game and get it running at all
2. use in-game options to find a resolution and layout comfortable from your preferred playing posture/position
3. enable frame rate overlay in the steam settings
4. start with default or auto detect settings for graphics or look up what others recommend online in sites like protondb. if you hit a comfortable frame rate (40-60+ for me personally) keep increasing the graphics quality settings in game as long it remains fluid to play. Don’t need to do it all in one session. I usually minimally increment the graphics settings at the start of each gaming session and simply revert once it’s no longer fluid.

Eternity on Android passes with flying colors.

After watching the original video I started putting some additional powder at the bottom of the loading tray every wash and it works great. Clean dishes ever since, no pre rinse necessary. Can recommend 👍.

That likely means they’ll put thought into a pleasant controller layout (including steam actions) as well. Good stuff.

git gud

not a meme per se but I always found the command abcde confusing:

user1: How to best rip this music album??

user2: Oh simple: abcde

user1: 🤔🤔?

abcde stands for ‘a better CD encoder’, the more you know

I mean taking the screenshot is the easy part, getting reliable OCR on the other hand …

In my experience (tesseract) current OCR works well for continuous text blocks but it has a hard time with tables, illustrations, graphs, gui widgets, etc.

That sounds like a useful feature. Which apps are you using?

How do you tag another user? Did you just mean you left a mental note or is it possible to assign custom tags to users somehow?

GoldenEye has terrible controls compared to modern controller and especially mouse+keyboard but in multiplayer it didn’t really matter as anyone is on even footing.

My family still has one but the image quality is terrible on modern big screen TVs because

1. It’s stretched out and native resolution of N64 is already tiny by today’s standards.
2. Unnatural aspect ratio unless you can set black bars somehow.
3. Modern displays have sharper pixel separation and colors don’t ‘bleed’ into each other as much which kinda helped the rough polygons of that era.

The result is a picture that is both sharp and blurry at the same time and gives me head aches after an hour or so.

Ok, now that you mention it: I think the difference is that (at least in my region) the PlayStation was sold with a memory card included. Standalone memory cards for it were cheap. N64 came without a memory pack and they were more expensive.

IIRC PS also had a more granular slot size (eg gran turismo takes up 1 slot while final fantasy takes up 3 slots) while on the N64 it was large and fixed (each game takes up one large slot even if that slot doesn’t use up all the data).

In hindsight that has me wondering why they didn’t go for dynamic slot size 🤔. Maybe because a save file could grow over time and they wanted to ensure that you could always overwrite/update?