a1studmuffin

This has been the weirdest console generation. I’m still surprised they railroaded ahead with the PS5 and Xbox Series X launches right at the beginning of the pandemic.

No, see you’ve fallen into the exact trap I just described. The “exact same binaries” is not true. The Steam build will have the Steam overlay SDK integrated into it. The GOG build won’t. Each store may require its own SDK and API integrated into the build. But even they were the exact same binaries, you’ve still got to think about QA, build pipelines, storefront configuration (including achievements and online subsystems like leaderboards, parties/lobbies and voice chat, plus collectables and any other bespoke stuff a particular store has) and community management, plus any age ratings and certification/testing each store requires (though PC is usually pretty sparse on this front).

For small indie teams, all of this can seriously eat away at your time, so it makes sense to limit how many stores you target based on risk vs reward.

Edit: btw I’m not trying to be a troll, I just know from first-hand experience. I’ve been in the games industry for over two decades and have done everything from AAA to running my own indie studio. Indie development is brutal, you really have to be clever about your time management otherwise your risk of failure skyrockets.

The reality is those other platforms won’t make much difference on sales at all, and with a limited indie dev team they’ve made a wise decision to focus on the largest PC storefront.

It’s the same reason a lot of indies don’t target Linux, the effort vs reward simply doesn’t make sense for small teams. Anyone who says “But Unity and Unreal Engine support Linux! It’s literally two clicks!” has no idea what they’re talking about and hasn’t actually been through the process of releasing a game for multiple platforms.

Another vote for Mikrotik, but only if you’re technical-minded and want to learn how routers work. One of the things I like the most about it is the ability to import/export the router config as plain text. That makes it very easy to do things like bulk-editing (I have a lot of IOT devices I need to configure), storing your config in version control for safe-keeping etc.

It really shouldn’t be possible in a EULA/agreement of any kind to essentially say “you agree you can’t sue us in future for anything ever”.

Witcher 4: Uma, The Jester Years

But in many ways, it would probably be easier for them to remake in first person, considering they’ve got the engine and a wealth of Fallout 3D assets ready to go.

What I love most about 8-bit era games are how small they were storage-wise. Most of the ROMs are tens of kilobytes for the entire game. Developers were severely constrained by the hardware limits which led to some creative decisions, eg. the bushes and clouds in Super Mario Bros are the same sprite just drawn in different colors. All code was written in pure assembly for efficiency and size.

To put it into perspective, AAA games today are one million times bigger.

I feel like they’re going to get into legal trouble with that name and logo.

Especially considering it scales by adjusting accuracy! That makes it very adaptable so it could be used everywhere from microcontrollers through to Google data servers.

Haha, love the last paragraph. It’s hard for software engineers to release code publicly knowing their work is going to be scrutinized by other engineers, without adding a disclaimer or caveat of some kind.

“We had very little time and were crunching for months”

“I know this is a bit hacky but I was 7 years old”

“I wrote this code in hospital while I was recovering from anesthesia”

It reminds me of a musician playing their song publicly for the first time.

If you enjoyed Twisted Metal, you will enjoy Fallout. Both are excellent TV adaptations of their respective games, and have a thick layer of dark humour underpinning the action. Twisted Metal was particularly surprising, I want to shake the hand of whoever was looking at that crusty old PS2 game and saw dollar signs for TV!

… isn’t that the point of mechanical keyboards?

I feel like you could totally change the switch resistance with magnets. Electromagnetism goes both ways… apply a variable current to a coil in each key that repels it from or pulls it towards the base?

AliExpress is the worst at this. Which category should I disable? AliExpress, aliexpress, Chat or message push? And even if I figured it out, there’s no way to stop store spammers from sending you useless messages constantly, detracting from actual sellers with questions.

It might stop the heat though if he’s a US puppet to appease congress.

It’s a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries split system. The two options I had were an IR blaster or a DIY ESPhome-based module plugged directly into the unit that controls it over the SPI bus. I opted for the latter as it gives full status info in addition to control.

I’ve also got a Samsung unit in another room that I can control. For that one I use SmartThings… not ideal as it goes through the cloud, but I’ll take what I can get.

If you’ve got an old-school heater, you might have luck with some of the smart thermostats designed to be retrofitted into old houses.

Edit: just looked up your heaters online. Since you’ve got a lot of them, and they look pretty old, I’m guessing the smart controllers are just acting as relays. So yeah perhaps an ESP32 relay module would be the way to go! Once you’ve got the code working for one, you could roll them out to the rest. You’d need some confidence working with relays and electronics of course.

The simplest automations are the best. An hour before I typically get up, if the bedroom is too cold, turn on the heater.

Slight tangent, but I recently cleaned out the house of a parent after they passed away. There were boxes and boxes of family photo albums. We kept them for a while out of guilt, but we really didn’t know anyone in the photos aside from one or two people. Eventually we got rid of them. Point being the value of your stuff is probably far less to others then it is to you, especially photos to future generations.

Very reassuring to see how quickly the security issues were resolved, awesome work Home Assistant!