GNOME’s design philosophy is “we’ve determined that nobody needs this feature”.

KDE’s is “we’ve determined that nobody needs this feature… but it would be really cool, fuck it, we ball cube”.

I’ll never understand why the US refuses to modernize the horrid NEMA 5 connectors. A recessed receptacle, insulators around the base of the live and neutral blades, spring-loaded detention mechanism to keep the connector from slipping out… in its current state, it’s only two steps removed from sticking the bare wires into the socket.

When USB-C-compliant devices are connected, they have to negotiate which side is upstream and which is downstream. So yes, they’re hermaphroditic, just like snails.

In contrast, the non-compliant USB A-to-A cable that Ugreen uses with its own devices is closer to hyenas. If you know, you know… and don’t you wish you didn’t.

Now all I need is a way to remotely start a headless session and I can finally nuke X11 off my computer.

Do you want regulatory overreach? Imagine forcing every small project or self-hoster to adhere to the rules set by the equivalent of the HDMI Forum, but controlled by the likes of Microsoft and Facebook.

To redirect your other question: you should ask the web developers. If they’re honest, you’ll get a dozen legitimate answers that can’t be solved without locally running code. A chat web app, for example, needs to either poll the server at a given rate, or use a WebSocket to fetch incoming messages, both of which require Javascript. Then it needs to modify the DOM to display the new messages, which again requires Javascript. If it needs access to the microphone or webcam, it has to use some kind of local interface. I could go on. The point is, a lot of this arbitrary local code exists because there’s no other way to implement many features without it. Imagine having to reload an instant messaging app if you want to see if you’ve received anything. It would be like writing a GUI application using Qt or GTK, but without using any events.

Most websites would break, or not even display, without javascript. Sure, it’s bonkers for you, but an alternative browser that can’t immediately show a website that works perfectly well in Chrome wouldn’t get much of a user base.

https://buttplug.io/

It’s open-source, written in Rust, and has plugins from Stardew Valley to Ultrakill.

Any electrician worth the name should be able to read both ANSI and IEC diagrams. Besides, 60617 was never formally adopted as a replacement for ANSI conventions. I live in an area where the customary symbols are a variant of IEC, but ANSI is still widely used in the electronics industry.

Smaller axial lead resistors mark their resistance values using colored bands. Three or four bands grouped together, towards one end of the device, mark the nominal resistance. If there are three bands, the first two represent the tens and ones (A, B). If there are four bands, the first three represent the hundreds, tens, and ones (A, B, C). The final band is the multiplier or magnitude (M).

For example, the three-band code of yellow-purple-red represents a nominal resistance of 4.7 kiloohms. The first yellow band is 4 × 10, the second purple band is 7, and the third red band is a multiplier of 100: (4 * 10 + 7) * 100 == 47 * 100 == 4700.

An optional band, painted on the other end of the device, marks the accuracy or tolerance in percents. If there is no such band, assume a tolerance of 20%.

I recently switched to CachyOS. While I don’t have the same hard-on for it that most users seem to have, I like how it’s set up by default to create a btrfs snapshot of the root filesystem before and after each update. Grub can even boot into individual snapshots directly. I’m almost looking forward to the day it saves my ass after an update breaks my system.

I made a language-agnostic guide to reading color-coded resistors:

Delays expected as radio traffic devolves into immature giggles whenever a flight into Pensacola (PNS) or Charlotte (CLT) is spotted.

Sometimes not even money. Microslop was left holding the bag when they jacked up the price of Gamepass and suddenly it became unaffordable for a lot of customers, and spent billions on a lemon. Sony is actively alienating their supporters, rejecting their largest market, and going all-in on a game that can’t even reach five thousand daily concurrent players on Steam because they’ve also already spent billions on a lemon. Bad calls and sunk costs all around.

I didn’t mean that in a very positive way.

I know there’s a post-hoc artistique justification where Alan is a hack writer and everything in the dark place is only as good as his imagination… but a poorly made game is still a poorly made game, and trying to shove half of a Max Payne action shooter into an Alan Wake game is just asking for disappointment (just ask Amnesia fans about pigs).

But they okayed Alan Wake’s American Nightmare.

That’s valid. The only thing I miss from my previous XBone controller was the ability to use the D-pad with my right thumb, or even the middle of my left thumb to an extent. The asymmetric Xbox layout is supreme.

I’m pretty sure you can also combine radial menus with mode shifts. Dishonored 2’s default Deck config has a mode shift bound to L1 (which opens the in-game weapon wheel), which temporarily reassigns the left analog sticks as mouse input while the button is pressed. I’m pretty sure the same could be done with Steam Input’s radial menus too.

You should give radial menus a try. I use one in Dishonored 2 and a different one in Warframe, both on the left trackpad.

In Warframe, the entries send keypresses for the eight numpad numbers corresponding to the direction that I press on the trackpad (bottom left is 1, top is 8, etc), which activate some of the hotkeyed gear items. In Dishonored 2, it just sends a number row keypress in order (first entry is 1, second is 2, etc), which switches the active power or weapon.

In other games, I just use it as a secondary D-pad (usually directional swipe) with a mode shift on one of the back buttons. My ideal setup would be to have an eight-way directional swipe without having to define a radial menu.

Steam Input is great, I just wish the config app was better.

Is it unstable, or resource intensive?

Yes and yes. Most of the Steam client is implemented, poorly, as a web app running in a web view derived from (I believe) an old version of Chromium. It’s needlessly resource-intensive, even more so than Electron apps. The suite as a whole uses its own libraries in ~/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_{32,64} and I’m pretty sure it still depends on some 32-bit-only things. The overlay sometimes causes ridiculous performance issues related to input events (I move the mouse and the game drops to single digit framerates) even if the overlay isn’t active. The Steam Input config utility is poorly designed and horribly implemented.

Lately it’s also been trying to murder my PC.

I love Steam as a service, but the client is in an unacceptable state.

But is it safer there?