[-] Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world 2 points 22 hours ago

๐ŸŒŽ๐Ÿ‘จโ€๐Ÿš€๐Ÿ”ซ๐Ÿ‘จโ€๐Ÿš€

If you happen to have easy access to the ROM, how's "Star Wars: Racer Revenge" run?

It's the less popular but more fleshed out spiritual successor to the N64 pod racing game - the PS2's take nailed the physics - the two engines and racer pod are (or at least feel like) three separate entities, and playing in first person view with the engines controlled separately by the left and right joysticks feels fucking magical.

Tried to run it on PCSX2 years ago, but it was one of the few games that meshed so poorly with the emulator that it wasn't playable. I'm guessing the emulator has seen some improvements since then - could definitely use a nice shot of nostalgia.

[-] Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world 71 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Zotero

If you're in any flavor of academics from middle school to doctorate program or otherwise writing papers that require strict citation formatting, drop what you're doing and click that link.

Or probably YouTube it or something first so you can see why it's so much better than your standard internet citation generators.

Don't forget to share the intel with your classmates!

Edit - honorable mention to Desmos for 99% of your calculator needs... with the unfortunate exception of exams, cuz phone.

[-] Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

...and a swan-dive into fascism is preferable to that because...?

Our political model is janky as fuck. I don't need to explain the pitfalls of a two-party system to you - I already know you fucking hate it or you wouldn't be eyeing a 3rd in the first place. I hate it too. But a two party system is what we have, which means you have three options:

  • Red (fascism)

  • Blue (not fascism)

  • Let the other voters choose Red or Blue for you (abstain or vote 3rd).

ย 

Which of those options will do the best job of accomplishing YOUR goals?

What even are your goals? 3rd party as POTUS? You gotta lay the groundwork first. 2016 was the perfect stage for a 3rd party victory within our current model: we had an absolutely hated candidate running on both of the big two; a voterbase just as sick of the status quo as they are now; a Libertarian with a genuinely likable personality, some solid policy stances, and who managed to shift the "crazy" that Libertarians were reputed for to an honestly charming variety of "quirky", and a surprisingly steady stream of coverage by the media. We will never see better conditions for a 3rd victory in our current model.

So how did the Libertarians do with that perfect storm? 3%. They got fucking 3% of the vote. How do those conditions compare to today's? Red is running that same hated sack of shit Trump; but Blue couldn't find a candidate hated as much as Hillary if they tried to - to the contrary, Harris is churning up optimism like I've never seen before. The die-hard Reds and Blues aren't going to change their votes over that, but the folks in the middle are going to be far less inclined to vote 3rd than they were in 2016. 3rds have gotten pretty much zero media attention this time around. They literally do not stand a chance to beat even 2016's 3%, let alone enough to actually win.

Your only way to the top is to change the political model into one that's more favorable to you; and the easiest way to do that is to keep not-fascism in power long enough to get the general population pissed off enough about not having ranked choice that it starts making its way into bigger and bigger elections. Your next-easiest path to victory is insurrection... that most likely both fail and get yourself killed, so please don't do that. Your least-easy path to victory is to allow fascism to take root, as that will push the model even further away from your reach: if that happens it's game over for everyone except the fascists.

If you see a different option that'll lead to a 3rd victory in our current model, I'm all ears; but if not, you still need to set the stage with favorable conditions, to include preventing the stage from being burned to the ground.

I'm gonna make a peanut butter and jelly pizza now just out of spite.

[-] Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world 27 points 1 day ago

The Dems will preserve a political model that's at least malleable. 3rds will need to work together to push ranked choice more and more into voters' field of view.

Republicans will swan-dive into fascism, in which case 3rds (and everyone else) are fucked.

Dems aren't going to help 3rds directly, but any one who wants the possibility of a 3rd party victory later is committing political suicide by failing to vote blue as a means of buying time. Voting 3rd when that 3rd has no potential for victory is self-destructive.

[-] Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world 33 points 2 days ago

3.3m / 182b = 0.0018% of Elon Musk's wealth.

What percentage of your wealth do you lose if you get caught driving 5mph over the speed limit?

This shit needs to be proportional to both severity of the crime and total wealth.

[-] Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world 20 points 2 days ago

I've heard and experienced WAY too much supporting anecdote to just wave it off as confirmation bias. Official statements by telecoms and such be damned, this shit is 100% happening.

[-] Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world 78 points 2 days ago

There's a lot of things to argue about, but pizza just isn't one of them. It's a chunk of bread with leftovers on it. If it tastes good on pizza, it belongs on pizza; and what tastes good on pizza depends on the tongue probing it.

Pineapple... sausage... anchovies... goat cheese... potato chips... a fucking strawberry slurpee - if you like it, you rock it.

The only wrong option is to abstain from making/ordering the pizza you want because that ingredient doesn't 'belong' there.

322

Made this for a comment reply to another thread; thought y'all would enjoy it too! ^_^

[-] Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world 16 points 2 days ago

...I didn't even know eating the tail was an option. Like, it's pure fucking chitin - there's nothing to emulsify. It's like trying to eat a fingernail, or piece of plastic.

Squeezing that last little nub of meat out of it, yeah, but the tail itself? Dafuq?

Or are we talking about that little nub of meat tucked away in the chitin hole? Just realized we might be calling two different things the 'tail'.

[-] Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world 118 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)
[-] Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world 27 points 4 days ago

Naw, it'll just play a metal-hitting-metal sound effect, he'll brief make eye contact with the camera, give a little smirk, and the scene will continue with no further acknowledgement.

16

I visit this site probably more than I should, and when I browse, then come back a bit later to browse again, I'm seeing a LOT of repeat content.

The one and only feature I miss from that other site was being able to browse by reading a thread title to assess if its something I want to click on, if no hit 'H' to hide it, and it's gone; next one bumps up, and repeat.

So I'd skim by pressing H... H... H... H... "Ooh that one looks cool!" read the article, comment w/e, H... H... H... H... then I'd pop back in an hour later, and those threads would still be gone.

Unsure if that was a built-in feature or part of the RES thing. ...is there an RES -or- 'LES' for Lemmy?

15
submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world to c/techsupport@lemmy.world

The laptop I'll be recording them with is running Windows 11 Pro.

Not loving the 'Camera' app that comes stock with Windows.

Tried recording just with my cellphone, but ran into issues with audio quality and battery life. I have an old webcam, and just ordered a tiny bluetooth microphone that I'm hoping to either plant near or literally pin onto the prof if they're cool with it.

Not looking for anything fancy... ability to choose both video and audio device, record/pause, and save so that I can upload to YouTube and forward it to the class. (side question... best video format for this?).

Not really familiar with this kind of software... I recall one of my gaming buddies being a fan of OBS Studio, but unsure if that's just on-screen capture for gaming/streaming or if it can do webcam-only too - DL'ing right now to experiment. In the mean time, taking all suggestions!

Thanks, all!

Edit -

Took about 5 mins to get all the shit on my wishlist figured out in OBS (https://obsproject.com/), and if my dumb ass can figure it out that quick, that is some GOOD software!! Kinda wish I'd have tried first before asking, but was not expecting it to be that easy. I'll leave the thread up just incase its helpful for someone else later.

9
submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world to c/techsupport@lemmy.world

Follow-up to this thread - this is way more specific, so hopefully worthy of its own thread. I think wildcards are the best option for my skill level (basically none), and have gotten a good chunk of what I wanted to accomplish done with those.

An issue I've run into and can't seem to google my way out is making TTS pronounce acronyms in a sensible way. For example "PACU" (post-anesthesia care unit) is usually vocalized as "pack-you" but my TTS software likes to say things like "pace-uh". Or "PO" (latin abbreviation for 'by mouth') is vocalized by just saying the letters, but TTS says "Poe". Stuff like that.

When the TTS comes across a capitol letter with a space on either side, it just pronounces the letter, so I'd still lose things like "pack-you" but at least hearing it spell out "pee ay see you" would make sense, vs "pace-uh" which is gibberish and confusing at high playback speeds.

Best I've come up with so far is <([A-Z]{2})> on the Find side, but that's only spotting the two character terms like PO, and ignoring the longer ones... I'd hoped it would see PACU and detect PA, AC, and CU as three distinct sets of two that could cobbled into "P A C U".

Nothing I've done on the Replace side comes close to working. It either does nothing at all, or it'll do something like turn "PO" into <([A- Z]{2})>. Not sure if preserving the original characters is something A-Z is actually capable of - seems not, but I'm kind of an idiot with stuff like this, so any tips would be appreciated!

Thank you!

11
submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world to c/techsupport@lemmy.world

Nursing student here!

So we get a shit load of reading assignments, and since everything's digital nowadays, I've been leaning a lot on text-to-speech software that effectively converts reading assignments to listening assignments.

The problem is textbooks have a LOT of just... noise. Every image has something like "FIGURE 13.5 SURGICAL DISASTERS!" "FIGURE 13.6 YOU GOT SUMMONED TO COURT!" etc. In-text citations are EVERYWHERE, copyright info is EVERYWHERE... reading the content, you just skip over all that crap, but pasting it into a TTS service, all that trash gets spoken aloud and adds up to a huge time sink every chapter, and distracts from the actual lesson.

Googling it, the best I've been able to come up with is doing a find and replace in MS word for things like FIGURE **.*^13 with wildcards on and the replace field blank... but it's not very consistent - sometimes it works, sometimes not. Same with nuking parenthesis and the text within with \(*\)

All that said, I'm wondering if I'm approaching this wrong by using MS word in the first place. Would be absolutely amazing if I could save all the commands on standby, then run them at the same time. By end of the school program, we're talking like 100 chapters from multiple books, so anything that lets me just nuke huge batches of BS as quickly as possible and dive right into the listening would be a godsend.

Thanks all!!

35
submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

Skip to the tldr if you don't want the novel explaining the reasoning.

A friend gifted me their old Razer Kraken headset a while ago. The leather Razer uses is some CHEAP shit, so the couple years in a closet leading up to it landing on my noggin left it in a state of deterioration that would sprinkle my head and ears with little bits of black leather.

The speakers are good though, and free is free, so no complaints: I hit it with some duct tape and peeled it off repeatedly until all the leather bits were freed up - the cloth layer underneath the leather is now the outermost layer, and no more black sprinkles all over, so yay.

Unfortunately the tape pulling on the ear cushions was a bit too much for whatever adhesive Razer uses to stick em on to their mounting plate, and they pretty much just pulled off. Also no biggie - replacements are pretty cheap on Amazon, so I got a set and lived happily ever after...

...but now I've got the old mounting plates (minus the cushions) and an idea.

So... I do a lot of gaming, wife watches a lot of TV. We do this in the same room, so I pretty much always have my headset on, which blocks most TV noises from getting to me, and most gaming noises from getting to her. Works great until she says something, and all I hear is muffled gibberish until I lift a speaker off my ear and hit her with "What?".

-----------TLDR---------------

My idea is to put... idk... something... on the mounting plate of the side facing her that's stable enough to keep the headphone in the correct position (and not pressing directly on my ear) but basically leaves the space completely open to the environment so that external sound coming from that side isn't muffled.

I'm thinking something like a plastic spiral hair tie, but with an inner diameter large enough to encircle my ear, and the spiral diameter roughly the same as the cussion, at least when its under tension against my head.

something like this:

...but ofc not just a cylindrical spring, but a donut shape. I kinda suck at photoshop, but you get the gist.

The spiral hair tie is the closest actual product I can think of to what I'm picturing, but those are far too small... ideas?

12
submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world to c/buildapc@lemmy.world

Mobo is MSI Pro Z790-P

Cooler is Aorus Waterforce X360

Tried orienting the radiator so the tubes go toward the front vs back of the case - both orientations land that tube joint right in the path of the closest RAM slot. The lines are too stiff to enable much wiggle room in either direction.

Never used a liquid cooler before... I've got 4 brand new RAM sticks, so I'd hate to drop one, but I don't see any options other than just flipping the radiator around, and neither position does the trick.

Any tips?

*trying to upload a pic, but it won't let me... Will try later.

544
:-O (lemmy.world)
16

I have my phone set to remember my car, my wife's car, and a pair of bluetooth headphones. When it's within range of one of them, it connects and all is well.... until it detects another one, then it changes to that.

On the way home from work yesterday, I passed my wife on the interstate. Didn't notice her car, but did notice my music suddenly stop... oh well; not gonna futz with bluetooth when I'm driving... guess it'll just be quiet for the rest of the trip.

Couple minutes later, it comes back. Yay!

Make it home, and as I'm getting out of the car, the wife pulls up, so I wait for her and we're chatting our way back to the apartment. She mentions her car randomly started playing heavy metal on the way home for a minute, then stopped. Now the gears are turning - I ask if it was around the area when mine went silent, and yup! I was a couple lanes over, but my phone detected her car and ditched mine to connect to it.

I've noticed it auto-hop from my car to my headphones or vice versa before, but car to car is a new one.

It's really annoying... and seems like the kind of thing that should be a check box in the settings, but I got nothing.

Phone is a Google Pixel 8 if that helps.

I'd really like it to connect when it comes in range of a recognized device ONLY if it's not already connected to another device...

Am I just stupid? This seems super basic...

0

Watched the first episode of The Acolyte on Disney+, and there so many ads that I swear the ad-to-star-wars radio was 1 to 1.

...so I set sail. I'm so sick this. But now I've got three video files on the comp (Windows 10), but I'm struggling to get them into the TV... We have a Roku, but apparently my comp doesn't support 'Miracast', and that seems to be a huge road block going by guides online.

Hoping to not spend an arm and a leg, but probably need some cable or something other than Roku. I'm probably the least techy person on Lemmy, so please idiot-proof any instructions.

Thanks all!

65

Previously I've been pretty gentle with modding that game - things like SkyUI to make it a bit more PC friendly, utility mods like the one limits soul gems to ONLY being filled with their highest tier (no more wasting a grand by filling it with a mudcrab). Also LockPick Pro to effectively skip lockpicking, cuz I hate Skyrim's (bring back Oblivion's model!)... that's kinda it.

Looking for mods that bring something new to the actual gameplay. I know there are a ton of them - what are your favorites?

238
submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world to c/games@lemmy.world

Initial scrolling of the Steam Summer Sale seems pretty lackluster, but digging through the comments sections in other threads, a few gems have stood out, and it doesn't appear we have a thread dedicated to this yet, so post what you think are the best deals here!

Not mandatory ofc, but it'd be helpful if...

  • One game per top level post, so comments stemming from it are focused on on just it.

  • Hyperlink the game title to its Store Page

  • Include both the normal and sale price / %off

  • Include a short blurb about the game - if it's one you've played before, what did you like about it? If you're diving in blind, what grabbed your attention?

Good hunt'n!

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