Month: January 2020

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Microsoft is updating one of Windows 10’s oldest apps – but you won’t like the change

When you consider that Office is one of Microsoft’s big money makers for client side, and the main competition in browser space is an advertising company (Google), I’m not inclined to hold it against them very much. You can always install Libre Office or  Abiword if you really want free.

Rather: I’m just glad that Notepad gained support for Unix style end line markers. Most use I’ve had for Word Pad since the fall of 32-bit Windows has been to view text files that aren’t in DOS format, on machines that aren’t mine, or are in the process of setup. Prior to 64-bit Windows becoming the norm for NT based systems, I’d usually use edit.com for that purpose: but support for 16-bit DOS applications aren’t included in Windows x64.

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While my reason for going shopping tonight was driven by needing denture tickets, I think buying some lettuce, priced to move mushrooms, and dinner onions, was a good plan.

Leftover pintos, and croutons that have been in need of a salad, also round the salad. I’ve also been slobbered by two of three dogs, after giving them their snacks for the night.

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Things that remind me 16 GB of RAM isn’t enough for anything: when opening a nearly 1 gigabyte perf.data file in perf report, both takes forever and consumes ~92.5% of memory according to htop.

And somewhere along the way it exits with a message about being killed, and a toast pops up about my WiFi disconnecting. I’m sure the kernel OOM killer had a lot of fun.

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In some ways: it’s kind of fascinating how far our species has come, and how depressing how far we may have yet to go.

Dealing with Misty’s blister problem has made me think increasingly often about a scene from Star Trek 4: where Bones meets a patient waiting for kidney dialysis, and wonders if this is the dark ages–because it kind of is. And then they proceed to go rescue Chekov from having holes drilled in his skull by a crack team of ’80s brain surgeons.

We live in a world where science and reason has come a long way: yet much of our medical technology hasn’t evolved as significantly as our practical knowledge of medicine. We understand better how and why things work, but our influence is often limited.

In science fiction, such as aboard star ships named Enterprise: we see a world where what is broken can be repaired. Fixing broken bones is easier than welding metal. Bandaids and sutures replaced by repairing tissue and arteries. Tools that our chemists and biologists could only dream of for understanding the world around us.

Yet we live in a world where our only options are essentially medieval, compared to our dreams. We have to suture and staple people back together, because this is often the best our technology can do.

Hell, can you even imagine how much the equipment for an MRI costs, or how much it weighs, or how much our technology had to evolve to make that possible? From a pure technology standpoint such equipment is a miracle, a magical marvel. One we’ve only just begun.

I feel in many ways, we’re benefiting from the rise of science, and the ease at sharing collective knowledge. Our doctors know a lot more than in centuries past, and that’s a good thing. But the technology we’ve managed to develop for them? It’s far slower to evolve: tools and technologies take lifetimes to evolve.

On the other hand, in some ways the world we live in has been travelling like a rocket ship as marvelous technology is stacked upon marvelous technology, and knew knowledge refines our perceptions of the possible. When my grandparents were young, the concept of a transistor exceeded what we could construct. When my own parents were young, a long road made such things possible. As I sit here typing this, I can’t even fathom how many transistors were involved in making this journal entry. By the time I die, perhaps to a younger generation: the microchips of my computer will look like the capacitors and tubes in my great grandparents radio do to me.

It’s like, we managed to shoot man to the moon in a tin can using sticks and stones, compared to what our electronics have become since. Much as Apollo, surely would have been to Jules Verne, a lot of cool shit has happened since man took to the stars . But in many ways, our technology is still very primitive to what we can imagine.

Wouldn’t it be damned awesome, if we lived in a world where people created technologies that help man kind, far more than we spend writing buggy assed software? At least nerds can dream. Hmm, I wonder if androids would dream….

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The one thing about Martin Luther King Jr.’s greatness everyone keeps missing

If such a thing could be true of most people’s skills as a listener, it might be a better world overall.

Calling King a great listener isn’t the typical praise that people shower on him as the country celebrates the holiday in his honor. Instead, commentators invoke images of King as a solitary hero behind a podium, delivering speech after speech that changed history.

Things I find oddly amusing

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Things I find oddly amusing: thought I’d give defrosting the fish in the bag a go, ‘cuz why not?

Shortly after turning on the water works, the bag made like Yosemite Sam after a shootout.
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Next U.S. Navy aircraft carrier to be named after African American Pearl Harbor hero
https://flip.it/6Dlhwg

That is pretty damn cool. Didn’t think we would see a carrier not named after a president, shy of experiencing another conflict on the scale of the war in the Pacific.

Thoughts on Xbox Game Pass and SteamLink

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One of the perks of Steam, is the ease of continuing from anywhere.

Most games on Steam with more than ten cents worth of effort, support cloud saves. Most that don’t tend to be very old, or games that shouldn’t. Which makes it pretty easy to continue from another machine, or even the same machine from some future reinstall of the game. Many games on Xbox also support cloud saves, and it’s usually less famous titles that lack them, like indie titles.

At least when you’ve got a solid graphics card, and aren’t struggling to run the game to begin with, Steam’s in home streaming actually works great. So transitioning from /dev/desk to /dev/couch is more to do with input devices.

Microsoft’s Game Pass is pretty sweet, and ultimate makes sense if you were already paying for Live. But the trade off I think is the portability.

When I play a game on Steam: principally, I give little mind to whether I’m playing from my couch or in front of my computer. The decision is typically driven by how much precision mouse/keyboard work is required. The only game that’s been otherwise is Final Fantasy 15, as my CPU struggles to run it locally, unlike 99% of my other Steam games.

When I play a game on Game Pass, principally my thought is “Do I want to play at my xbox?”.

As much as I applaud Microsoft’s record and stream tech, I really love that they made it available, the truth is that I find the stream quality from my Xbox to my desktop to be inferior to my 780 GTX to my SteamLink over the same network and locations. There’s more visual glitches and even set for quality, the encoder can’t best the encoder on my nVidia card.

What would really make the PC side of that coin mean something, is if it were possible to share the same saves between my desktop and my Xbox. I.e. the decision would be like open Outer Worlds on my desktop, and continue from the same save I made on my Xbox. I’d call that a win.

By contrast the decision works out that I started playing on my Xbox, and need to stream to my PC if I want to play at my desk. Which means a loss of image quality, and the occasional wtf/freeze/lag; on the flipside Outer Worlds seems to do that less often than Halo 5 when I stream.

Likewise, I don’t think Microsoft offers the inverse. I.e. that I could stream my desktop to my Xbox, if I had started with the PC, I’d not be able to stream to my Xbox. Although it might be possible to horse wrangle something with my SteamLink. By contrast, Steam’s streamy goodness is basically from anything to anything, especially when you account for needing a Direct3D PC for most games anyhow.

Thus, I am finding that Game Pass is very worth it for the Xbox side of the catalog. On PC, it’s more like a “Meh”, because the only benefit I’m really seeing there is good odds of playing on desktop with a mouse, a game I wouldn’t want to play on console with a controller. To be fair though, my decision was based on the cost comparison of Game Pass + Live versus Game Pass Ultimate; that is to say on the dollars required.

Beyond the lack of PC <-> Xbox crossover, I’m finding Game Pass to be very worth it. For a while, I’ve actually considered dropping my Live subscription because Games with Gold doesn’t bring that many games of interest down the pike, versus how little multiplayer I tend to do on Xbox. Where as Game Pass delivers the content, and probably curtails much of the need to buy games outright.

I’m also pretty sure that if Valve offered something like Game Pass on Steam, I’d probably hand Gabe Newell my checkbook and be done with it, lol.