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CNN: Libraries are fighting to preserve your right to borrow e-books.

Generally my habits with e-books lean towards purchases more so than lending: but even so, I find the option of checking out an electronic copy useful once in awhile. In my neck of the woods that usually takes the form of OverDrive.

I imagine that as time goes on the issue will only get worse.

E-books are not going away, and most of us don’t want public libraries to go away either. Eventually, I expect the amount of books only available in digital form will go up over the decades not down. Authors and publishers still need to make coin but I don’t think that being a dick about it will help anyone, least of all in the long run: the one being a dick.

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Google’s new Android phone feature may help save your life

It’s kind of sad this has taken so long. Features like these might not be popular on the mind of mostly healthy, mostly young engineers who probably won’t see an ambulance ride for most of their lives if at all–but it’s damned nice use of technology.

We all have location and voice synthesis services in our pocket. Why not make use of it?

That fact that in my country, the cost of an ambulance or a serious hospital stay would probably give you a heart attack, is a different problem 😜😂

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Every now and then, I’ll stuff a few frozen pancakes in the toaster to make a quick breakfast. Usually followed by coating them in peanut butter and creating a sandwich. Today, since I skipped the PB, I opted to give the peanut gallery a taste.

Which was welcomed by the peanut gallery but I was reproached for it being the last of the pancake, lol. I will skip sharing the stare I am now getting from Willow….

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Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Hands-On: Keyboard and S Pen.

I’ve never really been a big fan of Samsung’s cases, be them the flappy cover or the same with a keyboard stuffed in. But I’ve gotta admit that keyboard/kickstand approach makes an interesting case.

This also gives me some hope, since my Tab S3’s cracked screen ain’t going to get any better and the alternatives are rather few without migrating to an iPad Pro.

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Sadly doesn’t look like SWAT 3 runs on modern systems, compatibility modes for XP and 9x don’t help nore does dandy tricks emulating an old GPU in software ala dgVoodoo. Although I suppose, loading Win98SE into a virtual machine might work.

That’s a great shame because the game was both pretty well done and ahead of its time nearly ~20 years ago. It remains the best tactical shooter I’ve ever played, and that’s probably been a lot over the years.

On the flipside with a little lovin’ the original R6 runs pretty well. The only technical issue I’ve had is a ghosting between the mouse cursor in and out of game which makes using the menus a hard on the eyes. Rather than taking my chances: I stuffed dgVoodoo’s Direct3D libraries in to begin with. R6 is so old it still offered a software renderer, so might not be so necessary.

I remember first playing Rainbow Six and finding it both intently interesting and quite frustrating as a kid; mainly for the laser-eyed snapshot of death effect, which is not as big a problem decades later. What remains irksome though is that path finding was effectively infantile back then. Thus in a game that resolved to plan a strike with multiple fire teams — you’ve got an A.I. that can barely avoid walking into walls just trying to follow you around. Aside from that, I’d say it remains a good game.

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Scary advances in time and drive tech: when you plop in an old game CD and it feels like most of the install time is how fast you can read unpack the data off a CD-ROM.

Rummaging through the bin in my closet, I went looking for my old tactical game of the year edition of SWAT 3. Along side it of course the sequel, my original copy of R6 III: Raven Shield and the first Rainbow Six. Needless to say when these games originally shipped most people had IDE hard drives and Windows 9x still had a very large market share. SSDs didn’t exist :P. Installing games off CD-ROM took quite a bit longer when SWAT 3 was a young game; I think I just spent a whopping five minutes counting disc changing.

Hmm, kind of wonder if there’s still a copy of the patch file for R6 anywhere. I still remember downloading that 33~35 meg file once upon a dial up life and being glad that no one had called our phone number for nearly four consecutive hours ^_^.

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It would suffice to say aging sucks. But when I stay up late, still get enough sleep, and feel much the zombie in the morning, I can’t help but think it has more to do with how much of my youth was spent with next to no sleep.

So much of my younger days, sleep time fell somewhere between 0400 – 0700 with wake times usually 0900 – 1000. Because in my family if you wanted any peace or needed concentration that meant waiting for everyone else to be asleep. Ironically back then I didn’t consume caffeine either, lol.

Last night was more like 0045 – 0915, or about eight hours of glorious sleep. Pardon me whilst I drain coffee like crazy.

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Special bonuses to running the built in OpenSSH service on your W10 install: being able to SSH in and taskkill a fullscreen game that is stuck.

Because apparently the “Hey, let me freaking alt+tab to taskmgr!” problem remains possible even after decades ^_^.

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Looks like Prey is on sale for $6 over on Steam, or about $8 with both expansion packs.

Can’t say that the game especially tempted me on release but the reviews I’ve read over the years made me consider, might be worth playing. I suppose atg this price and when you make it the PC version, it’s a bit hard to pass up.

Despite my times with the PlayStation 2 and Xbox One, I can’t say that I have ever cared much for using a controller for shooters. For many games, yeah a controller is both fine and kinda nice. But the more precise speed and accuracy becomes necessary: the more I want a mouse ^_^.