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Halo’s developers explain what can go wrong with unlocked framerates in old game ports

It’s also worth remembering that these kind of weird ass behaviors and bugs can occur on games  natively developed for PCs. Older games often have to cope with hardware that is faster than anyone imagined, and totally different from what the game was developed on.

A prime problem that comes to mind is the flying APC bug in MW3. On my older Pentium D machine, APCs would often fly up into the air and usually come back down. On my Core i5 machine: they never would come back down, or even be within targeting range most of the time. Which makes it hard to complete some of the early missions, lol. Today you require limiting the CPU speed and emulating a graphics card in software just to render it playable on modern hardware.

In fact, the game was old enough that when my eyes lit up at finding a copy of Mech Warrior 3: the next problem to solve was convincing the clerk to sell it to me because there was no returns welcomed, lol. I seem to recall Pentium 3s and Pentium IIs being high end processors around the time the game was released.

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Finding myself in need of something to watch, and skimming through unfinished series in my Crunchyroll queue, I find myself returning to Bodacious Space Pirates. I remember enjoying the first parts of the series because of how technology integrates into the scenery, and the premise being amusing.

Actually, come to think of it, I should have finished this years ago. While the notion of Marika finding herself inheriting a pirate captaincy likely guaranteed the show wouldn’t be boring, having worth while characters, and plenty of humorous action certainly makes it entertaining 🙂.

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Check out what I’m watching on Crunchyroll! http://www.crunchyroll.com/welcome-to-demon-school-iruma-kun/episode-22-sparkling-shock-792301

After how last week’s episode ended, I rather love the solution that Iruma, and his friends come up with. I may also have busted out giggling by the time Kuromu finds out what the heck is happening on stage.

iPad Pro -> Laptop mode

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ProCase iPad Pro 11 Keyboard Case 2018 [Support Apple Pencil Charging], 360 Degree Rotation Swivel Cover Case with Wireless Keyboard for Apple iPad Pro 11 Inch 2018 Release -Black.

I finally broke down, and gave in, and giving this a shot. There’s the reality, that most of the time I find a tablet an ideal form factor. But it is also a reality that I am not always near a desk or table like surface when it would be effective to have an external keyboard.

Thus far this is looking good. Study enough that I’m not worried about tap-tapity-tap-taping it over, or gravity getting the sudden best of me. Big enough that I can get a decent typing experience, and light enough not to have to remove the tablet constantly. Although to be fair, ease of removing the tablet is one of my goals—most of the time I actually want my tablet to be a tablet, and the lighter the better.

Hitting https://10fastfingers.com/typing-test/english I was able to get a decent result after 10~15 minutes of putting around. 85 words per minute with 91.81% accuracy isn’t a bad first attempt. Close enough to my full typing speed, that it’s more a matter of accuracy and getting used to the keyboard, than it is the actual size.

Which is really nice: because that was my primary fear. See, keyboards for smaller devices have generally been a failure for me. A widescreen 10.1” works pretty well, and 11.6” is probably my idea of the perfect sized keyboard in terms of widescreen. For standard laptops of yore, I usually would vote for the ~12” range. A 7” or 8” tablet keyboard is so small that I am better off using two-thumbed touch screen typing, for both accuracy and speed. A 9.7” iPad size keyboard is too small, but at least approaches a size where I don’t feel like snapping the keyboard in half. Given that sordid history, I’m happy to find that the iPad Pro 11” in this dock, is pretty effective; much like how my old 10.1” systems were big enough to use as a full time keyboard but more error prone than a standard PC keyboard.

Yay, it doesn’t suck!

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Unsure what disturbs me more: that I don’t think I’ve ever used my journal’s rss/atom feeds to test a news reader before, or that I feel tempted to setup one, lol.

In the increasingly distant past, I made fair use of news readers, and eventually welcomed Google Reader with open arms: because it solved the problem of syncing state between my laptop and desktop. I used it a lot until I didn’t.

What primarily changed wasn’t the demise of Reader, so much as my migration to different sources. By the time Reader shutdown, I hadn’t actively used it in several years. Typically, I now consume such content from my tablet: not my laptop, or desktop. Likewise feeds from sites that aggregate stories related to my interests, like ye ol /. gradually got replaced with things like Flipboard, Google News, etc. They are what really killed off my use of news feeds.

Today, the sync problem means less because I don’t wanna look at my feeds on my PC things—I wanna lean back, and read the feeds off my tablet. As time has gone on, most temptations I get to add some feed to my list, usually takes the form of a blog somewhere that gets updated with interesting stuff once in a while. More often, generally geeky news or world affairs populate through other sources.

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Three comfortable goons, and Misty is using my leg as a pillow.

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When I think about how much I dislike calendaring / pim software on *nix systems, and I see http://calcurse.org/ that looks handy, and that it has a code base that doesn’t suck, I kind of wonder what should bother me more. That I’m tempted to try using it, or just how much I dislike using Thunderbird compared to my tablet.

I basically maintain an array of calendars. Most in a certain popular cloud service, segregated for various purposes; and one on my employer’s service for dealing with “Damn it, people send me meetings as ics files!”.

In practice: I often prefer to reach for my tablet whenever the words Calendar, Contacts, or save when Outlook is involved, Email.

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Passing thoughts:

  1. Sometime this year, I’m liable to have 3,000 posts stored here.
  2. This totals all the journal entries when I used Livejournal, my migration to Blogger, and my return to it in the post-G+ life.
  3. I don’t think I want to know how many G+ posts are in my backup, but not here.
It does kind of perturb me that more than six years of my journal entries aren’t in the system. But at the same time, writing code to transbliterate my data dump into the a format Blogger supports, is not exactly convenient. But I probably should get around to it someday, ‘cuz Blogger’s export format is more widely accepted than G+’s.