I once met a person that never drank water, only soft drinks. It’s not the unhealthiness of this that disturbed me, but the fact they did it without the requisite paperwork.

Unlike those disorganised people I have a formal waiver. I primarily drink steam and crushed glaciers.

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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Meanwhile the fan PC port is absolutely amazing. I couldn’t play my copy of PD on my actual N64 because the low framerate made me motionsick, the fan-made PC port runs smooth.

    This makes me remember what happened with the re3 and revc (GTA III and GTA Vice City) projects. Fans fixed so much in those games, in their spare time, and published it as a patch (so you still had to own the games). Take Two DMCA’d and sued them just before releasing their the maligned “GTA Trilogy”. I wonder if Microsoft would have done the same before releasing new Perfect Dark content?






  • I am not so sure that it will end up faster or better.

    **In theory: **A CPU scheduler should give programs as much CPU time as they want until you start nearing CPU resource saturation. Discord doesn’t need very large amounts of CPU (admittedly it’s a lot more than it should for a text chap app, but it’s still not diabolically bad). It will only start getting starved when you are highly utilising all cores. That can happen on my 2-core laptop, but I don’t have any games on my 6 core desktop that will eat everything. Nonetheless on my laptop I’d probably prefer my games take the resources (not Discord) and I’d happily suffer any reasonable drop in responsiveness of Discord as a result.

    I don’t think that a new process (a new dedicated browser-client) instead of a new thread (tab in existing browser) is intrinsically faster or better. CPU schedulers are varied and complex, I wouldn’t be surprised if any differences in performance measurements would end up down in the noise. If anything the extra memory usage might cause more IO contention and memory starvation, making everything slower rather than faster. But this is all conjecture, so don’t give it much credit.

    Basically, it’s faster to focus on painting a single canvas than it is to painting 3 at the same time.

    I don’t think that’s much of a problem in practice, at least for Firefox: one tab can crash and stop rendering completely (or lock up 100% of 1 CPU core) but the others will keep going in other threads. For the most part they shouldn’t be able to affect each other’s performance.

    In practice: What’s the actual metric that you think will be better or worse? I assume responsiveness to typing and clicks in the discord UI?

    I’ve never seen discord lag or stutter from causes other than IO limitations (startup speed, network traffic, heavy IO on my machine) or silly design (having to refresh the page after leaving it open all day, I suspect it’s intentionally auto-disabling but I’m not sure). That’s not something that running a separate discord client in a separate dedicated/embedded browser will fix.








  • A method I have not seen mentioned yet (for when you have an old precompiled version of an app):

    1. Identify the missing libs. You can run the program, but sometimes it’s easier to use ldd
    2. Use your web browser to download the missing libs from Debian’s repos (stable or older if need be). Unfortunately you often also have to grab their deps too.
    3. Extract the .debs
    4. Move all of the .so files into the same folder as the old program you are trying to run
    5. export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=“$(pwd)”
    6. Now try running the app

    It often takes a bit of fiddling, but it’s worked for me a few times and you only need to fetch the few libraries you are missing. For bigger things however it can be a dependency hell, you might as well use the distro’s actual package manager inside a chroot.

    Note: You don’t need to be using Debian as your host distro, I don’t. As long as it’s a glibc based distro you should be mostly fine (glibc is mostly backwards compatible)



  • My distro recently dropped support for gtk+2 (which I am fairly pissed about, since it’s the last good version of GTK+)

    Stuff like this completely throws the shared libraries idea in the bin. There are lots of benefits, sure, but none of them matter when your program won’t even start.

    Please name and shame your distro. GTK2 is a core component of userspace for many users, just as important as glibc and bash. Maintaining it might be annoying, but it’s the lesser of two evils.

    My distro (Void Linux) dropped support for qt4 a few years back. Now I’m running QUCS in wine. “win32 is the only stable ABI in Linux”

    (And yes you’re right 2 is the last good version of GTK+. Gtk3 and 4 look and feel so much worse, they make me feel like I’m being punished.)



  • SFF = Small Form Factor. It’s smaller than traditional ATX computers but can still take the same RAM, processors and disks. Motherboards and power supplies tend to be nonstandard however. Idle power consumptions are usually very good.

    USFF = Ultra Small Form Factor. Typically a laptop chipset + CPU in a small box with an external power supply. Somewhat comparable with SBCs like Raspberry Pis. Very good idle power consumption, but less powerful than SFF (and/or louder due to smaller cooler) and often don’t have space for standard disks.

    SBC = Single Board Computer.


  • I wouldn’t attack via USB, that path has already been too well thought out. I’d go for an interface with some sort of way to get DMA, such as:

    • PCIE slots including M.2 and external thunderbolt. Some systems might support hotplug and there will surely be some autoloading device drivers that can be abused for DMA (such as a PCIE firewire card?)
    • Laptop docking connectors (I can’t find a public pinout for the one on my Thinkpad, but I assume it’ll have something vulnerable/trusted like PCIE)
    • Firewire (if you’re lucky, way too old to be found now)
    • If you have enough funding: possibly even ones no-one has thought about like displayport + GPU + driver stack. I believe there have been some ethernet interface vulnerabilities previously (or were those just crash/DOS bugs?)