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Cripes, this argument again. Give it a rest already, people.

I don’t know about you but I’ve never used mine for combat and I’m unlikely to be in a position to try. Despite the inherent ridiculousness I do occasionally EDC mine, but mostly I use it as a folding camp knife.

There are oodles of other perfectly cromulent knives to recommend, of course (just ask me how I know!) but I zeroed in on this one for the sheer perversity of its selling price being near enough to precisely OP’s available figure.

If you’re going to be that way about it, might I recommend a Leatherman Skeletool which is also currently about $75.

An HOKC Finka-C is almost exactly $75 on Amazon right now.

Apropos of nothing, really.

Ooh, a 486-66. Yeah, you’ll be playing a ton of 3D games on that… I owned a Pentium 60 back when — yes, even one of the ones with the floating point division bug — and it could play Doom very nicely but couldn’t quite hack it for Quake and without some manner of hardware acceleration it was absolutely inadequate for any of the PS1 game ports that came out shortly thereafter.

The crux of it is that I think you’re doing quite a bit of conflation here between the PC (i.e. the Intel x86 compatible platform) and home computers, which indeed historically used all kinds of different architectures. Yes, the MSX and Commodores and Amiga and Sharp X68000 and all the rest of them were things that existed, and I find all of those equally interesting as old consoles because by and large they were all doing their own things and were not just yet another PC clone.

The Playstation beginning from the 4 on upwards and the XBox since its inception (literally “Direct X Box” initially) meanwhile are just low-rent x86 PCs. Using parts and hardware anyone could buy and put togther, if they felt like it. To each their own, but I don’t see any appeal there at all.

And for the record: Yes, I am well aware that the oodles of 8 bit home micros from the '80s and so forth had various joysticks and gamepads. I owned several and I still have a few of them. As far as game input goes, of them are without exception absolute crap compared to a simple NES pad.

I don’t think that’s really so. The difference between game consoles and desktop computers historically has been the input peripherals and also the dedicated hardware built into said consoles specifically for video game functionality. These were architectures built specifically around video games, not general purpose computing. It’s not good enough to say that an Apple II and an NES have the “same” processor when the Apple lacks the hardware tile mapping functionality, independent background layer support, hardware sprite transparency, screen scrolling registers, etc. Nobody figured out how to hook an actual NES controller up to a home computer until much later, either. The NES could also have the Zapper, the Power Pad, the robot. Not so much on your PC or Apple. Hell, the original Apple 2 barely even supported color.

But regardless of all of that, editing to clarify my main point here: The Apple II is not a PC. It is a home computer, but it’s not an x86 PC.

The 386 had just come out around the time of the American launch of the NES in 1986, and remember that the Famicom hardware itself dates back to 1983. The 286 was the hot ticket at that time and I don’t doubt a 286 machine would be better at running your spreadsheets, but certainly not action video games. They’re different machines that are purpose built for different applications.

Home computers desperately tried and failed to match the inherent gaming capability of consoles for quite some time. Remember that it was a big deal at the time that John Carmack managed to make “NES-like” scrolling happen on an IBM PC clone in Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement (the foundation of which later went on to become the Commander Keen games) but its scrolling was still multipixel and choppy and ugly compared to what the humble NES could do in its sleep. (One exception to this may have been the Amiga, which had rather Genesis-like architecture including hardware sprite support.)

It really took the Pentium to get the PC platform in particular in parity with consoles of its era, and that was accomplished through raw computing power up until the time that dedicated gaming oriented graphics cars became prevalent. At that rate the PC was “better” in several respects, see also the entire debacle with trying to get Doom working acceptably on the various 16 bit and early 32 bit consoles, but at the cost of… literally, cost. A PS1 cost $299 on launch day in 1995. A similarly capable PC, not just any random budget desktop, would run you somewhere between $2500 and $3500 in total.

Things got flip-flopped by the time of the advent of the original XBox, and certainly by the 360 and the PS4 on upwards. Desktop computing power had become cheap and accessible enough that it was trivial even at the time to just grab a processor and GPU of the same architecture and capability as was in the OG XBox (or much better!) and just slap it in your computer. In fact, by that time I already had.

My main problem with the current crop of consoles, excepting the Switch/2 (which I have a different problem with) is that they’re all just a cut-down PC anyway. Except one that you don’t control, and is subject to an order of magnitude more vendor bullshit even than usual. Consoles quit being interesting to me not just because of their reliance on internet connectivity and inevitable decay of all of the necessary features that this entails once the manufacturer loses interest in favor of the Next New Thing, but because they don’t do anything inherently interesting anymore. They all basically have the same controller, they all play basically the same games barring console exclusives, and none of them do anything experimental or innovative. Do you want the green one or the blue one? Otherwise, there may as well be no difference.

Except for dumb shit that Sony insists on keeping locked to the PS5 and other dumb shit Microsoft insist(ed) on keeping locked to the XBox Series Whatever, my PC can also have the same controller and play the same games better.

I have a pretty comprehensive collection of retro consoles from the slap-a-cartridge-in-and-play eras, and I have to wonder if anyone is going to bother in the future with preserving the PS4 and XBone, or the PS5 and XBox Series, etc. in the same way when half of what they did doesn’t work anymore because the servers are gone. Not to mention the Switch 2 cartridges which don’t actually contain the games.

In Windows 10, you could move it to the top, left, or right of the screen.

In every version of Windows up until now which has contained a taskbar and start menu, as far back as Windows 95. Not just Windows 10. Let’s not sell short the full extent idiocy on display, here.

“Pouring its engineering resources,” my ass.

He’s definitely wearing gloves. You can also see it on the plasma gun recoil sprite:

The shotgun:

And especially with the super shotgun in Doom 2:

And for good measure, these uncropped pistol sprites are in the “vault” thingy that came with the latest Bethesda rerelease:

Welcome to the wonderful world of people having TikTok brain.

I want to play flat games like Elden Ring same as always in third person, but have the world surrounding me in VR. Maybe there are motion sickness issues that would make that hard.

If you haven’t played any of the Lucky’s Tale games, this is basically exactly how it works. I found that when I was just starting off with VR, this type of third person thing was significantly less motion sickness inducing than first person movement, for whatever it’s worth.

Trover Saves The Universe is another similar take on that idea, if you can stand a shitload of Justin Roiland voice acting. The framework is certainly there for a fully 3D third person VR game. I agree with you that this idea really ought to have legs, and somehow it still doesn’t.

This is quite possibly the dumbest thing I’ve read in my entire life.

If for some reason I am forced in the future to be immersed fully in some manner of dystopian metaverse in order to interact with others, I absolutely do not want my face in the virtual world to be my real face. As a matter of fact, I don’t want anyone’s face to be their real face.

I want to be sitting around that boardroom table with three anime girls, Skeletor, a guy in a samurai mask, and somebody with a horse for a head. For fuck’s sake, get creative.

Also, apparently no one is expected to have a problem with giving goddamn Google an accurate enough scan of your own face that they can use it to produce and animate a photorealistic simulacrum of you and, more likely than not, also shove this data irrevocably into their perpetually hallucinating bullshit generation machine. Has anyone fully read the fine print on this?

I’m good. Miss me with this shit by several miles, please.

The goal of your offset is not to be zero. Actually, in a perfectly ideal world that would be impossible because it would result in your nozzle touching and dragging along the surface on the first layer. Your actual final Z offset figure will be arbitrary based on the vagarities of your particular machine including the total overall length of the nozzle and thickness of the build plate, etc.

The actual goal is to achieve an accurate first layer which results in a thickness of 0.2mm or whatever your first layer’s height is, with minimal inaccuracy. You have to set the offset of the nozzle from the plate via Z axis adjustment such that there is a (literally) paper-thin gap between the tip of the nozzle and the plate. That doesn’t mean just setting it to zero. If setting it to zero actually worked, there would not actually be any reason to calibrate it…

Wiping the bed with alcohol doesn’t really remove any contamination from its surface, it more or less just moves it around. Wash it thoroughly with dish soap and running water as others have suggested and give it a real good rinse afterwards. The goal is to get oils and other contaminants off of the surface and to wash them down the drain, whence they will trouble you no more.

Let me translate this for everyone: “Oh crap, our plan of discouraging competition by dumping devices onto the market at a loss didn’t work. Now we’re scared of Valve.”

You, uh, didn’t turn multiplayer off in your options, did you? That setting doesn’t follow your account around, it’s per machine.

I leave it off on my laptop because it causes the Space Anomaly to devolve into single-digit frame rates when other players are present and rendered, especially when docking.

Note that this doesn’t prevent you from seeing other players’ bases, nor impact the ability to see people on your friends list or their status. Your game will still connect to the servers if it can. It only prevents other players’ keisters and ships from being placed in your universe.

Task Manager is launched by the listener in winlogon if you use the Ctrl + Shift + Esc method though, right? I’m pretty sure you can still launch Task Manager, and from there attempt to relauch Explorer, even if Explorer is borked or not running. You’d just have to know how to do that and that you can.

That’s what I always do when Explorer’s ears inexplicably catch fire and I’m either too lazy or too naively hopeful to reboot.

For anyone following along at home, Windows Explorer is also responsible for displaying the start menu/taskbar. In the example in the article there’s something else funky going on inside Explorer, though, because the taskbar and even the desktop icons are all there, it’s just not rendering correctly. (Explorer is also responsible for showing all of your desktop icons.)

Who wants to be the first to martyr themselves getting turned into Swiss cheese after firing the first shot? Is it you? Why not?

That is your answer.

I’ve never retrobrighted anything because I always had a hunch this would be the case. It turns out I was vindicated. We all know full well that oxygenation is one of the things that deteriorates many materials, including embrittling plastics, and what you’re doing with this stuff is literally just oxygenating the shit out of your plastic in order to bleach it.

For stuff that I’ve really cared about de-yellowing, I’ve always just cleaned it thoroughly and painted over it. This has the added bonus of the paint being an additional protective layer rather than a destructive chemical reaction inflicted on the material itself. Sure, it sucks that you also paint over any logos printed on it or whatever, but you can recreate those with stickers if you really care. I figure that if anybody can’t identify what an NES or Dreamcast or something is shaped like, even without the logos on it, they’re probably not invited to any more of my parties anyway.

IP Over Avian Carriers.

If you have more than one toolhead you’re not limited to just ramming different colors of the same material in there, either. You can run otherwise incompatible filaments that even require different temperatures from each other in the same print. Plus the ram-cut-and-purge brigade rarely work well with soft materials like TPU.

Multiple toolheads is the way to go if you actually want to get work done and not just slowly poop out multicolored low poly Pikachus, or whatever.