I have a lot of 90s - aughts edutainment stuff that might be of interest to some people in my life. This might be a half decent way to preserve my old PC library for this stuff. I feel like virtual machines are pretty hit and miss and non-technical people don’t seem to enjoy messing around with them

Demoscene, baby. People made things, shared them anonymously, and almost turned their nose at building a reputation or a brand.

The internet I fell in love with years ago is nothing like the pathetic shadow of it we live with today.

Macroblank has a fun compilation of remixed demo music, many of the original tracks are mostly known for being used in keygens. It’s called Keygen, obviously.

There was an idea tooted over on Mastodon

It’ll just be called Microsoft Copilot.

None of you are in an abusive relationship with the cruel mistress that is Windows and her accursed family and it shows.

Personally I’m excited for when they rerelease regedit as Windows Copilot, MFS as (Co)Pilot, and Purble Place as Copilot Kids Demo.

I used to refuse change at the bakery when I was a kid and would instead pick something out of the stack of pirated PS2 games. Something like two US dollars? Three? Not an egregious sum for my child self to waste every so often. The death of the on the ground piracy culture of the third world really sucks, although those beautifully dodgy TV boxes give me hope for humanity.

Those were the fucking days eh? You either catch a movie on TV or in the cinema, or you get lucky with whatever they’ve got on random counters in random shops. Remember watching schlock? Was that bad for culture? Was it really that bad?

Has Z Lib just been down for a while? I think I remember using it not that long ago

The fact that they pass a referral link by default even to Lemmy is really funny.

That all looks good, but I wanted to specifically mention the most simple barebones and decent option that’s already included in software more of us use. I’d think if we’re installing more things we would be looking at something more powerful.

For simple things, the local translation in Firefox has been more than enough. Go to about:translations. It’s pretty limited compared to Google’s frankly impressive language list but I’ve used it almost exclusively since it’s added the languages I need to translate most frequently.

If the Mullvad desktop app could just exclude the Tailscale ports this would be fixed. I like their implementation but I would much rather have the full controls of the Mullvad software itself especially if I’m on a desktop.

I think I’ve heard somewhere an opinion that someone preferred the original atmosphere of the game even if it was flawed. I do wonder if they have a mode for that.

I haven’t played the game so I don’t know, but that’s the first thing I think of for some reason

I’m so vehemently opposed to using their euphemism for it. “Age verification” is just the marketing name for it, it’s identity verification.

O&O Shutup10 is the most straightforward for Windows. You can run it every once in a while to see if anything’s changed, and it will let you know.

I did have reduced frights on and it didn’t work for me. I’ve even read some anecdotes about it being worse than having it off. It doesn’t remove the creatures I think it just makes them walk slower and makes the sounds less jumpy, I think.

Put off the DLC for so long (4 years now? 5?) that I’d have to relearn a fair bit to get back into it.

I remember being chased by a creature and noping out. I’m not built for horror games and that was a huge shift in tone from the idyllic feeling of the base game. I get that the thing I’m avoiding is basically a sprite with eyes and some music cues designed to feel a little stressful but I don’t know.

Pretty sure you get these if you move. These names are common in my part of the world and they’re never common in the place the name refers to. At some point an ancestor moved and it stuck to their kids.

Oh there’s absolutely no excuse for it not to open Terminal when you type terminal. I can’t replicate it on my side but I’ve probably turned that “feature” off ages ago. I’m a little surprised at the downvotes, as I’m making fun of Windows. Linux used to have a reputation for its learning curve, especially knowing CLI commands. Daunting stuff for the average user. It’s better now, and beautifully enough it’s Microsoft’s fuckery with putting unwanted shit in their OS that’s teaching people more about the inner workings of the system they’re using, both pushing them towards gutting the OS, and towards other OSes. In the Lemmy demographic that’s usually Linux, around me it’s actually been Macs, and those are even more egregiously expensive where I live.

Another way the esotericness tables have turned: the Windows configuration UIs have similar names, do adjacent functions, and aren’t listed anywhere in one place. You have to know what setting you want and where it’s found. There used to be one Control Panel, and a few advanced tools you could find in the Start menu. Microsoft wants to “modernize” some of these, so they’ve pulled parts of their settings piecemeal into their new Settings UI (which they call an app, I don’t like that). But you still have some settings that are still in the legacy Control Panel UI. You have a ton of settings that are still in standalone legacy settings UIs. Some of them look like Windows 10, some like Vista/7, and there’s a handful that look like Windows 95. You need to know that the display color calibration options in the Settings UI can be overridden by the vendor’s control software (that’s a whole rant), and that what you actually want is a standalone settings window called Color Management. You need to know what operations can be done in Disk Management, Disk Cleanup, Optimize Drives, you need to know that they exist, and you then need to know if the command you want is actually only achievable in diskpart. I have nothing against diskpart but I can’t tell you which among Terminal, PowerShell, or Windows PowerShell (or any of the x86 variations plural of each of them) is the right place to use it. I can intuitively tell it’s not Windows PowerShell ISE or Azure Cloud Shell though. Yay for computer literacy. I type cmd into the Start menu and it works from there, so I’m content with that. I can’t say Raspberry Pi OS has this many configuration locations but once you know the two or three places to look you’re done.

I know that I will have to move to Linux eventually. I’ve only complained about things in Windows that aren’t designed to abuse the users directly, which is a drop in the bucket, ethically at least, when you look at the responsibilities of the world’s most (or second most) influential company regarding personal computing. But I look at all this and feel like it’s accelerating the scary trend of younger people getting worse with computers. I was able to follow instructions correctly in a novel computer environment to set up a mini homelab with a bunch of Linux servers talking to each other. People my own age and slightly younger at work seem to know fuck all about the computers we use and that terrifies me. We were supposed to get better over time, not worse! There’s a new, younger IT guy, he’s not much younger than me, and half of what I’m procedurally required to ask his help on is something he doesn’t understand at all.

Home server mountain hermit life is no longer over the horizon for me, that’s all I can say really.

You’re not wrong but there’s something very funny about a gaggle of Linux evangelists complaining about it not being obvious what aliases to type to open something

AFAIK there was a memory leak in PowerToys. But it’s definitely ballooned in scope since it was first released. I suppose turning off the parts you don’t need would help but it really should still be more efficient. Doesn’t help that the Microsoft Department of AI Department seems to have started sinking its teeth into it as of the last few updates.

Few years ago, people literally had to rob the bank for their own money here. Thing was, when you went to the bank and you asked for your money and they didn’t give it to you, they were technically breaking the law, and you brandishing a weapon to while asking for something that is legally yours is not a particular crime. The thought of threatening a bank employee whose job was to be a verbal punching bag for an evil financial system wasn’t appealing to many people, and most people didn’t have enough in there for it to be worth it, so it wasn’t as common as the media made it out to be.

A lot of “robbers” used obviously fake “weapons” and that did work - while also giving plausible deniability towards the law (“I didn’t really make a threat”) and for the employee (“I was being threatened and complied” without actually being in danger).

You’d think our sordid history with capitalism would instill a lesson or two in our society but vapid “entrepreneur” culture and socio-economic pick-me-ism are at an all time high here and every day I am drawn more to the mountain hermit life and this is not a joke.