California. It’s about 70°F (21°C) outdoors.

I’m barefoot.

I imagine that there is one for marketing additional accessories to.

If you seriously want to set something like this up, you’re going to need a device that can emit the smells that you want.

This instance of a device looks like it uses atomizers hooked up to different tanks:

https://www.amazon.com/Automatically-Releases-Immersive-Compatible-Platforms/dp/B0CNMXSN2K

I’d imagine that one run as many tanks as one wanted.

One limiting factor is that scent isn’t going to immediately change when you change your virtual environment. I’d guess that emitting the vapor close to your face, maybe running a hose up towards it, would help. Probably want some kind of exhaust to purge the previous smell from the room. My guess is that the reason that the reason that a “booth” is used in the submitted article is to minimize the airspace surrounding the user and thus clearing time.

Second, some form of computer control. Maybe some device that has relays controlled via USB. A relay is an electromechanical switch that can can cut power to an atomizer on and off, could run it to the atomizer.

https://ncd.io/usb-relay/

Those guys sell USB devices with up to 64 relays. I haven’t looked, but it probably looks to the computer like a virtual serial port, takes text commands.

Then you need some kind of daemon running on the computer to send these commands at appropriate times.

And lastly, you need some way to trigger the daemon when the game is seeing some sort of event. Could monitor the game’s logfile if it has one and contains the necessary information – I recall some Skyrim-hooking software that does this – take a screenshot periodically and analyze it, or identify and then monitor the game’s memory, probably either a technique called library injection (on Linux, library interposers are a way to so this) or using the same API that debuggers use.

If the hentai game that your friend is after is Ren’Py-based – a popular option for visual novels, which many such games are – and the game includes the Python source .rpy files, which some do, then the game’s source itself could simply be modified. If it contains only compiled .rpyc files, that won’t be an option.

You’re going to need to obtain whatever scents you want to emit as well. You can get collections of essential oils – the aromatherapy crowd is into those – and mix them up to create blends that you want, stick 'em in the atomizer tanks.

One issue is that hacking it into an existing game is going to mean that the game isn’t intentionally designed around the use of scent.

Ah, gotcha, thanks.

The thing the guy is poking at is a synthesizer, a device that lets you compose music and synthesizes the audio.

He got a service manual that showed some technical information about a similar synthesizer that indicated that some of the pins on one of the chips were used for a standard interface used to diagnose problems on devices, called JTAG. He guessed correctly that his similar synthesizer also used the same pins for this.

He made some guesses about what functionality was present, and was able to identify the microprocessor and download the device firmware using this port.

He then went looking for interesting bits of text in the firmware. What he ran across was something that appeared to be a diagnostic shell (I.e. you enter commands and can see a response) as well as the password to access it.

He didn’t know how one reached the shell. He went digging in the firmware further and discovered that the device – which acted as a MIDI device over USB to a host computer – took in special MIDI commands that would go to this shell.

Now he had a way to access the shell any time he had one of these synths plugged into his computer via USB – he didn’t need to physically connect to the diagnostic pins on the chip.

One feature of the shell permitted modifying RAM on the synthesizer. It wasn’t intended to let one upload executable code, but he uploaded it into some unused memory and then overwrote the frame pointer on the stack used by the shell program to point to that code (which a processor uses to know where to continue executing after running a subroutine) and then returned into his code, which let him get to the point where he could not just upload code to the microprocessor but also run it.

He wrote his own transfer program for high-speed data transfer over USB and modified the in-RAM code that displayed video.

This then let him upload video to part of the display and display it at a relatively high frame rate, which is the anime video shown in the last section. I believe that the laptop in the foreground is showing the original frames.

My understanding from two articles recently posted here is that it is a fad for hardware hackers to play this “bad apple” anime video on all sorts of old and low end devices.

I’ve long wished that FPS games could be updated to modern engines. Problem is, as things stand, it’s normally done with a lot of manual work. Occasionally there are remakes. Sometimes fans go out and do stuff like OpenMW for Morrowind, reimplement the entire game engine and often add support for modern features like antialiasing or reflective water or dynamic shadows or whatever. Which is impressive, don’t get me wrong, but it will never result in it being the norm for games to be forward-ported. Too much work. And it creates ongoing maintenance work, especially if you want to keep up with new hardware.

The way multi-language, multi-architecture compilers work is to have an intermediate representation. So, if you want to support a new language, you just write a translator from your language to that intermediate representation. If you want to support a new architecture, you just write a translator from the intermediate representation to your new architecture. This is increasingly efficient as the number of targets and languages increase, since to support N languages on M architectures, you write N+M translators, rather than NxM (which you’d do if you wrote a specific translator to a specific architecture and wanted to support all combinations). And it isolates the maintenance work – someone adding support for a new architecture doesn’t need to worry about knowing how Language X works or bother to support it.

What I’ve wondered about is doing something like that for video game worlds. Have a software package that can convert Fallout: New Vegas’s world to such an intermediate representation, something capable of expressing all of the stuff in existing game worlds, then having a generator that can output that intermediate representation to Starfield’s engine, for example. A number of games make use of Lua for scripting support, which also would somewhat-facilitate forward-porting game logic. Some functionality that isn’t present in older games would require some human involvement – like, say Old Engine doesn’t support volumetric fog and New Engine does, maybe when converting to the intermediate representation, one has the option to add it, requires some game-specific work in the part of the Old-Game-To-Intermediate-Representation translator.

I agree – and before DnT, there was P3P, which also would have done it – but it is what it is at the moment.

I’m mostly exasperated with it because I wipe all cookies each browser restart, which is a much more-reliable and less-obnoxious solution than the EU’s regulatory approach of trying to convince the remote end not to make use of its ability to set them. If you do that, you get the cookie banner every time on sites that show it, which means that the cookie banner regulation has made my experience rather worse. And unfortunately, some sites show the banner to non-EU-based users – we don’t elect EU representatives, but we still get some spillover from their policies.

There’s some Firefox plugin that will try to hide the cookie banners:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/istilldontcareaboutcookies/

EDIT: Yeah, from the description on there, the author is doing exactly what I am with the “not retaining cookies” approach, and smacking into how poorly that interacts with the cookie banner regulation:

The EU regulations require that any website using tracking cookies must get user’s permission before installing them. These warnings appear on most websites until the visitor agrees with the website’s terms and conditions. Imagine how irritating that becomes when you surf anonymously or if you delete cookies automatically every time you close the browser.

Probably it should only do so if the link is actually being hyperlinked which doesn’t happen for blockquoted text, so I guess it’s probably a Lemmy bug.

Might also try [email protected].

For users, this tight integration was incredibly convenient.

In Firefox, I have had any search starting with “gm” set up to do a Google Maps search. So “gm Omaha” will go to Omaha.

That is, I create a bookmark that’s aimed at:

https://maps.google.com/maps?q=%25s

and then in the Bookmark Manager, set the keyword to “gm”.

Kagi – which uses bang prefixes to do searches on external sites – appears to have done the same thing on the service side with “!gm”. So “!gm Omaha”. (They normally have their own, OpenStreetMap-based map thing, but if you want to do Google Maps, that’ll do it.)

EDIT: For some reason, the Lemmy Web UI seems determined to convert “%s” to “%25s” in the URL above, and I can’t seem to find an escape sequence that avoids that. It’s intended to just be “%s”.

Just to be sure that this isn’t driven by misunderstanding, do you specifically require a smaller printer, or do you simply want to be able to print on A5 paper? Are you sure that a mini printer that can print on US Letter or A4 can’t print on A5?

I haven’t used a mini printer, but I think that all of the traditional printers that I’ve used can handle smaller paper – the paper size is just a maximum that the feed system can handle. I’d assume that getting a larger-format mini printer will probably also be capable of doing A5.

Kagi lets you blacklist individual domains yourself, but I think what OP is asking is “is there a search engine that identifies and blacklists AI generated content itself”.

I think that the answer is probably that yes, probably all search engines try to block spam websites of any sort, AI-generated or no, and will do so all the time, or at least downrank them. Trying to present relevant, useful material at the top of the results is basically the business that search engines are in.

Now, do any do so to a level sufficient to fully eliminate them? I’d guess not. SEO spammers have been trying to pollute top results with their hits for about as long as search engines have been around, and trying to cheaply bulk-generate content that looks like something that the user might want is just the latest form this takes. My guess is that that’ll be a cat-and-mouse game for some time to come.

Honestly, are there that many people who do a carnivorous diet?

Omnivores, sure, but exclusively meat?

I think that the Inuit traditionally eat overwhelmingly meat, as there isn’t a lot of plant food available, but I don’t know about exclusively.

Like, vegans already have their own issues in getting the right nutrients, and I’d think that carnivores would have a harder time. Scurvy?

Steam does spit out some diagnostic messages, and I believe – don’t quote me on this – that programs that it runs normally have the same stderr/stdio, so stuff they write will show up there as well. Normally, these are not saved in a file. I generally launch it from a script, so that it’ll save said log messages in a file that I can view.

gam-steam.sh:

#!/bin/bash

# Some games (Wasteland 2) require more file descriptors
ulimit -S -n 4096

exec steam "$@" >~/.steamlog -console -nobigpicture -nochatui -nofriendsui -silent 2>&1 &

Leaves log messages in .steamlog in my home directory. You may or may not want some of those other options being passed to Steam.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzi3k7K0lFA

goes back to check scripts

Yeah, looks like I ran it with Proton, albeit outside of Steam. That being said, as long as you don’t mind maybe having WINE and Proton update your .reg files when they alternately run and display a little window while doing so, I also didn’t have a problem with running Skyrim utilities with WINE on the same WINEPREFIX as Proton.

gam-sr-proton.sh:

#!/bin/bash
fo4_prefix=~/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata/489830/pfx
steamapps=~/".steam/steam/steamapps"
proton_dist=~/".steam/debian-installation/steamapps/common/Proton - Experimental/files"

export PATH="$proton_dist/bin/:$PATH"
export WINEDLLPATH="$proton_dist/lib64/wine:$proton_dist/lib/wine"
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$proton_dist/lib64:$proton_dist/lib:/usr/lib/steam:/usr/lib32/steam"

WINEPREFIX="$fo4_prefix" WINEESYNC=1 "$proton_dist/bin/./wine" "$@"

gam-sr-lodgen.sh:

#!/bin/bash
exec gam-sr-proton.sh ~/".steam/steam/steamapps/common/Skyrim Special Edition/SSELODGen 3.2.1-6642-3-2-1/SSELODGen.exe"

I suppose that you could probably also set up Mod Organizer 2 to run it. Think I maybe initially did that script back when I was using Wrye Bash.

I’ve used Mod Organizer 2 successfully, and is the one I would recommend (for Skyrim, never tried modding Morrowind and Oblivion). Have Steam launch MO2, have MO2 launch Skyrim. Also works with Fallout 4 modding.

I’ve made Wrye Bash work both natively in Linux and via WINE before, as it’s in Python. However, it wasn’t easy – it didn’t work out of the box, and I had to both apply patches and hand-modify some of its filesystem code – and was becoming more problematic on HEAD in git. I don’t know if the situation has improved since then. I consistently saw a certain level of breakage with the wxWindows widgets that it used – had controls operate flakily and such. I would recommend MO2 over it, unless things have improved since the last time I looked at it.

I don’t recommend manual installation of mods in general; it’s a pain to manage. You want a mod manager.

A few things – most notably SKSE – do require manual installation, as they aren’t packaged in a “mod” zip that MO2 recognizes; the executable should go in the top-level game directory. SKSE does work.

If you’re running Bodyslide to regenerate clothing models, run that through Mod Organizer 2 as well.

If you modify animations, IIRC I wasn’t able to get Nemesis working; I did have luck with FNIS.

I have never attempted to get ENB shaders working, so I can’t say whether-or-not that works on Linux.

Setting up a modded install is still – depending upon the scope of what you want to do – a major project, but the challenges in tracking down mod incompatibility issues isn’t really Linux specific. If you go install a couple hundred mods, you’re going to have a broken installation. I would set aside some time for this. I also used binary-search shooting – if your install isn’t working, disable the second half of your mod list. If it still isn’t working, then disable the second half of the first half of your mods and repeat, etc. That’ll find a problematic mod in time logarithmic in the number of mods you have.

EDIT: If you want to run Morrowind in Linux, you may want to run the open-source engine reimplementation OpenMW, which is a lot-more-capable than original game. I played Morrowind on OpenMW, and the mods I used worked there (though damned if I can remember how I managed them, but I don’t recall it being a hassle).

EDIT2: I was able to get browser links working with Linux-native browsers using the nxm: links on Nexus, having Mod Organizer 2 handle said links to download and install mods, which I found to be the most-amenable way to do so for mods hosted on NexusMods.

EDIT3: You may want to use the latest Glorious Eggroll build of Proton. I distinctly remember some issues that there was some patch to work around involving heap memory allocation by SKSE that Valve’s Proton builds didn’t handle at some point and Glorious Eggroll did, though I can’t recall whether that was both Skyrim or Fallout 4 that smacked into it.

EDIT4: I don’t recall whether I used modorganizer2-linux-installer for the whole thing at the end, but I am sure that the nxm link handler I used, modorganizer2-nxm-broker.sh, came from there. That’s probably the first thing that I’d run, as it’s intended to be a one-script setup for a Mod Organizer 2/Skyrim setup in Linux. If it works, great, you’re mostly done with the setup (just need to manually install SKSE, which I don’t believe it installs).

EDIT5: If you dick stuff up to the point that you want to roll back to a fresh Skyrim install, reinstalling Skyrim from Steam takes an obnoxiously long period of time, because Skyrim is large and Steam will download it again. What I did was to tarball the Skyrim game directory (~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Skyrim) after getting it installed from Steam and launching and closing it once (IIRC Skyrim does some init on the first launch that I also avoided). That produced a quick way to roll back to a virgin installation state. If you break something and can’t readily get it back, delete the game directory and untarball that tarball, as that’ll let you roll back to “just installed Skyrim” state. Not critical, but I used tar -Ipixz; the pixz compressor supports parallel decompression, which also speeds this up, as a tarball of the whole Skyrim game directory is pretty large.

EDIT6: Another good reason to use a mod manager and not to manually-install mods, at least using Linux-based decompression tools to just unpack them into the game directory: Linux has a case-sensitive filesystem (well, unless you want to rig up your Skyrim directory to be case-insensitive, which you can do with some filesystems). WINE/Proton already handles making this case insensitive, does something like convert to lowercase and cache a hashed list of directory names for fast lookups, so stuff that goes through the WINE/Proton layer like Mod Organizer 2 can do stuff in a case-insensitive way. Unfortunately, there is no convention for Skyrim mods as to what case to use – on Windows, it doesn’t matter – so different mods will have different cases when they try to overwrite the same file. As a result, if you try to install mods created by people modding for Windows on a typical Linux filesystem using Linux tools, you’re probably going to get different copies of the file using different case, which will produce a mess. The easiest way I found to deal with it was to just use Windows-based tools like Mod Organizer 2 to unpack mods, leverage the WINE case-insensitivity code to deal with all this.

EDIT7: Apparently it is possible to get ENB shaders working on Linux, according to the modorganizer2-linux-installer page. I have not personally tried to use them.

I imagine Washington and Beijing are probably in some degree of concurrence about US defense contractors not having a supply chain that goes through China.

He said that he’s exhausted his drive enclosures:

The desktop has no more open SATA ports or drive enclosures, so I’m not sure what the best option for adding more drives is.

So I guess he could use eSATA and some kind of external enclosure or something, but he’s gonna need more than just throwing more drives in the desktop and adding a PCI SATA controller card to get more places to plug 'em in.