• 21 Posts
  • 92 Comments
Joined 1 month ago
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Cake day: April 2nd, 2025

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  • You can use Heroic Games Launcher to download and play Epic games.

    I could, but those games contain and execute Epic code. (I checked this by examining the binaries, which is probably against Epic’s terms of service, but I don’t care if they find out and ban me.) This would still be true even if they were launched with Heroic or some other launcher. After the snooping that Epic code has already been caught doing, I don’t trust it to run on my systems.

    plus I block them in my firewall so no calls home.

    Wise decision.


  • Both Mint and Fedora are community projects licensed and attributed as such, and neither corporate entity could take ownership or close either one.

    I wasn’t suggesting that they would. Rather, I was referring to the strong influence that Red Hat has over Fedora. It might be fine for people who love Red Hat’s design choices, but not so much for people who don’t. That’s why I mentioned Mint as an alternative.

    there is functionally no difference between RedHat<>Fedora and Canonical<>Mint.

    There is, because Debian is upstream of Canonical/Ubuntu. This means Mint can easily sever ties with the latter. In practice, Mint has opted out of Ubuntu-isms more than once, and already maintains a distro based directly on Debian.





  • For the uninformed:

    That was when Blitzchung, in his post-tournament win interview, uttered a brief sentence in support of Hong Kong (and implicitly in support of human rights). Blizzard responded by revoking his prize money, banning him from tournaments, and terminating the interviewers who happened to be on camera with him at the time.

    This action took place late at night (well outside of US business hours) and was accompanied by a letter that some analysts pointed out had peculiar phrasing patterns that one might expect from native-Chinese speakers writing in English. The excuse given was a tournament rule prohibiting any act that “brings you into public disrepute, offends a portion or group of the public, or otherwise damages Blizzard image.”

    To answer your question: No.

    At the subsequent BlizzCon, Blizzard president Allen Brack gave a speech in which he “apologized” for the vague act of failing to live up to the high standards they set for themselves. He didn’t mention Blitzchung at all. This was a typical, predictable, corporate non-apology, allowing them to say “I’m sorry” for something other than the harm they inflicted or the position they took. Neither Brack nor Blizzard apologized for the actions taken against Blitzchung and the interview hosts. The punishments were not reversed. (I think Blizzard eventually responded to massive public pressure by somewhat reducing the duration of Blitzchung’s ban, but never lifted it entirely or restored the interview hosts’ contracts.)

    A few years later, Activision Blizzard was bought by Microsoft. Bobby Kotick, the CEO at the time of the Blitzchung decision, is no longer there. We don’t know who else participated, so we don’t know if they are are still making decisions at Blizzard.












  • This site does detailed reviews, including measurements, photos, and comparisons:

    https://www.rtings.com/monitor
    https://www.rtings.com/review-pipeline/monitor
    https://www.rtings.com/vote/monitor

    This one is good for digging up details about specific models, such as what panel is used or where it was made, also with comparisons:

    https://www.displayspecifications.com/

    Simon over at TFTCentral used to do the best monitor reviews. Sadly, he quietly replaced his site with an OLED-focused blog a few years ago, perhaps because catering to gamers with disposable income makes more money. Nevertheless, he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to displays, his tech articles are still good (if you can find them on the new site), and he might still review IPS models once in a while:

    https://tftcentral.co.uk/

    For me, IPS beats OLED, because:

    1. OLED suffers from burn-in after enough years pass. Some vocal gamers on Reddit don’t seem to care about this, arguing that you’ll throw away the monitor before the burn-in becomes a problem. I think this is irresponsible (unnecessary environmental damage), and wasteful (I keep using my tools until they die).
    2. A good IPS panel will have only mild glow at off-angles. It’s visible around the corners if I’m playing very dark games in a very dark room and sitting close to the screen, but even then, it’s never bothersome, since I don’t spend much time staring at the corners of the screen.
    3. In addition to gaming, I spend lots of time reading text. IPS is generally great for this. OLED panels vary in this area, in some cases even using weird subpixel layouts (e.g. BGR) that defeat font rendering systems like ClearType, making the text anything but sharp. Eye strain sucks.

    I haven’t been following display news in the past year or so, but when I was, LG.Display’s “IPS Black” panels were on their way to market with a promise of higher contrast ratios than traditional IPS. I think Dell or HP were going to use them. By now, more of their kind might exist.

    When I was last shopping for a 27" gaming/productivity display, I narrowed it down to the Asus ROG Strix XG27AQMR, Dell G2724D, and Acer Predator XB273U V3bmiiprx. That was roughly a year ago. I don’t know if those models are still on the market, or if better ones are available now.





  • Mumble for voice chat. (It already beats Discord in that department.) A server can be self-hosted, or rented for dirt cheap.

    Matrix is getting better all the time, and although it won’t replace all of Discord’s features today, it is catching up. I already use it for text chat, and wouldn’t be surprised if it could take over for video, screen share, etc. in the next year or so.

    Tip for people wanting to try Matrix now: Consider disabling encryption on your Discord replacement rooms until Matrix 2.0 is fully released, to avoid occasional frustrating glitches. That won’t be a loss coming from Discord, which doesn’t have end-to-end encryption anyway.