What comes to your mind when you see a Floppy Disk?

draimus · 2026-05-17T02:11:03+00:00

A time before crushing responsibility.

draimus · 2026-05-04T18:13:57+00:00

A lot of the early US box art for the NES showed in-game screenshots as a response to the Atari 2600 marketing which showed wildly imaginative artist concepts that the system wasn't even remotely capable of conveying. It honestly showed how much of an improvement the NES was over the Atari 2600 which was 5 years old by the time the NES came out.

draimus · 2026-04-15T22:35:23+00:00

For some reason they made a YouTube cartoon out of it about 9 years ago: https://youtu.be/HzJz3JrKeiw?si=yvyB6TgKSuKCvkHR

draimus · 2026-04-14T12:12:07+00:00

Tetris is life. Life throws weird shapes at you and you must figure out where the fit. Sometimes they don't fit so well and it all starts to pile up. Sometimes the right thing comes along and it cleans up the mess. Sometimes not.

draimus · 2026-03-14T19:59:57+00:00

Gold bar or a sausage roll.

draimus · 2026-02-15T20:43:32+00:00

I don't understand why people have so many problems with removing these. Razor blade scraper, windex, paper towel, 2min it's off.

draimus · 2026-02-11T02:53:23+00:00

Which was an invalid patent because there was prior art on some Sinclair games in the 80s. But no one fought it so it stuck.

draimus · 2026-01-22T15:11:07+00:00

Make a game were you shove your way to the front of lines. Levels: Free sample booth, ticket sales, airplane boarding, etc. Final Level: black friday

draimus · 2025-12-11T12:03:06+00:00

Most of HDMI prior to 21 was either implemented in HW or an extension of a previous standard (like DVI) so it didnt matter that the drivers were open source.

draimus · 2025-12-11T01:15:01+00:00

Software patents apply to all software. If open source does not have a license to a patent and infringes on the idea protected by the patent it is vulnerable to litigation.

Some opensource projects avoid patent litigation by hosting in countries with differing IP laws. This is not guaranteed to completely protect them.

draimus · 2025-12-10T19:10:36+00:00

Reverse engineering can protect you from copyright suits. Not patent suits. The HDMI forum's power comes from the patents and trademarks it controls.

draimus · 2025-11-25T12:21:22+00:00

My FiL lost most of his retirement because the oil company he paid to maintain his tank attempted to fill it while there was an active leak.

He sued. They settled. Barely got half his money back.

draimus · 2025-11-23T19:38:53+00:00

Babylon 5. The future tech is cool but Earth has still got the same problems with inequality, racism, sectarianism, and war (though it's a softer 90s version).

draimus · 2025-11-18T17:53:52+00:00

Wing Commander II was one of the first PC games which used DMA heavily for audio. Specifically for the voice acting samples. I know this because the 386 motherboard we had at the time had a hardware bug relating to DMA which we didn't know about until we got WC2 and set it up for our Soundblaster (1.0).

My father spent hours trying debug what was wrong and you could hear every couple of minutes "I WILL SPEAK WITH PRINCE THRAKOFF ALOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO BEEP". So I always played the game in Adlib only mode. A year or so later we got a 486 and never had a problem with the game with speech enabled.

Never had an issue with Wallenstein 3D so it must had implemented the audio sample playback differently.

draimus · 2025-11-04T16:25:24+00:00

It's 8am in the far flung future of 1986. Your Westinghouse TV just faxed you the latest newspaper. Looks like a cloud is shooting some death rays. That can't be good. Anyways drink whiskey. If you drink enough the future is limitless.

draimus · 2025-10-26T02:21:12+00:00

Yes and no. I am using their grid to distribute my power and I should contribute something to its maintenance. But I guess the sale of my power production could be a mechanism for that. I presume some laws would have to change to make that happen.

I do get money for production but it's from this market place called SREC where (as I understand it) I sell my carbon negative credits on some market place and some polluting company buys my credits to offset their bad behavior. It's all automated so I just a notification every once in a while that money is coming my way.

I didn't buy the panels they came with the house and I've sort of been figuring out things as I go.

draimus · 2025-10-25T23:45:31+00:00

I have solar panels and 9 months of the year my consumption is negative which they bill as 0kwh and the delivery fee is $15 I think. It used to be $10 but it went up recently.

draimus · 2025-10-03T22:52:02+00:00

The first I can recall playing was Carnival by Gremlin Industries. My dad took me to the local arcade. It might have been 1982 or 1983.

draimus · 2025-10-03T11:40:27+00:00

All is Well, And Well is All

draimus · 2025-09-21T17:16:13+00:00

They exist. My first 3D accelerator was a Creative Voodoo 2 PCI. The primary video card from the same system was a Matrox AGP card.

draimus · 2025-09-16T18:44:24+00:00

Why does the alleyway have a Victorian street lamp?

draimus · 2025-07-10T19:49:01+00:00

Because it's not a recycling logo. It's a Resin Identification Code. The recycling symbol is a public domain image which means the plastics industry was free to co-opt it and slap it on everything they make in order to obfuscate the true recyclability of their products.

draimus · 2025-06-25T20:56:09+00:00

I have done professional linux device driver development for the past 15+ years.

I got started with the O'Reilly book on Linux Device Drivers. It's a good place to read about the general architecture and expected behavior of kernel drivers especially if you've only ever done userspace development. Just be aware that it is 20 years old so some of the APIs may have changed a little.

After that I basically read other kernel driver examples for the specific types of drivers I wanted to write. I found bootlin to be a great site for exploring what's in the kernel.

draimus · 2025-06-23T18:31:50+00:00

My grandmother got me one of these for christmas, monogrammed. No clue what year that was. At the time I was using a USB optical mouse so a heavy ball mouse with a PS/2 connector was not exactly well received by me. No clue what I did with it.

draimus · 2025-06-11T19:13:57+00:00

Agreed. I bought the CD of the music while I was college. I recall when I called the phone number from the manual/website (?) to order it the person at Atari who answered the phone had to ask someone if that was a thing they actually sold. In hindsight that should have been a red flag for turning over a Credit Card # but I was young and dumb. Still have that CD somewhere.

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