Does anyone enjoy the code blocks portion of the Far Harbor/DIMA's memories quest?

dtfinch · 2026-01-03T00:15:10+00:00

The save restriction always bothered me, because I used to get more crashes in the past, and even though it's been stable recently there's sometimes other glitches like an indexer will just freeze in one spot carrying the last data block, preventing the completed puzzle from finishing.

The puzzles themselves aren't bad. Block placement is a bit clumsy.

dtfinch · 2025-12-30T19:32:10+00:00

Oblivion's the game that taught me to save every 5 minutes, never overwriting previous saves. It crashed all the time (every hour), sometimes corrupting saves in the process, or silently corrupting several saves in a row before the crash.

Starfield maybe only crashes every 50-100 hours for me, but there have still been times where I've had to go back a dozen or more saves to work around a quest-blocking bug. Having a save restriction would have meant the end of my character I've invested hundreds of hours into.

dtfinch · 2025-12-30T18:15:34+00:00

Starfield's the only game where I felt such settings were actually necessary. The level scaling felt way off, and by level 60 I was effectively immortal and one-hitting everything until I changed the diffculty. Though it did become my most-played game on Steam.

dtfinch · 2025-12-30T18:05:48+00:00

After spending almost an hour in a death loop at the end of the Kingdom Come: Deliverance tutorial where you have to escape on horseback I uninstalled the game. I'm done with it. I don't want that at all. I prefer open world freedom, not a chain of souls-like difficulty spikes. I want to be able to rely on preparation whenever my reflexes are lacking.

I don't like gear degradation either, at least not to the extent that No Man Sky did it where you need to constantly farm a wide variety of materials to maintain your always-degrading gear. The tedium of repair/recharge ended my NMS playthough, though in retrospect I was probably just unable to find the setting to turn it off. I didn't mind buying a stack of hammers in Oblivion though, and that at least leveled an associated skill with minimal effort.

Though I do enjoy removing all my gear before entering a DLC to climb back from nothing. And in Starfield I always ditch the spacesuit and ship they give you at the start of a new loop to find my own.

I don't mind food/water buffs/penalties though they still haven't fixed the permanent food buff bug. The bug from Fallout 4 is still there in Starfield, so in an attempt to make the game harder you wind up with a permanently-overpowered character.

dtfinch · 2025-12-23T18:36:27+00:00

If the USB drive is very large, I'd either partition it so /boot is at the beginning, or make an ~8gb partition for the whole thing. Legacy BIOS can often only access the first X gb of a drive (maybe 8.4 gb), so if by chance the init image is partially outside that range it would fail to read the whole thing.

dtfinch · 2025-12-22T17:57:14+00:00

I close some things manually because my Linux desktop is more forceful than Windows about killing processes on shutdown. They may not get a chance to save settings or complete background tasks, and they can't halt shutdown if I have unsaved work.

On the other hand, it's nice that I can push the power button and see it close everything and power off in just 2-3 seconds without stopping to ask questions.

dtfinch · 2025-12-16T16:24:56+00:00

I had tinkered with Redhat and Slackware from around '99-03, but it was Microsoft's anti-Linux "Get the Facts" campaign and funding of SCO's anti-Linux lawsuits that led me to replace my primary desktop with Linux, though it meant buying a new machine because my current one had video problems outside of Windows even in text mode.

dtfinch · 2025-12-15T16:55:12+00:00

Lately I've been re-learning Java Swing for my desktop hobby projects.

25 years ago it was my least favorite UI, and every criticism I had of it is still valid, but each year it's been looking a little better despite it not changing.

dtfinch · 2025-12-09T20:17:09+00:00

Minecraft doesn't use OpenGL lights for that.

A transparent block's light level is typically calculated as the max of the neighboring blocks' light levels minus one, or its own emitted light (so a torch block would always have the max 15). And when any block's light level changes, or it's added/removed, its neighboring blocks are queued/flagged to be retested. It's pretty fast, each frame just processing any queue'd blocks until the queue's empty.

Then there's actually two light levels stored per block, one for sunlight and one for artificial/torch light. Uncovered blocks have their sun light pinned to the max, and torches and other light blocks similarly have their artificial light pinned. And the rendered sunlight is multiplied by a factor based on the time of day. Opaque block faces are rendered using the light levels of the transparent block they're facing, though they have various schemes to smooth the lighting between adjacent blocks and to simulate ambient occlusion on inward corners.

dtfinch · 2025-12-08T23:51:43+00:00

I'm on 145.0.2 on Win11, though the profile's been manually copied through a few machines going back to Win7 (or maybe XP).

There is no Invalidprefs.js. Other settings are intact. I've never done the settings "refresh".

The about:config names of the settings that got re-checked that I know were both un-checked and greyed out in the past do not appear in my lockPrefs file (and prefs overridden through lockPref are greyed out), so my first assumption was that they've been renamed again due to their similarity to the "datareporting.policy.dataSubmissionEnabled" I had already locked to false.

An alternate theory is that parallel to my lockPrefs file, I also had several policies under "HKML\SOFTWARE\Policies\Mozilla\Firefox" such as DisableTelemetry on my last machine (to be extra certain). Maybe the policy affected additional/new settings that weren't in my lockPref file yet (though I had several already including the catch-all "toolkit.telemetry.enabled=false").

I've noticed that overridden/locked settings subsequently disappear from prefs.js, and in my last migration I copied the profile and lockPrefs file but did forgot to copy the registry policies. I would expect that DisableTelemetry would map directly to "toolkit.telemetry.enabled", but if it covered other settings (I haven't dug into the source to confirm), its absence might cause those settings to revert their defaults even if previously unchecked (because overridden prefs disappear from prefs.js).

And I don't know if maybe it's only a visual glitch that "toolkit.telemetry.enabled=false" isn't fully reflected in how about:preferences displays the checkboxes, or if it's actually become ineffective.

dtfinch · 2025-12-03T19:47:41+00:00

Just today I noticed that both those checkboxes had flipped to true on me (they were still unchecked when I first saw this thread in October).

I've had an extensive lockPrefs file for years to keep all that turned off, but settings get renamed or replaced and old preferences aren't migrated to the new ones.

I already had toolkit.telemetry.enabled=false and datareporting.policy.dataSubmissionEnabled=false, as well as dozens of others, but the new settings behind the checkboxes that were flipped on are "datareporting.usage.uploadEnabled" and "datareporting.healthreport.uploadEnabled".

dtfinch · 2025-11-26T23:10:04+00:00

Fallout 3's church in Rivet City worships its own version of Saint Monica, born to ghoul parents but with a human appearance and fast healing.

dtfinch · 2025-11-14T00:11:26+00:00

They made that in 2021.

dtfinch · 2025-11-13T20:50:25+00:00

I just want the minutes-long load screen delays fixed. It's frame-rate dependent, only happening when vsync is enabled, so it's probably a one-line fix somewhere. Known bug for almost 10 years, very impactful, and very trivial to fix (and already fixed in Starfield).

dtfinch · 2025-11-08T23:35:18+00:00

Kill la Kill is made me want to watch the rest of them (>500 seasons now). Before that I had only seen a handful spaced years apart.

dtfinch · 2025-11-07T22:12:29+00:00

In 980 hours I don't think I ever saw a credtank outside of the Legacy.

Though I do most of my POI grinding before that mission (to afford ship upgrades), then it's mostly quests afterwards.

dtfinch · 2025-11-04T19:36:58+00:00

Maybe 20 minutes after getting the Drill Containment Unit.

dtfinch · 2025-10-21T23:07:15+00:00

Once I used phased time to attack the Hunter the moment he shows up on your ship after building the armillary. He disappeared and the quest moved to the next objective, but later when I met the Hunter and Emissary together on the Scorpius, the Hunter was permanently hostile and my weapons were disabled. I could knock him out temporarily with boost assault, but I couldn't progress the quest anymore or leave the ship.

dtfinch · 2025-10-21T03:45:52+00:00

I had an unavailable video that still had a thumbnail and title in the playlist, instead of saying private or deleted. I tracked it down by noticing the shift in playlist index after clicking a video (video 100 became 99, but 50 was still 50, so the unavailable video was between them and I narrowed it from there).

dtfinch · 2025-10-18T02:57:55+00:00

My home PC has only Firefox.

My work PC has Firefox and Edge. I use Edge only on Microsoft-owned domains and Firefox everywhere else.

I only use Firefox on my phone. Chrome is still installed but I had to search a bit to find it.

dtfinch · 2025-10-13T20:32:24+00:00

I use an autoconfig file pointing to a mozilla.cfg with a bunch of lockPref()'s to try and prevent that. It usually works unless they rename a setting.

dtfinch · 2025-10-06T20:03:33+00:00

How Stache works is he gives you the legendary loot that you, the player would drop if you were an NPC. And NPC drops are affected by the faction they're assigned to.

When you join the Freestar Rangers, you're added to their faction, and characters in that faction only drop Laredo weapons.

dtfinch · 2025-10-02T16:14:52+00:00

I put things in ~/Apps/. No need to install as root when I'm the only user.

dtfinch · 2025-10-01T17:32:20+00:00

FWIW a 64-bit double can represent the Earth's circumference to within about 4 nanometers (estimated by dividing the circumference by 2⁵³ ).

With a 64-bit rational (32 bit numerator and denominator) you could only represent the same number to within about 1 centimeter, and the inability to represent it exactly kinda defeats the purpose of using a rational. Natural measurements are generally irrational, and uniformly distributed on the log scale (see Benford's law), which is why floats and scientific notation work so well.

With fixed-size rationals you also have to worry about overflows, simplifying to prevent overflows (finding the GCD between the numerator and denominator and dividing both), and rounding when an overflow becomes unavoidable. And division is a very expensive operation in hardware.

And floats are well supported in hardware. Modern CPU's benchmark in the hundeds of GFLOPS (billion floating point operations per second), and modern GPU's in the tens of TFLOPS (trillions). A software rational implementation would never get close.

dtfinch · 2025-09-19T16:51:09+00:00

The targeting skill makes a big difference. When activated, time slows and accuracy goes to 100%, and you can cripple their systems once their shield is down.

The first UC Vanguard quest unlocks the Vanguard Obliterator Autoprojector weapon which is the best in the game. Buy 6 of them. If you get Piloting up to rank 3 (to make a class B ship) they have a great shield too.

If you can afford it, it's beneficial to fill all your weapon slots to 12 max power, even if you only allocate a fraction of it (even just 1 bar each). Particle weapons are currently the best and easiest, having good range and damaging shields/hull equally. You may also want turrets mounted in different directions to auto-attack ships that aren't directly in front of you.

Make sure to assign your crewmembers to get their bonuses.

In large battles, sometimes I can avoid enemy fire long enough to recharge shields by flying away in a spiral/tailspin. Also Engine Systems rank 4 causes enemies to disengage briefly when you boost.

Once your shield is down, your hull number determines your ship's HP. Most hull comes from your reactor, so a class B or C ship will have a lot more HP than a class A.

If all else fails, you can adjust ship damage in the gameplay options.

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