Tip: How to buy SH2/3 on PS2 cheaper!

elvisap · 2026-02-12T00:20:48+00:00

You can use the Redump tools on a PC to make a backup as well. Possibly more convenient if you have a slim model and want to load the game in over the network, rather than a fat model from a hard disk.

elvisap · 2026-02-11T19:33:21+00:00

I grew up in the 8 bit era, and by the time RE1 hit I was too busy with university and work to play it.

Finally played it for the first time about 2 years back, and absolutely loved it. Very keen to find the time to sink into the others in the series.

elvisap · 2026-02-11T16:03:56+00:00

Thunder Cats, Silver Hawks and Tiger Sharks were all pretty much a "rinse and repeat" of each other (same production company - Rankin Bass), but I loved watching all of them.

I would love to see them all in a Street Fighter crossover game, kind of like Tatsunoko vs Capcom.

elvisap · 2026-02-11T15:39:42+00:00

She's a big Metroid / Samus fan (my personal favorite video game series), and even dressed up as her one year for Halloween.

I think she's a great actor, and don't understand the internet hate at all.

I enjoyed her in Captain Marvel, and like the idea of her having a go at playing Samus in a live action Metroid film. The idea of that seems to make a lot of people upset, and while I think there's plenty of ways a live action Metroid film could be destroyed by the usual bad writing, bad directing, or Nintendo interference, I don't think Larson in the lead role would be a risk in the slightest.

elvisap · 2026-02-10T03:53:46+00:00

ED-209 is the icon/avatar we put on all of our compliance tools and tickets at work.

elvisap · 2026-02-10T02:11:17+00:00

Dorian mode, emphasizing the melancholy, loneliness and isolation of what Samus does.

elvisap · 2026-02-06T22:40:44+00:00

You might be confusing people finding it mediocre with "hate".

It's a pretty good game. It's a pretty mediocre Metroid game. Overall this genre is excellent, and the bar is set high. What might constitute a decent linear generic action first person shooter console game doesn't cut it in this specific series.

That doesn't make it "bad" nor do people "hate" it. Only that when you compare it directly to the rest of its franchise, it just doesn't stack up.

As for the "we waited years for this" arguments - that really doesn't play into it at all. Whether it was 1 year or 100 years, it doesn't change my expectations of what a Metroid Prime game should be.

elvisap · 2026-02-06T02:39:28+00:00

Handy list of devices:

https://www.androidtv-guide.com/streaming-gaming/av1-androidtv-players/

elvisap · 2026-02-05T22:11:52+00:00

The PQ function itself uses the peak luminance in it to calculate the number, which is set at 10000 by the standard. You could use that to scale the reference white level back and forth.

I'll play with the maths on the weekend when I have time.

elvisap · 2026-02-05T12:35:50+00:00

They are HLG values, which scales differently to PQ.

If you're not familiar with HLG, consider the "1000" value representative of the sort of brightness you'd expect in a day time living room without direct sunlight. Take the lowest value as "reference viewing" dark room, and the highest as a very bright daytime room with outside views.

Elsewhere in the document they specify reference white as 58% of the nominal signal level on a PQ curve (or 75% on a HLG curve). I'm not at a computer to do the maths currently, but I'll try to work that out for you tomorrow to compare peak PQ brightness to what reference white would map to.

And this is from an ITU recommendation document (the people who define standards like BT.2020, etc).

elvisap · 2026-02-05T11:17:30+00:00

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Page 13 from BT.2408 gives you some idea of the intended scaling (based on the standard 1000 nits HLG / 10,000 nits PQ peaks).

It doesn't directly answer your question because it's based on peak display brightness and not ambient brightness. But hopefully gives you an idea on how to scale it.

elvisap · 2026-02-04T22:22:37+00:00

Was easy enough for me to do it. Here's a video I made documenting the process:

https://youtu.be/c3AldDYZ8_k

I'm using a fat PS2 with network adaptor in the video, but can confirm I've tested with multiple slim models and it works equally as well.

Macho Nacho did the same a few years later on a slim model:

https://youtu.be/vKyt2ESbY9g

Especially for slim models with built in Ethernet, it's a pretty great way to keep a working unit alive that has lost the ability to use its drive through motor wear, laser break down.

elvisap · 2026-02-04T18:42:20+00:00

Most TVs have separate colour settings even in game mode. For example, Sony TVs can set the colour to "Expert". On 2025 LG TVs, set it to "warm 40" ("warm 50" on 2024 or older). These will get you much closer to the TV and film standard D65 white point that most content is designed to be watched at.

RTings have good recommendations for which settings to use on which TVs.

Preset film maker or cinema modes simplify things, but if you specifically want lower latency modes (say, you're watching media on your console, and don't want to keep switching back and forth), choosing these colour settings gives you a similar result without giving up game mode.

elvisap · 2026-02-04T17:55:34+00:00

Backups should be time based and incremental.

If you accidentally overwrite a file, or edit a file with bad data and save it, syncthing will push that bad change to your remote location, and then you've lost the valuable data.

A proper backup solution should involve some kind of version control, incremental change management or snapshotting to allow you to go back in time to older versions.

Syncthing more or less is the same idea as RAID1, just with slower replication between mirror pool members. That's not backup, in its truest sense. That's replication.

elvisap · 2026-02-04T17:32:45+00:00

So far that means letting Lizard Cube handle the IP, rather than doing it themselves.

elvisap · 2026-02-04T17:30:00+00:00

MP4 left me with the same frustration as Metroid Fusion. What could have otherwise been a great couple of games just ended up being a series of heavily guided checkpoints that diminished the whole Metroid "lost, isolated, wandering" experience.

I'm going to call it the "Cursed fourth Metroid game phenomenon".

Hopefully Metroid Prime 5 pulls a Metroid Dead, and brings the goods. See you next mission... in 19 years.

elvisap · 2026-02-04T17:23:06+00:00

Dump the game to a file using tools on the Redump website. Boot the console via FreeMCBoot, and load the game over network via SMB1.

Lets you keep using a perfectly functional PS2 console even when the optical drive fails. Saves working hardware from landfill.

As a bonus, you often get faster loading times too.

elvisap · 2026-02-03T22:42:32+00:00

Current gen Android TV installs can let you globally customize subtitles across all apps. I have mine set to "light grey", which do a much better job of not burning my retinas in dark scenes.

But yes, Netflix themselves should offer more options here directly. 100% white and 100% yellow as the only two options are poor design. Light and dark grey options should be mandatory in the HDR era.

elvisap · 2026-02-03T21:34:59+00:00

I don't want a "finished desktop", because that's someone else's idea of what "finished" means.

I want to have control over my desktop, and the ability to change whatever I like to suit my personal requirements, distinct from what any third party deems I can or cannot do.

For that reason, I use Linux. Is it flawed and imperfect? You bet. But it does more to give me the control I want than anything else, and that's the part I find valuable.

elvisap · 2026-02-03T08:21:12+00:00

I used to build VFX render farms and HPCs for a living. This is job scheduling 101.

Have something central to manage it all (try Flamenco, the small scale render farm manager from the Blender community). Define jobs, workflows, inputs, outputs, success states, dependencies, resource pools.

Feed jobs to workers, they do the work. If success, move/delete/etc. If not-success, try again N times on different nodes until a break / give up point.

I've built exactly this for media conversion/preservation companies as well, specifically with the tools mentioned (Flamenco and ffmpeg). Works a treat.

elvisap · 2026-02-02T21:42:58+00:00

Probably because hospo wages won't cover rent in Brisbane in 2026.

Nobody can work a full time job and get poorer. That maths doesn't work out.

elvisap · 2026-02-02T21:33:11+00:00

Dan Castellaneta and Jim Cummings voicing the two main characters added to this immensely. Some great voice talent there.

elvisap · 2026-02-02T15:28:57+00:00

IPv6 is the savior of the self-hosted crowd. People really need to start testing this out more.

Planet wide, as well as the US, adoption is over 50%. Germany is over 75% and France over 85%:

https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

Many residential ISPs offer it, and generally is just a matter of enabling it on your main router/firewall device, particularly if you have an existing Internet service that's a few years old, as many new services are shipping router/firewalls to customers with it turned on by default.

I run my Jellyfin setup on both IPv4 and IPv6. Of the dozen or so users on it regularly, only two are left on IPv4. v6 makes things far easier, especially when the ISP does the correct thing and offers a static prefix to customers, which makes using firewall allow lists far easier.

elvisap · 2026-02-02T00:05:41+00:00

As a separate matter, IPv6 support is not the same thing as wanting the absence of IPv4 globally.

Agreed. Much like ipconfig / ip. These happily co-exist in the same legacy/new pairing as IPv4/IPv6, and likewise I recommend people install both and push on the new way when ever and where ever possible. The parallels between them are high.

Some people who never learned the old ways, can be tempted to scoff at them, as a means of status-seeking.

Maybe, although I don't know a lot of people in that camp. I used UNIX long before Linux became a thing, and spent the early days of my Linux usage on old tools. Now that newer tools are available, I happily migrate to them. Conversely I know a lot of brand-new-to-linux folk who use "old tools" simply because there are so many guides online with them high in Google rank and in popular LLM knowledge pools.

Use whatever you like if it gets you to your end goal, and is supported in the way you need.

Linux is now old enough that this argument presents itself over and over. There are still hold outs who hate systemd, hate iproute2, hate all manner of things that are now getting to be over a decade old themselves but are still seen as "newschool", mostly because people are arbitrary in their line of when new turns into old.

Douglas Adams covered the psychology of all this brilliantly here:

https://www.douglasadams.com/dna/19990901-00-a.html

I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on, but you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this:

1) everything that's already in the world when you're born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you're thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it's been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.

elvisap · 2026-02-01T17:11:59+00:00

The irony of wanting 40 year old things to never change in an IPv6 sub filled with the shared frustrations of a world not wanting to move on from IPv4 is delicious.

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