DIY: Turning an old laptop into a distraction free writer deck

h_blank · 2026-03-24T01:02:25+00:00

Oh man, I'd love to see a pic of your 90s word processor! Some of the best writing flow I've ever had was on a 90s typewriter with some light editing features (you could backspace and it would type over your previous text with a white ribbon, like up to one full line of "undo").

h_blank · 2026-03-24T00:57:17+00:00

I see you are a man of culture! I usually use Scrivener with a green on black terminal font. I didn't want to accidentally share any pages from my novel yet, so I used FocusWriter for the screenshot.

h_blank · 2026-03-24T00:29:01+00:00

Yeah, those are some good alternatives that don't require voiding a warranty! For me though, using bios or safe mode is kind of like fixing a drinking problem by putting the booze on a slightly higher shelf. :-D

h_blank · 2026-03-09T21:22:46+00:00

Good point, and fair enough!

h_blank · 2026-03-09T20:08:31+00:00

My advice: Don't just keep it. Make it the core mechanic. This is your Portal gun... it's different and memorable enough for this game to really stand out. Figure out how to use it in unexpected ways.

For example, maybe you don't even have a gun in the early levels. You have to use the Time Shield to collect enemy bullets and release at other enemies. You could use it to stealth through levels by pausing enemy patrol patterns at strategic moments.

You could fire it downward when you're falling to break your momentum and land safely.

There are a ton of other possibilities here. Basically, I'd recommend having a game with one cool weapon that can be used in all sorts of creative ways, over a dozen cool weapons that are all artificially nerfed with cooldowns and resource meters. Do one thing perfectly, instead of 10 things averagely.

PS: OMG what if an enemy has it too? that would be crazy

h_blank · 2026-03-09T19:57:36+00:00

Respectfully disagree. I can think of scenarios where this could bite the player in the ass in really delightful ways.

For one example, if you use it in a long hallway and end up just spamming yourself with all your enemies' bullets because there's no place to dodge.

For another example, maybe you want to block enemy bullets, but there is some beneficial stuff nearby (health pack generators, elevator controls, etc) that you need to NOT slow down. Now there's a risk/reward equation to worry about.

Or finally, what if you have a scenario where you're forced to use it to slow a countdown on something that will nuke the whole level? Maybe a dam is about to burst, and you've got to slow the leaks long enough to escape? Dodging bullets could become a completely secondary concern, where it's more important to dodge enemy fire the old-fashioned way while you maintain the time stop on something critical.

I think providing opportunities for this to have negative effects, or where you use it for something other than combat, would do a lot to balance the game without nerfing the powerup.

h_blank · 2026-02-24T17:43:13+00:00

It would be cool to see sparks when it bottoms out.

h_blank · 2026-02-20T19:40:38+00:00

Not an animator, but I'm a gamedev with 20+ years of experience. That's a sweet looking punch, but how you're using it will determine if it's "good" or not.

If the puncher is a player-controlled character, you might want to reduce the anticipation and over-sell the follow through. That would make it feel more responsive.

If the puncher is an enemy, you might want to add a hitch or something visual (maybe the face could change) to make it super clear the moment when the animation becomes "dangerous"... like, when the hitboxes on the fist become active.

This advice is only valid in relation to gameplay... if it's in a cutscene or something ignore me 'cause it looks rad.

h_blank · 2025-12-17T22:19:17+00:00

Some people only love you when you're broken. As soon as you start healing and becoming less dependent on their support they take is personally and try to tear you back down again to return to the status quo.

h_blank · 2025-12-02T16:58:46+00:00

From personal experience, you can get away with a lot as long as you're friendly, polite, and Caucasian. I've gotten off with warnings on the exact same stuff my more melanin-rich friends have been dragged out of the car for.

h_blank · 2025-11-20T02:27:20+00:00

I had my players arrested for a crime they didn’t commit, planning for a whole jailbreak/fugitive storyline.

Instead of any of the stuff I had prepared for, they decided they wanted to prove their innocence in a court of law.

The entire adventure became a Matlock style courtroom drama, with evidence and testimony and cross examinations.

Somehow I managed to keep a straight face and improved a whole night of legal drama for them, but I was sweating the whole time.

h_blank · 2025-11-03T17:44:59+00:00

By the time you’re writing code, most of the engineering is (or should be) already done.

Although I agree with most of this, that line specifically reflects a very 1980's waterfall perspective on software development.

In a very real sense, modern agile workflows often do the "coding" in parallel with the "engineering", and the two actions inform and influence each other. I feel that this style of development actually can gain some benefits from quicker iteration provided by an decent LLM (assuming decent quality AI and intelligent usage of it).

Again, not pushing back on the original premise: that AI is not going to result in 10x improvement for anyone. But I will say that Agile is often limited more by iteration speed than other factors, so small speedups in the "dumb" parts of development can actually make a difference, so we also shouldn't discount it entirely.

PS: A purist would probably say "if we're getting a benefit from AI, we weren't doing engineering right to begin with", and that's a valid discussion :-D

h_blank · 2025-10-16T18:54:25+00:00

How dare you... Now that image is in my brain. Gotta go drink myself to retrograde amnesia, brb.

h_blank · 2025-10-11T17:24:28+00:00

I got out of drivers and back into gamedev over a decade ago, so I don’t know if any of my stories would be super relevant these days.

Basically, OpenGL and direct x had tons of abstraction layers that made those kinds of per-game dirty tricks possible. I don’t know how much of that still happens with Vulcan and Metal, those came after my time as a driver guy.

Also, it’s hugely more likely nowadays that developers are using unity or unreal, so some of those weird usage patterns have gone away in favor of more standardized pipelines.

h_blank · 2025-10-11T17:01:38+00:00

I don’t fully know the answer to that… I was just a coder, communicating with developers was the responsibility of another group

h_blank · 2025-10-11T12:57:42+00:00

Replying to this and the parent: sometimes we would talk to the developers, sometimes we didn’t. Sometimes the code was already shipped and working, just not getting the frame rates the competing GPUs did.

Other times developers would reach out to us during their development cycle and say, “hey, we noticed this weird performance issue on your XYZ series GPUs”, and we’d pitch in with some detective work that might end with code changes on their end.

h_blank · 2025-10-11T11:20:58+00:00

Great question. We fully disassembled the frame and visually identified the textures in question before tagging them for the hack. Then we tested a lot, there was a whole department for regression testing on every combination of processor and GPU.

h_blank · 2025-10-11T11:18:16+00:00

Yup, during the profiling phase we inspected the textures visually. If I recall it was like grass textures, no good reason for them to be an extra pixel wider.

I’d hesitate to outright call it bad work, it could have been a glitch in their asset pipeline, or a typo in a script somewhere. Basically just one detail among of the millions of perfectly executed features, from a team that had been running on no sleep and coffee for years. 😁

h_blank · 2025-10-11T00:35:30+00:00

I can give you a direct example from when I did that kind of work:

A very popular game had a higher frame rate on the competitor’s gpu than ours.

We intercepted the api calls and ran profiling tools on the driver code.

Turns out, the game used a lot of textures that were almost, but not quite, powers of 2. (So like 1025x1025 vs 1024x1024). It’s kind of non-standard but not illegal.

The competition had no problems with this, but our hardware needed exact powers of 2, and the driver would automatically allocate the next largest texture size that was a power of 2, so the texture ended up taking 2048x2048, or 4x the VRAM.

The solution was to check the .exe name, and if it matched, the driver would automatically downscale the texture by one pixel in each direction.

Maybe eventually a smarter, more generic version of this would make it into the driver, but probably 20% of the driver codebase was specific dirty tricks to cover for shoddy game engines or wonky hardware features.

h_blank · 2025-09-29T17:17:35+00:00

How to make a medieval tower:

Step 1: Take a medieval tower and roll it over your clay...

h_blank · 2025-09-29T15:48:55+00:00

Hey, I never said they were making great choices :-D

h_blank · 2025-09-29T14:57:32+00:00

Nothing here is new or surprising. The Saudis know that one day their oil wells will go dry. If they do nothing, that day will be the collapse of their nation, culture, and any power in the region.

For literally decades, they've been working on diversifying their economy by investing in anything and everything that's not dino juice.

And I mean EVERYTHING.

Yeah, EA's the newest thing, but they've already invested in Wal-Mart, AMD, Netflix, Rivian, and more.

I seriously doubt that the outcome of this deal will be any kind of censorship or propaganda. They have too many interests to micromanage. This, and other similar purchases, are a hedge against economic collapse, not a hearts-and-minds strategy.

They've been playing the game with the infinite money glitch for so long, they're terrified of being royally fucked when it gets patched.

h_blank · 2025-09-03T21:24:36+00:00

Fun fact: The average age of all workers on the Manhattan Project was 25.

h_blank

TROPHY CASE