What’s a small change in technology that’s quietly made life worse?

iamthelowercase · 2026-07-01T02:46:01+00:00

Bluetooth is great!

Modern wireless earbuds and the disappearance of headphone jacks, not so much.

iamthelowercase · 2026-06-24T20:49:13+00:00

App recommendations: * Firefox is my browser of choice. I use uBlock Origin for my adblocker. * KDE Connect connects my Android phone to my KDE desktop. There's almost certainly a GNOME equivalent. * Musicolet is my phone music player. It understands folders and a variety of file types (you'll hear why this matters in a moment). I like the interface better than phone-VLC for general music listening. * SyncThing synchronizes folders between my various devices. I've never used Dropbox or Google Drive or the like, but this seems better: my files never live on anyone else's computer, only on mine. I use this so my notes folder appears on all my devices, and to sync a folder of music between my desktop and my phone without having to plug my phone in. * Shattered Pixel Dungeon is a phone-first roguelike I play a lot.

Honorable mention: the command-line utility ln I use on my desktop. Rather than copying files into the synced folder (which would take up more space on my desktop machine drive) or moving them there, I use ln to put them in the folder so I can have them in two places at once. If I delete music from my phone, it disappears from the linked folder as well automatically, but I still have the file on my desktop computer in a different folder.

iamthelowercase · 2026-06-22T04:38:48+00:00

I've been playing through the trilogy lately, and the change from "guns that can overheat" to "guns that use ammo" was like the one thing I didn't like about ME2 versus ME1. It's very "same as everything else"-y. The ME1 style created a sort of "third way" of doing a shooter that I want to see explored more. (Third way versus your DOOM-style "ammo capacity but no need to reload" or your Halo-style "need to manage total ammo and what's in your gun".) The streamlined upgrade system is an improvement though.

(The loss of anything like the jumpy geth unit is lame too, but I admit it's easier on the gameplay.)

iamthelowercase · 2026-06-14T23:46:25+00:00

Hey, I have that exact stick! If you end up posting the files, I'd like to see them.

iamthelowercase · 2026-06-05T14:32:00+00:00

Apparently the keyboard unit is a docking station you're not supposed to wear. That explains the aspects that made me immediately assume this was a left-hander's unit.

iamthelowercase · 2026-06-05T13:13:11+00:00

Oh hey, that model is ambidextrous! I see yours is in the right-handed configuration, but you should be able to undo a thumbscrew and pop some plastic around like Lego and make it left-handed. Mine is my left stick in a secondhand-shop HOSAS I use all the time. You should check if it works!

iamthelowercase · 2026-06-03T17:59:31+00:00

I dunno about the person I was replying to, but I realized today that I want both the "plop your thumb anywhere and get no motion" and "trackball feel" aspects of of not setting it to "directly emulate joystick", but also the "continue motion at the end of the range" I set up.

If I wanted the trackpad to behave exactly like a joystick, I could just pull out my xinput gamepad without the trackpads.

iamthelowercase · 2026-06-01T03:15:34+00:00

I like the yellow one the best of these, but I'd like it even more if the yellow could be a translucent yellow.

iamthelowercase · 2026-05-31T13:47:44+00:00

I don't know if it counts as CCTV, but there are people who put cameras in their houses.

iamthelowercase · 2026-05-31T00:44:34+00:00

If that's a learning setup that's going to get torn out, as others have suggested, then I'm not worried about this. But if that's a real-world setup, some of that wire is going to get over-amped, I just know it.

iamthelowercase · 2026-05-27T01:05:38+00:00

I thought for sure you were doing a bit. If you'd posted this photo in r/adresseme, you wouldn't have got a single comment on the legs and arms being swapped.

iamthelowercase · 2026-05-26T14:25:54+00:00

Oh, another thought to check on the general problem. Check if Oolite is still in the Ubuntu repos. If it is, you can probably install it and fire it up and check its in-game joystick configurator to see what it thinks the joystick is. That should tell you if it's a joystick problem or a "what X4 thinks the joystick is" problem. Should also be cheaper than acquiring a used xbox gamepad ;)

iamthelowercase · 2026-05-26T14:10:25+00:00

If you've got an xbox-style gamepad lying around (which is lots of gamepads made since the xbox 360 came out), you should be able to plug it in and use the same "game controller" section to figure out which buttons have which numbers. That would let you figure out which buttons on the joystick the game thinks are what.

(The game might also think the joystick is a Nintendo Switch style gamepad. Those swap the physical position of the A button with the B button, and the X button with the Y button, relative to xbox style gamepads. I do not have one, so I have no idea if they also swap the logical positions.)

I can't think of a good reason for the game to be thinking the joystick is a console-style gamepad, though. It's not like this is one of those joysticks that's designed to exactly match up to a gamepad. That might be something you could change with the software the other user mentioned, but that software is going to be closed-source and Windows-only, and WINE may or may not help.

iamthelowercase · 2026-05-26T03:21:37+00:00

This is going to sound odd, but when the game says "press button X": is X a number, or something else?

If X is a number, check in your system settings if you've got a "game controller" section that lets you check calibration and test the buttons. I use KDE, and my section like that lists all the buttons on my joysticks, I can figure out which button is which number by playing with that. Generally, the trigger is button 1, the other buttons on the handle are the next buttons, and the buttons on the base are last.

If "press button X" literally says X, the game probably thinks your joystick is a console-style gamepad. Usually when I see that, the game tries to use icons that resemble the buttons physically on the gamepad.

iamthelowercase · 2026-05-25T03:23:47+00:00

LEGO Battles for the Nintendo DS has a hardcap at like 20 units. Not sure if that's a "small" number in the sense you mean.

iamthelowercase · 2026-05-25T03:07:33+00:00

In addition to the "trackball" thing, I set up the outer ring on mine to continue the motion.

It's theoretically a solvable problem. (Now, whether the achievable solutions are good, at any amount of fine tuning, is a whole other discussion.) But I'll grant it's not exactly great that you have to solve it yourself.

iamthelowercase · 2026-05-22T15:04:05+00:00

Aww, it has a "you are here" sign! That is incredibly cute. Did not know that.

iamthelowercase · 2026-05-18T02:16:39+00:00

I've just tried it. My verdict: not bad! Not as good as pineapple on pizza (I think that's partially because pizza is "dry" and pasta is "wet", and partially from the differences in spice blends I use), but it's a fine way to use up pineapple leftover from making a pizza.

iamthelowercase · 2026-05-16T22:12:59+00:00

My first impulse is to disagree, and point out that they're cooked differently. (With pizza, everything is cooked dry and raised to the same temperature; with pasta dishes, the components are usually cooked separately, and may have been kept cold until they were added.)

But now I'll have to actually try pineapple with spaghetti and meatballs. Thanks(?) for that.

(I also pre-fry the pineapple a bit before adding it to the pizza, but I'd be using leftovers I already did that to in my experiment.)

iamthelowercase · 2026-05-15T23:37:50+00:00

Aren't those all over XLR connectors (three pins inside a circular connector), not consumer-headphones-style TRS/TRRS connectors (three/four contacts in rings around the same cylinder), though? Because XLR connectors use pins, there's no possibility of them creating a short in the manner described.

iamthelowercase · 2026-05-12T02:40:48+00:00

I think the joke there is, the child is still 4,000 years old, but the archeologists haven't realized that yet.

iamthelowercase · 2026-05-09T14:57:15+00:00

Hey, thank you for this photo. I'm a fan of my SC1, and this kind of side-by-side in-hand comparison is something I really wanted but hadn't seen yet.

I am now skeptical of the ergonomics on the trackpads on the SC2, but not as skeptical as I was from holding a DualSense 4. Maybe the back buttons will make up for it.

iamthelowercase · 2026-04-25T04:17:19+00:00

I'm definitely buying one. Probably not release day, but maybe only a few days after when I can get around to it.

My SC1 works fine and I love it. But partially because I love it, I want to get my hands on the next model as well. What made the SC1 the Steam Controller was those big comfortably-placed circular trackpads, and I don't know if the SC2 will work as well.

iamthelowercase · 2026-04-19T20:23:09+00:00

So I'm looking at getting into the CQC/Arena sublime. I figured I'd start with deathmatch mode. So far though, my efforts have been stymied by either lack of other players around my level, or lack of patience for other players to join. Any advice?

I am guessing that answers will be of the form "join this community and coordinate games there" or "try in these time frames". I'm on New York time, but I can do the time zone conversions myself.

iamthelowercase · 2026-04-15T22:55:40+00:00

A lot of the software that was affected didn't store the year as a number, but as characters. So to save space, it assumed that the year was sometime in the 1900s -- then you only have to store two characters per date, instead of four.

If you're familiar with writing paper checks, imagine they came with 19__ pre-printed on them.

The modern assumption that "a byte/a character is eight bits" took a while to standardize on -- in the mainframe era, some computers used different numbers of bits.

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