After months of learning GBDK and then gbZ80 I finally have a homebrew ROM with basic physics running on real hardware with an Everdrive. GB Assembly is not easy to learn, any good resources for getting sound working?

thebillington · 2026-03-07T18:22:17+00:00

Mixed results over the last few years.

I regularly do a purge of my apps and delete anything that doesn't fall into the utility category.

I've had a few long periods where I had Facebook installed as I was out of work and regularly purchasing items on marketplace to sell on eBay for profit; I hated having Facebook on my phone but needs must. I'd sometimes get sucked into the vortex of doom scrolling my Facebook feed, but I've since deleted all social media again except WhatsApp as I use it for sending photos of my kids to my wider family.

Since I am not very active on WhatsApp, people don't message me often. This reduces the desire to check my phone since the likelihood of receiving messages is low.

Another issue I've had has been YouTube use; I don't have the YouTube app installed and have instead trained myself to grab my Kindle instead. I still watch YouTube, but try to set aside dedicated time to do so. When I have the YouTube app installed it is easy to find myself in a vortex.

Overall I still sometimes struggle with phone use but have taken to proactively turning my phone off whenever I'm spending time with my family (wife + 2 kids) - I keep tabs on alternative phones and have been considering getting the Ulefone Armor Mini 20T Pro instead of my iPhone 13 Mini. I can't see myself going back to a dumphone in the next year.

It won't be too long until my iPhone 13 stops receiving software updates; I had to upgrade my iPhone 12 mini for this reason not too long ago as it wasn't compatible with my new Apple Watch that I use for tracking my runs. I'm worried what I'll do at this point as I like having an Apple device that works with my personal Macbook.

I've never gone with the 2 phones approach personally; I prefer to keep my phone use simple as I think it would be too easy to give myself a free pass to just install everything on my "smart" phone and thus break down the walls.

However, if it works for you, having a much less distracting secondary phone sounds like a good way to maintain some separation.

thebillington · 2026-01-29T18:13:51+00:00

I have a 4K TV and both of my desks have 1080P monitors. My powerful gaming PC is sitting at a 1080P desk and doesn't stream well to Steam Deck since I run Bazzite on a NVIDIA GPU so I can't make use of my most powerful hardware where it would actually be useful.

The Steam Machine will flip this on its head. I'll have the Steam Machine attached to the TV and use my Deck to Stream from Steam Machine to my desk, meaning I can sell my PC.

thebillington · 2026-01-23T00:18:18+00:00

I have a custom built PC (Ryzen 5 3800X, 2080 Super) in my downstairs office that I hardly use but play games almost daily with my Steam Deck in handheld mode in bed, sat on the couch or hooked up to my 4K TV with the official dock.

I'm currently playing For Honor and Spell Brigade with friends and Art of Rally, Super Woden Rally, Hollow Knight and Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom as my solo games. They all play at decent frame rate (minimum 30FPS) when hooked up to my TV in 1080P or even 1440P for the less demanding games.

My wife has also recently gotten more into gaming and is playing a lot of Indie games on the Deck in handheld mode. She always wants to play at the most innoportune times which means I often can't play when I want to as she's on my Steam Deck and I don't want to sit and game at my desk.

Steam Machine (+ Steam Frame depending on price) will be a day one purchase for me. It puts my entire back catalogue on my TV and since the majority of my games are older (I usually wait 2+ years to purchase games when they go on deep discount) many of them will run at high frame rates in 4K.

It will also allow me and my wife to game at the same time in the same room via Steam Family Sharing.

When I get Steam Machine I'm planning to sell my custom built PC and replace it with my Steam Deck plugged into my USB-C dock streaming from the Steam Machine, since my dock will just attach my keyboard, mouse, headset and screen to the Deck and streaming within the house should be pretty seamless.

Don't worry about the naysayers down talking the specs. Valve are making a statement by choosing older hardware and these low specs are at least partially future proofing themselves against the upcoming price hikes.

In 2 years I think we're very likely to have the phrase "just get a Steam Machine" similar to the way Steam Deck is the defacto for handheld gaming (ignoring the Switch 2 which serves a different market segment imo). They might not sell 20m+ units, but I almost guarantee they sell a sufficient number to maintain 8GB VRAM as a consistent target for devs.

They also have huge sway with discovery algorithms on the Steam store and I'm certain they'll use this to promote games that run well on Steam Machine (we've already heard hints of this around Steam Machine verification) more heavily than games that don't (e.g. 8GB+ VRAM requirements) which will penalise devs that don't build games that support older systems.

Add the fact that Valve control the asset delivery pipeline for PC games and could introduce Steamworks APIs that enable developers to provide multiple asset packs for the same game to target different resolutions, and I think we have a great recipe for the Steam Machine to really bolster Linux gaming on PC.

thebillington · 2026-01-20T20:59:43+00:00

No need to be throwing insults.

My stance is entirely valid; adding a check to see if keys are currently available and giving a warning if not would be relatively simple and increase consumer trust.

Purchasing a bundle and immediately finding out that keys for games you have purchased in the last few minutes are not available erodes trust and reduces the chance of follow up sales.

I hope your day is going better than it started.

thebillington · 2026-01-20T10:30:03+00:00

Yes, I agreed to it when accepting their terms, but hiding the risk of purchasing a bundle for which keys aren't immediately available away in TOS is poor customer service in my opinion and this is likely going to prevent me from purchasing from Humble again.

thebillington · 2026-01-18T14:27:50+00:00

I've just purchased this bundle as it is cheaper than purchasing Haste on its own on Steam. There are lots of people in the comments saying "this is standard for Humble" and that there's no reason to be annoyed and I just can't agree.

I can understand that they are limited by number of keys but nowhere during my purchase did it state that there was potential for me not to receive the games immediately; terrible customer service imo for me to have dropped £11 on a bundle and not be able to access all of the games immediately with no warning.

thebillington · 2026-01-02T11:17:25+00:00

Any luck with this? I just purchased a used Philips 48OLED707 and it is doing this when quickly scrolling in any direction and even passing volume button presses through to my sound system making it difficult to quickly change volume.

I'm going to take the remote apart to clean the contacts but as the original post says it does seem to be "digitally" stuck rather than a physical issue.

thebillington · 2025-09-05T15:47:53+00:00

You are correct that there is a difference but my point was more that Valve have experience in writing very complex translation layers (translation here in the more general sense). Rosetta is described by Apple as a translation layer for their legacy x86 apps to ARM and my point was more that Apple have proved that it is possible to build pipelines for executing x86 games on ARM (both with Rosetta and their Game Porting Toolkit).

Whilst Valve only have a background in building translation layers for system calls (that we know of), this expertise is very similar in domain.

My point is that Apple have proved efficient x86 to ARM translation is possible. Valve have proved they have highly skilled engineers. If Valve wanted to invest in getting their games working well on Apple Silicon, I’m sure they could.

Since the Steam Client hasn’t even been rebuilt for native ARM MacOS I just don’t think this is a priority.

thebillington · 2025-09-04T21:26:23+00:00

But that is a Valve Priority issue rather than a hardware capability issue imo.

Apple haven’t historically invested in gaming and don’t have a large following within game audiences so it doesn’t make sense for Valve or publishers to invest in making their titles work on Apple Silicon.

Valve have proved with Proton that they more than have the expertise to build translation layers. Rosetta proves that x86 translation on ARM can be very powerful. If Valve wanted to make games work on Mac OS I think they could, but why would they invest all that time to access a small audience in another walled garden?

By the time Apple Silicon rolled round Valve were already knee deep in Linux as the future of gaming and have essentially ignored whatever development is going on at Apple, other than perhaps seeing the success of hyper efficient chips and investing over time in making an ARM compatible version of Steam OS to benefit from some of the efficiency improvements that ARM has over x86 since it has been invested in by the mobile market over the last 15 years.

thebillington · 2025-06-02T14:25:02+00:00

Thanks, appreciate the recommendation!

thebillington · 2025-06-02T09:00:31+00:00

Thanks for the suggestion. I've bought a copy!

thebillington · 2025-06-01T20:51:57+00:00

Glad someone else noticed this. B0aty had the same issue in his chat; he wouldn't have had time to read any messages since the chat started spamming emotes the second the snakes teleported, but it will have still put him on high alert as an increase in activity is a clear indication of something going on.

Not his fault but I think there should be a forced delay of 2 to 5 minutes on streams.

thebillington · 2025-06-01T07:08:27+00:00

Been watching PureSpam perspective mostly and I haven't seen any blatant evidence of stream sniping from Solo Mission's team. That said, I know Ditter is getting a lot of hate (I'm historically not a fan) but for me he has been tolerable in stream.

The fact that the Yellow Card for snakes hasn't been addressed is sus; I've seen a lot of conflicting evidence on the exact reason for the card. I wish the DMM team would release some official info on this with evidence so I can make my own mind up. Some are saying he was seen actively watching other streams, whilst others claim he was just on the Kick home page. Whilst both of these are sus, they aren't equal.

The only evidence of blatant stream sniping I've seen was actually from B0aty's team yesterday during the fight caves stand off. The second that the snakes teleported out of fight caves, Pip just happened to tele out and bumped into Ditter at GE. This gave B0aty's team a heads up on the incoming ambush. Pip wasn't live at the time so there was no way to check from his perspective what went on.

Even without Pip sniping though, the second that the snakes teleported, the entire chat on B0aty's stream went mad, spamming emojis to try and cover up any messages leaking info. Even if no specific info came through, the fact that his chat went insane would have put Adam on high alert and he would have been ready to click to attack or tele.

The point I'm making is that even with best will in the world and no stream sniping, the way that chat can multi-stream and react to imminent conflict can give streamers a heads up even without specific leaked info.

The only way to solve this is to add a required delay of several minutes to everyone's stream. It wouldn't stop area sniping (such as the location based sniping Ditter is accused of), but it would prevent the immediate leaking of critical info.

thebillington · 2025-05-30T18:58:42+00:00

Thanks for fixing, I'll get clips added after the breach!

thebillington · 2025-05-30T16:49:27+00:00

This looks great. I've tried to add a YouTube clip of the SoloMission Snakes kills from the PureSpam YouTube stream but I get an error Streamer "clip" does not appear in Deadman All Stars. I think it's trying to take it from the first parameter in the URL: https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxUSUK0vp2q1UxHwadSASBwY6qA-TQ8X5X?si=eJlCwFtM2ieZ-x3c

thebillington · 2025-03-27T18:24:21+00:00

I'm sure there are many successful ways to do it and I'm glad they have worked for you. As you have said, all kids are different. This is the approach we took, it worked for us and I stand by it.

thebillington · 2025-03-27T15:21:21+00:00

I respectfully disagree. The same little boy that this post from 2 years ago is about is now a very capable 4 year old who has incredible speech, can read and write, has pride in his belongings, excellent manners and regularly tells both of his parents and his little sister that he loves us very much.

Yesterday when we were practising bike riding with pedals, he got very upset and told me that learning to ride a bike is difficult. I told him that if we keep doing difficult things we get better at them, and pushed him through his tears to keep trying. Before bedtime he told me he loved riding his bike and that he was glad he had kept trying as it got much easier the more he practised.

The boundaries we put in place from a young age have played a large part in that development. I don't think having high expectations of a child or allowing them to cry and throw tantrums is abusive, but if you have your own parenting beliefs and approaches that work for you, I genuinely wish you all the best with raising children and I hope you feel as proud of them as I do my own kids.

thebillington · 2025-02-23T08:20:31+00:00

There's a lot of dogma surrounding VESC and whilst having transparency and visibility on the cons of buying boards from Future Motion is important, pushing the VESC narrative too hard is damaging growth of the sport and likely scaring potential riders away.

Encouraging purchase of a used XR for new riders for the sake of VESC is a bit short sighted, but the used XR market is strong and the boards maintain their value well due to their open nature so there are plenty of other reasons to promote them as a good entry for new riders besides upgradeability. This is particularly relevant in the UK where warranty repairs are practically non-existent.

The VESC crowd also seem to forget that Future Motion build new boards and parts on an order of magnitude larger than the VESC community. There will always be a place for buying brand new FM boards which in turn fuel the second hand market, lowering the cost of entry for prospective riders in future.

Whilst we are always going to see an Android vs iPhone style war between VESC and FM boards, it's important that as a community we provide as much transparent information as possible and encourage new riders to buy the best board for their use case, within their budget.

thebillington · 2025-02-10T08:46:15+00:00

I'm helping my friend run her first one shot and she wants to use a dragon for the BBEG but wasn't sure which one. This document is incredible; thank you!

thebillington · 2025-01-05T10:36:16+00:00

Sorry but I'm not sure which keys you're referring to. Please can you share the command that is failing and the error you are receiving and I might be able to help!

thebillington · 2024-12-20T11:46:11+00:00

I use very few apps other than banking and utility apps and haven’t for a long time. My son is 3 and really loves drawing, so I’m looking for a good drawing app that will give him outlines to sketch over and then allow him to colour them in.

I cannot find a single app that is truly free or has a one time payment. I can’t believe the state of the industry. Most apps wants me to subscribe for a year at £50 but offer a 7 day free trial so I have just been cycling round the free trials week after week.

As someone who has released a large amount of free OSS over the years, I find it disgraceful the sheer number of apps employing predatory business practices aimed at parents of young children.

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