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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • We can only hope so.

    I’ve suggested to my team a few times that we should start a new business developing “Atlassian, but good”. They’re up for it. So many of our wider business have never used “anything but Jira”, and they can’t see it for the steaming pile of shite that it is. Not just that it’s a bad tool for developers, QE, project management or customer support, but they couldn’t imagine anything that’s better in any way, or how it would look if it didn’t have so many issues.


  • Yep. Arch on my personal multi-use laptop, Arch on my work Java-development laptop, Arch on my gaming PC, Arch on my home Forgejo / DNS / NAS server. Just easier to not have to remember how to do things in different ways, plus my home server can efficiently act as a repo cache.

    Did have ALARM installed on the home server back when I used a raspberry pi, and while that’s an amazing project, a pi is just a bit underpowered for some uses. Got a mini PC extremely cheap since it wouldn’t support Win11, but it runs Linux like a champ.



  • Awesome page, thanks. Have bookmarked.

    Harfbuzz though? That’s going to take some replacing. Hopefully someone will fork an earlier version. The thing that it does (accurate multi-script font shaping) is difficult to do; requires a lot of rule-of-thumb knowledge that’s unlikely to be possessed by a single person, needs a lot of collaboration.


  • It doesn’t take too much of a graphics card to push a ten-year old game about, but you need quite a CPU to handle the emulation. I’ve just upgraded from a Ryzen 7 / 2700X (which struggled a bit, kept 30 fps though) to a Ryzen 9 / 5900XT, which does it quite well. Ironically, the RAM crisis seems to have made CPU upgrades a bit more affordable, since not so many people are buying either.

    Higher resolutions need a fair amount of RAM, but we’re talking “a fair amount of RAM compared to a PS4” - if you’ve a few gigabytes of system and graphics card RAM, that should be plenty.


  • The licensing isn’t particularly difficult for Bloodborne - Sony own it, and their video game publishing arm is still a going concern. I doubt there’s any technical problem, since it’s on the same engine as Dark Souls 3, and that’s multi-platform. Could probably recompile it for PC and release it tomorrow, if they wanted to.

    From consider it one of their masterpieces, and want to do any ‘HD’ remake themselves. They’ve had quite a few offers (I understand) by other companies who’d like to do it, but I think they’re aiming higher than unlocking 60 fps and a quick upres of the textures.

    Sony have a bit of a complicated relationship with ‘primarily single player games’ and ‘multiplatform ports’. Since Xbox appears to be dying, they’ll have the only next-gen walled garden in town. Why share, when they could sell systems?

    Any consolation, ShadPS4 can run BB at 4K / 60fps right now, if you want it? Need a bit of a beast of a PC, but can confirm you can play it all the way through, not too many issues.



  • There’s some very important transatlantic cables that come ashore in New Jersey; data centres built there will have excellent links to both the Eastern US and a lot of Europe, making it quite a desirable location.

    Data centres have a few constraints on their locations. Network connections, of course, and power and water for cooling. Their margins are also a bit dubious (Ed Zitron did an excellent investigation in a recent article) but they benefit from low taxes and sweetheart deals with the local municipalities. Doesn’t take much to make that deal look shaky and be rid of the DC. Well done though NJ, keep it up!




  • Each package has an average of 1.1 Gb of binaries? Maybe delete a few of the old versions, then. But I think the most serious ask there is the network infrastructure - lots of big downloads around the world soon add up.

    The Arch linux package is about 150 Mb; they’ve a few larger ones, but most come in at a few megabytes. (Have just checked my Pacoloco shared cache - average of 773 packages is 5.8 Mb. That serves a network server, a gaming desktop, my personal development laptop and my work development laptop, so it’s a cross section.)



  • Audio codecs like MP3 usually do a Fourier transform to move the sound into the frequency domain, discard any frequencies that you’re unlikely to notice, and encode ‘rate of change’ for the remaining ones. So the encoding problem is usually sound with fast changes in intensity or frequency, which is basically what percussion is.

    System is quite percussion heavy, so will sound bad.

    Recently moved from Spotify to Qobuz, because fuck Dan Ek, and the fact that they’ve got better bitrates across the board really makes the difference for jazz and jazzy stuff. Neglected, sounds crap on Spotify. Sounds great on Qobuz. But that’s the change from ‘bad’ to ‘quite good’ bitrates; additional bits are very much a case of diminishing returns.


  • I’d be happy if plasma looked a bit more like WinNT. Completely functional, all the information there at a glance. Nothing hidden away in hamburger menus, no guessing about what you can and can’t click on. Does what it needs to then gets out your way. The best-designed that Windows has ever been.




  • I dunno. Oxygen Not Included looks crisp on a 4K monitor. And it makes my job easier, being able to have an absolute tonne of code on-screen and readable. I reckon I could probably use an 8K monitor for those things.

    Yeah, I generally have FSR running on any 3D game made in about the last decade - even if I can run it at 4K at a reasonable framerate, my computer fans start to sound like a hoover and the whole room starts warming up. But upscaling seems a better solution than having separate monitors for work and play.