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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • A raspberry Pi is a very good emulation device using the RetroPie image. A Pi 4b can go up to PSX/N64 fairly easily.

    On the handheld side of things, most of them that “come with” ROM sets will have them loaded on an SD card. These manufacturers often skimp on the cards though, so expect it to die quickly. You can usually just clone the whole SD to a new one and it’s fine.

    Most of these devices use RetroArch and software emulation. However, there is another option. The Mister project and devices sold by Analogue use field programmable gate arrays - chips that can change their structure according to software. This means running an NES game on one of these devices is more literally like running it on original hardware. For accurate emulation, this is the best option by far. However, it comes with a significantly higher price tag.

    In general the easiest and least expensive startup for emulation is on the PC. With fairly modest hardware, emulation of everything up to PS2 is possible with some newer platforms also being very emulatable (notably everything Nintendo puts out is easy to run because their architecture is largely straightforward, their systems are lower power, and there is significantly more demand for their games)

    If you specifically want something hooked up to your TV, a first generation (launch window, before they increased the battery life) Switch can happily run a fair amount of stuff, including everything up to N64/PS1. The (new)3DS/2DS is also a great emulation device and can run basically everything up to SNES/Genesis handheld.

    Oh and one more option. If you have Android, you can easily install a variety of emulators and use a Bluetooth or wired controller with them utilizing a controller phone mount.



  • When I’m talking about leaks, I’m not talking about the extra energy required to constantly run vacuum pumps. I’m saying that HSR infrastructure needs inspection and occasional repair, but not nearly to the extent that a vacuum tube based solution would. Any savings made via efficiency are pissed away by having to pay more maintenance crews and material cost to maintain the infrastructure. The tubes are also much less likely to be able to be automatically inspected like rails can be using inspection cars because any train moving through the tube can only inspect the interior walls. Besides, rail already exists across much of the US for use as freight infrastructure. These same rails, if inspected and tested properly, can be used for high speed rail much more immediately than waiting for tubes to be built. Besides all of this, more aerodynamic trains can and have been built, but are not in use in the US. Instead, we send bricks down the rails. The “immense” efficiency gain from 0.5 atmospheres of air pressure is likely significantly less impressive when compared against well designed trains with regards to aerodynamics.

    All of this is also completely ignoring how dangerous tunnels are for fires. Even with proper safety precautions, fires in tunnels are exceptionally dangerous. By venting out the smoke that kills people, you increase the intensity of the fire that also kills people.


  • Sure on a small test track. As soon as it was meant to be scaled up, every attempt has been whittled down. Either it fails completely (Look up Brunel’s Atmospheric Railway) or has been so expensive and impractical that it gets reduced to cars in tunnels.

    If you are most concerned with efficiency, then building the cheaper HSR infrastructure to get freight off of roads and passengers off of planes as fast as possible should be the first priority. Holding even a partial vacuum in tubes hundreds of miles long just to eke out a little more energy efficiency is laughable. Everything leaks. Maintaining cabin pressure in a 73-meter plane is a completely different beast from maintaining vacuum in miles of tube. It’s likely that maintaining the tubes will end up costing so much that any efficiency gains acquired from the vacuum will evaporate.





  • They can only be connected to your router if the router has POE support. If it doesn’t, you will need a separate switch that has POE ports. Many POE cameras etc are sold with power injectors. You plug the Ethernet from the router into the injector, plug the injector into a wall outlet, then run Ethernet from the injector to the device. If you don’t want to get a whole new switch with POE ports, you could get POE that way.







  • My main desktop has 1TB of storage (NVMe, fast) but I have a whole separate home server that has one 500GB boot drive and three 6TB hard drives running in a ZFS pool. (ZFS is analogous to RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks. basically one drive can die and I won’t lose any data as long as I replace the drive before a second one dies.) This 21TB storage bucket holds anything and everything that doesn’t need to be on my primary computer. It holds all my documents, photos, music, movies, TV shows, backups, and all of my disc images and ROMs for emulation. The only things I keep on my primary PC are games I am currently playing or will play soon and programs that need to be installed or run locally. Everything else is loaded over the network as-needed. For most stuff, I can just point my applications at the network share by mounting it to a drive letter in Windows.


  • I get the distaste, but language is a fluid thing. Plenty of words we use now do not mean the same thing as when they were first coined. I think Lame is a pretty safe word to use in modern times without people taking it poorly.

    If you still have a distaste for it, then replacing it isn’t going to be that hard. Lame isn’t really part of my general speech, not for any particular reason, it just isn’t. I would say something sucks instead. If something doesn’t warrant the full suck to you, you could say “that’s rough” or something. Lame as a word fits in many situations, but maybe not all of those situations warrant the same word.

    When I was a kid, everyone (and I mean everyone) in my age group described things as gay or retarded. Over time I grew out of that language and met people who were genuinely hurt by it enough for me to change it. It took a while to do, but now neither of those terms is something I use negatively. I can’t say that I consciously picked words to replace them with, though. Just being thoughtful about what language I used helped me remove those uses from my day to day life and the rest of language came in to fill the void more or less on its own.





  • So far I have found that being on a smaller instance has been beneficial because most of the small instances don’t get defederated as long as they aren’t actively encouraging terrible behavior (or are abandoned) even if you primarily post at beehaw or something, having the option to find good communities within other large instances is nice. Reddit had some good communities even as the site was going down the enshittification route.

    I don’t really care about most of the communities on my home instance, but having access to everything else on lemmy within reason is nice.