text_garden's recent activity
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Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games
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Comment on Does Shawarma Law give a more definitive answer on whether or not a Hot Dog is a sandwich? in ~food
text_garden Link ParentOn one hand it classifies the pumpkin pie slice as a "bent toast", but later classifies a sliced deep-dish pizza as a quiche. By the logic that a pumpkin pie (which should be classified as a...On one hand it classifies the pumpkin pie slice as a "bent toast", but later classifies a sliced deep-dish pizza as a quiche. By the logic that a pumpkin pie (which should be classified as a quiche) becomes a different food cube when sliced, so should the sliced deep-dish pizza which no longer retains the quiche topology.
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Comment on I want to talk about sailing! in ~hobbies
text_garden LinkI used to sail optimists as a kid. It's a kind of tiny, very mobile and easy to maneuver sailing dinghy. I grew out of them and never pursued bigger boats. As an adult, sailing is something I...I used to sail optimists as a kid. It's a kind of tiny, very mobile and easy to maneuver sailing dinghy. I grew out of them and never pursued bigger boats. As an adult, sailing is something I would like to do, but not enough I think to warrant the investment of time and money into dealing with boats.
Would love to hear more about your trip.
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Comment on Could we get a page dedicated to spirituality? in ~tildes
text_garden Link ParentI don't really use them except to see at a glance where something was posted. Like if I see the title "The story of Mel" (now on my front page) I might have no clue what kind of story to expect if...I don't really use them except to see at a glance where something was posted. Like if I see the title "The story of Mel" (now on my front page) I might have no clue what kind of story to expect if I couldn't see that it was posted in ~comp (though bad specific example for me, since I know the story of Mel).
Tag filters have been useful though for the same purpose you use the groups. In my use just to get rid of capeshit and AI news without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
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Comment on Could we get a page dedicated to spirituality? in ~tildes
text_garden LinkThere is a ~humanities group which is suitable for that as well as other topics of a philosophical nature. It seems to me that the problem should precede the solution, and it's not like the...There is a ~humanities group which is suitable for that as well as other topics of a philosophical nature. It seems to me that the problem should precede the solution, and it's not like the existing groups are overflowing with discussions on this topic.
On the other hand, perhaps more people would be interested in the topic if there was a designated space for it.
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Comment on Setting up own email FQDN (and maybe service?) in ~tech
text_garden (edited )LinkI rent email service from mailbox.org. They have a guide for the DNS setup required to use your own domain. It was surprisingly easy. Just make sure that whatever service you use implements IMAP,...I rent email service from mailbox.org. They have a guide for the DNS setup required to use your own domain. It was surprisingly easy.
if I do wind up going the third route, I imagine it wont be possible to migrate all my emails with me when I have to do a migration cause a service is starting to go down the drain? Is there a way around that? I'd like to have access to all my emails in 1 places.
Just make sure that whatever service you use implements IMAP, and then use a client that fetches messages and stores them locally. I don't know of a service that doesn't, and if I did I would laugh and spit at it.
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Comment on What have you been listening to this week? in ~music
text_garden LinkJust bought and listened through Sorry I'm late, I Saw a Dog by Morgan Ågren. He's a bit of a drummer's drummer. Drumming on strings in particular seems to be the basis for the whole album, a...Just bought and listened through Sorry I'm late, I Saw a Dog by Morgan Ågren. He's a bit of a drummer's drummer. Drumming on strings in particular seems to be the basis for the whole album, a thing he's been recording experiments with on his YouTube channel
It's hard to describe what it is, but it's great!
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Comment on Contender for the most non-viable startup: Reflect Orbital in ~tech
text_garden LinkThat's the basic premise of a Bond movie as far as I remember it!That's the basic premise of a Bond movie as far as I remember it!
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Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games
text_garden LinkI'm playing through Doom 2 In Rural Only. It's a rural-themed community project WAD, one of the Cacowards winners of 2025. The difficulty is moderate at Ultra-Violence and some quicksaving between...I'm playing through Doom 2 In Rural Only. It's a rural-themed community project WAD, one of the Cacowards winners of 2025. The difficulty is moderate at Ultra-Violence and some quicksaving between battles but there was definitely a hump at map02 as far as I'm concerned. The archviles and pain elementals are a menace. My favorite so far is map07 which is an open-ended sandbox where the keys are gated by three challenges you can take on in any order.
I scrolled through the Steam Nextfest demos and found few interesting titles. The False Echo demo was fun and engrossing, probably something for Papers, Please fans for being a narrative bureaucratic procedure simulator. Then there was the Prospice. Horror MudRunner-like. Promising, but I had to turn off the screen flickering effect!
Other than that, I played through another run of Desecrators. They updated the level generator so they can have more interesting topologies, with loops. I was surprised at how much more interesting the maps are now! It also seems to generate them a lot faster.
I also played through Vomitoreum for the second time. It's a good time, a short metroid-like FPS with a creepy, horrific atmosphere. I'd had enough time since last playing it to forget what to do. My main criticism is that none of the enemies respawn and there's a lot of looking back and forth for the path you've just unlocked, so by the end of the game there's a lot of wandering without anything meaningful to do if you're thorough on a first pass-through of an area. That said, the atmosphere is great and the map design is pretty cool to just look at. Nevertheless, I'd lost my patience near the end and looked up where the path to the end boss sequence.
The battles are also not very challenging. Most of the bosses can be beat by circle strafing and occasional jumping+dashing. I'm fine with that for a game like this, though.
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Comment on What have you been listening to this week? in ~music
text_garden LinkLast month I saw the Andreas Hourdakis quartet in concert. Great throughout but best of all they finished with a take on The Moonshiner. Didn't find a recording from that concert, but there's an...Last month I saw the Andreas Hourdakis quartet in concert. Great throughout but best of all they finished with a take on The Moonshiner. Didn't find a recording from that concert, but there's an old recording with a trio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oOOb82YmJA
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Comment on How have you improved your living spaces? in ~life.home_improvement
text_garden LinkPaintings, posters, tapestries. Lots of lighting options. In general stuff that gives me joy and comfort!Paintings, posters, tapestries. Lots of lighting options. In general stuff that gives me joy and comfort!
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Comment on Neşe Karaböcek - YALI YALI (1977) in ~music
text_garden LinkDidn't see that 303 bassline coming but it fits like a glove. I assume that was introduced with the edit since the damn thing wasn't invented in 77 hehe. I had a compilation of old Turkish rock...Didn't see that 303 bassline coming but it fits like a glove. I assume that was introduced with the edit since the damn thing wasn't invented in 77 hehe. I had a compilation of old Turkish rock music. They really seem to have had something going with drawing both from local tradition and funk/rock going on well into the 80s. Without looking at the description, guess the year of this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXsF3gCfWDo
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Comment on The internet runs on cats and porn. It’s about to get cattier and pornier. in ~tech
text_garden Link ParentI own a ".garden" domain, used for my email and website. It is surprisingly rare that an email form does not accept the address, but I think I've run into the issue at least twice. There is often...I own a ".garden" domain, used for my email and website. It is surprisingly rare that an email form does not accept the address, but I think I've run into the issue at least twice. There is often some half-assed client-side validation of email addresses in forms that accept them, usually implemented according to some very narrow, misinformed idea of what constitutes a valid email address, but the weirdo TLDs have been around for long enough I think that most accept whatever as a TLD these days.
Abbreviated file extensions seem like a long-lived artifact of CP/M and also FAT filesystems. Those only supported three character extensions, at least initially before LFN. Workbench on the Amiga had no such restrictions, and naming conventions were all over the place! For example, ProTracker (classic music software) prefers that the extension is a prefix. At least that's what the default file picker filter presumes. Workbench also didn't really associate programs with different extensions. Instead, an optional sidecar file (called an "icon") contained meta information about the file including which application should open it by default. Very flexible but cumbersome for large collections of files. Without an icon, upon double-clicking a file, Workbench would open a dialog where you would simply type the command you wanted to invoke with the file path as an argument. This has probably been addressed in patches and more current versions and clones like AROS and MorphOS, but I'm not keeping track.
Unix and its clones similarly don't really assign any special significance to extensions. Instead of an ".exe" or ".com" extension, executables are flagged as such with metadata in the file system. Data files often do not have extensions if it's known by convention what they contain, and POSIX tools will happily process them if you tell them to. XDG introduced some more modern desktop concepts which are now widely adopted, so in a typical desktop system you can still double click a music file and expect the music player to open.
If I recall correctly, RISC OS used the prefix "!" to indicate an executable, but I don't know whether this was just a soft convention or something the system actually took into account.
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Comment on I survived the certificate expiration of October 19th 2026 and all I got was to make a silly shitpost in ~tildes
text_garden Link ParentWhen I was a teenager my ISP (the biggest telecom operator in Sweden, Telia) forgot to renew the certs for their email domains. We couldn't fetch our email, neither could apparently anyone else...When I was a teenager my ISP (the biggest telecom operator in Sweden, Telia) forgot to renew the certs for their email domains. We couldn't fetch our email, neither could apparently anyone else using Telia's email service unless they disabled certificate checking IIRC!
I'm just happy I can do automatic renewal with ACME these days so I won't make the same mistake for my own domains.
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Comment on Grand Theft Auto VI | Launch trailer in ~games
text_garden Link ParentWas intrigued so I peeked at your history. AOE2! Been playing the 1999 multiplayer hits with friends for the past few years. Quake 3, Unreal Tournament, lately Worms Armageddon. Have yet to...My daily driver PC game is a 2019 re-release of something that originally came out in 1999
Was intrigued so I peeked at your history. AOE2! Been playing the 1999 multiplayer hits with friends for the past few years. Quake 3, Unreal Tournament, lately Worms Armageddon. Have yet to convince the others to play HoMM 3 and AOE2, but man, what a year for PC games! Apparently GTA II was released in 1999 as well, but I never multiplayed that.
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Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp
text_garden (edited )LinkI learned a bit of WebGL. Just enough to draw a quad using a triangle fan and then applying a fragment shader to it so I can play around with fragment shaders. I then wrote a small transpiler from...I learned a bit of WebGL. Just enough to draw a quad using a triangle fan and then applying a fragment shader to it so I can play around with fragment shaders. I then wrote a small transpiler from a subset of the Forth Haiku Salon dialect of Forth to GLSL. This was surprisingly simple once I found the right track. Compilation is logically almost like execution due to a pair of virtual stacks that keeps track of which variable currently corresponds to the top of the stack. So the concept of a stack really only exists at compile time.
A piece of Forth code like
1 3 + 5 * 3 swap -turns into a sequence of assignments in the fragment shader code like such:d0 = 1.0; d1 = 3.0; d0 = d0 + d1; d1 = 5.0; d0 = d0 * d1; d1 = 3.0; tmp = d0; d0 = d1; d1 = tmp; d0 = d0 - d1;The stack juggling stuff easily turns into a lot of entirely unnecessary reassignments, but my intuition is that the GLSL compiler will remove those through copy propagation optimization. The transpiler is for now just a Python script, but I want to rewrite it in either Zig (for use with WASM) or to JavaScript so it can be executed in the browser.
I've used three.js once before so I'm not exactly on deep water when it comes to WebGL, but that hides a lot of the details of WebGL so this helped me understand better how it actually works.
The history of it all is especially interesting to me. Shaders as a concept was apparently introduced to Renderman in the late 80s. To my knowledge, GeForce 3 was the first consumer graphics card to implement shaders. The idea is that you can turn texturing and lighting (and whatever else you might think to do with them) into the same problem by having an arbitrary program decide on what colors to output during rasterization. Before that, OpenGL had a fixed lighting and texturing pipeline which could do simple things like flat and Gouraud shading.
The GeForce 3 also had vertex shaders, which similarly execute a program for each vertex and can output whatever other vertex you want instead. In the modern OpenGL APIs you have to supply a vertex shader. For my application, this is very simple. I do translation and a simple scaling transform, just so I could more easily write my four vertices...
Later, geometry shaders became common, which operate on entire sets of vertices and are able to emit a whole new geometry instead. A basic example might be that your input is a bunch of single vertices which are each turned into quads by the geometry shader.
Then there's the "hey, what if we could just as easily apply these programs to arbitrary data instead of just graphics primitives?" that eventually snowballs into these threads being somewhat less interesting reading to me.
Other than that, I've installed the unscii fonts on my systems and use unscii-16 in my terminal. They predate but now implement the Symbols for legacy computing block added in Unicode 13, and provide good implementations of those characters based on old 8- and 16-bit computer fonts. Amiga as well as PC "ASCII" art now both look great in the terminal! I'm currently writing a translation table from C64 character ROM codes to Unicode but found that while it has a "CHECKER BOARD FILL" code which matches the C64 character 0x66, there are no standard half checker board fills as are found on the C64 (0x5a and 0x68). Unscii probably has the missing characters in the PUA blocks, but it would be neat to use standard Unicode entirely. The goal is for my screen editor petshop to be able to output a Unicode representation with escape codes for coloring and inversion.
The font looks great and is surprisingly legible as a TrueType font.
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Comment on Grand Theft Auto VI | Launch trailer in ~games
text_garden Link ParentIt seemed to me like the game wants to look like it's criticizing society in every possible way but refuses to throw any knockout punches. It ends up feeling more like vaguely cynical teenage...It seemed to me like the game wants to look like it's criticizing society in every possible way but refuses to throw any knockout punches. It ends up feeling more like vaguely cynical teenage edginess than anything.
I don't mind that since the open world and driving could carry this game two times over. Its greatest crime in my opinion is that it kind of squanders that with its extremely linear and sometimes plain tedious mission design. If not earlier, you start questioning your choice to play through it by the time you're stacking shipping containers or whatever other bullshit minigames they drag you through. The most fun I've had in its missions is getting away from cops. Even just getting from one point to another is usually more fun than anything else the missions have to offer.
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Comment on Repo for syncing ipods devices on Linux in ~tech
text_garden Link ParentHey, that could have been me! I switched to using the Foobar2000 app which solves a problem I had with audio cutting out at the beginning of songs in VLC. There you can easily also turn a...Hey, that could have been me! I switched to using the Foobar2000 app which solves a problem I had with audio cutting out at the beginning of songs in VLC. There you can easily also turn a directory tree into a playlist and shuffle it. My syncing script, for anyone else interested in this approach:
#!/bin/bash set -e mkdir ~/iphone-syncmusic trap "rmdir ~/iphone-syncmusic" EXIT idevicepair pair ifuse --documents "com.foobar2000.mobile" ~/iphone-syncmusic rsync -Lrvu --progress --delete ~/storage/musik/iphone/ ~/iphone-syncmusic/shared/ umount ~/iphone-syncmusicI just symlink the stuff I want on the phone into
~/storage/musik/iphone. The-Lflag causes rsync to resolve the symlinks while syncing so that the referents are copied instead of the links. -
Comment on What was a small but bright moment of your day? in ~life
text_garden LinkFor several years now I've made a habit of bringing peanuts wherever I go to throw some at the local jackdaws. I also feed them with müsli and peanuts on the roof outside my bedroom window....For several years now I've made a habit of bringing peanuts wherever I go to throw some at the local jackdaws. I also feed them with müsli and peanuts on the roof outside my bedroom window. They're not very trusting animals, but they understand consistency and now expect me to give them food. When I'm working from home, several times a day I'll see their heads pop up in the window while I'm walking past the bedroom, peeking cautiously at me. Then they move aside to let me open. Great waking up and seeing a tiny head in the window side-eyeing you.
The best part of this is that I have started recognizing some of them as well. At a casual glance they might seem very much alike, but they have distinct body languages, small spots of leucism in particular places, distinct calls, different styles of interacting with the other jackdaws, different battle wounds or defects, different levels of caution and so on. So just watching and feeding them you start piecing together which one is which, at least some of them. I see them growing up and I notice when they're gone.
I take photographs and have also started painting jackdaws in acrylic on canvas. It's the only subject I paint, really. There's a jackdaw subreddit I follow. I watch and rewatch jackdaw documentaries. I casually browse scientific papers on jackdaws. I'll image search for jackdaws to see if any new photos pop up in the results. I have a jackdaw desktop wallpaper.
Not exactly the small daily bright moment kind of stuff, but just to set up how much I love jackdaws.
Today I've fed two of my old favorites. The first one from my window. We have this habit that between pouring out some piles of müsli, I'll hold up and show a peanut, then place it on a railing that passes outside the window. It'll walk over and pick it up and then jump back to eat at a safe distance. We've had this habit since summer, and it's repeated most days and usually more than once a day.
I fed the other one outside the local store. I rode my bicycle there and the birds just came flying, landing all around me. The most aggressively food-wanting one is my favorite. It sounds like it has a bit of a throat problem, the usual call coming out sounding more like a sneeze. That seemingly makes it more eager to call out directly at me than the other birds are. It did, then expertly catching the peanut I threw in its general direction with a snap. It's like Michael Jackson throwing a coin at a jukebox except the jukebox does all the work.
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Comment on What single episode of a show would you recommend as a standalone? in ~tv
text_garden LinkThe X-Files S2E02, The Host. The show has a bunch of good candidates for its monster-of-the-week format and some terrible candidates for the overarching, winding alien abduction conspiracy plot,...The X-Files S2E02, The Host.
The show has a bunch of good candidates for its monster-of-the-week format and some terrible candidates for the overarching, winding alien abduction conspiracy plot, but this episode was well received and can be enjoyed in isolation. I just looked it up on Wikipedia and apparently a critic even noted that it was "a refreshing instance of a fully and satisfactorily resolved episode — like a perfect meal, although you definitely don't want to eat during this one."
It's about some kind of humanoid flukeworm mutant arriving in the bilge of a cargo ship from Russia, moving into the sewers where it starts killing people. The design of the monster is absolutely iconic, horrifying and by all means campy. The main characters are at their best, perfect representations of themselves. You will probably remember the flukeman for a long time after watching this.
I first had another episode in mind at first, S02E10 Humbug. That's probably more enjoyable if you are familiar with the characters and general tone of the show, though, because it's a bit of a departure in that regard, tuning the off-beat dark humor aspect to 11. But it follows a complete, conclusive plot and is one of my favorite episodes for the variety of colorful characters and the still-somewhat-cosy whodunnit mystery. A circus freak is murdered and all the other circus freaks are suspects, guest starring The Enigma.
I decided to try the demo after reading this and hearing about it elsewhere. Now I'm 8 hours into the game. Man do I love it! I don't mind a little grinding. If it was only a matter of getting your character stats up I might be bored with it, but I'm also getting more skilled as a player doing it, which is a lot more engaging to me.
The one thing I don't like about the game at all is the music. I thought that maybe this is a kind of homage to King's Field, then, so I listened to its soundtrack and to the soundtracks of some of its sequels. I believe I was correct, and that I get what Queen's Domain's soundtrack is going for and can appreciate that. I just don't think it's getting there. The King's Field soundtracks are quirky but have a certain finesse to them. They're highly musical where the Queen's Domain is not. As far as I know, the soundtrack is practically all loops, too, so even if I liked it I think I would grow tired of it.
Thankfully, the ambient sound design is great, so I just turned the music off. I think the mood works pretty well that way.