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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • And do you know how he managed to make every frame in that film look like a period painting…? A very particular and expensive lens NASA gave him.

    (Of course, though, while the man despised filming on location, he required massive amounts of reference pictures to build his sets, so even though the official moon landing was fake, NASA still had to get some astronauts there first to take those pictures for him.)


  • No, no, Kubrick hated shooting on location. All those Vietnam scenes in Full Metal Jacket…? Filmed right next to London.

    Now, he did fake the moon landing, of course, that’s why NASA gave him the lens he used to make every single frame in Barry Lyndon look like a period painting… but much like with the start of 2001 (also filmed in London), he wanted lots of location pictures for reference (he didn’t want to go there, wherever it was, but he had no qualms whatsoever about sending other people), so he demanded NASA send astronauts to the moon anyway to take those pictures, and the official moon landing was faked using those pictures taken in the real one as reference.




  • leftzero@lemmy.worldtoGames@lemmy.world[MEGATHREAD] Starfield - Your experiences!
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    10 months ago

    Yeah, probably, though computers take space, and electricity… though, admittedly, these days you can probably run a mail server on a raspberry pi (if you can get your hands on one) powered by a potato… 🤔

    The plan sort of was to eventually (once I can afford a new machine) move everything to VMs, with GPU pass through for the gaming one (I can’t afford a dedicated gaming machine — nor have the space for it — and I want something I can easily reset to a clean installation in case of Denuvo and similar malware without messing with my work software), but moving the servers and firewall to a small dedicated machine might indeed be a more realistic (and maybe even cheaper) approach…


  • leftzero@lemmy.worldtoGames@lemmy.world[MEGATHREAD] Starfield - Your experiences!
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    10 months ago

    “Graphics card not supported.”

    Find out I have to update Windows.

    Hadn’t updated since around 2018 and everything worked fine, but OK, fine, let’s try it.

    Can’t figure out how to reenable Windows update (it kept trying to come back, like a dog swallowing and revomiting its own puke, so at some point I’d disabled it with extreme prejudice, and it seems it stuck).

    Manage to find a Microsoft tool that’ll update Windows 10 to the latest version without going through Windows update.

    Upgrade assistant does its thing and at seventy-something percent complains VirtualBox isn’t compatible and must be uninstalled. Yeah, not doing that, got my family’s mail server in there. I was only 2 major versions behind, shouldn’t’ve been a problem, but all right, have it your way.

    Update VirtualBox, looks like Upgrade assistant is finally happy, after a couple aeons Windows is updated.

    “Graphics card not supported.” Fuck. You.

    Update graphics drivers (couple more aeons; in for a penny, in for a pounding).

    While Nvidia does its thing, try to start the VMs in the new version of VirtualBox. “Can’t start operating system”. Well, fuck.

    Eventually figure out that at some point around version 6 VHD support got fubared and Oracle never fixed it. This is why I don’t update.

    Start converting VHD disks to VDIs, which should fix it. What’s a few more aeons between friends.

    While I’m at it the drivers finish updating. Try to start the game again, third time’s the charm.

    Fans reach take off speed! Main screen goes black! Logos start showing! It lives!

    “Compiling 1 of 7000 shaders”

    (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

    System grinds to a halt. Finally manage to open program manager and kill the game. Probably shouldn’t have started it while I was migrating the virtual disks. (The fact that it’s a 980ti probably doesn’t help either, but hey, it’s worked perfectly till now, including with Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldur’s Gate 3, and by jingo it’ll work with Starfield).

    “It just works.”

    Anyway, meanwhile the disks finish migrating, and at least now the VMs work. Update the VirtualBox extensions just to be sure, reboot the VM…

    Black screen.

    (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

    Find out at some point the display drivers got fubared for Windows 2003 / XP and Oracle never fixed it. Manage to start the VM in safe mode and uninstall the VirtualBox extensions; after fixing the display settings, it sort of works again. Yay. Second VM is staying with v5.x extensions, thank you very much.

    Say what you want about Bethesda (they almost certainly deserve it), but at least they ain’t Oracle.

    Sigh.

    Gonna eat something, relax a bit, and leave the game to compile shaders while I sleep.

    With luck, tomorrow it’ll be done, and it’ll just work.



  • I mean… as someone who’s had to port some .NET framework software to .NET 6… yes… but.

    20 years old .NET framework code will keep working, sure, as long as you can find and install the correct .NET framework runtime, but maintaining it might be a different matter… you can code .NET with notepad, if you feel like it, but for .NET framework code you will need Visual Studio, with the proper SDKs… which might not be available in the latest version of Visual Studio (on occasion I’ve had to install VS 2019 so I could compile old .NET framework code in VS 2022).

    And when you get it to compile you still might have to deal with third party tools (Crystal Reports, for instance) that don’t work in modern .NET or later versions of Visual Studio…

    And of course then you want to add something new to the code, which is why you went through all that trouble to begin with… but the tools for what you want to do are only available in modern .NET, or as nuget packages that won’t work with framework… and you’ll have to migrate the whole thing to the latest long term support version of .NET… which sure, is several orders of magnitude less work than rewriting the whole thing in some other language, and heavily automated… but is still a whole process.

    But then of course there’s the bits of .NET framework that got deprecated during the transition (or in later updates), or the third party libraries that never got updated… and you’ll have to find or implement replacements for those…

    But yeah, once you’ve done all that your refurbished 20 year old code will still work today, and significantly better than it did before… and if it isn’t too ridden with windows dependencies (WPF and the like) it might even be portable to Linux or Mac, or whatever. And it’ll probably still work (and do it even better) 20 years from now.


  • leftzero@lemmy.worldtoComradeship // FreechatI think dogs deserve real food
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    11 months ago

    No one says no to some extra vitamins, but by that same reasoning cows (who’ll happily eat the occasional small bird or rodent if given the opportunity) would be omnivores too. Dogs eat grass occasionally, sure (though mostly because it helps them puke the indigestible crap they’ve swallowed while you weren’t looking), but an awful lot of what a real omnivore would consider food is literal poison to a dog.

    Dogs are stunted and inbred wolves, and ~15-30,000 years of artificial selection, while enough to cosmetically and mentally deform a species into hundreds of more or less fubared breeds, is not enough to turn a carnivore into an omnivore; that kind of thing takes millions of years.


  • We used to do that too. Dog happily inhaled it, as dogs are wont to do. Eventually, dog had a stomach torsion. Had to have surgery. Miraculously survived. We kept feeding it rice stew (we’re idiots, you see), dog kept inhaling it, despite warnings by the vet not to let it eat fast (how!?) and us trying our best (except not feeding him that kind of food, of course; as I said, idiots). Got second stomach torsion, second surgery. Didn’t survive. Everyone was sad.

    If your dog is medium to large (or smaller but with a wide chest) be careful it doesn’t eat too fast.


  • leftzero@lemmy.worldtoComradeship // FreechatI think dogs deserve real food
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    11 months ago

    Dogs seek “human” food, dog food, cat food, inedible garbage, their own (and other animals’) shit and puke, that unidentifiable dead thing in the ditch, aww, look at the cute liddle bunny wabbit NO! Fenton! Drop it! Fenton! Bad dog! pukes Fenton drops what’s left of the rabbit and inhales the puke in one slurp. Haks a few times, pukes it, the rabbit’s entrails, that thing from the ditch, and what looks suspiciously like a used condom. Proceeds to swallow the whole mix again with gusto. Dogs want to eat everything and most of what they want to eat isn’t really good for them, or is outright poisonous.

    Dogs, despite their brains being so fubared by domestication and inbreeding that they’ll try to eat anything even if it kills them, are carnivores not omnivores.

    We are omnivores evolved to be able to eat all kinds of crap (we call several poisons plants have evolved over millions of years to defend themselves from predators “spices” and “recreational drugs”), dogs are not.

    If you feed “human” food to your dog (or, more likely, if your dog eats it off the table or the garbage can despite you yelling at it not to), make very sure that dogs’ methabolism considers it food and not deadly poison, because the dog’s brain certainly can’t tell the difference, nor would it care to if it could…