gila

I’m sorry, I meant to respond about the lack of BBC archival footage, as it had to be archived to be able to compile it. You’re right that it was probably shot straight to VHS.

I remember the VHS we watched was presented as a compilation of episodes with a new introduction and interludes so my guess is there was some kind of professional reproduction of the episodes themselves

The groups forming the roots of digital media piracy established ‘the scene’, which holds itself to rules and has particular distribution methods. For example Usenet was popular for many years. https://scenerules.org/

By P2P I’m meaning these are ‘non-scene’ releases, just something a random person on the internet cooked up and released somewhere, in these cases by feeding some prior standard definition release through an upscaler and creating a torrent from the output, which involves certain considerations.

We can’t exactly determine the pedigree of these files, but we can say they are lossy transcodes, that is they first existed in a compressed format and later were re-encoded by the upscaler to another compressed format.

While the upscaled may look sharper to your eyes, data from the files as they were before that process was inevitably lost due to this transcoding. If we define “quality” as the amount of information from the original presentation that was retained in the output, then the standard definition versions are definitely higher in quality than the upscaled ones.

I’m not meaning to use the term in any perjorative sense, but it’s useful information to have. If an official HD presentation is ever made from the original film, it would certainly get a ‘scene release’ that would look better than these ones.

Yes, that is the quality of the original presentation. If anything it looks worse because it has been converted from film to a digital signal, as well as being stretched to be a bit larger than normal. Lmk if you young whippersnappers have any questions about this, I grew up watching this on VHS back in the dark times 👴

Yes, both are upscaled p2p releases

Just used this to load up some concerts for my long haul flights tonight and it worked great, thanks for the rec

I’m really meaning the lack of option not to consume fast-moving consumer goods, rather than the option to pay a premium for them elsewhere. When their market position is similar to like an outlet for government rations except for private profit, their net is essentially what was skimmed off the top of free enterprise. 2.66% is just the current maximum amount that is justifiably worth without doing societal harm

That’s an expected tradeoff of operating an essential service is the point. It’s not as though their margin is that slim by mistake, or out of goodwill, or bad business sense. It’s meant to lead to the situation where we shop at Walmart not by choice, but in lieu of other options.

Same shell, mine has Intel CPU though

I’ve had a lot of thinkpads and currently use an ideapad flex 5. I prefer the smaller form factor for a portable machine I take travelling or out to biz meetings etc. The autorotate and touchscreen work great in Debian with gnome-shell out of the box. No pinch-to-zoom but I believe that works on KDE plasma out of the box.

It can become surprisingly complicated with axial deadzone settings, but that’s not really important to understand. The simple concept is it’s the zone in which the stick is moved but no change in movement is registered in-game. The complication that is added is mostly related to more precise calculation of where that zone is

Metroid Prime series are more “action games” than FPS’ per se, but they are must-plays if you haven’t, & might scratch that itch. There’s a switch remaster of the first game, none yet for Prime 2 or 3 but it’s likely they’ll come out leading up to the release of the recently-announced Prime 4

Moving a joystick is fundamentally different to moving a mouse. With a joystick there is a spring constantly acting to center it - no equivalent force when using a mouse. So you need to get a feel for estimating that force and accurately counteracting it in various gameplay scenarios. That’s a completely different “muscle” to have a memory of vs. using a mouse I think

Also, modern controller joysticks generally are not great. Most have medium to large deadzones in the center by default. I’d recommend reducing them for more responsiveness. It comes with the tradeoff of being more susceptible to stick drift. But that isn’t something you should be afraid of. It’s a physical impossibility for their design to not wear over time. I’d recommend recalibrating and adjusting settings regularly. At the end of the day, replacing joystick modules only requires screws (no soldering) so it’s cheap and relatively easy.

If you’re really serious you could get some hall effect joystick modules. That way you wouldn’t need to recalibrate often and could keep a consistently small deadzone setting without encountering drift. i.e. default settings from like dualshock 2, when stick drift was just as apparent but people hadn’t gone crazy over it yet.

Minecraft would be fine for learning fps movement in a relaxed setting.

Summit fits image to screen horizontally, ideal layout for me

There has been a lot of investment into exhibition matches over the past few years, and into a Major League Cricket domestic competition which started in 2023.

There have been failed attempts at domestic leagues in the past, but MLC is a T20 competition. That’s a shorter and more accessible form of the game where a match generally takes around 3 hours to complete.

That could make a difference, because it’s a lot easier to keep kids interested for a few hours vs. the more traditional formats that could last anywhere between 8 hours, up to 5 days.

It’s only a 1-month season though, 25 matches over the course of July. I should hopefully make it to a few of them!

Losslesscut is what you want for this. It’s basic and concatenates without re-encoding. And it’s open source (as is handbrake)

Thanks! Got the script from the TwitchAdSolutions GitHub and it seems to work well

Doesn’t work on Twitch for me (using Firefox). I’ve had some success using ‘Purple Adblock’, but it works by connecting to a public proxy in an ad-free country for the duration of the ad - so it has issues during peak and can get you stuck in a loop

Looks like a notification bar. Just a wild guess, but maybe there’s an invisible notification causing it to auto-display. If so, you might be able to fix it by limiting notifications for the app.

Looks like a notification bar. Just a wild guess, but maybe there’s an invisible notification causing it to auto-display. If so, you might be able to fix it by limiting notifications for the app.