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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • In my first year of university, we had a fun project to make us get used to physics. One of the projects required filming someone throwing a ball upwards, and then using the footage to get the maximum height the ball reached, and doing some simple calculations to get the initial velocity of the ball (if I recall correctly).

    One of the groups that chose that project was having a discussion on a problem they were facing: the ball was clearly moving upwards on one frame, but on the very next frame it was already moving downwards. You couldn’t get the exact apex from any specific frame.

    So one of the guys, bless his heart, gave a suggestion: “what if we played the (already filmed) video in slow motion… And then we filmed the video… And we put that one in slow motion as well? Maybe do that a couple of times?”

    A friend of mine was in that group and he still makes fun of that moment, to this day, over 10 years later. We were studying applied physics.






  • That’s so weird. This isn’t about Nintendo hardware sucking: it’s running on an actual Nintendo Switch, except instead of it using the Switch’s OS and it running the game, it goes Linux -> Emulator (yuzu) -> game (running from an actual cart through a dumper) and somehow that’s faster.

    It’s a software issue.

    Is it the Nintendo Switch OS which is needlessly bloated? It does nothing, how can it be heavier than an actual Linux Distribution?

    I’m not familiar with how the Switch works, but the dumper has a FPGA for decoding the cartridge. Is this something that the Switch has to do in real time in software, and maybe that’s where the performance loss comes from? It seems unlikely but I know nothing of the Switch’s internals or software. In fact let’s just say I know nothing at all, I’m just an idiot.

    PS: Everyone who buys used Switch games should see this until the end. The dumper allows you to extract a certificate file from a cartridge. Basically, someone malicious could buy a new game, dump it including the certificate file, clone it, and resell the game. Then they would be able to play online with it. If you buy the original copy afterwards and play online, you are likely going to be the one whose certificate is flagged as fake, leading to you being banned.

    Also, they could just sell multiple copies of cloned games and you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference… Except for the certificate, which would be the same and would signal Nintendo that you (and like 10 other people) are playing a fake game, unbeknownst to you.


  • OK, so you have the opinion of people with flagship or even midrange phones, now here I come with my budget phone, a Redmi Note 8.

    I’ve used budget phones all my life since, well, they’re cheaper. The truth is that yes, you do notice some animation stuttering and some delayed responses, especially as the years go by and you have more apps installed (probably doing stuff in the background) and the apps you do have keep updating to be more bloated.

    This phone in particular makes it very hard to multi-task, as it’s very liberal with killing apps in the background to save RAM. This is annoying. But I’m using MI UI instead of stock android, and I’m sure I could change this.

    Honestly, I do feel like I’m being left behind and that I’m going to have to switch phones more often than if I had a more expensive model. But so far I haven’t encountered any apps I could not run (or even that I could run but only with too much stutter, making for a terrible user experience). So I’ll keep using it until I truly feel left behind, which can take a surprisingly long time. My usage time tends to rival that of people with flagship android phones and iPhones (maybe I even come out ahead)

    But you specifically asked about animation stutter. It does happen but it simply doesn’t bother me at all. It’s not constant, only happening when the phone is doing something else at the same time, and even when it does I can wait a few seconds and it’ll be fine. You also mentioned lag when opening an app, so much that you thought it didn’t register your input. It doesn’t happen to me since, while the app itself can take some time to open, the icon has feedback so I know I pressed it.

    Overall, I don’t think any of these issues are enough to bother me significantly for a good few years.





  • Minecraft, I tried summoning and defeating the Wither and was woefully unprepared. The entire world near the fight was filled with craters from the explosions. I was getting ready to throw the entire world away. Then I decided to just cheat and turn Creative Mode on for 1 second, the Wither disappeared and I was able to continue playing, now with PTSD.

    It didn’t help that I was playing on Bedrock (switch), which apparently has a much more difficult fight than in the Java edition.


  • AlolanYoda@mander.xyztoTechnology@lemmy.worldWhy a kilobyte is 1000 and not 1024 bytes
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    9 months ago

    A lot of people are replying as if OP asked a question. It’s a link to a blog post explaining why a kilobyte is 1000 and not 1024 bytes (exactly as the title says!). OP knows the answer, in fact they know it so well they wrote an extensive post about it.

    Thank you for the write up! You should re-check the spelling and grammar as some sections had some troubles. I have a sentence I need to go to the post to get, so let me edit this later!

    Edit: the second half of this sentence is a mess: “The factors don’t solely consist of twos, but ten are certainly lot of them.” Otherwise nothing jumped out at me but I would reread it just in case!