When this happens it’s often because a backend component gets rewritten and somebody decides that it’s too much work to re-implement some features for the new backend. It’s much easier to come up with a PR spiel for why removing the features is actually a good thing.

TIL. The wikipedia article with some more detail.

(early 8-bit era)

For Steam in general: If you are not in a major hurry to get a game wait for sales. There are major sales a few times a year and smaller ones all the time. Add games to your Steam wishlist to get notified when it’s on sale. Check steamdb for price trends.

The speech in Impossible Mission was sampled from a human actor not synthesized.

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So what are you playing this week?

I started playing Ring of Pain. It’s a deckbuilder-ish roguelite. There isn’t really a deck, it’s more of a loadout-builder (or tableau builder in boardgame terms). Meteorfall: Krumit’s Tale is the closest thing I’ve played before. RoP is sort of like a 1d version of that. Fun and fairly unique mechanics, smooth implementation. Runs great on the steamdeck too, good controller support.

OCRmyPDF is what I use as well, had good luck with it on boardgame rulebooks that sometimes come with missing or partial embedded text. Combined with recoll and the Emacs pdf-tools mode I have it all indexed and at my fingertips.

On Android it’s the only reasonable choice so no question there.

On desktop I used Netscape/Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox/Conkeror for many years but switched to Chromium when I had to start over after the XUL-apocalypse. But lately I’ve been maintaining my Firefox setup more or less in parallel with Chromium and this week as it happens I am trying to make the switch back again. Mostly just to wean off the Google stuff. Will see how it goes.

Another (less-critical) motivation is that Chromium takes over 10 hours to build on my machine. Firefox is under 1 and it gets done way faster even if an LLVM or Rust build is involved too.

It’s been mostly comfort foods: Slay the Spire and Binding of Isaac.

In Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime you have to save the Space Bunnies!

I’ve give up on the Youtube homepage long time ago. Only the Subscriptions view (with shorts filtered using a userscript) and search results are usable for me.

Some I don’t see mentioned yet:

• Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection ported to pretty much everything.
• Nethack (and its variants), Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup and Brogue are great roguelikes.
• For boardgame fans the original Keldon AI for Race for the Galaxy is open source and works very well on Linux.
• Fish Fillets NG is one I have fond memories of from many years ago.
• The Ur-Quan Masters is Star Control 2, another classic.

And why not phones too if the user prefers it that way. Can we have our user preferences back please?

x86 Macs are not the greatest example of longevity at this point.

EXWM. I am a longtime Emacs user so merging the concepts of Emacs buffers and X windows is a huge benefit. Only one set of keybindings to worry about, all of my Emacs window management stuff works for X windows too. One less external dependency to worry about too. In a new environment (like when starting a new job etc) as long as I have my Emacs config I am good to go.