Toots for HunterZ@mastodon.sdf.org account

Written by Ben S. on 2025-01-27 at 00:53

In today's episode of "Two Things Can Be Bad At The Same Time":

The investor class is disgustingly salivating at and opening their wallets to the current AI scam, in hopes it will help them further concentrate their wealth by kicking labor to the curb.

...and...

Swindlers/charlatans are massively over-hyping the current and potential capabilities of the current AI scam, in hopes it will help them gain/cement their own positions within the investor class before society figures it out.

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Written by Ben S. on 2025-01-26 at 22:19

There's a weird thing going on with disk defragmenters, where most of them have become severely enshittified. UltraDefrag, for example, used to be FOSS, but went commercial; an older free version is still available, but now pops up ads for the paid one.

It's so weird seeing people try to squeeze blood out of stone. With everything going to SSDs, fancy FAT32/NTFS defrag is now a super-niche thing.

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Written by Ben S. on 2025-01-24 at 21:47

Okay, partitions are backed up to the NAS as .7z archives. The homebrew + emu NAND archive is ~10GB, and the disc backups archive is ~200GB.

I'm reading that the Wii likes a FAT32 partition with 32KB cluster size, and that modern Windows won't format large FAT32 partitions. The USB HDD is 500GB, so I've booted an OpenSUSE VM and mapped the USB HDD into it.

Tried GParted first, but it set a 64KB cluster size. Now I'm trying mkdosfs on the command line, with a bad sector test.

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Written by Ben S. on 2025-01-24 at 08:05

Apparently in the last several years, it has become possible to play Gamecube game backups on a Wii using a Classic Controller via Nintendont, instead of having to buy and connect a Gamecube controller.

I tried doing this and found that Nintendont (and USB Loader GX's GC support for that metter) really doesn't like my USB HDD partitioning scheme, with homebrew on the first partition and games on the second.

I should probably backup everything to my NAS and then smash the partitions together.

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Written by Ben S. on 2025-01-22 at 04:24

My wife bought our Nintendo Wii around 15 years ago because it had a number of exercise/workout games/apps. After she got bored of it, I modded it and loaded up an attached USB HDD with all the best games for the system.

But I keep thinking about how the title song for one of the exercise games goes harder than it has any right to, and nobody knows because you can't find much about it online - despite being published by EA.

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Written by Ben S. on 2025-01-11 at 07:53

I'm eyeing the Denon AVRX1800H as a possible replacement for the 15 year old Yamaha, which would simplify things greatly:

1. Supports both eARC (2-way HDMI)

2. Supports 8K video on its HDMI inputs

This means the Fire Stick 4K should work when connected to either the receiver or the TV, and only an HDMI cable between the receiver and TV should be needed in either case.

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Written by Ben S. on 2025-01-11 at 07:45

TV digital audio mess:

Got a Samsung S90D 65" TV over the holidays to replace our almost 15 year old 47" Vizio.

Fire Stick 4K had to be connected directly to the TV because the old Yamaha RX-V665 AV receiver doesn't support 4K HDMI. Receiver also doesn't support eARC, so I had to connect a TOSLINK optical audio cable from the TV to the receiver.

The TV absolutely refuses to output optical audio unless I also leave it connected via HDMI for some reason. It's totally bizarre!

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Written by Ben S. on 2025-01-10 at 21:45

Just bought a unicorn: New-in-box front bookshelf speakers for the 5.1 set that I only bought the center+surrounds+subwoofer for around 15 years ago.

The parent company decided to retire the home audio products sold under that brand and use it exclusively for car audio.

We didn't buy the front speakers because my wife already had decent tower speakers, but the tweeters have worn out, and bookshelf speakers are a better fit for our usage (we don't have a big room and don't listen to music).

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Written by Ben S. on 2024-12-30 at 01:34

There's also a new Open Shop Channel website that hosts Wii homebrew apps, with their own fork of the Homebrew Browser that makes it easy to install/update stuff.

My (now 11-year old!) port of Abuse is up there: https://oscwii.org/library/app/abuse

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Written by Ben S. on 2024-12-30 at 01:32

Since I've been revisiting my softmodded Wii, I decided to do a refresh of its homebrew software. Wii development has slowed down a lot, but I missed some updates over the past few years - some of which are revival forks of stuff I was using.

The most exciting thing to come out of this is that there are now multiple ways to easily auto-patch games to restore online multiplayer.

I jumped into a round of Mario Kart Wii with 9 other random people from around the world - it worked seamlessly!

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Written by Ben S. on 2024-12-28 at 07:37

I really think this boss is poorly designed. First of all, you're underwater, which means worse mobility and visibility - but you're supposed to keep your distance from and dodge the boss.

Second, the boss is only vulnerable while charging if it decides to open its mouth, which it is much harder to goad into doing when its health gets low - you have to get as far away as possible and pray.

You're also supposed to somehow dodge, but I just tanked its ramming attacks.

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Written by Ben S. on 2024-12-28 at 07:35

Finally caught up to the 30% complete I was at when I last attempted Metroid Prime 2 on the Wii several years ago. I started over because I forgot everything that had happened.

I'm now wondering if I rage quit: There's a poorly designed section where you have to do a long puzzle section and then fight a stupid-hard boss without saving first. This time I beat it on my second try, but while on my last energy tank!

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Written by Ben S. on 2024-12-21 at 19:12

Also the "App Center" pinned app is just snap-store, and it fails to update itself...because it's already running lmao. Why would you make an upp updater UI that can't update itself?!

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Written by Ben S. on 2024-12-21 at 19:05

Installed Ubuntu LTS in a VM after having abandoned it for Debian several years ago, as first steps towards migrating a Win10 game server to Linux, because apparently Steam-adjacent stuff is best supported on Ubuntu.

Security updates are gated behind a subscription - yikes, the threat of microsoft doing this to Windows 10 is exactly why I'm looking to migrate!!!

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Written by Ben S. on 2024-12-06 at 16:55

Them: "I'm probably going to lock my Mastodon account and take a mental health break from social media."

Me: I bet they went to #bsky.

• checks bsky, sees multiple posts from them in the last hour*

You don't have to be weird about it, you can just leave - or post on both - or whatever.

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Written by Ben S. on 2024-12-02 at 20:34

"Don't complain that I post paywalled links" okay but I'm also not going to jump through a bunch of hoops to read the thing you linked, so you just wasted both of our time. May as well have linked a rickroll.

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Written by Ben S. on 2024-11-22 at 20:26

Power has been out since Tuesday night. Ran my car down by driving into work for 2 days, and now we need to charge it so I can drive a kid to swim - turns out the closest town can charge only 8 cars at a time for a population of tens of thousands of households. Ended up going to a friend's house who has power, which will also be convenient because we can pay them in bourbon instead of having to use a stupid app lol

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Written by Ben S. on 2024-10-12 at 18:54

Desperately need to get a new tablet. It can emulate PSX games with shaders, but can barely manage to show me a twitch stream because it runs out of RAM trying to process the massive javascript burden that saddles every website in 2024.

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Written by Ben S. on 2024-10-12 at 17:30

2009: I accidentally buy Bioshock on 2 digital storefronts, and gave one of the keys to a friend.

2024: I still have not completed the game, despite owning free copies of the Remastered version on 3 digital storefronts.

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Written by Ben S. on 2024-10-05 at 23:01

Got in my car today and it warned me about low tire pressure - it's that time of year where the air density is higher enough due to colder temperatures.

Got out the tire pump and discovered a new feature of my car: If filling the tires while the tire pressure menu is active, the car's horn will honk whenever a low tire reaches the correct pressure.

My cheapo pump has an automatic shutoff, but it's good to know in case I ever have to fill when out and about.

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