thirdBreakfast

Rosenau is part of a growing community who are ditching contemporary video games and picking up the consoles from their childhood, or even before their time. And gen Z gamers are following suit, with 24% owning a retro console, according to research by Pringles.

A bit of a YSK for noobs (like me).

I was setting up the RG35XX-SP with Knulli last night. They have an excellent little tool in the menus for checking for any missing bios files for the emulators. A few of the files I couldn't find anywhere, but I had similar (but not exactly) named files. For example, a DS emulation bios I was missing was dsi_bios7.bin but I had biosdsi7.bin.

Amazingly, the (I guess Batocera) developers include an 'MD5' hash of the required files in the message with each file name, so I was able to confirm these are actually the same files. eg for the file dsi_bios7.bin the MD5 was given as 559dae4ea78eb9d67702c56c1d791e81.

If you're not a software developer, you might not be familiar with hashes. They are basically a big number computed from every byte in a file such that if two files have the same hash, for practical purposes, the files are exactly the same.

To find the MD5 of a file in mac or Linux you just type md5 <filename> in the terminal (ed: md5sum <filename> on Linux - thanks @[email protected] ), or for little files like these, just drop them in an online MD5 calculator.

I've had a fitbit wifi bathroom scale for a while. Getting the data out got suddenly more difficult when Google bought them, and I didn't love giving that data to google. It's finally died, and I'm looking at replacement options.

In a perfect world, I could just go to a store and buy a "HomeAssistant Ready" scale. If I can't have that, I'd like a scale that is on my local network and exposes the last x weigh-ins as an API on the device, then I could write something to poll it.

I haven't seen anything like those, but have turned up:

• a project to decode the bluetooth transmissions of a number of scales (after you build an ESP32 device for it)
• the Withings cloud based scale, but with a well documented API

Any other good options?

Today, we took apart the ModRetro Chromatic: a new entry in the handheld gaming market that might remind you a bit of something from the past. The ModRetro Chromatic really does hit us hard in the nostalgias, bringing home that Christmas morning feeling. - ifixit

For context, I'm new to retro-gaming & emulation.

How I got here:

The Steamdeck became available in my country, and I instantly desired one, but since I have a considerable Steam library that doesn't get played on my laptop and an Xbox S that hasn't been turned on for a year, I had to question if I really could justify something that expensive that might not get played much after a couple of months.

I've heard of Pico-8 games on an unrelated tech podcast, and that interested me. So I googled what handhelds I could play those on, and a few rabbit holes later I was here - a sub $100 handheld that can play retro roms, "up to" PSP - which I own a shoe box of UMDs for. I know my way around Vice City and would like to go back some day.

Screen Format:

The idea of playing PSP games was what tipped me towards a 16:9 screen rather than a squarer format. Perhaps that will turn out to be right for me, but right now I'm regretting it since I'm in a deep nostalgia dive of squarish format games.

Physical:

A lot of youtubers recommending the RGB10 Max3 point to the bulbous back as making it nicer than some others to hold for a while. It's fine - no where near as comfortable as a stock Xbox controller. A lot lighter than my distant memory of the original PSP and the buttons feel cheaper.

I got the transparent black one - I can't read the labels on the "start" and "select" buttons, but that's already staring to not matter at all after a couple of hours of on and off use. The power LED (which I understand can be turned off) is blinding in bed.

System:

I took the common advice to buy better quality SD cards and copy stuff over. In the process I flashed the system card with RockNix. I believe it comes stock with JELOS, but I never booted it with the supplied card so can't confirm. Even though this system is a collection of things from diverse developers, it's very manageable.

My only previous brush with emulation was helping some kids building an arcade machine around a raspberry pie (a while ago) and I remembering it being a lot clunkier to move between emulators etc and getting games going properly. Rocknix/Retroarch is pretty great. A few key-combos to learn but that doesn't take to long. I haven't been getting into tweaking emulator settings, but the out of the box experience for just playing some games is good.

Screen:

Is really good. It's been a long long time since I saw my PSP so it's probably not fair to compare, but I would say the RGB10Max3 is better. Certainly better for viewing angle (which hardly matters for a handheld device).

Controls:

Nearly every review (I've obsessively consumed waiting for this unit to arrive) mentions the poor D-Pad. In some games I don't notice any problem at all, in others I get repeatedly squashed by barrels or eaten by ghosts because of it. Sometimes, swapping to the left joystick solves the problem.

So far:

I'm having a lot of fun. If I am still picking this up and playing with it in a year, that's probably an indication I should have gotten a Steam Deck, but if I've lost interest and passed it on to someone else I probably would have already gotten good value out of it. A third possible outcome is that if it turns out I keep playing 4:3 and similar format games (and especially if I have a go at developing some PICO-8), I might look at one of the DMG shaped devices instead - and possibly in the more pocket-able size since those less story-based games are consumable on the go.

Does any one have any experience of this low cost conical burr grinder? I'm getting sick of my (rather good Timemore C2) hand grinder.

Last June, fans of Comedy Central – the long-running channel behind beloved programmes such as The Daily Show and South Park – received an unwelcome surprise. Paramount Global, Comedy Central’s parent company, unceremoniously purged the vast repository of video content on the channel’s website, which dated back to the late 1990s.

Has anyone got some experience/advice for choosing between the options? It seems like they are:

• Minio
• Garage
• SeaweedFS

My usecase is just to have a local single instance for testing apps against. I prefer to spin stuff up in Docker on the homelab.

{
	"id": 707212476,
	"name": "Australian Flag",
	"description": "",
	"links": {
		"lemmy": [
			"[email protected]"
		]
	},
	"path": {
		"0": [
			[
				200,
				99
			],
			[
				200,
				0
			],
			[
				0,
				0
			],
			[
				0,
				100
			],
			[
				0,
				99
			],
			[
				0,
				99
			],
			[
				0,
				99
			]
		]
	},
	"center": {
		"0": [
			99,
			50
		]
	}
}

This is a pretty great 1 hour introduction to AI from Andrej Karpathy. It includes an interesting idea of considering LLMs as a sort of operating system, and runs through some examples of jailbreaks.

I'm writing a specification for a web app that will store sensitive user data, and the stakeholder asked that I consider a number of fairly standard security practices, but also including that the data be "encrypted at rest", i.e. so that if someone gains physical access to the hard disk at some later date the user data can't be retrieved.

The app is to be Node/Express on a VPS (probably against sqlite3), so since I would be doing that using an environmental variable stored in a file on that same computing instance, is that really providing any extra security?

I guess cloud big boys would be using key management systems to move the key off the local instance, and I could replicate that by using (Hashicorp Vault?) or building a service to keep the key elsewhere, but then I'd need secure access to that service, which once again would involve a key being stored locally.

What's your thoughts, experience, or usual practice around this?