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general·Generalbyeinval

Be careful with your language settings!

I unknowingly deselected "Undetermined" at some point and ended up missing out on a lot of posts for the past couple weeks.

I suspect this happened when I changed my account settings using my phone. And here I was thinking Lemmy died or something 😅.

To fix this for myself I highlighted "Undetermined", scrolled down, control+clicked "English", then hit "Save".

View original on lemmy.einval.net
x86_asm·x86 Assemblybyeinval

I guess I'll start things off

I picked up assembly programming in 2015 after my son was born while on paternity leave. I needed something to keep my mind busy between changing diapers and feedings, or I was going to go insane.

I started off with the 6502 through reading old magazines from the 70s and 80s on archive.org (Compute! Magazine was rich with examples and how-to articles. RIP Jim Butterfield). I bought two functioning C64s from a local Ham Fest with the hope of diving into the real-deal head first, but with kids that's much harder than it sounds. I had to shelve the machines and settle for VICE.

After about a year of mucking around trying different things I decided to start reading through old Intel and AMD architecture documents (8088/6). Around that time I discovered the "emu8086" emulator and purchased a license so I could watch my code execute and effect the system in real time. I knew about "insight" for DOS, and tried it too, but for the time being the emulator was a much better visual learning tool.

Shortly thereafter I became interested in operating systems and how they worked under the hood (i.e. DOS). So my next goal was to write a bootloader based on the Intel spec documents, and a tiny real-mode OS capable of reacting to user input. Nothing fancy, however this track turned out to be very beneficial.

I started programming in basic when I was little, copying DATA lines out of books so I could play games, and eventually graduated to C when I was 12-ish. Despite being able to program (fairly well) for years, I lacked the formal education of my peers at work. Assembly really jumpstarted potential in me that I didn't even know existed, and actually pushed me to become a more thoughtful developer. I used to be afraid of gdb but now it's my bread and butter.

If you want to take a look at the "OS" you can find it here:

https://git.einval.net/user/jhunk/minos.git/

I also wrote a program for my son at one point, though it's incomplete:

https://git.einval.net/user/jhunk/learncolors.git/

einval.net itself was supposed to be a programming blog. Again though, with kids I just don't have the time or energy anymore. Oh well. Perhaps I'll get back into doing that in 10 years or so 😉

View original on lemmy.einval.net
sysadmin_linux·Systems Administration (Linux)byeinval

So it begins...

I guess the GPL protects them from litigation here because users can still access the sources.

The new TOS pretty much states that if you "abuse" your RH subscription by repackaging their SRPMs and releasing them in the wild their lawyers will flay you in the town square.

Can IBM/Red Hat really lay claim to the modifications/patches they've made to open source packages? What about all of the contributions RH has made to the kernel over the years? Is that not "theirs" too?

In the software packaging world you see maintainers using freely available patches from Debian, Fedora, and so on for their own distros. So what happens now if a patch is only available through Red Hat? Is it reasonable to assume you'll get sued because it came from one of their SRPM packages?

I just think it's messed up. If this was limited to RH's own software projects maybe I wouldn't care, but making folks pay for access to what's already free (and they didn't write from scratch internally) is shitty. Unless I'm totally mistaken a lot of what ends up in CentOS and RHEL is derived from changes contributed to Fedora using the free labor/time/energy of everyday RPM maintainers.

So it begins...https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-streamOpen linkView original on lemmy.einval.net
pc_gaming·PC Gamingbyeinval

BattleBit Remastered on Steam

I purchased BattleBit the other day for $15 USD and I am enjoying it so far. The community seems pleasant at the moment. The developer-run servers have strict rules against being an asshole and a zero tolerance for spam/racism/politics, so that's definitely a plus. I can play the game instead of muting people constantly.

If you're a fan of Battlefield (1 or 2) or Project Reality then BattleBit might be worth checking out. The pace is as fast or slow as you want it to be. If you prefer static defense -- go for it. If you want to run into the fray to drag incapacitated players from the field while tracers whiz by -- go right ahead. If you want to employ teamwork and tactics to capture objects -- no one will scoff at you.

BattleBit Remastered on Steamhttps://store.steampowered.com/app/671860/BattleBit_Remastered/Open linkView original on lemmy.einval.net
pc_gaming·PC Gamingbyeinval

CDPR Confirms ‘Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty’ Unlocks New Endings

I'm one of those weirdos with several end-game saves on their hard drive for CP2077. If all of the Phantom Liberty quests are supposed to take place in the middle of the base game's story-line, it might be too easy going into it at level 50 with a maxed out skill tree and the best weapons in the game.

I haven't had a chance to sit down and read everything available yet but I sure hope they give the player another twenty or thirty levels to grind through.

CDPR Confirms ‘Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty’ Unlocks New Endingshttps://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2023/06/14/cdpr-confirms-cyberpunk-2077-phantom-liberty-unlocks-new-endings/?sh=43d5e80b6c8bOpen linkView original on lemmy.einval.net
general·Generalbyeinval

Death by user count?

The join-lemmy site no longer shows this instance's card because it's below the active user threshold. How are users supposed to find an instance that fits what they're looking for now?

This exists as well: https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances

Doesn't this do more harm than good? I don't have time to promote and advertise. I really liked the idea that people could easily find this and join if they wanted to.

I'm not taking down the instance or anything. This serves as a "blog" if I'm the only one posting anything. I'm just a little disappointed that small or new instances aren't easily discoverable at a critical time when performance and uptime are kind of important.

People are flocking to Lemmy over the Reddit API debacle. By listing instances based on user count they're overloading and crashing the same old servers hourly (already), instead of treating instances like a federated decentralized network. I guess we'll see what happens come July...

View original on lemmy.einval.net
pc_gaming·PC Gamingbyeinval

Aliens: Dark Descent

I want this game to be good but given the last couple flops set in the Alien universe my expectations are pretty low. Fireteam Elite, for example, is/was too arcadey for my taste and left solo players like me high and dry. I'm not a fan of random people showing up in my (what should be) single player game to "help" either. The third-person camera didn't do it for me in all of those tight corridors.

There isn't much information out there for a game about to go live in 9 days. Maybe that's for the best? Without a massive hype train catering to 12 years olds (flashy visuals, stupid character poses, loot boxes, etc) the development team might keep their jobs long enough post-launch to actually respond to player feedback and release meaningful patches, and implement quality of life changes.

My hope is that Dark Descent will be what Fireteam Elite should have been - a dark and gritty tactical game with XCOM-like game mechanics, set in an awful future where an evil mega-corporation aims to unleash a nearly unstoppable plague of seven foot tall bloodthirsty locusts on humanity. (Is that too much to ask for?)

View original on lemmy.einval.net
pc_gaming·PC Gamingbyeinval

I beat Cyberpunk 2077 on Hard mode

Gameplay:

  • 54 parts
  • No commentary
  • All main, side, cyberpsycho, and NCPD quests completed
  • 77% achievements (GOG)

PC Specs:

  • CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X
  • RAM: 32GB G.Skill DDR4-3200
  • GPU: AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT
  • HDD: Samsung 970 EVO Plus SSD 1TB

Mods:

^Installed just prior to recording #28^


My takeaway from this is that hard mode is hard in the beginning and enemies are absolute bullet sponges from start to finish.

Getting bullshit killed and running out of ammo constantly becomes tedious after a while. I'm not sure if its me or what. I feel like every encounter required several mag dumps just to kill a single guy. In that regard I have to say Cyberpsycho attacks win the "shittiest to fight" award. Sometimes they become immune to damage for reasons unknown. You really have to pay attention to the damage meter at the top of the screen, or risk prematurely wasting your entire inventory on a single crazy asshole.

During my first playthrough on normal I was a shotgun samurai through and through. However, sadly, even the best shotgun in the game can't keep up with the insane damage the various droids and gang members dole out at close range. Getting in close to splatter someone is a deathwish even if you spec out your character with full mitigation gear and select every skill under the shotgun skill tree.

If you're thinking about picking up or revisiting Cyberpunk 2077, don't bother with the higher difficulty settings. They add nothing to the game and have a tendency to break the immersion as you reload the same battle a dozen times because you got one-shot killed by a sniper from across town through five shipping containers.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLu84zuSbAT9g2aYNJhX3mnEKMmEF4fHbeOpen linkView original on lemmy.einval.net
sysadmin_linux·Systems Administration (Linux)byeinval

Docker and Red Hat Universal Base Image woes

What made Red Hat think it was a good idea to bind containers to a docker hosts's /etc/rhsm and /etc/pki data?

I recently ran into a situation where a RHEL 7 docker host that's primarily used for continuous integration jobs couldn't use the ubi9/ubi container image. Why? Because the host didn't have entitlements for RHEL 9.

After fiddling around with injecting RHEL 9 certs into the image I managed to enable the base repositories and a few extras, however that's about the time I realized this whole thing was an exercise in futility. Basic packages like createrepo_c were completely missing and I wasn't able to figure out which RHN channel provided it. Why are they separating rpmdevtools from createrepo_c at the repository level anyway; what's the point?

I wasted a solid day sifting through the only relevant documentation Red Hat provides (for OpenShift, not Docker) before giving up and going with quay.io/centos/centos:stream9.

After that I was back in business, building and distributing RPMs in about three minutes time.

View original on lemmy.einval.net
announcements·Announcementsbyeinval

Disabled email verification

einval's mail server is working correctly however the 0.17.3 release of Lemmy may have broken its builtin user verification system. Until that is confirmed fixed I'm making email registration optional.

You can still add an email address after signing up for an account, of course. I think this issue only pertains to new registrations.

View original on lemmy.einval.net
announcements·Announcementsbyeinval

Site is back up

My apologies to anyone that signed up between yesterday and today. I was trying to troubleshoot a problem with federation and ended up making things much worse. Unfortunately this required me to start entirely from scratch, but at least federation appears to be working correctly now.

I'm done messing around Lemmy's internals if you'd like to sign up again.

View original on lemmy.einval.net

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