CEC is pretty amazing for any relatively modern device (console, blu ray player, etc) in a “normal” setup.

The main problems are if you are a bit of a “power user” and have a receiver or something (although I have also heard issues with soundbars) with it not always being clear what audio outputs will be used. And as consoles become more and more glorified computers you can run into issues where a simple workflow like:

1. Start xbox
2. Start download of big game for later
3. Go back to “TV” to watch youtube

Results in the xbox shutting down and not actually downloading the game.

As a “power user” I just got a sofabaton (Just as mediocre and finicky as a Harmony but you won’t have forgotten that because your config is a decade old). but I keep telling myself that I should futz with my nvidia shield to see if I can use my receiver’s remote for everything instead.

That… is a really shitty meme that misses the point?

If you actually look at what the overlay exposes, the User still has the ability to pick specific channels, control volume, power, etc. All they really lose are the DVR (good example) and all of the user friendly stuff related to tv guides and the like (bad example).

I assume this is just AI engagement farming bullshit that someone fell for and posted to lemmy but… I would actually say it would make more sense if the overlay were almost inverted.

Removed by mod

The issue is when those preservation efforts completely undermine themselves. That is why I specifically highlighted abandonware becoming “upload all your gog installers”. When your “noble” intentions are predicated on not being able to buy a game or the DRM being too invasive and then you immediately encourage people to buy drm-free games and upload them to remind the companies WHY drm exists?

There is also very much the question of whether it even IS digital preservation to have a version 2.0 copy of a game that has had massive balance and even mechanic shifts over the past few years. Or a predominantly multiplayer game where botmatches were an afterthought. But at least that is a philisophical debate. Rather than just “gimme that Stranglehold”

What pisses me off the most with the entertainment industry, is how they expect you to buy the same things whether it’s a different format or on a platform multiple times.

No, they don’t. Yes, there are the people who will buy every single release of every single disney movie. But the general idea is that just because someone bought The Fifth Element on DVD twenty years ago doesn’t mean they are buying every single new 4k UHD re-release. Obviously that would be preferable but…

Furthermore, they willingly take away shows, movies .etc on a reguar cyclic basis on streaming platforms.

That annoys the piss out of me. But… that was how TV worked for decades. Seinfeld will always be on at 7 PM on TBS every single day until the end of time. But the three people who actually liked Coach? Once that got replaced by… Becker? It was “gone forever” and no longer something you watch when you are skipping school at lunch. And if you were REALLY a Wings superfan? You bought it on tape.

Most of this boils down to… we actually have it REALLY good these days. I remember when I had to make it a point to stop off at Best Buy on my way home from work for a month because I had read that a really cool CRPG called “Evil Islands” was coming out and knew that Best Buy would buy like three copies. And some random soccer mom was likely to buy something for her kid while she was buying batteries. And, of course, Best Buy wouldn’t tell anyone when they got new games and when they would put them on the shelves.

Now? I can hear about my dream game and still wait until a week or two after launch for a sale because Steam will “never” run out of copies.

It’s like, leave us the fuck alone. If something is not available anymore with absolutely no assured plans to bring it back for re-release and to be available on even streaming platform which leaves us to pirate - let it fucking be. What, are you going to make a shitstorm for people who buy movies and shows while thrifting? Surprised these fuckers haven’t gotten to that process yet because of how god damn greedy they are.

I personally have no problem pirating shit if I can’t get it otherwise (mostly because I would rather a proper blu-ray rip or to have it on Steam/GoG/whatever). But I will always call bullshit on that mentality of “We are just pirating because we can’t get it otherwise!”

Decade or two back and abandonware was very much a thing. Plenty of us were signed up to private trackers so we could share CyClones or Star Crusader because those were dead games. And plenty of those trackers had specific rules about not having anything that is currently for sale… or Nintendo… because they totally were about preservation and it was nothing about getting sued. Then CD Projekt start up this Good Old Games site and it is exactly what we were all asking for. And… that led to discussions on what happens when suddenly those old dos games ARE available.

End result? GoG rips are the preferred medium because they are DRM-free(-ish) and so forth. And it was obvious it was never about preservation and was just about wanting to pirate shit. Which… is fine. Just obnoxious when people pretend they are noble because they want to play Darklands without paying.

Which is kind of the other recurring theme. People want to be pirates. Cool, steal that shit. Just don’t pretend you are morally superior and a freedom fighter and blah blah blah. You want free shit. Cool.

Naomi Wu is one of the OGs of maker youtube and a lot of consumer grade 3d printing can be traced right back to her.

Teaching Tech have talked about this a fair amount over the past year or two. But Naomi basically trying to walk a fine line and not get CCP’d is pretty well known at this point. The issue is that she isn’t seeking help (because any help is likely to get her and her partner in trouble) and the major “gossip” youtubers just want to say “Stupid girl has tits”.

Real shit situation all around but hopefully she and her partner are safe-ish and happy.

Agreed.

But take a look at computing and UX in general. There is a reason that a common refrain at the college and entry level job levels is “These kids don’t know what a folder is because they are used to everything at the top level”. And… there are very good reasons to not deal with folders in google drive or whatever. Hell, everyone lamented the loss of the start menu but how many of us still just do “winkey, ‘makemkv’” or whatever to launch something? Which is how you get thought processes that hide that until they are outright gone.

And the same with error messages. Hell, I was in a meeting not too long ago where we had a very serious discussion about whether we should even still emit error data to the console for an application when NOBODY ever thinks to copy and paste that. So what are we gaining when the first day of any support ticket is “Okay… can you get me this file from this folder? Okay, open up explorer and click this box and type c colon slash…”

Its honestly a REALLY good idea. Still pisses me off that windows has had a QR code for years but it just goes to a generic support page.

That said: There are plenty of environments where a QR code is not viable. Secure environments where you cannot have a camera is one. But also most server rooms where the KVM has been abused for years and is covered in filth. What you can squint and scratch down on a piece of paper and what your phone can process are two very different things.

Linux so easy enough to have both code and text but I do have concerns on the broader impact of this being normalized.

Yup

This is shit. But dual booting (on the same drive) has not been viable for decades. It inevitably becomes a mess. Just have windows on one drive and Linux on another if you can’t fully switch to Linux.

And now I understand why that weirdo was so hellbent on the corporations of the world supporting this

Video length is incredibly important to The Algorithm and a LOT of content creators time their videos to the second. Taking away control of that (even if the end result ins the exact same length) is going to ruffle a lot of feathers and lead to a lot of people who want to “be a champion for the viewers who should like, comment, and subscribe and use my referral code for war thunder” as a result.

It was inevitable (and is arguably the “logical” extension of sponsor segments).

As for what it will do to timestamps: The same thing it does to timestamps in podcasts. Some podcast players have a special way to tag the timestamp to adjust with the inserted ads but NOBODY hosts with those. So they are rendered useless.

On the youtube side? They could potentially be auto-adjusted because youtube will know how many ads were inserted . But considering the goal of this is to serve ads…

I guess I am not getting it.

If you can access your files, you can copy your files. If the concern is that you only know how to connect from a full PC, consider plugging a laptop into the switch (or even just set up a VM).

Hard to give much more help without knowing your actual setup. But one nasty solution is to ssh into the server then connect to the running container (or mount the same storage into a different one) if there are some shenanigans going on there.

But yeah. My general rule of thumb is that if something needs to outlive the life of a container then it is being stored on the local filesystem or a zfs/ceph pool.

I selfhost my own nextcloud for notes and documents that I would like on my phone but not via google.

It is not a google docs/gmail/whatever replacement. They’ve spent the past few years hardening it and pushing for all the hallmarks of enterprise first software (e.g. making it a complete fustercluck to not have a proper domain name) but you still have stability and performance issues and the occasional upgrade issue that fucks up everything

I would also point out that if you aren’t selfhosting, what are you actually getting out of this? You are just spreading your data out to other companies who are often less transparent about how they monetize you.

Honestly? I think you are getting hung up on approaching this from the T9 perspective.

Take a look at the mechanical keyboard community. Most people are sane and looking at TKL or even 60% layouts where most buttons people actually use on a keyboard are represented by dedicated keys. But there are some real sickos who go for fully minimalist layouts where they have closer to 20 or even 10 keys. And those are the leyouts where you heavily rely on different layers so that “A” might actually be “Button 1 with modifier X and Y” whereas B is “button 1 with modifier X”. Basically people took the logic of dvorak and went to an insane degree. It is terrifying and it is beautiful.

And that has the same issues that mapping to a gamepad would. Some people are going to be able to internalize that in a timely fashion. Others are going to spend months using typing tools online to train themselves. And the rest of us are going to say “nope” and move on.

In terms of how to have a better steam deck keyboard? I think there is a lot of room for someone to go full keeb-pill and take advantage of the physical buttons. I would 100% watch that youtube video, maybe throw a tip in a tip jar, and then have a new appreciation for the touchscreen keyboard the next time I have to enter my Warframe password. But I still think that if your game is heavily reliant on having a keyboard… it isn’t a Steam Deck game. And that is fine. I am not going to play DCS on my Steam Deck. One of these days I probably will futz around with streaming X4 though.

T9 I think is an example of how to map a large input space (keyboard) to a small device (gamepad). But it mostly thrived in a way to convey meaning to a numeric string (1-800-COLLECT, for example). But the people who actually used it for SMS/beepers were few and far between and we were so reliant on auto-complete/predictive language during the flipphone era. This is why it was the era of “oh, so and so texted me. Let me call them back”

largely for the same reason that even a lot of “keeb” enthusiasts increasingly acknowledge that going below a 60/65% for a programmer or a 40% for a writer is… of very questionable utility. Some people have the brain pathways to learn completely different keyboard layouts and can keep 4 or 5 layers worth of keys in their heads and write straight up fortran with a 13 key keyboard, Just like how some people can learn a new spoken/written language in a few weeks. Most people can’t and they basically just “ruin” normal keyboards for themselves.

As for hacking the gibson: Actually the vast majority of media depictions involve basically a keyboard/touch screen strapped to a wrist (that IS what a deck is). So if you really want your daily driver to be something with serious security issues due to how the lock screen is implemented… that is how you get your Count Zero on.

But that really is the issue here. You and I are discussing how you would map an actual keyboard to the steam deck. That isn’t what is being discussed here (careful, you too will get blocked (OH NOES!!!) because you didn’t give proper respect to a blog post). This is mapping an RPG/roguelite from old school curses input to a gamepad/touch screen combo. Which, as I said, is a fundamentally “wrong” idea. In large part because the vikeys/vimkeys solution of a lot of classic roguelikes/lites was a way to provide gamepad like controls with just a keyboard.

As an aside: My brain is blanking on it (it might actually have been the Steam Controller), but I remember an on screen keyboard that actually used analog sticks and felt like a weird hybrid of t9 and the god awful ps3/4 on screen keyboards. Something like you hit a button to bring up the keyboard and then move your analog stick toward a cluster (forget if they were nested or not) and buttons to pick the options. Was very much in that “This is cool as hell but my brain is not gonna learn it” category.

As for the touch screen: I also really dislike it (hence hedging my comment above). But I do wish more games, particularly the complex ones, would take advantage of it. Let me tap the inventory bag to open up my inventory rather than switching to interface mode and sticking over to it or having a dedicated button that could be a different skill. Stardew Valley’s Steam Controller layout (I forget if it was official or community) was awesome in a similar way because you would get context touchpad menus to quickly navigate the interface. But the problem is that it becomes a device specific layout and gets almost no usage.

Mate. If all you want is an echo chamber then don’t post on a message board. That is a blog post with the comments turned off.

And I did read your blog post. I didn’t watch your podcast so, deep apologies if that offended you somehow. And I still think you are doing what a lot of developers did during the 00s when “console ports” and “optional gamepads” were the big thing in PC dev space. You are trying to adapt an existing control scheme with radically different inputs rather than acknowledging what controls you actually need.

That is WHY Caves of Qud is such an amazing steam deck experience. That is WHY stuff like Stardew Valley on the Steam Controller are still looked at so fondly. And that is why so many other games never “feel right”. Because devs are trying to map a gamepad to a keyboard (hello Dark Souls) or an analog stick to a mouse cursor (fuck you Bungie and Ubi) or a keyboard to a gamepad.

Hell, we still see it with a lot of the CRPG, Strategy Games, and RTSes that devs try to make work for a gamepad. Very few get it “right” because it is a really hard challenge. And why Dragon’s Age increasingly became basically a Divinity 2/Oblivion style game rather than a “real” CRPG like DA:O was.

I guess my argument would be: If you are trying to adapt a keyboard to a gamepad without taking advantage of a touch screen (arguably even then), you are “doing it wrong”. That is why Caves of Qud is, somehow, one of the best Steam Deck experiences out there.

If there hadn’t already been a court ruling-ish (it is complicated) giving Nintendo the “right” to do this? Sure

As it stands? It very well could be an intern filling out a word document

You don’t need a lawyer to file a DMCA request. You just need to be ready to get one if someone disputes it.

And Nintendo almost definitely have lawyers on retainer, if not in house. The added cost of this is the effort it takes to search github for “uzu” and send an email.