I run 16 Bit Virtual Studios. You can find more reviews from me on YouTube youtube.com/@16bitvirtual or other social media @16bitvirtual, and we sell our 3D Printed stuff on 16bitstore.com

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • When I was in Uni, we had the opportunity to apply for co-op at Black Berry when they still made phones with their own OS.

    I was getting into mobile dev at this time and applied and got an interview.

    I didn’t know what I was expecting but what I got was a 10-20min sales pitch for their phone and I wasn’t asked a question… I don’t think. From what I gathered afterwards they just wanted to hire/rehire one guy and had to interview others to be in the co-op program.

    Believe it or not I wasn’t sold on black berry after that.







  • Because printing in Linux both works and is supported and not supported and hope that there are drivers and they work.

    For example, I have a brother printer and in both arch and Ubuntu/mint the printer worked out of the box. But I was missing features like double sided printing. So I had to download drivers for it.

    In arch the drivers were on the AUR, so I was printing is seconds.

    In Ubuntu/mint they weren’t in my package manager, so I had to go to brother’s website and hope they had drivers. Brother did and while it took a bit it did work too. No worse than windows.



  • Pro: Price, Convenience, Looks

    Cons: Much like buying an “iPhone” from Temu, the price is usually reflected in the quality.

    Don’t get me wrong, there are cheep smart watches if you look for them or go second hand. But what you’ll find advertised on Temu isn’t it.

    Build quality is usually the first to suffer, but you’ll find mislabeled battery info a 500mah instead of the promised 1000mah. Or an LCD instead of an OLED.

    But those are things we can adapt too. The biggest problem is software. That’ll do and close enough has been the name of the game for years now. And sometimes “smart” just means it can (badly) track your steps and pretend to check your heart rate with a led pretending to be a sensor.


    Alternative

    If you are looking for any budget electronics try looking for last years or a few years ago models. I got a Garmin Forerunner 235 in 2022 for 1/5 of its asking price because I found a deal on eBay.

    I’d also look into the landscape of the market you are buying into and seeing who is actually making these things, and what is running on it.

    For smart watches I found the answer was

    Apple

    Android with Watch OS (Samsung google and many more)

    Garmin

    If the watch isn’t running android watch os or is made by Apple or Garmin. Assume its good too be true and look into it more, or look elsewhere.

    Good news China is lazy and one clone usually is made by many factories and someone else made a video about it. Might not be the same name, but it’ll be close enough.


  • Pepper Grinder (Steam/GOG/Switch/PS4/PS5/XB/ONE/S/X)

    Released in March of the is year (and in August for non switch consoles) Pepper Grinder is a traditional 2D platformer with a world map, levels, and a gimmick of using a drill to travel underground like a dolphin through water.

    Its platforming has a good rhythm to it, with a nice momentum when you go in and out of the dirt. The best way I can describe the game is that it feels like a Mario Gimmick level that’s been expanded to its own game.

    If I had any complaints about this game, is that the boss fights are a bit too tedious. Not impossible as I’ve been able to beat them. But requires a bit more precise movement than the levels which preceded it.

    Overall though, I haven’t played a 2d platformed in ages which I’ve actually wanted to go through in ages. And it is a welcomed addition to my gaming library.





  • Why you shouldn’t buy FO4 on GOG: On Linux it’s a bit more work, installing the game via steam it’s just one button and you are good. GOG you need a third party game manager like Heroic or Lutris. From there you can add it to steam, you’ll also want to download art as the ones provided by lutris are low res.

    You’ll also have a hard time with online saves as you’ll need to also install GOG galaxy, which isn’t fun and is very buggy.

    That said, from an application perspective, it’s running on Proton regardless, so it’ll run the same. And since the folders are easier to find (more structured like windows), I personally find modding in general easier.

    The reason you want to buy the GOG version is that it’s drm free and yours to keep. No launcher required. Not something you’d care about on a steam deck, but on a PC it’s nice to have.


  • For me it was installing apps from the AUR, like Intel Compute. Had dependency issues and errors every time other packages updated and when I tried to fix it, other modules would uninstall, and break my DE, or put my machine in an unrecoverable state.

    It’s not as bad as that time my btfs file system broke randomly in Fedora, since I was able to recover my data. But it always felt like an endless battle with the distro to keep it going. Which is why I moved to mint.

    I know it was a Manjaro issue since when I attempted to move to EndevorOS the issues were gone… though I dont like it as a distro (I.e. why isn’t a package manager gui installed by default)



  • Depends on usage. If I have 2 hands available Firefox, u lock Origin is a must on a modern web. But if I need one hand free for… let’s say holding an umbrella, then cromite, based on the chrome fork based off of bromite. As much as I don’t like chrome, on Android it’s the only browser that has gestures, which makes one handed usage perfect. Cromite, just has adblockers built int and lacks many of the tracking stuff too.


  • I’ve always struggled to find a good book to read. I love having books read to me, but to pick one up myself has always been a struggle.

    So when I say I’ve love the Ascendance of a Bookworm series, know that this is one of maybe 2 or 3 series I actually read. It’s a fantasy story about one little girls dream of trying to read books in a world without books. The premise is silly on paper, but the world building and characters are so detailed and flushed out that I’ve gotten sucked in and read throughout the whole series multiple times.

    The novels just finished the main series with Part 5 Volume 12, there an anime of good to mixed quality, and a manga too. Tips for new readers is to watch the anime before reading as Part 1 is not as smooth as the rest.

    There is also a lemmy server for discussions !aoblightnovel@bookwormstory.social


  • Depends on the distro.

    I found Linux Mint good enough for 99% of things, and most problems can be solved without a terminal.

    Problem is you’d still need to know enough about Linux (just like with windows) to troubleshoot. For example, the files app was causing an error when plugging in drives, I need to figure out that the files app wasn’t call files, but nemo, it’s config lived in a hidden folder called .config in my home folder, and in .config I could delete my configuration to fix my issue.

    In my view Linux is about Windows XP or 7 in terms of usability, a bit of a learning curve, but one worth learning.

    A few modern improvements which makes using Linux easier.

    Use Flatpaks where possible, it’s platform agnostic and usually supported by the actual devs.

    AppImages (think portable exe for windows), are another option, but to “install” them you’d need an app called Gear Lever.

    Check with an apps developer before installing, flatpaks can be packaged by anyone, and they might loose support (steam for example is installable via Deb not flatpak).