Woah, I’m still using this. Did I miss something here?

#catswiththumbs

(I don’t know if the fediverse already has a community for that, Reddit had one)

German government has entered the chat landline

I bought a RGB mouse a few months ago, tried it out for a few hours, got annoyed by the bright lights at night and turned off the lights.

For some reason, the Roccat software messed up and now it flashes green when clicking the middle mouse button (I couldn’t even find an option in the software to make it do that), but that’s kinda cool, so I kept it.

My computer is a sleeper build in an old server steel case. No RGB anywhere, and as a bonus, I can even sit on it, if I want. :D

2015

“I’M AS MAD AS HELL AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!”

Vodafone has a hotspot service here in Germany. All of their cable routers have a second wifi network everyone can use (unless you opt out).

When they introduced it, it had a big flaw: They stored the MAC address of your device in their database as authorized, but never deleted it.

Hypothetically speaking, you could pay for a month, cancel the service and then browse for over a year until they noticed you and kicked you out. 😆

But I would never do that, of course.

That’s true, but I found parts like the bottom chassis, display assembly and keyboard on Aliexpress. They probably have the joystick modules too.

The only thing I couldn’t find were the actual rubber thumbsticks, which might become a problem in the future when they wear out. GPD promised to sell them individually a while ago, but as of yet, they haven’t done so.

When gaming, I hold the device in both hands, just as they depict in their marketing material:

When I’m on location and I have it sitting on the desk, I use the left joystick for scrolling and the right for moving the mouse, it works really well and I don’t have to grip it (I configured AntiMicroX on Linux to translate the inbuilt Xbox controller to mouse movements).

It also has a builtin mouse mode, but you have to press the right trigger to speed up the mouse, so it’s very unconvenient when you’re not holding the device in your hands.

It is really well made. I had to take the whole machine apart to put in a QWERTZ keyboard and almost everything is easily replaceable and maintainable. The frame feels as sturdy as a typical Macbook chassis, the joystick elements are screwed in and can be swapped quickly, the motherboard and cooling system are also well assembled.

The only thing I hated is that they glued the power button onto the backlight foil of the keyboard. I don’t know what they were thinking, but glueing a flimsy flextape onto a flimsy foil is a horrible decision. Granted, most people probably never change their keyboard (but they didn’t have the 64GB model with German layout back when I bought it).

It’s around ~48°C under my regular coding workload (Chrome, Firefox, Slack and phpStorm opened with a video playing). It’s basically unhearable under these conditions, with the fan running on the lowest speed.

The max temperature it gets to is ~83°C, which it will reach fairly quick when playing demanding games like Cyberpunk and the device gets a little warm, but not annoyingly hot then. Yes, it’s a little thicc boii, but that works for its benefit because the thickness comes from the big heatpipe, fan and cooler.

Disclaimer: I put a PTM7950 pad onto the CPU and it greatly benefits from it. Temps with regular paste are worse - I definitely reached temps in the 90s before (but it was not throttling).

It’s proprietary I think, you can buy it as an accessory and put it in yourself or get the machine with it already builtin.

Tigole is doing the same.

GPD Win Max 2. I love this little thing so much. ~8-10 hours of battery life, up to 64GB RAM, 16-core Ryzen on the newest model, 2K display. It’s only 10 inches and it can run Cyberpunk with raytracing. It also has two slots for SSD’s and an optional LTE module.

The sticks are hall effect sensors, so there’s no drift (looking at you, Nintendo). The keyboard is backlit and feels way too satisfying for something this small. (I actually like typing on it)

On the backside of the device, you can slide out two metal covers and place them on top of the thumbsticks, hiding them and making the device look more professional.

I once took this to a customer doing a training session and dropped the line “This thing is more powerful than all the computers in this room” and it was probably true.

Olan Rogers made Final Space and he’s working on Lightspeed right now. It had a pretty successful run and has a loyal fanbase, despite it being cancelled.

But yeah, stories like these are very rare.

Disney’s “The Black Hole”. It came from a time just after Walt Disney had died and they were still figuring out their shit.

So they made an extremely dark SciFi flick with a cute robot that appeals to children which is such a weird combination, but I liked it a lot. I can’t even say why.

The U.S.S. Cygnus looks fucking badass, too. One of the best ship designs in a SciFi movie, change my mind.

Current versions of Windows really feel like they’re chugging under the hood. I got a GPD Win Max 2 last year, with 64GB RAM, an eight-core Ryzen and an RTX-capable GPU, it’s a beast of a machine.

The start menu still takes a second to open. The explorer menu is loading in after the window has opened. Doing a right-click to open context menus also takes longer than it should take (and it’s noticeably quicker when you bring the old context menus back). Every time you do an action in Windows 11 it feels like an old geezer gets up from his wheelchair, fights a cough attack and almost collapses while trying to go to the bathroom.

I once read that the new start menu and those fancy explorer ribbons and context menus are written in React, so I guess the rendering engine is just a massive bloated browser nowadays that puts your system under way more load than it needs to.

Compared to that, Fedora 42 is blazingly fast on this machine. With a Samsung SSD the whole thing was installed in five minutes and KDE Plasma is just so snappy - everything opens instantly and it never feels like my machine needs to think for a second before displaying something. Now that we’ve also reached higher FPS in games with Proton in some scenarious, there is no good reason for me to even use Windows anymore.

It’s alright, there are many of us who like SeaQuest DSV, too.

It’s built on a , by now very modified and incompatible, Linux kernel.

Which is also forked again by various phone manufacturers that make their own modifications on top of it.