long, retro handheld history
Actually, let's do a little story about the Dingoo A320, because it's fascinating. It wasn't the *first* handheld emulator, but by many accounts it kickstarted the cheap handheld emulator market, and inspired projects like the OpenPandora.
Imagine this: it's 2009, you're browsing through DealExtreme (back when it was still good), and suddenly you see a little device that promises to play video (in the original format!), music, and even emulate your retro games!
Keep in mind that in 2009, smartphones were still an up-and-coming thing, and most "MP4 players" still required you to use weird proprietary transcoders to convert video files into their janky device-specific format. So native video support was a big deal! It even did 720p without issues.
And then you look at the price: 60 EUR. Free shipping. What?
Turns out that it's actually a *very* cool device. Emulation performance is mixed - as is to be expected in 2009, with only PCs being capable of better performance for more recent consoles. Probably the only handheld that beat the A320 was a modded PSP.
Video and audio, however, that was the strong point. Video up to 720p played flawlessly, in basically any format - it was almost as versatile as VLC. 1080p was doable. FLAC audio? No problem. And the sound chip was of great quality for the time! The screen wasn't bad either, although the viewing angle was a bit off - it was a repurposed phone screen mounted at a 90 degree angle.
Another very interesting point was the battery. A single charge got you 8-14 hours of battery, depending on whether you were playing games, or music, or something else. It kept charge very well. Some people reported that it still booted up after being in a box for almost 10 years, without having lost their charge!
(It could play music *while* doing other stuff on the device, by the way - another pretty unique feature compared to most MP4 players at the time.)
The QA was a bit hit-or-miss, but when it was a hit, it was a HIT. I've had mine drop 4 meters onto a tile floor, fly through a train and bounce off the stairs a few times, and it never broke. Didn't even shut down.
(There was a brief scare with the "HK models" - slightly different models of somewhat worse build quality, and requiring different firmware due to a different display driver. It never became clear whether these were knock-offs, or just cost-cut models.)
But things *really* got interesting once the homebrew scene got going. We ended up with many homebrew emulators, some games, and eventually even a dual-boot Linux distribution - Dingux.
Interestingly the manufacturer was kind of under-the-table cooperative; they provided internal tools for unbricking a device after a failed flash, firmware images, and so on. They didn't provide source, but there was definitely some deliberate assistance going on.
At one point, they even flew out the Dingux developer to China to discuss the possibility of official Dingux support.
Unfortunately, things didn't last. Not long after this, there was an internal dispute of some sort, and the company split into Dingoo-Tech and Dingoo Digital. Both released an "A330", which were different devices, and neither were very good. After this, Dingoo faded into obscurity :(
It's now 14 years after I got my A320. These units still(!) regularly sell for more than the *original* retail price today, even in used condition. Probably the first device from a Chinese brand I've seen that has 'held its value' so well in EU/US.
Unfortunately the CPU is quite dated by this point, and there's not really any homebrew activity anymore either.
The A320 had some unique features that I haven't seen in another handheld emulator since: the power button had a key-lock feature (useful for MP3 player use in your pocket), there was an AV-out that doubled as secondary headphone jack, and so on.
RIP the Dingoo A320 I guess, and I hope a worthy successor appears some day.
Cars:
- are allocated most streetspace in cities
- occupy some more with (tolerated) illegal parking
- are favoured by road law
- are the main cause of road deaths vs. other modes
Status quo supporters: "Will someone think of the poor car drivers as well?"
It feels like the more Mastodon instance shutdowns we see, the more important it gets to think about how to enable migrating posts. Migrating a user's follows/followers is good, but for a user to lose their entire post history is pretty severe. And the longer you use a server, the more painful it gets to lose that history of everything you've ever written.
Why liberation won't happen unless we all learn some Disability Justice (long)
I don't have anyone in particular in mind here, but there is definitely a pattern I've observed that seems worth calling some attention to.
Entrenched, systemic oppression relies very heavily on making it difficult to change - that's the nature of power inequality: those impacted have less capability to affect things.
But *everyone*, regardless of level of privilege, is subjected to a kind of systemic exhaustion. "Change is too hard and too slow" is the bottom line, but the idea is rarely expressed so plainly. It's often felt, but rarely put into such blunt words.
So let's talk about spoonies for a second. I'm referring to those of us who have to be extremely careful about where we place our energy every single day, because we just don't have that much capacity to do *anything*, let alone all the things daily life demands of us, plus take on changing the world.
Oppression is designed so that the path of least resistance always serves to reinforce that same oppression.
This means that liberation is always going to be a huge amount of work. In fact, it is - by design - more work than we can actually take on directly, in a limited amount of time. This is *why* oppression has never gone away: it is literally designed to be immune to erosion.
But as anyone who is disabled or lives with chronic pain or illness can testify, just because it's too big to do all at once, doesn't mean we can't handle it at all.
We just have to be very, very wise about how we allocate our energy.
And anyone who wants liberation is going to have to learn those skills. Otherwise the system will continue to chew y'all up, spit you out, and eliminate yet another group of people who *might have* made a much bigger difference if you'd been able to avoid burning out.
So what better way than to learn from those of us whose literal daily survival depends on us being very good at that exact skill set?
OK, since people don’t seem to have learned their lesson about thread unrolling bots and services, here’s a short summary of why they are bad;
a) Non-consensual, b) removes content from the context in which is was published, which often means that c) it starts competing with the original, outside of control of the author, and then d) gets monetised when the service becomes popular, because cost, and opportunity.
If you want the feature, do the work of integrating it into the client.
Books You Should Read Instead of Harassing Black People 10/28
https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/ca081da7-a564-405a-8140-ce88cdabc729
we are a strictly antifascist organization. we have zero tolerance for fascism or anything that enables or allows it. (yes that includes capitalism)
We do not work with transphobes/fascists/racists. If you open an issue or PR on our git repo and we see you are one of those things, or hang out with people like that, we will kick you out of our space. We have no patience for bigotry, and we see no reason whatsoever to tolerate having it anywhere near us. Fuck terfs and fuck nazis.
📢 Ten Forward Moderation Announcement 📢
The following instance(s) have been suspended from Ten Forward:
ioc.exchange - a transphobic user was moderated despite a report and me reaching out to the admin directly via DMs.
the user and post in question - hxxps://ioc.exchange/@gewure/109811032931084137
CW for blatant transphobia. It's bad.
I am attaching a screenshot of my DM conversation with the admin.
Sat Feb 11 08:31:33 PM UTC 2023
i just don't emphasize it
cause the weird way disability rights and mainstream neurodivergent rights movements emphasize "we have the body/minds fix your broken systems and work cultures! hire us!" truly makes my anti-work anarchist ass itch
like get hired to survive, yes.
but save more than a crumb of integrity if you can.
mastodon meltdowns, meta
@joepie91 I have been trying to remind myself of how there are no utopias. When you migrate, you are not moving to paradise. You are just hopefully going somewhere better.
And once there, you are part of it. Which implies a responsibility to you, and you to it. Responsibilites like trying to make the place better for each other. No place is going to be perfect. But we as a community can make it better and better, until it's the best we can get it.
fediblock, cyberplace.social, of course it's regarding fucking Hogwarts Legacy
#fediblock cyberplace.social
admin gossithedog just ducking and dodging criticisms like a pro to continue to keep self-justifying playing (and actively posting about) Hogwarts Legacy. "ally" my ass. typical "cis ally" that only helps when it suits them.
Technical debt collector and general hype-hater. Early 30s, non-binary, ND, poly, relationship anarchist, generally queer.
- No alt text (request) = no boost.
- Boosts OK for all boostable posts.
- DMs are open.
- Flirting welcome, but be explicit if you want something out of it!
- The devil doesn't need an advocate; no combative arguing in my mentions.
Sometimes horny on main (behind CW), very much into kink (bondage, freeuse, CNC, and other stuff), and believe it or not, very much a submissive bottom :p
My spoons are limited, so I may not always have the energy to respond to messages.
Strong views about abolishing oppression, hierarchy, agency, and self-governance - but I also trust people by default and give them room to grow, unless they give me reason not to. That all also applies to technology and how it's built.