fourfour3

Oh these are nice, I didn't realise they'd updated them with 2.5Gbit ports :)

For something a bit more affordable, the Turris Omnia or Mox are nice options too - https://www.turris.com/

I'm not the biggest fan of OpenWRT et al (or pfSense/OPNsense, for that matter), but they're reasonably friendly for a technical user.

Personally, I still really like a small, low power x86 box running normal Linux as a firewall & router. Sadly the options are either very expensive or from questionable sources (eg aliexpress x86 low power machines are common). I miss PC Engines - https://www.pcengines.ch/eol.htm :/

In the UK we actually only have one provider that does - EE. They do native v6 and 464xlat for v4 connectivity where handsets support it.

Every other major provider is doing a horrible mess of IPv4 CGNAT with no native v6 still.

https://malwaretech.com/2024/08/exploiting-CVE-2024-38063.ht... is very worthwhile reading as a write on up this - it's nothing inherent in IPv6 and was a bug in Windows's packet processing of reassembled packets.

I'm not convinced it would be particularly exploitable with a firewall between the system and the rest of the internet blocking unsolicited incoming traffic -which is what most consumer routers etc are doing for IPv6.

I'd agree - IPv6 is only going to get more important from now. Especially with ISPs doing rollouts paired with moving v4 to address conserving mechanisms like CGNAT.

The short list looks pretty sensible to me with those two exceptions. The long list gets a bit paranoid for me at the end - especially 32 onwards or so.

I think you've missed the point:

> I wonder, if you were to script all the commands you ran back in the day, and ran that same script on your old 386 and on a modern system with a top-of-the-line AMD Epyc or Intel Xeon, how much faster would it run?

Implies you're compiling the 386 era versions of Linux - so the fact modern Linux is larger is immaterial.

Especially with the increase in storage performance - going from a hard disk that might have even still been using PIO modes to modern NVMe would be gigantic

I really enjoyed PvP and PvE shooters with my friend group in secondary school (that's 11 to 18 or so), but I don't get the same feeling with people I don't know. I do some occasionally with other friends but it's just not the same as it was then.

My taste in games has changed too as I've gotten older - I find myself mostly playing a mix of older games, story rich RPGs and indie titles - eg things like Tyranny, Baldur's Gate 3, Disco Elysium, OpenTTD, Rimworld, Slay the Spire... twitchy FPS games just don't do it for me any more.

So this article's main findings (the splits by age) definitely fits with me - I'm out of the <25 age group and have been for a while ;)

Ah, I was meaning "indefinitely" in the sense of "an unspecified period of time" :)

Practically, it's very rare for games to disappear from a Steam library once purchased. It happens for stolen/fraudulently purchased keys (eg keys bought with stolen credit cards), but for a whole game it's very rare.

It has happened, but generally for games that relied on online servers for functionality and the servers have been taken down.

This is from a gamer's PoV, not someone in the industry:

AAA Games are too expensive. Pricing for a retail product is not solely based on the cost to produce it, you have to price in what the market will bear and I think the games industry just isn't doing that. £60 or £70 for a base game (that often has microtransactions in it, or is often kinda incomplete with major plot still to be delivered via DLC, usually with £80 or £90 'premium' editions) is a lot of money for what are already stretched budgets. Most gamers I know wait for sales with significant discounts (50% or more) before they even consider buying AAA titles.

If you can't make a game affordable, then maybe the big AAA industry is making the wrong games, oversaturating the marketplace, or quality is suffering. Starfield's a good example - years of work to produce a game that is resoundingly 'meh'. You can't expect customers to shell out £60+ for 'meh', no matter how many people or resources were used to create it.

There's a lot of smaller 'indie' developers that do not have hundreds of staff that are making games that the market engages with and seems to love. Anecdotally I know my friend group generally prefers these titles to AAA. They frequently fill a significant percentage of the Steam Top Selling lists and these lists are sorted by revenue, not by number of sales. Their prices are more affordable (£10, £15, £20 or £30 are common price points) compared to AAA titles that are trying to cling to that £60 price point.

Steam doesn’t really compare to Netflix and Spotify - it’s not a subscription service where you can play whatever is currently available and titles appear and disappear with no notice.

You buy individual games on Steam and it stays on your account indefinitely - you do have to pick and choose what you buy.

Something like Microsoft’s Game Pass is closer to Netflix and Spotify than Steam.

Steam is more like the old iTunes Music Store model.

At the moment I'm using Mythic Beasts in Cambridge - they're not cheap but their support is fantastic - https://www.mythic-beasts.com/.

I have a few friends using https://www.ukservers.com/ and https://www.veloxserv.co.uk/ who are more reasonably priced.

I've also used m247 in the past, but had terrible experiences with them since they were acquired by private equity - network & support quality went really downhill.

For servers, I use https://serverfactory.com/ and https://www.rackservers.com/. As is typical for this kind of thing ignore the online pricing and email in - you'll usually do rather better, but they'll want you to pay by bank transfer.

edit: being outside of London means power is a lot cheaper, but I get about an extra 2ms of latency to my server. I consider that a reasonable tradeoff :)

I've been doing colocation in the UK for my personal hosting for 15+ years now, and it has worked fantastically well for me.

There are three things I'd recommend though that the articles kind of gloss over:

* get reasonable OOB access as a priority

* get real server hardware

* set up backup on day 1

OOB access can be as simple as a serial console server that your colo provider lets you access (most modern servers still have DE9 serial ports!), but ideally you want server hardware with an IPMI. It is fantastic for saving you from the 'oh no, I just firewalled myself out' problem (my colo provider is about an hour away, I don't want to do that trek on my weekends!), and with a proper IPMI you can boot from an ISO file over USB to do things like OS upgrades/reinstalls/recovery or firmware updates with ease. I personally have a Mikrotik router doing WireGuard for me to connect to for remote access to secure the IPMI behind a VPN.

Real server hardware saves you a ton of time & money in the long run for less upfront cost than you think. There's a lot of options - HP/Dell for more traditional choices (incl on site servicing options), Supermicro are well established, and there are more recent challengers that are putting out reasonable hardware like ASRock Rack. You should expect to buy this in a B2B fashion - you'll probably talk to/email a salesperson, but I've found I get ridiculously better pricing this way than buying online. As a bonus, you get an IPMI, ECC RAM that works, hot-swap drive trays, etc. In my experience, this kind of hardware really rarely fails - it's designed for 24x7 usage.

There's lots of backup options. You might push to something like Backblaze b2, use someone like BorgBase, or push backups to home. I have a home server with a bunch of hard disks, so I do a mix - I use borgbackup & push my backups daily to both my home server and to BorgBase.

My personal colo right now is an ASRock Rack EPYC 4004 barebone with a 12 core 24 thread CPU, 128G of RAM, 2x 2TB NVMe SSD, 2x 4TB SATA SSD, another 2x 2TB SATA SSD. I use quite a bit of the storage, and I use it to self-host a bunch of useful things - eg GitLab, CI, email, containers via Docker, side projects, the odd game server for playing things with friends. Adding up what those would cost me to host individually via VMs, AWS, GitHub subscriptions, etc makes paying for colocation an option I'm very happy with!

For me the problem with Electron is the “uncanny valley” effect - every app implements its own UI elements, and nothing is quite the same as the OS’s native behaviour.

Different apps have different unique quirks/odd behaviour, almost none of them do the right thing on platforms like macOS.

The article slipstreams drivers rather than any updates - but yes, you could slipstream updates, and there are unofficial pre-updated ISOs available.

I've tried ones for 98, 2000 and XP and I've found that most of those unofficial updates go too far - they tend to try to do things like backport DLLs or APIs for better compatibility with newer software, but I've found they make the system less stable and less period correct - which affects software compatibility.

In my case, I'm trying to run a mix of old programming software and old games - both of these had problems on unofficial update packs.

It's behind my normal router/firewall so not directly internet accessible, but yes, I have it on my normal home network.

Most network traffic to it is via a samba server on Linux configured to be accessible to SMBv1 still for use as a file dump.

It doesn't really talk out to the internet much - you can't get modern browsers and even if you could it would be too slow to be practical.

If you have a need to install older Windows now, there are some great resources for installing updates:

- https://legacyupdate.net/ - great for Windows 2000 and XP in particular

- https://windowsupdaterestored.com/ - targets more Windows OSes

I have a Pentium 3 system under my desk for running some software that needs access to specific hardware (so I can't just run it in a VM), and Legacy Update was fantastic for getting Windows 2000 working properly.

I'd second this comment.

The best sync is one you don't do at all!

If you're doing devops, I can't imagine you have a particular performance constraint that is tying you to a big desktop - like a requirement for a GPU, etc.

The current lineup of Mac laptops is fast. I have a M2 Pro work laptop and an AMD 5800X personal desktop. The laptop is faster at single threaded tasks and it's basically as fast if not slightly faster (depends on workload) for multithreaded tasks. Plus the Pro and Max laptops have reasonable external monitor connectivity.

And I'll also echo the parent poster and say that I haven't seen FF draining battery more than other browsers for a long time on macOS - I use it as my primary browser on my work laptop.

They do indeed, and they sound superb :)

Thanks for spending the time on it!

Hey, thanks for looking into this so fast.

I checked this and it doesn't seem to be working for me - I can select it as a GM synth in the settings and select the right MIDI port, but it's not actually playing out via WebMIDI - it sounds like it's still using ADLMidi. Same behaviour in both Firefox & Chrome.

If I refresh the page after that, it just then keeps skipping tracks instantly. I'm using https://pixeltune.org/?b=ZD1UcmFuc3BvcnQgVHljb29uIERlbHV4ZS9... as my test tracks.

edit: just noticed there's some debug logging in the JS console. Here you go: https://www.pastery.net/naegce/

Fantastic!

Sadly it’s quite hard (and expensive!) to get a real SC-55 in the UK :/

The 8820 is the same architecture etc as the SC-55/88/88 Pro, so the simulation is basically swapping out the sample sets. I can’t tell the difference :)

My next target is a MT-32 :)

Do you have any plans to let people download the music collection in bulk? eg a direct download or via archive.org?

You mention in your FAQ that preservation is a big goal of this for you, and this is a very impressive collection that I'd hate to see disappear like some of the original sites!

I'd love to see WebMIDI support similar to https://chiptune.app/

I have a SC-8820 - it can simulate a SC-55/SC-88/SC-88 Pro (the SC-55 in particular is what a lot of VGM MIDIs were made using) and I'd love to be able to use it with this collection :)

13th and 14th gen desktop parts are nearly identical - so lumping them together makes sense.

Edit: 14th gen top end parts are basically 13th gen parts with different binning and higher clocks.

I’m very surprised re “docker works better on windows” - at work we do web dev and we use mostly macs.

We’ve tried windows machines for docker and hit a ton of performance problems that just aren’t there on modern docker for mac.

I have a physical whiteboard.

I write each task as one line on it (if I need bigger notes I keep those electronically - typically in Apple Notes).

There's something very satisfying about getting to wipe tasks off as they get done :)

You’re right - I should have clarified that in my comment!

The Wii GPU is very much the GameCube one with some tweaks and faster clock speeds.

The 360 one is absolutely an ATI custom Radeon part.

It’s a bit tricky even to say that ATI developed them - they were designed by ArtX (mostly ex SGI staffers who had also worked on the N64), who were bought by ATI.

I agree with this a lot.

I miss 1Password Mini in particular still (and no, Quick Access is not a replacement).

Ah, I find mixed DPI/resolutions is a disaster on Windows too - apps break when moved between monitors quite a lot.

The trick for me was going all in - 4K monitors at 150% only on both Windows and Linux - on Mac I have a 4K portrait and a 5K landscape, and that works fine there.

I've been using 150% on both X11 (since late 2021/early 2022) and Wayland on AMD hardware and it's been pretty much fine.

I'm really surprised by this - I use Arch (btw) with KDE Plasma (5 and 6) and I've been using 150% on a 4K monitor for a long time and it has worked very well. Modern Qt apps work fine, browsers too.

I find the GTK side of things a lot flakier, though.