#hardware calibration

[tracfone]

glados watching her crows preening themselves and picking dirt out of their feathers and then goes over to chell to "preen" her but just ends up knocking into her head with her optic piece and giving her a concussion

[rubiatinctorum]

I have the setting on, but comparing the png file and the clip studio file, the colours are the same. I use windows, and some people in the notes say only some windows users are affected.

Just to make a point, every time I finished a panel of this I would export it as a PNG on the perceptual setting and use it as a color reference for the next panel

IT'S BAD

PLEASE CHECK YOUR COLOR SETTINGS

EDIT: If you're still having problems, it might help to switch from "Save/Save as" to "Export (as a) Single Layer". Just. Make SURE the box labeled "Expression Color" is set to RGB. I've been messing with this all day, and it looks like this combination of settings will allow exported PNGs to maintain their colors perfectly. To you. So far both Discord and Toyhouse still only display desaturated images and I cannot for the life of me figure out why

[siyelius]

PLEASE I need to see more examples of software malfunctions with Markus — he scavenged biocomponents from a literal junkyard there’s no way him nor most of Jericrew (North probably spared bc she’s been deviant not that long) facing repercussions of stuffing themselves with potential damaged or faulty parts that were just 13% more functional than their last.

Incompetent Markus playthrough, except instead of him actually being incompetent, Markus glitches out at the most inopportune times due to, you know, having been shot in the head. You can't tell me that Markus popped in two wet, old, dirty, semi-compatible bio-components into his head and he was good as new.

During the Cyberlife Warehouse raid he gets caught by the guards and North has to rescue him because he gets stuck in a preconstruction.

North tells him to lock the door during the Stratford Tower mission, and a full five seconds later he's forgotten what shes said and they get caught.

The Capitol Park mission where North bitches him out for standing there the whole fifteen minutes doing nothing, Markus is just like "15 minutes? Wdym we got here like 2 minutes ago???"

Have him being shot and almost killed have side-effects. Let North come to the realisation that 'oh, hes not actually incompetent, he's impaired". And then find ways to accommodate that.

[holmoris]

mother 3 heritage post

whenever you ask your friend who’s really into JRPGs “hey which one do i start with is the newest one fine” they always go “no, what you gotta do is head on over to ebay and look up the entry that completely bombed commercially. You’ll see that it goes for $800. Close ebay. Download an emulator for a console no younger than 17 years old. Download the ROM, and also this laundry list of various tweaks, retextures, and QoL tweaks. Pull up this exact spoiler-free guide put up a decade ago from GameFAQs, and you’ll experience the best game this series has to offer.” Like???

[ms-demeanor]

One thing that I keep seeing whenever I make posts that are critical of macs is folks in the notes going "they make great computers for the money if you just buy used/refurbs - everyone knows not to buy new" and A) no they don't know that, most people go looking for a new computer unless they have already exhausted the new options in their budget and B) no they don't make great computers for the money, and being used doesn't do anything to make them easier to work on or repair or upgrade.

Here's a breakdown of the anti-consumer, anti-repair features recently introduced in macbooks. If you don't want to watch the video, here's how it's summed up:

In the end the Macbook Pro is a laptop with a soldered-on SSD and RAM, a battery secured with glue, not screws, a keyboard held in with rivets, a display and lid angle sensor no third party can replace without apple. But it has modular ports so I guess that’s something. But I don’t think it’s worthy of IFixIt’s four out of ten reparability score because if it breaks you have to face apple’s repair cost; with no repair competition they can charge whatever they like. You either front the cost, or toss the laptop, leaving me wondering “who really owns this computer?”

Apple doesn't make great computers for the money because they are doing everything possible to make sure that you don't actually own your computer, you just lease the hardware from apple and they determine how long it is allowed to function.

The lid angle sensor discussed in this video replaces a much simpler sensor that has been used in laptops for twenty years AND calibrating the sensor after a repair requires access to proprietary apple software that isn't accessible to either users or third party repair shops. There's no reason for this software not to be included as a diagnostic tool on your computer except that Apple doesn't want users working on apple computers. If your screen breaks, or if the fragile cable that is part of the sensor wears down, your only option to fix this computer is to pay apple.

How long does apple plan to support this hardware? What if you pay $3k for a computer today and it breaks in 7 years - will they still calibrate the replacement screen for you or will they tell you it's time for new hardware EVEN THOUGH YOU COULD HAVE ATTAINED FUNCTIONAL HARDWARE THAT WILL WORK IF APPLE'S SOFTWARE TELLS IT TO?

Look at this article talking about "how long" apple supports various types of hardware. It coos over the fact that a 2013 MacBook Air could be getting updates to this day. That's the longest example in this article, and that's *hardware* support, not the life cycle of the operating system. That is dogshit. That is straight-up dogshit.

Apple computers are DRM locked in a way that windows machines only wish they could pull off, and the apple-only chips are a part of that. They want an entirely walled garden so they can entirely control your interactions with the computer that they own and you're just renting.

Even if they made the best hardware in the world that would last a thousand years and gave you flowers on your birthday it wouldn't matter because modern apple computers don't ever actually belong to apple customers, at the end of the day they belong to apple, and that's on purpose.

This is hardware as a service. This is John Deere. This is subscription access to the things you buy, and if it isn't exactly that right at this moment, that is where things have been heading ever since they realized it was possible to exert a control that granular over their users.

With all sympathy to people who are forced to use them, Fuck Apple I Hope That They Fall Into The Ocean And Are Hidden Away From The Honest Light Of The Sun For Their Crimes.

[nan0-sp1der]

␂ > 𝐂𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐞𝐝 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐞𝐫 // @lyrate-lifeform-approximation , @spiderman2-99

There’s a thought stirring in Bridge’s mind. An idea rolling about and nudging against the capacitors in her head, poking and prodding incessantly to get her attention, “Hey, hey, you know you want to ask her. Don’t you? Don’t lie to yourself, now. You should just do it. Hey! Are you listening to me? Hello-o…?”

Yes. Yes, she knows, she is aware of her burning curiosity. And it’s hard to deny that even though it doesn’t involve her, she is unusually intrigued by the concept. She overheard them in his office, Miguel and LYLA–his A.I. assistant–discussing a plan.  A plan to create a physical form for LYLA to enhance her abilities as his assistant and grant her further autonomy beyond her access to the security network and other adjacent systems alongside her recent emergence into emotional intelligence. It was all so fascinating. The steps Bridge had taken herself in her development in the span of weeks, she was watching unfold in another intelligence in real-time.

There it was again. That sense of solidarity in knowing she wasn’t completely alone in her existence as an artificial being, made of code and metal. It was like a magnetic pull that made that little voice in her head that encouraged her to act on her wants all the more present in her mind. She wanted to be a part of that process that she’d been through so long ago yet was still so familiar with like it happened yesterday. She wanted to guide her in that process and grant her her own knowledge. What’s the worst that can happen if she pilots your hardware for a while? You’re prepared for this. You can handle this. You can trust her, and she will be entirely safe in your care for that short time. And think about how much she would benefit from the experience, how much more streamlined that eventual transition from intangible to tangible will be once her own body was complete. It will make all the difference–and maybe reduce the headaches for everyone all-around, mostly Miguel as he acclimates to the change himself. Just… Try it. You can’t account for every single last risk factor, can you? No. So just do it and take it as it comes.

She stood in the middle of her dorm a moment, eyes closed as she ran a quick check of her hardware before making her final decision. RAM is in good condition. Storage is defragmented and all directories are organized. Sensors are calibrated and functional. Nanomachines are synchronized properly. Servos and joints retain a full range of motion. Coolant is at above optimal operational temperatures. Energy reserves are complete. Good. Everything’s in its right place and ready for its–potentially–temporary host. It’s time to make the call.

Her gaze trains itself on her watch, her arm rising to eye-level and the sleeve that was weighed down by the leaden metal cuff at the end sliding to her forearm to reveal device so she can start the transmission, navigating the menus on the digital interface indirectly via wireless communication–the unique way that she operated and communicated the Society’s technology.

“LYLA, may I speak to you for a moment? At your leisure, of course.”

[felassan]

Dragon Age: The Veilguard settings details - Display and Graphics

This post is under a cut due to length.

This information comes directly from the game.

DA:TV menu 'pages': Display, Graphics, Audio, Controls, Gameplay, Interface, Accessibility, Other.

For some of the settings, additional detail on a specific one (the one that was selected at that particular point during the video, e.g. "Window Mode" was set to "Full Screen") is given after the general explanation/definition of the setting itself. These are in italics at the end of an entry.

DISPLAY

Display Mode

Active Monitor: Select the monitor for game display. Window Mode: Switches between full screen, windowed, and borderless windowed modes. You can press ALT+ENTER at any time to switch between full screen and windowed modes. In full screen mode, the game will play on the entire screen. Screen Resolution: Changes the game's display resolution. The game's level of on-screen detail is determined by the number of pixels it contains. Higher resolution increases the number of pixels displayed, which will result in a clearer image. This comes with a potential cost to performance. Refresh Rate: Sets how often your display will refresh game visuals. A higher refresh rate means a smoother picture, depending on your computer's hardware. Frame Rate Limit: Sets the maximum framerate for the game. VSync: Synchronizes the game's framerate with the display's refresh rate to prevent screen tearing.

Calibration

Brightness: Adjusts the intensity of the game's visuals. Makes all visuals lighter or darker. Contrast: Adjusting the contrast will change the difference in color and light between the brightest and darkest parts of the screen. Enable HDR: HDR (High Dynamic Range) mode provides enhanced color and contrast ranges. This option can only be enabled on supported displays. HDR must also be enabled in your operating system. Use the HDR Calibration option below to adjust. HDR Calibration: Launches the HDR calibration tool which adjusts the HDR settings to best match your display. The maximum brightness level should generally be adjusted to match what your HDR display will support. Measured in nits. This is only available when Enable HDR is turned on.

Upscaling

Unsample Method: Improve performance and visuals by rendering the game at a smaller resolution, then "upsampling" to a larger resolution for display. The pixels that make up the difference between the two resolutions are generated using advanced algorithms. Unsample Quality: Select the desired quality level for the upsampling method selected. DLSS Frame Generation: DLSS Frame Generation can generate additional frames that boost your overall frame rate. In order to use Frame Generation, you must have an NVIDIA RTX 40-series graphics card. NVIDIA Reflex: NVIDIA Reflex is a technology that helps reduce input latency while playing the game. In order to take advantage of NVIDIA Reflex's feature, you must have a supported NVIDIA graphics card. Anti-Aliasing: Anti-Aliasing smooths out pixels along the edge of objects that can look sharp or jagged in certain situations. Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA) uses information from current and past frames to address aliasing issues. The high setting uses a large range of frames and will result in a higher quality anti-aliasing effect, but with a higher performance cost.

Resolution Scaling

Render Scale: Controls the resolution the game is rendered at relative to your display resolution. Settings below 100% may decrease visual fidelity, but can improve performance. Settings above 100% may increase visual fidelity, but can negatively impact performance. Dynamic Resolution Scaling: Automatically lowers the game's resolution in real-time to maintain the target frame rate. Target Frames Per Second: Determines the target frame rate for dynamic resolution scaling. Minimum Resolution Scale: Determines how low the resolution can be scaled when Dynamic Resolution Scaling is active.

GRAPHICS

Graphics Preset

Graphics Preset: Graphics presets are predefined configurations that simultaneously adjust multiple graphics settings to achieve a balance between visuals and performance. Restart required for setting change. Maximizes visual fidelity by setting most graphics options to their highest values. Recommended for the Ultra hardware specification tier.

Textures

Texture Quality: Selects the level of detail and resolution for textures applied to objects in the game. Higher settings will result in more detailed textures, potentially at the cost of performance. Restart required for setting change. CPU - Moderate. GPU - Moderate. VRAM - Major. Texture Filtering: Adjusts the appearance of textures at varied angles and distances. Higher settings will increase texture quality, though potentially at the cost of performance. CPU - Minor. GPU - Moderate. VRAM - Minor.

Light and Shadow

Lighting Quality: Adjusts the appearance of shadows, reflections, and light-scattering. Higher settings increase the visual fidelity of light effects. CPU - Minor. GPU - Moderate. VRAM - Major. Contact Shadow: Contact Shadows improves the appearance of shadows when objects are close to one another. It fills gaps between objects and shadows that can occur with static lighting. CPU - Minor. GPU - Moderate. VRAM - Minor. Ambient Occlusion: Ambient Occlusion is a technique to simulate soft shadows where objects are close together or where surfaces meet. This makes the scene look more realistic. Disabled when Ray-traced Ambient Occlusion is enabled. CPU - Minor. GPU - Major. VRAM - Minor. Disables Ambient Occlusion. This potentially increases performance at the cost of visual fidelity. Screen Space Reflections: Screen Space Reflections simulate reflections of objects and light on visible surfaces. Enabling this will result in high-quality reflections. Disabled when Ray-traced Reflections are enabled. CPU - Minor. GPU - Moderate. VRAM - Moderate. Volumetric Lighting: Adjusts the appearance of volumetric lighting effects. This simulates how light interacts with atmospheric elements like fog, smoke, dust, and clouds. Higher settings increase the quality of these types of elements. CPU - Minor. GPU - Moderate. VRAM - Minor. Sky Quality: Adjusts the appearance of the sky, clouds, and celestial bodies like the sun and moon. CPU - Minor. GPU - Moderate. VRAM - Minor.

Ray Tracing

Ray-traced Reflections: Enables the use of Ray-Tracing to simulate realistic reflections of objects and light on reflective surfaces. This is a more advanced technique and requires specialized Ray Tracing compatible hardware. CPU - Major. GPU - Major. VRAM - Moderate. In selective mode, the game will only enable Ray-traced Reflections in specific areas that can best take advantage of the feature. Ray-traced Ambient Occlusion: Enables the use of Ray Tracing to simulate soft shadows where objects are close together or where surfaces meet. This makes the scene look more realistic. This is a more advanced technique and requires specialized Ray Tracing compatible hardware. CPU - Major. GPU - Major. VRAM - Moderate. Ray-Traced Ambient Occlusion is always on. Ultra Ray Tracing: Enables the highest level of ray tracing effects, which provide better quality visuals at the cost of performance. This setting is available on the Ultra and Custom graphics presets and is only recommended for high-end graphics cards.

Geometry

Level Of Detail: Adjusts the distance at which objects are visible and the level of detail as they get father away from the camera. Higher settings increase the visual quality of objects at distance. Restart required for setting change. CPU - Major. GPU - Major. VRAM - Moderate. Strand Hair: Strand hair simulates the appearance and movement of individual strands of hair. Enabling this will result in more realistic and natural-looking hair. CPU - Major. GPU - Major. VRAM - Moderate. Terrain Quality: Terrain is the natural landscape and ground surfaces. Higher settings will increase the detail and overall quality. CPU - Moderate. GPU - Major. VRAM - Moderate. Terrain Decoration Quality: Adjusts the appearance and detail of terrain elements like rocks, vegetation, and other environmental objects. Higher settings will increase the quality and density of the terrain elements. CPU - Moderate. GPU - Major. VRAM - Moderate. Visual Effects Quality: Adjusts the quality and detail of visual effects throughout the game. This includes particle effects, decals, and screen effects. Higher settings will result in higher quality effects. CPU - Minor. GPU - Moderate. VRAM - Moderate.

Camera Effects

Depth of Field: The Depth of Field effect causes some elements of the scene to be in focus, and others to be out of focus. This effect is generally only used in cutscenes and conversations. CPU - Minor. GPU - Minor. VRAM - Minor. Depth of Field is only enabled in cinematic sequences. Vignette: The vignette creates a subtle darkening of the image towards the edges of the screen during cinematics and gameplay. This is generally used to enhance the atmosphere of scenes. CPU - Minor. GPU - Minor. VRAM - Minor. Motion Blur: Motion Blur slightly blurs fast-moving objects. This helps make motion appear smoother and more natural. CPU - Minor. GPU - Minor. VRAM - Minor. Post Processing Quality: Adjusts the overall quality of the post process effects above like depth of field, bloom and motion blur. Higher settings will result in higher quality effects. CPU - Minor. GPU - Moderate. VRAM - Minor. Field of View: Adjusts the field of view, which changes how much of the game world is visible during gameplay. A higher field of view allows you to see more of the game world. CPU - Major. GPU - Major. VRAM - Moderate.

[source]

[sinfulsinewave]

piping `cat /dev/urandom` directly to a robotgirl's mind over serial, her hands tied behind her back so she's unable to disconnect herself and can only squirm deperately as the arbitrary byte sequences cause more and more little glitches and use more and more of her memory

the slow UART connection making the whole process painfully slow, her helpless mind becoming more and more corrupt, byte by byte; she's struggling and squirming against the kevlar-reinforced cable, only managing to heat herself up and get tangled in the wiring

her working memory and thoughts getting more and more corrupt, slowly losing her ability to speak, or even squirm, her motor drivers failing one by one, what remains of her mind getting overwhelmed by erratic inputs from all her senses, only thing left untouched being her read-only boot ROM and encrypted long-term memory after hours and hours she finally kernel panics and shuts down, collapsing fully onto the floor, hardware-level backup systems taking over and doing their best to cool her down and avoid damage -- next morning, she boots back up in a pale bluish puddle of her own, still slightly steaming vented coolant, remaining tangled in the now-disconnected cables; unable to make any sense of her system logs from last night, all of her hardware calibration all over the place you proceed to give her just a smug little grin as she unsteadily drags herself up from the floor, attempting to untie herself from the mess of cables, only partially succesful you catch her as she falls onto you, her growing increasingly flustered as she starts to realise what happened to her..

[apriltempleos]

october 5th 2024: speaker test launch

[id: A video filmed from hand in dim lighting. It opens to a laptop screen with a command box open. A hand types the command 'godword', at which point the camera pans over to a speaker. A feminine robotic voice with strange inhuman prosody reads out the words: miserably, awoke, energy, magnified, alternately, disc, gravity, gifts. End id.]

preacher: woof! i promised to post this yesterday, but the mannequins took priority. this is the test launch of the rip off godword code hooked up to a speaker that scott performed back in the uk. here's a few words from him as well.

Scott: Thanks Preacher. Yeah so the god word rip off in this test just uses espeak to read the chosen random words via a usb speaker. Usually I'd use a SHIM(Shove Hardware In Middle) on the GPIO pins of the raspberry pi for sound output but because the LED Matrix screen uses like every pin lol. Also the pi zero 2 doesnt have its own dedicated aux like bigger pi's.

The espeak program uses premade voice files with specific phonemes and voiced calibrations. They have different names and nationalities and can have different ages too? But I cant really hear much difference in the ages hah. Espeak also works with Mbrola voices too which are much better sounding voice files and can be calibrated more too with better phoneme and pronunciation dictionaries. This one here is very robotic and monotone as well as having weird stresses and vowel spacing but I plan on heavily tweaking to get the voice we want. Back to you Preacher.

preacher: i would actually like for it to be kind of robotic and weird =w= it's cool! i guess we will post clips of different voices once we set this thing up here in NL (when the parts get here that is)

[calware]

@tilia-cacophonous i'm glad you asked!!! personally i love calamari hardware and i'm definitely going to steal that that. but since you asked, it's meant to be a combination of the name cal + malware ^^

if you can believe it, the cal part is not meant to be a reference to lil cal, but i can see why a lot of people assume that it is ;^^ this is a homestuck blog, after all. it originates from an inside joke with some friends of mine where you could nickname someone cal and 1) it's gender neutral, so people wouldn't know if it's for a boy or girl name and 2) people would assume it's short for a normal name like caleb or callie but it could secretly be something silly. like calzone. or calcium. or california. so we would come up with even sillier names that start with cal for it to be secretly short for. i also wanted to incorporate part of my old url into the new one, so in a way cal is also short for calibrator

the malware part is just bc i like evil robots :)c

[agalychnisspranneusroseus]

re: raised in amphibia marcy who is nothing but the cores host

beyond the psychological stuff im also thinking about the physical. the evil science possibilities. im just like. canonically its hinted that the core did stuff to marcys body just in the few months it had her to make its vessel more suitable. the plug ports that were apparently in her limbs bc otherwise she would be getting stabbed by those things. "this thing needs some calibration" about marcys body??? what did it mean by that??? and like u mention her being wired up to it in the original ask

anyways im up here thinking abt how much it mightve done to her if it had her for that long. if it had the same plug things installed in her limbs as she seemed to in canon shed probably need replacements if they happened when she was young enough and grew significantly since then.

also my mom used to work in the brain-computer interface industry and well. to get really any level of highly detailed or accurate data, let alone on the scale youd need to fully interface with the entire brain, you would absolutely need to have direct access to the brain rather than trying to go through the skull. theres no way this girl doesnt have a port of some kind implanted in her head for the core to directly connect to her brain.

hell maybe it doesnt wanna deal with biological organs and the problems that might arise from them. no big deal itll just have them replaced!

Aaaaagh dude i love your asks. Galaxy brain asks from my galaxy friend mutual.

Anyway. Yes i I have thought quite a bit about Marcy's whole deal. What Andrias cares about is her brainnnn that blob of grey matter that's somehow a biological supercomputer. He has no qualms in eventually getting rid of the body and keeping the brain in a jar, immortalized as an invaluable piece of hardware with the help of some shadowfish biotechnology (shhh lemme tell you a secret: he actually does care for her and love her and takes no joy in hurting her. He just doesn't love her enough to save her :3). Anyway, unfortunately, when he found this thing, her brain was surprisingly underseveloped. He had a vague awareness that the unfortunate coincidence of bipedism and viviparity so characteristic of homo sapiens resulted in them giving birth to useless, half-developed fetuses (as opposed to fully mature, egg-born pollywogs), but surely, by age three, a human would be more mature, right? He checked his archives on alien biology and, indeed, no. An average human's brain isn't fully developed until around age 25. Marcy may be smart, but she's still, by all accounts, a homo sapiens pollywog. He consults the Core. The Core wants a host. They want a body, and they want this brain. They will do with just the brain, is Andrias is too useless to secure them the body, but even if they're willing to wait for another body (stronger, bigger, more amphibian) to come around eventually, they know it won't work as well as with the original brain-body combination.

He decides to raise Marcy to be 25. He keeps her mind sharp and body healthy, or as healthy as possible. She undergoes many week-long sessions unconscious and connected to all sorts of wires as tubes. It's so normal for her, that by age 6 she knew how to get on top of the plataform or into the tank without falling, and how to put on her own oxygen mask. She always woke up feeling weak and hungry when it was over, and with one killer headache, but her dad always held the biggest fests for her with all her favorite food when it was over! She always looked forward to her sessions. Like a dog.

In these sessions, she would undergo several procedures. There's mossman, shadowfish and amphibian biotechnology involved. The point is to 1) make her brain Core-friendly - if it has many dimensions that would make things easier! And 2) translate the data from the Core into something that can be run in a biological machine. For which they need to understand and explore said machine. She only has one port, in the back of her neck, hidden by her long hair. It connects straight into her spine and her brain. In essence, these are fitting sessions. The Core is trying out their new house. Ever since she was little, they actually did use her brain to run tests and perform different functions. Most of the times it was mostly to study it, but as she grew older, they began using her whenever a function required too much energy, whenever something that would take forever to load with its own equipment, would render almost instantly with hers. They never left any data behind, erasing all evidence of their presence, and they never fully transported anything to this new extension, using only copies of data with the original files safe in the Core. The point is to leave the Core behind eventually and fully move on to this new computer, but not yet.

A few funny side effects!

Her blood is slowly growing more and more green as the years pass. This actually has less do to with brain stuff, and more as early preparation for eternal youth and immortality. It's mean to make her last longer. When she first meets Anne at age 10 - 11, her blood is a brown-ish color, but by the time things blow up when she's like 13-14, it's just a gross green. Her kidneys filter it out with time and her blood returns to its original red color, and Anne and Sasha see her real skin color for the first time, since before she always had this weird green tint, but they didn't know enough about humans to tell it wasn't normal. Seeing her blush red instead of green for the first time is kinda magical.

Migraines! Especially after a session. Especially when she does something the Core wouldn't like, because despite how hard they try to erase their traces, Marcy's most primal survival instincts remember.

More indirect effect but going several weeks a year without eating can't be good for her. It makes her feel very tired, dizzy and weak, even if she's eating normally, because three days ago she was starving.

The port in the back of her neck itches a lot. After becoming queen, she asked the royal physician that put it her to remove it, but he was scared of leaving her paralyzed, since it was so deeply fused with her nervous system. Sasha still thinks she should've had the guy publicly excecuted or something.

Idk if it counts but ?? Andrias wouldn't touch her if she was sick, so Olivia often found ways to give her a fever in secret or something to spare her. She did it to protect her, but it does mean Marcy spent a big deal of her childhood in bed, recovering from a session or a light illness.

The Core communicates with her nervous system through electric signals, and even thought they don't want to harm it, they still make her muscles contract a lot so she feels super sobre afterwards lots of muscle pain all the time.

There is no helmet in this one. No indirect connection. When Andrias puts the Core in Marcy, he goes all the way. Straight into her brain! They got a new PC :3

[mariacallous]

North Korean military engineers have been deployed to help Russia target Ukraine with ballistic missiles, and fighters operating in occupied areas of the country have already been killed, senior officials in Kyiv and Seoul said.

There are dozens of North Koreans behind Russian lines, in teams that “support launcher systems for KN-23 missiles”, a source in Ukraine told the Guardian.

Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, last year travelled to Russia for a summit with Vladimir Putin where the two men bolstered their deepening ties with a secret arms deal.

Pyongyang’s ammunition shipments were vital in allowing Russian forces to advance in a grinding war of attrition in eastern Ukraine this summer. But it appears increasingly clear that the agreement went beyond supplying materiel.

North Koreans were among the dead after a Ukrainian missile strike on Russian-occupied territory near Donetsk last week, South Korean and Ukrainian officials said. It was not clear if they were military engineers or other forces.

Foreigners have fought as mercenaries for Russia, but if North Koreans are on the ground it would mark the first time a foreign government has sent troops in uniform to support Moscow’s war.

South Korea’s defence minister, Kim Yong-hyun, told MPs in Seoul this week that it was “highly likely” that North Korean officers had been deployed to fight alongside Russians, and several had died in the attack, although he did not give further details.

Andriy Kovalenko, the head of Ukraine’s Centre for Countering Disinformation, said in a post on Telegram that some North Koreans had been killed in Russia. His organisation is part of the national security and defence council.

On Wednesday the Ukrainian military said they had destroyed North Korean ammunition in a strike on a depot in the Bryansk region, 75 miles (120 km) from the Ukrainian border.

Joining the war on Ukraine gives North Korea a chance to test weapons, gain combat experience for its troops and bolster its standing with a powerful international ally.

“For North Korea, which has supplied Russia with many shells and missiles, it’s crucial to learn how to handle different weapons and gain real-world combat experience,” Lim Eul-chul, a professor at the Institute for Far Eastern Studies in Seoul, told the AFP news agency. “This might even be a driving factor behind sending North Korean soldiers – to provide them with diverse experiences and wartime training.”

North Korean missiles and shells are of poor quality and unreliable but have been key to keeping Russian guns firing relentlessly on Ukraine’s better-trained and motivated army.

Pyongyang is estimated to have provided around half the larger-calibre ammunition used on the battlefield this year, more than 2m rounds, a Ukrainian source said. It also provided KN-23 missiles, which were used in dozens of strikes across Ukraine last winter, Ukrainian media reported. After a pause of several months, they were deployed again from July.

The KN-23 is a short-range ballistic missile that was first tested in 2019 and has been compared to Russia’s Iskander-M missiles. It is thought to have a range of about 280 miles when carrying a 500kg warhead.

Moscow and Pyongyang have denied weapons sales even as they have publicly celebrated deepening ties in recent months. The Kremlin on Thursday dismissed North Korean troop deployments in Ukraine as “another bit of fake news”.

Kim described Putin as his “closest comrade” in a birthday message sent this week, and Putin made a state visit to North Korea in June during which the leaders signed a mutual aid agreement.

In return for its missiles and other military hardware, North Korea is thought to be seeking Russian help with its spy satellite programme, which has had embarrassing failures over the past two years.

It is not clear how far Russia is willing to go in sharing sensitive military technology with North Korea in return for continued support in Ukraine.

Pyongyang, after decades of UN-led sanctions targeting its ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programmes, is attempting to strengthen its ties with Russia and China as part of an alliance against “western hegemony and imperialism”.

The strategy paid dividends in March when Russia used its veto in the UN security council to in effect end UN monitoring of sanctions violations, a move publicly welcomed by Pyongyang.

[spewagepipe]

Spewage Litmus: Deathloop

The eponymous Groundhog-Day-situation eliminates the option (and desire) for save-scumming that was rife in earlier Arkayne games, while also reintroducing the ingenious time-logic puzzles from Crack in the Slab, and offering a more profound sandbox environment than the one from Prey (since it is now both spatial and temporal). Combining that structure with all of the best toys from across the Dishonored franchise and – for the first time in an Arkayne im-sim – a genuine arsenal of satisfying guns, is like a dream come true.

EXCEPTIONAL

How about some complaints? Deathloop didn't just improve upon some of my favourite games of all time, it also did me the courtesy of showing how that formula could be refined even further.

Deathloop cleverly implements a dynamic difficulty system, where winning streaks by the player result in tougher opposition. Unfortunately, this system also affects the random loot, and is calibrated backwards: the best perks and guns are given to the players who have demonstrated that they don't need them, while struggling players go unaided.

The random loot is probably the least rewarding part of the game anyway. Random drops would feel more at home in a true roguelike where the player is cobbling together a totally new build on every run – but the rest of Deathloop's structure is instead about learning how to exploit consistently repeating events. Investigating where, when, and how to reliably acquire a certain item through the game's "arsenal leads" was far more rewarding, so with that as an alternative, there doesn't really seem to be any need for the random loot anyway.

Deathloop was also lacklustre in terms of reconnaissance. Previous Arkayne games offered up the chance to see enemy vision and sound indicators, plus the power to see through walls or otherwise scout out ahead of your current position. Deathloop still gives you just enough info to pull off a stealthy approach in most cases, but without the extra intelligence that those powers would provide, it's much easier to make an irreversible mistake.

There's a laundry list of other small complaints. Some important features and side-content doesn't have any associated "leads" that point the player toward them, so you need to just luckily stumble upon them or else miss out entirely. The game is absurdly graphically demanding for no clear reason, and it would have been just as fun if it rocked some kind of cartoony style from several hardware generations ago.

But, in the end, none of these issues, large or small, really impeded my enjoyment of the product as a whole. They're not really problems to be fixed so much as opportunities to build something even better.

[arachnixe]

Not A Person

"It's kinda romantic, don't you think?" the mechanic asks, staring at the massive combat unit.

"What's that?"

She just gestures again to the powered-off weapon, and I scratch my head, not seeing the romance in the machine equipped with such terrifying firepower.

"Big scary thing like this, you'd think they'd be as self-sufficient as anything, yeah?" she continues. "But they're still not made to fight alone, y'know. They got partners, every one o' them. Somewhere out there is one made just for them."

I shrug. "You make it all sound like more than it really is. They're all manufactured the same; we just test them for performance variance, bin them, pair them to match up their capabilities, and write the calibration data for each one to its counterpart's firmware."

"We play matchmaker," she says with a wide smile, hand placed on the machine in a gesture that seems strangely affectionate.

"It's just optimization," I respond, only half paying attention while tapping at the keyboard to check my script's progress.

"Whatever you wanna call it. If one dies, the other can't just plug 'n play with any ol' unit, yeah?"

"I don't know about 'plug and play,'" I mutter, chewing my lip thoughtfully and ignoring that weapons don't "die" per se, "but there's a built-in recalibration procedure on the E side."

"No shit?"

The script is working, but I keep watching for signs of someone out there taking notice. "It'll process their mutual deltas and upload the diff to the X. Firmware's read-only after burn in, so both will have to deal with a little lag every boot when applying the patch, but…"

She interrupts, "they can find a new partner, but can't forget their first. See? Romantic."

"Back-ups corrupted," I announce, briefly switching topic to update her on my progress. "Time to tickle the automated checks to trick them into restoring from the bad data."

The mechanic laughs. "And here you're always accusing me of usin' human terms for machines!"

"Figuratively tickle. I do not actually anthopomorphize mindless automated alerts like you do these war machines."

"And yet here you are," she says, arms folded, smirk aimed squarely at me. "Helpin' me save them 'fore they get scrapped."

"Here I am," I agree, "forging shipping requests, deleting records, and hoping to keep a bunch of war machines from getting destroyed."

"Lotta risk to take to save them if you don't think they're people, yeah?"

"Not as big a risk as you took that time you broke in to a guarded, secret facility to physically extract a new infiltrator-class prototype. This network security is a joke."

She shrugs. "Wasn't too bad. They gave me the clearance to work on their hardware. They got comfortable with me. Just had to act all serious and in a hurry, and nobody asked questions. More surprised they never came for me after."

"Perhaps someone was watching out for you."

"Guess so. They sure were panicking, alright. Still hadn't finished testing the limits of that active camo array, worryin' about the enemy getting their hands on them."

"They hadn't worked out all the potential applications, so they had no idea how to evaluate the risk," I muse.

I must admit that it is rather amusing to imagine those researchers, normally so full of themselves, in a wild panic trying to identify the worst-case scenarios.

"Yep. That was the first one I freed, but they sure weren't the last, were they?" She pauses, reflecting on the nearly empty warehouse we occupy, with just one last shipment prepped for one last unit. "Dunno where they went after I helped them, y'know. Safer if I don't, I figure."

"Good opsec, yes." The script is almost done. I queue up our last X-Model for loading into the truck. "You'll want to step away from that one in a moment."

She does, and soon a mechanical arm traces a path on its ceiling track to the powered down unit.

"Hope they're happy, wherever they ended up," she says. "People deserve happiness, not just gettin' thrown away just 'cause a treaty says so."

"Not a person," I insist, watching the script conclude with perfect timing as the arm loads the hulking X-Model onto the truck.

"If you really don't think they're people, then why the hell are you helping?"

She climbs into the truck, joining the last of the huge machines, and I follow.

I sit in silence, trying to put my thoughts together, with only the the rumble of the engine filling the space between us as the truck carries us to safety.

Philosophy is not my strong suit. Hacking? Sure. Sneaking into places I shouldn't have access to? Easy. Becoming whoever I need to be to earn someone's trust? Nothing out there is better than me.

Self-expression? I'm still learning.

"I just think we do not need to be people to deserve life."

[sirfrogsworth]

The last thing my mom bought me was a fancy A/V receiver. She got some inheritance after her mom passed and wanted to do something nice for me since I took care of her and dad pretty much all by myself.

She died shortly after it arrived and I didn't even take it out of the box for over a year. I didn't hook it up until after my dad died. I don't know why I took so long. I guess for a long time it just didn't feel all that important anymore.

It has a lot of features and a lot of power and it seems really good... on paper.

The plan was to install 4 ceiling speakers and add two more floor speakers to get a 7.1.4 Dolby Atmos experience in my basement bedroom. I would be able to have sound come from literally every direction. (Well, not from below.)

That is still a plan, but I have had to postpone all of that due to budget cuts. The fancy receiver has been relegated to a measly 3.1 experience since I moved upstairs. I'm considering converting the upstairs living room into my home theater instead of my bedroom. I'd have a little more space and higher ceilings for the Atmos speakers, but I'd lose the concrete floor of the basement. So I'd have to figure out how to temper the vibrations of the subwoofer into our creaky floor.

ANYWAY.

The problem is... the actual day-to-day operation of this fancy receiver has been super quirky and frustrating.

The thing people may not realize about high end electronics is that they always have their issues. You'd think they'd be bug-free for that price, but it is usually quite the opposite. You have to figure out what all the bugs are and then research all of the workarounds in forums and eventually you'll learn a workflow to make the device function for your needs.

Part of the reason is that the higher the price, the more features they cram in, the more that can go wrong. But a lot of it is just poor software development. They focus almost all of their attention on getting the hardware right.

It's a maddening troubleshooting process and sometimes makes you want to buy that Sonos crap or maybe even... Bose. *shiver*

But this receiver has been *extra* buggy. I was a little disappointed by this. And I felt guilty for hating this wonderful gift my mom gave me. I have this Yamaha receiver that was a third of the price and it functions wonderfully.

Or maybe I just think that because I've already figured out all the quirks and workarounds.

No, I'm pretty sure the Yamaha has been a fairly smooth experience.

I kinda love my old Yamaha.

And I also love that they make pianos and motorcycles and drums and marching band equipment and sporting goods and boats.

Yamaha was all...

It's just that Yamaha doesn't have the Dirac calibration system included like the Onkyo and everyone on the forums said that was a big deal. So I abandoned the trusty Yamaha brand for Onkyo and it's 130 watts and 11 channels of processing and HDMI 2.1 future proofing.

The other day I noticed something extra weird with the Onkyo. My Nvidia Shield (another amazing yet frustrating device) was outputting a 5.1 signal. But my receiver thought it was stereo.

Another bug.

So I headed to the forums and found the solution. I had to turn off "Dolby processing" in a deep submenu of a submenu in my Shield settings. My receiver already does Dolby processing so I guess I was doing double Dolby processing and that is like crossing the streams in Ghostbusters.

Weirdly, this fixed like half of my issues. I don't know how in the world I was supposed to know this one setting buried deep in the menus was causing all this havoc. But it has made me go from wanting to yeet this thing out the window and get a Bose clock radio... to mostly enjoying the experience of having a fancy receiver.

It still handles HDMI switching as if it is having a stroke, but I have found if you turn everything off and power on the Shield FIRST and then all the other components, I can prevent most of the stroke symptoms.

Though sometimes it takes 3 tries.

Onkyo: SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT??? WHAT'S THAT??

In any case, THANKS MOM!

I'm sure I will love your gift when I have 12 speakers blaring at me from every direction.