When this happens it’s often because a backend component gets rewritten and somebody decides that it’s too much work to re-implement some features for the new backend. It’s much easier to come up with a PR spiel for why removing the features is actually a good thing.

TIL. The wikipedia article with some more detail.

(early 8-bit era)

For Steam in general: If you are not in a major hurry to get a game wait for sales. There are major sales a few times a year and smaller ones all the time. Add games to your Steam wishlist to get notified when it’s on sale. Check steamdb for price trends.

The speech in Impossible Mission was sampled from a human actor not synthesized.

deleted by creator

So what are you playing this week?

I started playing Ring of Pain. It’s a deckbuilder-ish roguelite. There isn’t really a deck, it’s more of a loadout-builder (or tableau builder in boardgame terms). Meteorfall: Krumit’s Tale is the closest thing I’ve played before. RoP is sort of like a 1d version of that. Fun and fairly unique mechanics, smooth implementation. Runs great on the steamdeck too, good controller support.

OCRmyPDF is what I use as well, had good luck with it on boardgame rulebooks that sometimes come with missing or partial embedded text. Combined with recoll and the Emacs pdf-tools mode I have it all indexed and at my fingertips.

On Android it’s the only reasonable choice so no question there.

On desktop I used Netscape/Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox/Conkeror for many years but switched to Chromium when I had to start over after the XUL-apocalypse. But lately I’ve been maintaining my Firefox setup more or less in parallel with Chromium and this week as it happens I am trying to make the switch back again. Mostly just to wean off the Google stuff. Will see how it goes.

Another (less-critical) motivation is that Chromium takes over 10 hours to build on my machine. Firefox is under 1 and it gets done way faster even if an LLVM or Rust build is involved too.

It’s been mostly comfort foods: Slay the Spire and Binding of Isaac.

In Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime you have to save the Space Bunnies!

I’ve give up on the Youtube homepage long time ago. Only the Subscriptions view (with shorts filtered using a userscript) and search results are usable for me.

This sounds similar to SLIME (and its fork SLY) for Common Lisp. These tools use their own protocols rather than LSP in part because they pre-date LSP but also because LSP is not a good match for everything they do. In addition to the usual LSP functionality like symbol lookup, xref and completion they also provide a very good Lisp REPL. It is easy to have the server side (called swank) running as part of an existing service which sounds a lot like what the post describes. For example I’ve used SLIME to connect to my live StumpWM sessions.

Some I don’t see mentioned yet:

• Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection ported to pretty much everything.
• Nethack (and its variants), Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup and Brogue are great roguelikes.
• For boardgame fans the original Keldon AI for Race for the Galaxy is open source and works very well on Linux.
• Fish Fillets NG is one I have fond memories of from many years ago.
• The Ur-Quan Masters is Star Control 2, another classic.

x86 Macs are not the greatest example of longevity at this point.

EXWM. I am a longtime Emacs user so merging the concepts of Emacs buffers and X windows is a huge benefit. Only one set of keybindings to worry about, all of my Emacs window management stuff works for X windows too. One less external dependency to worry about too. In a new environment (like when starting a new job etc) as long as I have my Emacs config I am good to go.