If you look for a “watt meter plug”, you’ll pribably understand what it is at a glance. It’s a device you plug into your wall outlet (or surge protector or whatever). It has a power outlet on it, which you plug your device into, and a screen that shows watts drawn and watt-hours over time. Super simple. I think “Kill A Watt” is the most well known brand.
I went down a rabbit hole when the “blue light bad (at night)” thing hit 5-10 years ago. At the time I was curious about what the “dose” relationship was - ie, how much blue light did it take to affect your sleep - and how severely sleep was actually impacted.
What I found was that you will see lots of articles and health advice that said to avoid blue light and digital devices before sleep, but that when you dig into the source that all this advice was based on, it was a handful of really shady studies, such as the one I mentioned in my previous comment.
The belief that blue light affects sleep originated from research on the effect of sunlight on sleep patterns. But studies/articles makes a giant leap from the fact that bright sunlight has a measurable effect on sleep to the belief that any light that matches the sunlight spectrum also affects sleep.
Look at the s actual studies and read them. Draw your own conclusions about the quality of the study. What I found is that studies had to massively “crank up” the factors to show any effect. They do not attempt to replicate real-world usage of devices before sleep.
I remember reading a study on sleep quality, purportedly testing whether people sleep better after reading a print book compared to a digital book. If I remember correctly, this is also one of the studies cited for the “blue light bad” trend.
The study found that reading digital books vs print harmed sleep. Their test conditions were something like this (note: I’m not exaggerating how ridiculous the setup was):
Print book: sit/lay in bed however you wish in a moderately lit room and read for some number of hours before you sleep.
Digital book: in the same room with the same lighting, an iPad is attached to a a device that holds it a prescribed distance from your face. The device cannot be moved, so you must sit in a particular position for the entire reading time. THE IPADS BRIGHTNESS SET TO MAXIMUM. You cannot adjust the brightness.
Yeah, I’m probably going to sleep worse after being forced to sit in the same position for multiple hours while being blinded.
Ambrosia probably provided me the most hours of gaming entertainment over the 90s. They published Mac software and, if I remember correctly, most of their games were shareware and the non-paid versions were pretty well featured.
I wonder how many hundreds of hours I played Escape Velocity and Escape Velocity Override. Those were some absolutely amazing games and they supported plugins (mods) and had a thriving mod community.
For the 90s mac users, you’ll probably recognize a lot of their games (listed on the Wikipedia page). Here are some from the 90s that stand out to me:
Maelstrom
Chiral
Apeiron
Swoop
Barrack
Escape Velocity
Avara
Bubble Trouble
Harry the Handsome Executive
Mars Rising
EV Override
Ares
Escape Velocity Nova
Just curious since you clearly know a lot about this stuff: What are your thoughts on the heat sinks being a part of the issue? Is there a decent chance the device could benefit from replacing whatever adhesive/paste was used to attach them? Or is that even doable?
While I haven’t dug into anti-chest specifics, I’m pretty sure they all function this way. Not that I like it either, but if you don’t want games accessing this information, you’ll probably want to avoid games with anti-cheat.
Eg Denuvo, which is widely used and recognized (recognized as shit that causes lots of issues, too), gets kernel level access, which means it can do anything it wants.
Interesting, but very light on details about “cheaper than tapwater”. And the title is clickbait; the system they have is a small scale prototype and the developers only estimate that it would be cheaper than US tap water when scaled up. There is no further detail on costs in the article. Here is the extent of what it says:
the team estimates that the overall cost of running the system [when scaled up] would be cheaper than what it costs to produce tap water in the United States.
The article doesn’t provide any more info on the costs than the above quote. Dunno if the actual journal article provides more detail; I don’t have access. But I would need to see a lot more about how they produced that estimate and how uncertain the estimate is.
Ever heard of Sealioning? Look it up. That’s you. Your posts are dripping with pseudo-intellectual “just asking questions” spittle.
Three thoughts:
I wonder if you would still have this take if you played a newer, high quality AAA game on a high end setup. I don’t mean to imply that your mind will definitely be blown — really don’t know — but it would be interesting to see what doing so would do to your opinion.
Gaming is about entertainment. There is no denying that better/bigger/smoother/more immersive tends to add to the entertainment. So devs push those boundaries both for marketing reasons and because they want to push the limits. I have a hard time seeing a world in which gaming development as a whole says “hey, we could keep pushing the limits, but it would be more environmentally friendly and cheaper for our customers if we all just stopped advancing game performance.”
There are SO MANY smaller studios and indie devs making amazing games that can run smoothly on 5/10/15 year old hardware. And there is a huge number of older games that are still a blast to play.
Old curmudgeons unite! I totally knew what you meant.
Edit: that said, I would add NVMe SSD as the way to go… although I think that is pretty much all you find these days. Are non-nvme m.2 drives a thing?
I haven’t used other handhelds, but what you say is what I’ve seen from other discussions and reviews. Yes, there are more powerful systems with better screens, but the SD’s OS is miles ahead (but not without a lot of quirks as well). The touchpads are incredible - I couldn’t imagine trying to use a handheld PC without those touchpads. Also, the custom control configuration abilities built in to steam OS are incredibly versatile and detailed.
Voyager has good features for hiding posts as well as marking posts read and hiding read posts.
You might give the Voyager app a try. It’s what I use. It has a hide post option, as well as a “mark read on scroll” option and a button to hide read posts. I think you have to enable the last two in its settings.
That is a great article. Everyone here should click over and read that one!
I suspect that there is “palm check” turned on for your touchpad. This is designed to keep you from accidentally moving/clicking the touchpad by brushing it with your palm while you are typing.
Look for a “palm check”, “palm rejection”, or “disable touchpad when typing” setting in your touchpad utility. As far as I know, these are all roughly the same thing.