Seconded this. Very small too, at about 10 MiB, or 250 kiB per game, which is tough to beat! The Android port is probably the best but a Linux and Windows version also exist. Get it on F-Droid

There is also Gauguin, a similarly small app but with only 1 puzzle type, this one. There are more options though, including more operation combos, negative and non-consecutive numbers, and even rectangular grids! The controls are a little worse if you ask me and so is the performance but not by a lot. I have spent huge amounts of time playing the game in both apps and I slightly prefer this one thanks to more variation.

Electrolytic capacitors are closer to batteries than to non-polarized capacitors. Lithium-ion cells in capacitor housings also exist, presumably to evade tariffs and restrictions involved in shipping batteries.

We still need more government apps on F-Droid. EU’s OSS strategy suggests that we’ll have them eventually. I don’t think such badge will ever exist there, though.

pure data wise

Data-wise, the screen is 32x30 tiles, which is 256x240 pixels, or 280x240 including the border. (The height is set by the modified NTSC standard at 240p60, and the width of 256 was chosen to simplify 8-bit arithmetic, plus 24 pixels for a border.) With square pixels, the aspect ratio would be 16:15, or 7:6 including border. The video timing was chosen so that this fills the entire TV screen, which is 4:3. As a result, the pixels have an aspect ratio of (4:3)/(7:6)=8:7 (varies a little between TVs). However, the NES could only flip sprites and not rotate them 90°, so this could be taken into account when creating the rotated versions.

Another successful system with non-square pixels was the IBM PC, whose CGA and EGA cards had a 320x200 resolution (or multiples thereof in other modes), which resulted in PAR (4:3)/(8:5)=6:5. Square pixels first became available with VGA’s hi-res mode (16 colors at 640x480), adopted by systems such as Windows 3.1 and TempleOS.

Guess what other obscure old system used rectangular pixels? The IBM PC.

CGA and EGA used resolution modes that were multiples of 320x200 (PAR 6:5). VGA’s 16-color hi-res mode was the first to support square pixels at 640x480, and it would become a standard for years to come because TempleOS and Windows used it (you can even force Windows 7 to run in this mode!)

The NES and SNES had PAR 16:15 8:7 (oops) (which is often ignored in emulation), and so did the most common NTSC DVD-Video mode (none of the commonly used ones had square pixels but you only really notice it with subtitles - you cannot correctly display them at native resolution on an LCD).

And that’s just the successful systems I know off the top of my head.

Soviet personal computers failed for other, obvious reasons. They struggled to copy the latest chips, and the economic incentive was minuscule despite the government’s investment - very few people could afford a computer in the Eastern Bloc, and they could not be exported due to patent infringement and being years behind. The economy collapsed after USSR broke up and nobody wanted to invest to rebuild the industry.

That being said, people in the Eastern Bloc were very resourceful with what they had (mostly clones of Atari’s 8-bit home computers and IBM PCs). A blind person from Czechoslovakia made a speech synthesis sound card for an IBM-compatible PC, which functioned well enough to allow him to be employed as a full-time programmer. At least one of the three exemplars works to this day.

Most common middle- and upper-tier phones, as well as any Pixel and Fairphone (thanks to being more open) will get a custom ROM with updates 8+ years after the release, and you can buy a used 5-year-old phone quite cheaply.

Typing this on my 10-year-old Sony Xperia Z with Android 13. It cost me $0 (found in e-waste) including a data plan (owner forgot SIM inside). The camera has low sensitivity and dust in it and the battery is worn, but everything else is decent. I will open it some day to fix the problems, a replacement battery cost me $10. There is even 4G and NFC, and the 1080x1920 screen is nearly “retina-density” at such small size. I decided to not use the SIM as it could be criminal, and I have my prepaid one in s dumb phone, but I use it for entertainment - the phone fits in my hand and the design is quite timeless. The CPU is a little weak, it cannot decode 1080p30 or 720p60 video in real time, and gets hot quickly on demanding websites.

/e/OS and many others. Look up your model on xda-developers.com, where most ROMs are published. The most commonly supported devices are Google Pixels because AOSP is officially developed by Google for them.

I wonder if the shape of the button pads was chosen for functional or aesthetic reasons

How come it took 20 years for a popular console? Sure, it probably takes some effort, maybe X-raying the boards, but a schematic can be created by someone with a desoldering oven and multimeter. Or sandpaper and flatbed scanner. At least they’re free.

Edit: apparently includes full board recreation, that’s better

Lots of disabled people are avid gamers. This is a dick move and I hope they realize that.

Has lots of uses!

I love vehicular manslaughter! 🚶‍♂️҉🚗_𓀿 #crime

Unfortunately, AAA devs usually already have such a backlog of bug reports that they won’t consider this an advantage

Self-hosting using MediaWiki

Yes, Bandersnatch is technically* a video game. Didn’t know they made others.

Mine is Samsung Galaxy J5 2017 for $50. Reasonably small, headphone jack, fully rectangular OLED screen, physical buttons, Android 10 thanks to XDA Developers. Minor inconveniences like no Bluetooth audio and camera app failing to start but I am satisfied overall.

Acode… Not too simple, though

Guess what, Replika founder Eugenia Kuyda was literally inspired by the episode (Be Right Back).

They’re not going to give you other users’ data or stats despite obsessively collecting them. (I get the sarcasm though)

Many on F-Droid.

• Puzzles by Simon Tatham
• 2048
• OpenTTD
• Anuto TD

Until ChatGPT is shut down. Have control over your waifus, people!

Did you read what I wrote? I did have a GRUB boot menu before accidentally disabling it. Now booting “ubuntu” or “EFI” from BIOS just boots the default GRUB entry (Windows).

And pen support is a disaster in Windows. It can differentiate the pen from fingers but giving each a different action? Nope. Krita works but the Erase button shows context menu while the Menu button scrolls. GIMP senses pressure but only allows clicking, not dragging (I can draw points, or straight lines if I hold Shift). In Pinta, there is no pressure dynamics and the Erase button does erase but only when the pen is hovering above the screen. This is what I’ll be resolving in the next days so that I can give my sister a decent guide to notetaking, writing & drawing with the pen.

simply boot back into the previous kernel

That’s asking too much from somebody who cannot fix a screwed-up GRUB config from a Live USB (it took me several tries to successfully update-grub from the Mint installation, and the one time I succeeded, the config is wrong and I cannot boot into it: GRUB menu never shows up no matter what I press, and I set Windows as default for my noob sister). As I said, I’m not the primary user and I will now be mostly debloating and customizing Windows for her, after which she takes it to college. So working Linux is not on the agenda until Christmas at least, and I’ll put up with WSL (or my own laptop) until then.

I have been warned against using Mainline due to instability. I will wait until a stable release, it’s my sister’s laptop anyway and I have another.

I actually installed Mint before going through the Windows OOBE. However, the laptop is so new that the touchpad, touchscreen and fingerprint sensor don’t work in kernels <6.5, and the Wi-Fi card in kernels below 6.0. Most distros ship with kernel 5.x and none have LTS versions with 6.5 (which only became stable this week). I am not nearly skilled enough to go with a non-mainstream or unstable distro. My sister will need Windows so I configured GRUB to boot that by default with 0.2 s hidden timeout and now I can’t boot to Linux at all. I’ll be reinstalling it anyway in a few months.

That being said, Windows is also terrible. You can’t configure the fingers to only scroll and the active stylus to only draw in a note-taking program, the touchpad’s horizontal scrolling is reversed while the vertical is not, the handwriting recognition has not improved since my grandpa’s 2004 Windows Mobile PDA, there is a shitton of telemetry, and uninstalling Edge caused the fingerprint reader to stop working somehow. Without asking, it encrypted my storage with BitLocker (which I cannot configure because it’s not the Pro edition) and I had to enter two 48-digit codes to unlock the D: and E: partitions on each boot (thankfully I removed that). I would welcome encryption if it unlocked on Windows login and didn’t completely lock non-Microsoft account users on the same device from the storage partition. NumLock stays lit in Sleep mode or when the display is closed. Also the manufacturer CaReS aBoUt pRiVaCy and therefore included a camera cover but has a fucking persistent app that “monitors the system” and shows extended warranty popup ads, but is required to limit the battery charging voltage.

And the internal PSU makes a maddening coil whine all the time but the company just said “manufacturing is difficult and we screwed up, just use headphones lol”. It could be fixed by some soft glue, foam or rubber around the inductors but I think I would lose the warranty over this.

Normies barely know what that means, and don’t care.

Confirming this on (my sister’s installation of) Windows 11. Not even restore point would give me a result (switching to en-US at least found Reset my PC but still creating a restore point is nowhere to be found unless you know where to go from previous versions of Windows).

I have a couple rooted Android 4 phones that I could use but they would be rather slow and have security vulnerabilities. Unless someone makes a custom ROM for the obscure models I have, these problems won’t go away.

I think a root app that runs on Android 4 would work but the devs would have to implement modern standards (TLS 1.2) themselves, the performance would be bad and the phone will probably have known security vulnerabilities.

I use a dumb phone for that, and due to my provider’s oversight, I get 1 MB for free a day on a prepaid card, enough for basic stuff like train timetables on Opera Mini (no email due to privacy concerns but I am frequently enough on Wi-Fi anyway). So I carry two phones: my smartphone has no SIM card and is used most of the time while my Nokia lasts a week while in standby.
So neither phone could work as a server, nor would most of anyone else’s given that everyone expects 100% uptime, which phones don’t really provide.

However, how about using one of the three rooted Android 4.4 phones in my drawer? My home Wi-Fi, a USB charger and a root app that runs a remotely maintainable web server would make it a great website hosting option. Sadly, I don’t know any Java and few people develop for Android versions before 5, among other things because of its bring-your-own-TLS-1.2-implementation necessity.

Of course, they are more than capable enough (if you remain connected to the network and don’t care about the battery drain).

However, society is so used to “^T_H^E _C^L_O^U_D” that this seems backwards.

Captured on PS4™ Pro

Not very pro if it leaves a watermark /s