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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • So, most of my recommendations are going to be FPS or first person. For Valve related stuff:

    • Half-Life 2 is pretty much a must have along with Episodes 1 and 2.
    • Black Mesa is a remake of the original.
    • Entropy : Zero 2 is a fantastic fan made mod that’s a good follow up after finishing Half-Life 2 and the episodes.
    • The original Entropy : Zero is pretty good, but the default difficulty is hard as hell.
    • Portal 1 and 2 are also a must have
    • Portal: Revolution is an independent mod that’s a good follow up after 2.

    As for non-Valve games and related:

    • Crab Champions - fast paced, third-person, rogue-like shooter.
    • Talos Principle 1 and 2 - first-person puzzles with a serious philosophical scifi story. It actually gets a bit heavy when it discusses mortality and death. 1 is being remade into a “definitive edition”.
    • Untitled Goose Game - Honk!
    • Gnorp Apologue - fun little game
    • Pineapple on pizza - it’s free. I would describe it as games-as-art.
    • Any of the Serious Sam games. They were made for PC.
    • Fallen Aces is still in early access, but a good story driven retro FPS with sprites and multiple ways of navigating each level.
    • Trepang2 - a bit of an odd FPS with bullet time.
    • Roboquest - rogue like FPS
    • Exit 8 - horror walking simulator. Kinda short once you figure it out.
    • APE OUT - Ape smash! Top down “shooter”.
    • Hotline Miami 1 and 2 - top down shooters with fast deaths and excellent soundtracks
    • The Binding of Isaac - has always been popular if a little dated
    • Gunpoint - stealth puzzle third person. Came out a decade ago, but a good game.
    • Party Hard - little indie murder-everyone-and-don’t-get-caught.
    • The Stanley Parable - walking simulator with some interesting dialog and interactions. 9-to-5 office people can relate.
    • Dusk - awesome boomer shooter
    • Antichamber - came out a decade ago, but it’s mind bending first-person puzzles.
    • Hades and Hades 2 which is in early access. Third person isometric rogue-like.
    • The Invincible - Story driven walking simulator based off the book of the same name. Good story.
    • Firewatch - story driven walking simulator
    • Deep Rock Galactic - wasn’t my pint of beer, but a lot of people like it.



  • Apple has a long history of working against right to repair and third party repair shops. This includes making it difficult for third parties to source the parts needed and changing the designs to requiring part pairing in the name of security. It got to the point where repair shops were buying broken Apple products so they could hopefully source the parts needed.

    Looking through what they provided now, it’s basic stuff any third party repair shop could do if they could source the parts. It’s useful. However good electronic technicians can go beyond that and do board level repairs. But that requires schematics and diagrams. A lot of times they would have to get those through other parties who in turn got them through less than official means or violated NDAs.

    Guess what Apple isn’t providing? Board level information. This is just doing the minimum the law requires them to do.

    Bonus: Louis Rossmann talks about Apple’s history of right to repair [10 minute video]






  • That depends. Are you looking at preserving the music without loss of information? Then you need to use a lossless format like flac. Formats like aac, mp3, opus can throw away information you’re less likely to hear to achieve better compression ratios. Flac can’t, so it needs more storage space to preserve the exact waveform.

    You can use a lossy format if you want. On most consumer level equipment, you probably won’t notice a difference. However, if you start to notice artifacting in songs, you’ll need to go back to the originals to re-rip and encode.


  • There’s talk on the Linux kernel mailing list. The same person made recent contributions there.

    Andrew (and anyone else), please do not take this code right now.

    Until the backdooring of upstream xz[1] is fully understood, we should not accept any code from Jia Tan, Lasse Collin, or any other folks associated with tukaani.org. It appears the domain, or at least credentials associated with Jia Tan, have been used to create an obfuscated ssh server backdoor via the xz upstream releases since at least 5.6.0. Without extensive analysis, we should not take any associated code. It may be worth doing some retrospective analysis of past contributions as well…




  • Tom’s Guide has shit reporting. This was the same site that repeated the bogus DDoS smart toothbrushes story. And they’re at it again with more sensationalism.

    From something more reputable:

    The use of the victims’ faces for bank fraud is an assumption by Group-IB, also corroborated by the Thai police, based on the fact that many financial institutes added biometric checks last year for transactions above a certain amount.

    It is essential to clarify that while GoldPickaxe can steal images from iOS and Android phones showing the victim’s face and trick the users into disclosing their face on video through social engineering, the malware does not hijack Face ID data or exploit any vulnerability on the two mobile OSes.

    More from bleeping computer:

    A new iOS and Android trojan named ‘GoldPickaxe’ employs a social engineering scheme to trick victims into scanning their faces and ID documents, which are believed to be used to generate deepfakes for unauthorized banking access.

    Now, don’t get me wrong, you should take malware and social engineering attacks seriously. But get your information from sites that do real security journalism.