Short answer: It depends. Doing full flash reads of your USB sticks and SD cards (dd if=/dev/XXX of=/dev/null bs=4k status=progress) may help for a lot of them. But not all. The only solution I can actually recommend (for any storage media) is backup them up and regularly testing/moving the backups.

If the read of the disk is particularly slow then that indicates the flash cells are degraded. If a second read of the disk is much faster then that indicates some action may have been taken by the flash controller IC to fix this.

Long answer:

NAND flash cells slowly leak charge, making their state indistinguishable. A flash controller IC (usually separate to the NAND flash IC or ICs) has the job of noticing and fixing this (by rewriting the data to another or the same cell) before it gets too bad. That doesn’t necessarily mean it does it particularly well.

Some (few?) flash controllers periodically scan for weak cells and rewrite to fix them. Some (most?) flash controllers notice weak cells only when you read them. Some (many?) flash controllers are shit and don’t do any of this.

Flash controllers also have a bunch of other features and jobs, like maintaining a spare pool of cells (over-provisioning) to swap out for bad ones and even forcing the USB stick into read-only mode if they think things have gone particularly bad. Again this varies a lot depending on implem, some do it, some don’t, and for different reasons (out of over-provis cells, corrupt mapping metadata, arbitrary thresholds, etc).

(5minute in) When you have a quest market or a minimap, the player doesn’t take in the gameworld. They’re not playing a game so much as they’re sleepwalking through it. It becomes a monotmous grind, there’s nothing stimulating or exciting about it. Go here, pick up this item. Go here, talk to this person, rinse, repeat.

I hate minimaps with a passion and turn them off in games wherever possible. Otherwise I find myself playing the game primarily looking at the minimap, with the actual 3d world just being a background obstacle course I occasionally have to flick to. With it off I have a lot more fun, getting lost and learning new areas.

Flicking to a pause menu map or similar adds friction but I have not found a better way (EDIT: the video touches on this, where a lot of modern games are broken without minimaps and quest markers. There are ways the designers can fix this, like partial maps. I want to make a game now with some shadily hand-drawn maps…)

Written in C, not C++, is one for me. I’m writing a little hobby game in C.

He (He₁) gas molecules are absolutely tiny, they love to leak through everything.

Site seems offline now, says “Closed Jan 30th”

Ty. Sorry it was a grumpy warning :(

From memory, it felt like the electrostatic discharge that used to happen whenever I was touching my car.

That’s likely a valid comparison. Some parts of the tube might give you the same style of event as static electricity discharge when you touch them. Other parts would give you something more though :D so please don’t take this as a generalisation.

Interestingly, the PC suffered no damage at all and didn’t blow its internal fuse, either.

Fuses are OK as fire prevention devices, but mostly useless as electrocution prevention. They blow based off power draw and time. Many human-electric interactions don’t actually draw that much power or last that long when compared to normal circuit power draws & timescales.

Thankfully, it must have been all volts and no amps so I was OK, even though I let out quite the yelp. 😁

Complete myth. Please don’t repeat this. It’s not even remotely close to a generalisation, it’s completely wrong and dangerous.

(Sorry, pet peeve of mine. Have had family members happy to play with mains wires but terrified to touch car batteries for fear of death)

100mA through someone can be harmless. 1mA through someone can be fatal. Lethal conditions occur under certain complex circumstances involving not just voltage/current, but frequency, exact waveforms, duration, contact points and the individual’s physical parameters (human skin resistance varies a LOT, it’s not an insignificant factor).

The most commonly encountered electrical hazards involve 50/60Hz 120/230V mains and hand/foot dermal contacts. This is a lethal combination that can cause heart fibrillation. Even 5mA or 100VAC can cause this (sometimes you will see lower numbers cited, “it depends”). Death can occur a day later, see immediate medical attention if you believe you have been shocked by mains wiring.

At very high frequencies our nervous system is not sensitive, so we can pass larger amounts of current or deal with higher voltages without much harm. I’ll still hedge this with “it depends”, you can get thermal burns (which if on the eyes includes blindness) and pathways through the body vary with contact points, changing the risks.

Static electricity discharges can be crazily high voltages and currents (many amps, sometimes hundreds of amps). Yet they are not a hazard.

The high voltages in your CRT will supply very high currents when applied to dermal contact points on the human body. This will likely induce involuntary muscle contraction. Prolonged contact could cause burns and unwanted chemical reactions to occur internally, but is unlikely to cause heart fibrillation because of the non-repeating DC nature.

I was young and did not have access to soldering irons. So I bridged the two pins with aluminium foil and sticky tape.

It would slowly peel off and my controller would suddenly stop working mid game. I couldn’t reboot the console because I couldn’t save (no VMUs). So I’d fix it live – I’d leave the screws out of the case, jiggle my fingers in there and fix it.

This was fine, worked for most of a year. Until I killed the console by accidentally touching the controller PCB to another PCB whilst doing this fix. I still have the corpse somewhere, to this day I still feel awful about it.

Absolutely amazing. Going to go for the offline port though, I don’t trust my save data to my browser.

N.B. Only worked in Chromium (not Firefox) for me.

Every news website is covering it. I think I’ve spotted most of 10 articles around the place.

The law of well-marketed unreleased goods dictates that this vehicle is not going to meet any of the promises mentioned in the articles. I hope to be proven wrong, but just like video games: don’t pre-order, wait for it to come out and be reviewed.

I swear that I read that white lead oxide is water soluble, thus happily sticks to your fingers and then gets on your food. I must be misremembering.

Maybe it was something about the solid lead object turning into an (oxide) powder that can then be easily ported as tiny particles on greasy hands? Hearsay science and safety information from me today :)

The fun thing about Pb is it’s relatively safe in pure form. Unfortunately the oxides that appear on its surface are water soluble and love entering our bodies.

Just looked this up, apparently I’m completely wrong. Maybe I was thinking about lipid compatibility? Not sure now.

Welcome to security news theatre :(

I don’t think espressif would bother suing, these kind of misshapen claims get constantly made against popular projects all of the time. It’s just unusual to see so much coverage about this particular one.

Not so say that externally attackable vulnerabilities in an ESP32 don’t exist, they might. Bluetooth devices have an awful track record. But making them up doesn’t help the world.

I happily ran THUGPRO under wine, so I assume rethawed would be the same. Dunno.

Where am I even supposed to buy it if I wanted to, which I don’t really,

Looks like it’s abandonware. Yeah, publisher dropped the ball.

Bleepingcomputer’s title and article are very misleading, the presentation did NOT reveal a backdoor into an ESP32. It looks like Bleepingcomputer completely misunderstood what was presented (EDIT: and tarlogic isn’t helping with the first sentence on their site).

Instead the presentation was about using an ESP32 as a tool to attack other devices. Additionally they discovered some undocumented commands that you can send from the ESP32 processor to the ESP32 radio peripheral that let you take control of it and potentially send some extra forms of traffic that could be useful. They did NOT present anything about the ESP32 bluetooth radio being externally attackable.

Another perspective that might help: imagine you have a cheap bluetooth chipset that is open source and well documented. That would give you more than what the presentation just found. Would Bleepingcomputer then be reporting it’s a backdoor threatening millions of devices?

Might be worth checking out ReThawed.. You can choose the physics models, UI, characters, tricks and maps from all of the old THPS games.

I tried THUGPRO previously (another community mod in similar vein) and it was fun, especially the mods to the park editor (overlapping objects!) and Sonic Adventure maps.

It looks identical to me. Same size before clicking, same size after right clicking -> Open image in new tab.

GNOME 2 was fun and easy. It felt like they were trying to learn from the mistakes of Windows and Mac UIs.

Anything odd with temperatures or power draws perhaps? nv-top shows both for me (but I run an AMD GPU + non-proprietary drivers), otherwise lm-sensors might be good.

nvtop seems to show normal usage

Neither the GPU nor CPU utilisation change at the 30 min mark? If one is pegged at 100% then it’s probably hard to work out what is going on. Running a singleplayer game staring at a wall and configured with limited framrate might let you run both the CPU and GPU at less than 100%, perhaps making it easier to see if one or the other suddenly changes.

Hiring: Low level guys.

Opportunities: Adventurer interactions. Loot. Rumours before the bigger places hear about them.

– Dungeon management