RoabeArt [he/him]

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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: October 13th, 2020

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  • I need to get back into OSM. Pokemon Go was the reason I initially started contributing. The game uses (used?) OSM map data, and certain Pokemons will spawn near certain biomes (water, woods, etc).

    My little cousin played the hell out of PG around 2017-2018, and they mostly played it around the big park in our town. At the time, the park appeared on OSM (and by extension PG) as a featureless green polygon with a few roads and footpaths. In reality it has a bunch of woods, streams, a pond, playground, public pool etc. So I did a quick readup on how to add stuff to OSM and I gave the park a digital makeover. I even walked around the footpaths with my phone and marked them out with the GPS so that they would appear in the map more accurately.

    Unfortunately it was quite a while before Pokemon Go updated its OSM database, and my cousin lost interest in the game by then. But I kept at contributing for quite a few years, adding random stuff in spurts and stopping for a month or two








  • RoabeArt [he/him]@hexbear.nettoScience Memes@mander.xyzWormholes
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    5 months ago

    I still remember the way my science teacher explained a hypothetical warp drive (like how it is in Star Trek). He took a black towel, representing space, and laid it flat on a table. He set down a miniature model of the Enterprise on one end of the towel, then accordion-folded the towel up so that the other end was close to the ship. He moved the Enterprise over to that end of the towel, and unfolded it so that it was flat again. The Enterprise was now on the other end of the table.

    An overly simplified visualization, but it really illustrated the idea to my ten year old brain how space-time could hypothetically be bent to make fast interstellar travel a possibility. Also it made me realize that warp speed on the Enterprise wasn’t just a super powerful rocket or something.



  • Before Louis Pasteur’s disproving of spontaneous generation, most people believed that bacteria and putrefactive organisms like maggots etc. spontaneously poofed into existence, like a video game character spawning. Pasteur suggested that maggots came from flies laying their eggs on rotting meat etc, and that bacteria were everywhere and will multiply quickly under the right conditions. A lot of people at the time thought these were crackpot ideas.




  • I wouldn’t say “completely fucked”, but for a few years I noticed YouTube on Firefox has this occasional quirk where videos will quit playing and infinitely buffer at the exact same timestamp. Like there’s no way around it except skipping about 30 seconds ahead with the seek bar, or doing a Ctrl-F5 (hard refresh) and starting the whole video over. Opera GX doesn’t seem to have this problem at all.

    But it’s still not a big enough deal to make me give up Firefox completely.



  • I used to do emulation on my Raspberry Pi. It had an analog AV output, so I connected it to an old tube TV I had. The games managed to look better on that than on my HD monitor with HDMI. Even moreso once I figured out how to set the Pi’s video output to 240p (the resolution for most consoles at the time).

    Apparently some older games took advantage of CRT screen artifacting to create effects, but they don’t translate very well to LCD or LED screens. Like the waterfalls in the 16 bit Sonic games. On a newer LCD they look like shit, but on a CRT they have a transparent look.