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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • While unfortunate, as a consumer it’s the only recourse we have. We don’t buy unity, we buy games. I won’t buy a game that might just suddenly disappear from a store where I bought it, cause the developer can’t or won’t carry install fees that may or may not come at any point.

    Yes, it hurts developers. Yes, he shouldn’t have to suddenly have to pay that fee, but that is out of my control. But I’m still not taking the risk with my money. Unity clearly wants to do this, eventually they probably will.

    Let’s stop buying games with unity so they have no customers left that can slam with install fees after-the-fact. All we can do.


  • Having the sun shine through a large window is an issue, but is also an issue for a good picture on normal TVs. Picture quality with protectors is better when the room is darker (increases contrast), but a normally lit room is just fine. It also depends on how and what you’re watching. I generally do darken the room when I’m actively watching a movie, but no need for that when putting something on you’re just half watching. You can still tell just fine what’s going on even in a bright room, it just looks a bit washed out.

    It also depends on the brightness/class of the projector of course, and on the screen. Don’t underestimate the visual difference a screen makes. Both having any screen over just projecting onto a white wall, and a great screen over a cheap ransom one.

    The core issue is that a projector uses throwing light as bright, and not throwing light as dark. If your surface (screen or wall) is rather white and illuminated without the projector actually projecting light into it, that is as dark as a black part of the picture could possibly be. There are screens that are reflective, but more gray than white, those help with that, too.

    I would say a normally lit room (with artificial light in the evening for example) is fine to use a projector. “Well lit workspace” really depends on you’re definition. For my definition of “well lit” it wouldn’t be ideal, but I’ve just installed like 49000 lumens of illumination into my 3.5 x 3.5 meter workshop, cause I like to see what I’m doing and life is too short for bad lighting.





  • Of course. The point isn’t too “get stuff”, it’s too support someone. You see someone doing something you like and you want to motivate them to keep doing that thing, join the Patreon. Like a YouTuber far too small to justify dedicating time to making more videos. Think of it as a donation-subscription. Chucking like a coffee worth of money at a YouTuber isn’t a large difference individually, but adds up, and it’s more than I could generate for them by watching ads.

    There are many creators out there that simply couldn’t do their thing without Patreon, or would have to cut back on the amount of “stuff” they create. At a certain size it allows people to go “full time”, which is very very far away from the number of followers/subscribers a site like YouTube requires for this. It’s also more stable compared to ad revenue or changes in “the algorithm”. Note that the percentage taken by Patreon is tiny compared to a twitch sub, YouTube ‘join’ or similar things(essentially a processing fee, not like 50% as it is on twitch).

    I support a number of people, mostly cause I love their stuff and want them to continue, or cause I think it’s just an important cause. The fact that you might get an occasional goodie or whatever is besides the point.

    That’s also where the term Patreon comes from: think Renaissance era rich people or just royalty essentially funding artists, so they can focus on their art. Without this in the olden days, we would have a lot less art from those times these days.



  • The oceans are vast. The problem we have is that the area essentially shipping lanes (large traffic), regions where there’s some traffic, but massive areas are neither. Nobody is gonna nick your done in antarctic waters. It’s hard to get even basic measurements from there, because nobody goes past to even drop a buoy, let alone map the ocean floor.

    During the current Ocean Race (massive sailboats, partially riding on hydrofoils) that circles the globe, at least one team was dropping buoys along the way, cause the scientists can’t afford to send a ship to do just that. Or find one that just goes there, for any reason. The route goes from Europe past Africa, past Australia, then past south America and back up the Atlantic. The shortest route for that would go through the ice, but there’s an exclusion zone to prevent danger from ice. This area is where they dropped them.

    There is often nobody within thousands of natural miles. Let alone anyone remotely close enough to even spot a droneship.