#USB-C problem

[untypicable]

The Mystique of USB Cables: A Modern Enigma

There are few certainties in life: death, taxes, and the eternal frustration of USB cables. These unassuming little connectors—so essential, yet so infuriating—have an uncanny ability to turn even the most composed individual into a muttering, frustrated mess. You’d think something designed for universal use (it’s in the name, after all) would be straightforward. But no, USB cables are a riddle…

[a-queer-query]

Ah yes, the joys of having a phone for two years (the model itself is about 3 or 4) and the fucking charge port won't work properly

[stinklebug]

gaymers, i fear i have lost the controller war.

[fiendishartist2]

never buy a mac this is my message to you

[rizardofether]

Ah yes, the abyss. The loading problems do at least lead to some interesting moments.

[fair-itself]

Snacks. Painkillers. Tissues. A water bottle. Phone charger. Sunglasses. Sunscreen. Umbrella. Wallet. Mask. Gum. Pocket knife. Flashlight. Hand sanitizer. Compact mirror. Mini hairbrush. Self-defense implements. Stain remover pen. Emergency sewing needle/safety pin kit. Scissors. Writing utensil. Hat/scarf/gloves/etc. in case it gets warmer or colder. The goal is to have all the crap you might need in an emergency so you don't have to buy anything or go home to get it. You can judge, but I know who you'll turn to if your blood sugar is dropping or you can't get a tag off your clothes before a job interview.

@ people who carry bags everywhere what do you put in them what is there to bring other than chapstick, keys, phone and maybe a tampon why are you packing a suitcase to be outside for 5 hours

[bluefuecoco]

the only ace attorney game i don't have now is Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright which is one i REALLY want, so I guess I'll have to pull out my 3ds again for a little...tinkering

[bigthingsforeverintheworks]

tragic my magic usb converter doesn't solve this problem

[sugar-phoenix]

𖥔 . overheating . 𖥔

synopsis: you're out on an operation with Boothill, and after a long battle and a quick getaway, you turn to realize that the cyborg cowboy is...overheating. With all the implications that come with that. tags: f!reader (Boothill refers to reader as "Lady" and "Missy" once), no smut, fluff, light romance a/n: 1.3k words, wrote this in a craze based off of a headcanon that @k9wa and @nvuy posted about! tickled my brain too much!

ao3 link here!

The sound of gunshots rang out in the night. You ducked in your getaway vehicle, a hover car illegally outfitted with nitrogen turbo boosters. Sticking our head out of the car every now and then, you aimed your pistol at the heads of IPC guards, knocking them dead left and right.

Boothill had been inside the IPC base for a while now. It was supposed to be a quick job. He only needed to run in, download the secret data straight to one of the USB ports on his hip, and then run out. Probably nailing an IPC soldier or ten in the head while he was there.

“Boothill,” you muttered, “where are you?”

You met the cowboy only once before this operation — he had sought you out as a fellow Ranger against the IPC for your getaway vehicle.

“’M gonna be lootin’ a pretty big IPC base, ‘n I need some kinda escape route,” he drawled. ���You git me?”

You happily agreed. Why not? Anything that would be a loss for the IPC was a win for you.

Not to mention the cyborg cowboy was one of the finer men you’d come across in your travels.

Presently, you shook that thought out of your mind and fired a shot at another guard. It’s better to stay clear-headed when you’re in a shootout. Any unholy thoughts were perfectly fine to sift through in safer, calmer settings.

“Where is that dang cowboy?” you muttered again for the fifth time.

A hoot and a holler rang through the air, and you glanced towards the entrance. As though in answer to your question, Boothill emerged from within the base, running full gallop towards the vehicle.

“Start drivin,’” he ordered as he slid into the passenger seat.

“You don’t have to tell me twice,” you replied as more IPC soldiers spilled out of the entrance. The engine roared as you slammed the gas pedal to the floor.

“Ugh, turn up the A/C,” Boothill groaned.

“Turn ‘em up yourself, cowboy,” you responded. “I’m too busy making sure we’re getting away.”

The cyborg reached towards the dashboard and rotated the knob to the coolest possible setting. He leaned back into his seat, huffing and panting.

“All good?”

“Yeah. ‘S just a lot of fighting. Got me worked up.” He sniffed. “This dang A/C ain’t cool enough for me.”

You shrugged, checking the rearview mirror. The IPC vehicles were hot on your heels.  Thankfully, that wasn’t a problem for you. As an expert driver, you were fully trained in the art of evasive maneuvers. It’s what the cowboy hired you to do, after all.

You sped into the nearby city, a metropolis that conveniently had many twisty alleys and tight turns.

“This’ll be a piece of cake. Don’t you worry, cowboy,” you chuckled. The cowboy didn’t answer, and you were too busy focused on the road to check on him.

Drifting through intersections and jumping across lanes, you managed to throw off the majority of the IPC squadron pursuing you. There were only three small hover vehicles left, chasing you through a single-lane alleyway. You revved your engine to taunt them and cackled as the reverberations echoed off the buildings on either side.

The hovercar drifted, fishtailing as you made a sharp turn to the right. You swore as the sound of screaming metal rang out in the air, signaling that your spoilers had scraped against the walls.

“That’s gonna cost ya, cowboy,” you quipped, smiling as you saw two of the three vehicles crash into the wall behind you.

“Lady, I ain’t at fault for your drivin’ skills.”

You snapped your head towards Boothill, giving him a full-on death glare.

“Not that you drive bad, missy! I was just sayin,” he said, raising his hands up in surrender. It was then that you realized he’d unzipped his jacket, letting it fall lazily off his shoulders.

Heat rising to your cheeks, you snapped your attention back to the road, trying to evade the last IPC hover vehicle. A few quick turns and an IPC crash later, you pulled into a dark alleyway and braked, turning off the car.

“Why are we stoppin’?” Boothill asked.

“They’re probably swarming the city. Best to lie low for now until it all subsides.”

There was shuffling in the passenger seat, and you turned to look.

Boothill laid back against the seat, his limbs sprawled out. His bangs were arranged in wet clumps, and sweat gleamed off his face in the glow from distant neon signs. The rest of his long hair was put up along the headrest behind him, leaving his neck bare. His jacket, bandana, and hat were thrown in the back, leaving his upper torso bare for all the world to see. His pants were shrugged low on his hip, almost revealing his unmentionables (did cyborgs even have unmentionables?). Panting and huffing, he closed his eyes, frowning. You could hear a loud hum emanate from within his robot body.

“Boothill?” you croaked, fighting to speak through the feeling of your brain frying in your skull. It wasn’t just his appearance that was, well, hot, but a boiling heat was radiating off of him. You had hardly noticed in all the earlier action.

“Yes, darlin’?” He groaned. Your heart fluttered at the way he said darlin.’

“What. Are you doing?” You hardly thought the cowboy was one to give in to his darker desires at the drop of a hat, although there was something off about the scene that told you it wasn’t motivated by lust.

He chuckled before answering.

“Told ya I got worked up during that fight. I’m overheatin.’ One of the problems with having a robot body, ya get me?” Boothill breathed out heavily, his breath steaming in the air. “Fudge,” he muttered, closing his eyes and frowning again.

“Are you in pain?” you asked. His stance was akin to a man tortured, impaled from the back with hot iron spears.

“Nah, darlin,’ nothin’ like that. Just… hot, is all. Really fudgin’ hot.” Boothill let out a breath of steam again. “It’ll go away, like it always does. I jus’ need ta’ keep still for a lil’ bit. Let it cool down.”

You leaned over him, trying to ignore how close you were to his hot (both physically and metaphorically) abs, and pushed the passenger door open. It only went so far as the narrow alleyway let it, but you could feel the cold air of the night wash over you both.

“Thank ya’ kindly, darlin,’” he murmured.

“Don’t mention it,” you said, leaning back. You jumped when your arm brushed over his body.

“Did I burn ya?” Boothill didn’t move but his eyes fixed you with a worried look.

“No, you didn’t, it’s just…” You trailed off, not knowing how to end that sentence without embarrassing yourself. A heat creeped over your cheeks again.

“Oh, I see,” he smiled. “You can touch me if ya want darlin.’ I don’t bite.” He punctuated that sentence with a wide grin, showing off his shark-like teeth.

“But not right now,” he said as you tentatively reached an arm towards him. “Not while I’m hot like this. And it ain’t cause I might burn ya sweetie, but with all due respect, I ain’t wanna touch anything right this moment.”

“Got it,” you said sitting straight back in your seat.

A silence filled the car, gently broken by the whir of Boothill’s internal fans and the ambient hum of the city outside.

It was a comfortable, soft kind of silence. You let it soak into your flesh, down to your bones, etching this moment inside of yourself. It was nice.

“’Course, when I’m not overheatin,” Boothill murmured, “you’re free to touch whatever.” He grinned mischievously.

“Stop it,” you said. “You’re gonna make me overheat.”

dividers by cafekitsune

[apol]

I always disconnect bc I don't like charging it specially bc my current cellphone charger and headphones use the same entrance

the headphones doesn't work all the time bc it connects to the charger part, I know its like that bc the opposite has happened before AKA my music stopped playing bc I put my cellphone to charge bc the music is supposed to be playing on the headphones but I can't use the headphones bc my phone is charging

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

[mrcrawly]

MORE house MD headcanons (just hilson)

finished season 2 officially FINALLY. took forever. anyway these freaks live in the little furrows of my brain and eat my grey matter so here's this

House:

had multiple deadly allergies as a kid that he grew out of as an adult for some reason

the pickiest eater you have ever seen. the canned soup is not a laziness thing he's just afraid to waste his money on shit he won't eat

composes his own songs on the piano when he's got time but never writes then down, freestyles that shit

DEFINITELY has some pot he smokes a few times a year

obviously when Wilson learns this he's concerned that maybe it's laced and is like House where are you getting this and House literally tells him the exact location on the exact part of town on the exact street and where the guy normally is on weekdays because he assumes Wilson wanted in on it

subconsciously thinks of Chase, Cameron, and Foreman as his children. of course he doesn't realize it nor would he ever admit it so don't misinterpret but lwk worries about them a lot and talks about them to acquaintances in such a way that multiple people actually think he has three grown up children

gets overstimulated fairly easily but not the shut-down-get-quiet overstimulation he starts yelling and hitting things and getting pissed off

has bad anxiety but in the opposite way most people do. doesn't get anxious in most social situations at all whatsoever but give that man ten minutes alone with his thoughts in his own house and he's sweating

doesn't sing but has perfect pitch. sometimes someone in the office will hum something or make a noise and he'll just absently go "E flat" (based on one of my irl friends noah you won't see this but you freak me the fuck out with that)

runs cold all year (something something universal recipient)

eventually stops drinking because it gives him panic attacks and nightmares

sad weepy drunk

pretends not to care about patients but there have been several times that a patient died and made him completely shut down for days at a time

views his disability as something to compensate for

if House MD took place in the modern day he would definitely have a twitch live stream about a patient to get idea

chronic nail biter

most definitely would own one of those massive fucking brick flip phones even if the show was set today

he doesn't know what OS stands for. couldn't tell you what a USB-C looked like if his life depended on it. wouldn't be very good at operating a smart phone. has an extremely durable cheap phone because he's always dropping and/or throwing it

Wilson:

lactose intolerant methinks

or possibly gluten sensitive

would still eat gluten bread and dairy products regardless

never quite got the hang of chopsticks. if he gets sushi or Chinese takeout with House, House makes that little chopsticks contraption for him

do you guys know what im talking about

the kind of autism that makes you feel bad about everything ever all the time and obsessed with a particular thing

definitely collected baseball cards at some point in his life

doesn't really keep kosher but hates most meat so he rarely ends up mixing dairy and meat anyways

if you gave him one of those Nee Doh nice cube things he would sit there and play with that shit for hours at a time

if he was born in the right generation he would have loved slime as a kid

ended up really close with House's team

does marching Halloween costumes with House every single year

House actually doesn't like Halloween (lots of walking) but it makes Wilson happy so usually he agrees

one year they went as American Gothic (House insisted on being the old man with the pitchfork and now everyone has photos of Wilson in a bad blonde wig)

really good in pediatrics. it really wears on him if he has a young patient but he handles it really well

taught himself to make balloon animals for the pediatric cancer patients

runs warm all year (something something universal donor)

big spoon

has joint problems but he insists it's not that bad so he won't go get seen for it

favorite movie is Pretty in Pink

office teddy bear. working in oncology is hard and some of the nurses just don't take it as well, so if he's around he takes it upon himself to comfort them

shockingly pretty good with technology and phones. i like to think this is because he has a fairly adaptive personality as it is and medical technology (especially in oncology) is always changing so he's used to keeping up with new things

definitely would have one of those fucking military ass otterboxes and a tempered glass screen protector and a camera protector like someone is gonna come run over his fucking phone

lwk i think he'd be kinky asf but im gonna leave that there

[seat-safety-switch]

At the university where I work, there's all kinds of amazing research projects going on. As part of the public service requirement of my extensively-negotiated parole, I am forced to help with whoever needs it. I've rounded up test monkeys, convinced sobbing grad students not to abandon their field of study, and made coffee for a bunch of MBAs theorizing about how to create even bigger layoffs than their grandfathers could ever have dreamt of. And also there's some nerds with computers.

Robots, while not as cool as they once were, are still being developed every day. We've forgotten how to make all kinds of shit, but we can still follow the instruction manual to make the robots that remember how to make that shit. Which is good, because otherwise we wouldn't have any cars, or refrigerators, or the small island nation of New Zealand. Computer scientists are busy figuring out how to make those robots walk up and down stairs, which is a problem that has evaded them since the beginning of time.

You might not think it's particularly useful to be able to go up and down stairs. I certainly didn't, but it turns out that some important things are available on other floors of a building. The nerds were having a lot of trouble making the robot do it, until I pointed out that the building is equipped with an elevator. Much forehead-slapping ensued, and we went out and got completely sloshed at the campus bar, relieved to finally have solved one of the remaining hard problems of computer science. Unfortunately, in our rush to imbibe, we left the robot turned on. When we got back, it was gone.

What I'm trying to tell you is that if you live in a regular house, you're gonna want to sleep on the second floor. Or in the basement. Anywhere except for the ground floor. We don't think the robot can really harm anybody, that's an awful stereotype of runaway robots, but we do suspect it's running a bit low on charge and will do whatever it takes to suck up some of that sweet, sweet juice. So if you look out your window this morning, and see that someone has spontaneously assembled most of the macrostructure of New Zealand on your front lawn, call us right away, and also hide all of those cheap AliExpress chargers that look like USB-C but won't charge your laptop. Those'll just make it angry.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

American education has all the downsides of standardization, none of the upsides

Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM.

We moved to America in 2015, in time for my kid to start third grade. Now she's a year away from graduating high school (!) and I've had a front-row seat for the US K-12 system in a district rated as one of the best in the country. There were ups and downs, but high school has been a monster.

We're a decade and a half into the "common core" experiment in educational standardization. The majority of the country has now signed up to a standardized and rigid curriculum that treats overworked teachers as untrustworthy slackers who need to be disciplined by measuring their output through standard lessons and evaluations:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Core

This system is rigid enough, but it gets even worse at the secondary level, especially when combined with the Advanced Placement (AP) courses, which adds another layer of inflexible benchmarks to the highest-stakes, most anxiety-provoking classes in the system:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Placement

It is a system singularly lacking in grace. Ironically, this unforgiving system was sold as a way of correcting the injustice at the heart of the US public education system, which funds schools based on local taxation. That means that rich neighborhoods have better funded schools. Rather than equalizing public educational funding, the standardizers promised to ensure the quality of instruction at the worst-funded schools by measuring the educational outcomes with standard tools.

But the joke's on the middle-class families who backed standardized instruction over standardized funding. Their own kids need slack as much as anyone's, and a system that promises to put the nation's kids through the same benchmarks on the same timetable is bad for everyone:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/28/give-me-slack-2/

Undoing this is above my pay-grade. I've already got more causes to crusade on than I have time for. But there is a piece of tantalyzingly low-hanging fruit that is dangling right there, and even though I'm not gonna pick it, I can't get it out of my head, so I figured I'd write about it and hope I can lazyweb it into existence.

The thing is, there's a reason that standardization takes hold in so many domains. Agreeing on a common standard enables collaboration by many entities without any need for explicit agreements or coordination. The existence of the ANSI/SAE J563 standard automobile auxiliary power outlet (AKA "car cigarette lighter") didn't just allow many manufacturers to make replacement lighter plugs. The existence of a standardized receptacle delivering standardized voltage to standardized contacts let all kinds of gadgets be designed to fit in that socket.

Standards crystallize the space of all possible ways of solving a problem into a range of solutions. This inevitably has a downside, because the standardized range might not be optimal for all applications. Think of the EU's requirement for USB-C charger tips on all devices. There's a lot of reasons that manufacturers prefer different charger tips for different gadgets. Some of those reasons are bad (gouging you on replacement chargers), but some are good (unique form-factor, specific smart-charging needs). USB-C is a very flexible standard (indeed, it's so flexible that some people complain that it's not a standard at all!) but there are some applications where the optimal solution is outside its parameters.

And still, I think that the standardization on USB-C is a force for good. I have drawers full of gadgets that need proprietary charger tips, and other drawers full of chargers with proprietary tips, and damned if I can make half of them match up. We've continued our pandemic lockdown tradition of my wife cutting my hair in the back yard, and just tracking the three different charger tips for the three clippers she uses is an ongoing source of frustration. I'd happily trade slightly sub-optimal charging for just being able to plug any of those clippers into the same cable I charge my headphones, phone, tablet and laptop on.

The standardization of American education has produced all the downsides of standardization – a rigid, often suboptimal, one-size-fits-all system – without the benefits. With teachers across America teaching in lockstep, often from the same set texts (especially in the AP courses), there's a massive opportunity for a commons to go with the common core.

For example, the AP English and History classes my kid takes use standard texts that are often centuries old and hard to puzzle out. I watched my kid struggle with texts for learning about "persuasive rhetoric" like 17th century pamphlets that inspired anti-indigenous pogroms with fictional accounts of "Indian atrocities."

It's good for American schoolkids to learn about the use of these blood libels to excuse genocide, but these pamphlets are a slog. Even with glossaries in the textbooks, it's a slow, word-by-word matter to parse these out. I can't imagine anyone learning a single thing about how speech persuades people just by reading that text.

But there's nothing in the standardized curriculum that prevents teachers from adding more texts to the unit. We live in an unfortunate golden age for persuasive texts that inspire terrible deeds – for example, kids could also read core Pizzagate texts and connect the guy who shot up the pizza parlor to the racists who formed a 17th century lynchmob.

But teachers are incredibly time-constrained. For one thing, at least a third of the AP classroom time seems to be taken up with detailed instructions for writing stilted, stylized "essays" for the AP tests (these are terrible writing, but they're easy to grade in a standardized way).

That's where standardization could actually deliver some benefits. If just one teacher could produce some supplemental materials and accompanying curriculum, the existence of standards means that every other teacher could use it. What's more, any adaptations that teachers make to that unit to make them suited to their kids would also work for the other teachers in the USA. And because the instruction is so rigidly standardized, all of these materials could be keyed to metadata that precisely identified the units they belonged to.

The closest thing we have to this are "marketplaces" where teachers can sell each other their supplementary materials. As far as I can tell, the only people making real money from these marketplaces are the grifters who built them and convinced teachers to paywall the instructional materials that could otherwise form a commons.

Like I said, I've got a completely overfull plate, but if I found myself at loose ends, trying to find a project to devote the rest of my life to, I'd be pitching funders on building a national, open access portal to build an educational commons.

It may be a lot to expect teachers to master the intricacies of peer-based co-production tools like Git, but there's already a system like this that K-8 teachers across the country have mastered: Scratch. Scratch is a graphic programming environment for kids, and starting with 2019's Scratch 3.0, the primary way to access it is via an in-browser version that's hosted at scratch.mit.edu.

Scratch's online version is basically a kid- (and teacher-)friendly version of Github. Find a project you like, make a copy in your own workspace, and then mod it to suit your own needs. The system keeps track of the lineage of different projects and makes it easy for Scratch users to find, adapt, and share their own projects. The wild popularity of this system tells us that this model for a managed digital commons for an educational audience is eminently achievable.

So when students are being asked to study the rhythm of text by counting the numbers of words in the sentences of important speeches, they could supplement that very boring exercise by listening to and analyzing contemporary election speeches, or rap lyrics, or viral influencer videos. Different teachers could fork these units to swap in locally appropriate comparitors – and so could students!

Students could be given extra credit for identifying additional materials that slot into existing curricular projects – Tiktok videos, new chart-topping songs, passages from hot YA novels. These, too, could go into the commons.

This would enlist students in developing and thinking critically about their curriculum, whereas today, these activities are often off-limits to students. For example, my kid's math teachers don't hand back their quizzes after they're graded. The teachers only have one set of quizzes per unit, and letting the kids hold onto them would leak an answer-key for the next batch of test-takers.

I can't imagine learning math this way. "You got three questions wrong but I won't let you see them" is no way to help a student focus on the right areas to improve their understanding.

But there's no reason that math teachers in a commons built around the (unfortunately) rigid procession of concepts and testing couldn't generate procedural quizzes, specified with a simple programming language. These tests could even be automatically graded, and produce classroom stats on which concepts the whole class is struggling with. Each quiz would be different, but cover the same ground.

When I help my kid with her homework, we often find disorganized and scattered elements of this system – a teacher might post extensive notes on teaching a specific unit. A publisher might produce a classroom guide that connects a book to specific parts of the common core. But these are scattered across the web, and they aren't keyed to the specific, standard components of common core and AP.

This is a standardized system that is all costs, no benefits. It has no "architecture of participation" that lets teachers, students, parents, practitioners and even commercial publishers collaborate to produce a commons that all may share and improve upon.

In an ideal world, we'd get rid of standardization in education, pay teachers well, give them the additional time they needed to prepare exciting and relevant curriculum, and fund all our schools based on need, not parents' income.

But in the meanwhile, we could be making lemonade of out lemons. If we're going to have standardization, we should at least have the collaboration standards enable.

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/16/flexibility-in-the-margins/#a-commons

[thewertsearch]

Well, now that you've got these home-alchemized hormones, why not alchemize them into something else? After all, what's the point in transitioning if it doesn't increase your combat potential?

Combining your CHARGER and ESTROGEN creates... the MTF EXTENSION CORD.

Which, you guess, makes sense.

Problem is, this doesn't count as a charger. You guess you could plug a charger into it to get a bit more range?

Maybe the alternative would work better.

Combining your Charger OR Estrogen creates the UNIVERSAL DIRECTIVE.

NOW we're talking! With this baby, you can turn any port you plug it into into a compatible USB-C port. Definitely more preferable than trying to figure out how to alchemize adapters for all those wacky port shapes down on LOCAH.

At least, it sorts out the smaller ones. Some of the data and power you've seen going around doesn't look like it'd work over USB-C. Maybe there's an HDMI version?

You're not sure how it does as an actual weapon, but you'll figure that out when the time comes.

(My talents at spritework are... not the best, so I just settled for lazy overlays of the trans flag.)

Fantastic work! This gear will surely help me on my Quest.

Perhaps I can also use the hormones to give myself a double-jump? ;)

[makrustic]

A Landscape Pixelartist reviews the XPPEN Artist Pro 14 (2nd Gen)! 🐦🌿

XPPEN was kind enough to send me this to finish my latest piece on; and it is here to stay for me to make more pixelart on it. Review below! ✍️ ———

Here are my thoughts using it for a week:

- The 1920x1200 Display makes drawing comfortable and manageable, while being amazingly bright and color accurate.

- The 16K-Pressure Pen draws responsively, along with its Felt-Tip Nibs—that comes with its Metal Case—feel very natural.

- It also comes with a Customizable Wireless Remote that can house all your shortcuts!

- The tablet itself has Built-In Foldable Legs that serves as a sufficient-enough stand.

- And my fave feature, is if your device has a USB-C port, you can plug it in using only *one cable*. ———

- The only problem I encounter is if the ambient room temp is quite warm, the tablet tends to heat up, especially around where the cable connects to it.

- I also suggest getting a separate stand that offers higher angles if you are prone to neck pain from looking down too often. ———

Overall, The Certified Cluster Commando approves!

Thank you XPPEN for sending me this tablet for reviewing! ❤️

And as a bonus, they have given us a 5%-OFF Discount Code 'makrustic5' on products in their store!

US store: https://bit.ly/4a6xrIi CA store: https://bit.ly/3yaDMW0

[autolenaphilia]

I got a Steam Deck last year, and it’s such a great machine. It’s obviously inspired by Nintendo Switch, but it’s a lot better than a Switch.

The most important part is that it runs PC games. It’s fundamentally a Linux gaming PC in the form of a handheld console. There are a lot more games available than any console and and PC games both on Steam and GOG are a lot cheaper than console ones. You can get old or indie games for as cheap as 1-3 euro during sales. It’s a tremendous advantage for the deck over its console competitors.

And while the obvious intent of the deck is to get more people to buy games from Steam, it isn’t a walled garden at all. The deck launches into Steam when you boot it up, but you can go into desktop mode, and then it functions as a normal PC running a Linux distro. From there you can install Lutris or Heroic Games Launcher, and use it to easily install games you bought from GOG and Itch.io.

You can also do things like use the official dock or an unofficial usb-c hub to hook the deck up to a monitor, mouse and keyboard to use it as a desktop PC. Or you can hook it up to a tv to use it as home console.

The hardware is also a lot more powerful than a switch, the demanding triple-a games it can play is actually impressive. Although this comes with the natural disadvantage that it’s bulkier too. Putting more powerful PC parts demands more space for them. The deck is not something I bring with me outside. But then again I didn’t even do that with the 3DS, which was actually of a practical size to do that. The deck is portable enough that I can comfortably play lying in bed, which is how I always used my handheld consoles. So it’s perfect for me, but maybe not if you want to play it on the bus or something. It can probably be a fun addition to your luggage on longer trips though.

Of course, as mentioned, the Steam Deck uses Linux. This has both advantages and disadvantages. The main advantage is that it allows Valve to customize the operating system to make it fit with the machine it’s running on. The Deck’s SteamOS feels really well-integrated into the hardware, like how a proper console OS should be like. It’s not that dissimilar to how Sony used FreeBSD to make Playstation’s OS. Windows would not allow for this amount of customization and would not integrate as well.

And the open source nature of most Linux development allows Valve and the user to use existing open-source Linux software to their advantage. For example, the desktop mode is largely not a Valve creation, it’s an existing desktop environment for Linux, KDE Plasma. Yet it extends what the user can do with the deck to a great extent, like for installing non-steam games.

The main disadvantage to the Deck using Linux is that most PC games are built for Windows and don’t run natively under Linux. To run games built for Windows, the Deck has to run it through Proton, a compatibility layer which is Valve’s own gaming-focused version of Wine. Wine/Proton is far from perfect, sometimes games require extensive tinkering to work, or only run with serious issues, or don’t run at all, no matter what you do. Sometimes a game not working with Wine due to some random but serious issue that comes naturally from running a Windows executable on a Linux system via a compatibility layer. Sometimes it’s due to things like a multiplayer’s game anti-cheat system requiring access to the Windows kernel, and it will block a Linux pc from running the game because it has no Windows kernel.

This is however not as big a problem as it might otherwise be. Most games work, more or less. Valve has put a lot of work and money into both their own Proton and the Wine project as a whole, and they work a lot better than they did 10 years ago. Many run perfectly out of the box, because they are native, or play nice with Proton. Some require mere minor tinkering, like using a different version of Proton. And I generally don’t play multiplayer games, or if I do they don’t have draconian anti-cheats, so the games that are blocked because of anti-cheat are no big loss to me. The Steam Deck not running Fortnite is a plus in my book.

And we shouldn’t forget the Steam Deck verified system. Basically Valve employees check if the game runs out of the box with no issues on the Deck. They get a verified rating if they work with no issue, including both proton compatibility but also things like the controls working nice and the text being legible on the deck’s small screen. They also get a “playable” rating if the game runs to an acceptable standard but with tinkering required or other minor issues.

This is a good system. If you dislike tinkering, you can just buy and play games on steam with a verified rating, and the deck will work like a normal console for you, but with a lot cheaper games. It’s a good way to get people used to consoles into PC gaming, which is probably the point of the Deck.

And if you want more than deck verified games from Steam on the Deck, you are given the freedom to do it. I’ve gotten officially non-supported steam games to run on the deck by installing and using proton-GE and I’ve installed and played games from GOG.

The Steam Deck is really how a Linux PC for the common people should work. An easy and slick experience for casual users, but freedom and customization given to those that want it.