#playing with computers

[bekandrew]

Laptop Necromancy

I'm running my whole art portfolio through Glaze. If you don't know, it's a program build by a group of uni students that's won awards and is designed to basically prevent AI libraries from being able to meaningfully "learn" anything from your art. It can be found here for free. It wouldn't run on my actually functional laptop (it tried rendering for 2 days straight and then got to something like "Time remaining: -200 minutes" and still never spat out anything completed). So, while waiting for the seemingly endless rendering to stop and a reply for access to their Web option, I decided to try something a little off the wall.

I ended up taking my largely non-functional old laptop (8+ yr old Dell Latitude i7) I hadn't figured out how to safely dispose of yet and see if I could give it new life. It was a mid-tier "gaming" laptop when I purchased it, though I needed the specs for heavy graphics work for work as an artist and as I was, for a time, still in uni for engineering before switching majors. It currently won't run most of the programs I need for work - it abjectly refuses to open Krita no mater what I do, and throws a fit and crashes with even GIMP sometimes. I even have to be careful with internet browsers now with that one. Its hard drive is pretty toast, hence why I needed to suck it up and get a new laptop. Something is damaged in a way I couldn't make a proper clone of the drive and something's fucked with the BIOS is fucked in a way I couldn't even run a recovery usb and it has no disk drive. It makes frightening noises from frequently trying to run its HDD at 100%. The casing itself is held together with duct tape and spite. This laptop survived several moves and homelessness before finally being too finicky to put up with after wife and I were rehoused. It literally requires support at all times to not be torn further apart by the weight of its own screen. It also needs to be elevated in a way to give the fans a little help. It's a technological senior citizen. Despite the hard drive being largely toast, the OS still works pretty fine. The RAM isn't high as I'd like, but it's not bad, either. It's main draw for this very specific purpose is the dual GPUs. There's a version of Glaze that you can force to run off a GPU instead of the CPU and make it go MUCH, MUCH (from my experience, literally 5-10 times or more faster).

I had a Solid State Drive lying around from when I'd attempted to keep the old laptop alive longer, so I stuck it in my external dock, installed Glaze on it, and filled it up with a folder of art to be Glazed. It then proceeded to take about a day and a half of fussing with graphics drivers - including uninstalling the one the uni students recommended and going back to my old one because the one they recommended was technically compatible but was borking things for some reason, and manually changing settings to force the computer to use the correct beefier GPU for the program. I also had to uninstall a ton of shit that was slowing my computer down and sometimes making it lock up entirely - things I used to need when I used that laptop for normal purposes but no longer needed there (things like Steam, Discord, Grammarly, etc).

So long as I don't run much of anything off of the internal HDD outside a couple Windows Explorer windows for viewing files and Task Manager to keep an eye on hardware status, it mostly stays nice and quiet now other than a few spikes here and there with low % usage. Glaze runs smoothly off the external SSD, the CPU and RAM usage remain pretty stable and manageable during rendering, with the GPU usage only at a little over half the computer's total capability. Despite being bested by much simpler daily usage, this old shell of a laptop now renders a resource-intensive program over in a corner and I can just check it every couple hours to see how it's doing.

[mzcain27]

I think game studios should just release their character creators online. For the times when I don’t wanna play the whole game, just the lil dress up part

[naarisz]

Gale's missing modern au scene from the patch 8 animation. The others left the game, while he was preparing gamer snacks. :DD

[l48yr1nth]

enough playing touys together. lets BE touys together.

[islandlobster]

in light of switch 2 direct and as an advocate for playing windwaker: if you have a low-end laptop/pc and a wired controller you can play ww HD for free, let alone gamecube ww. download dolphin. go to r/roms. save yourself 600 dollars

[lowpolyanimals]

Cat from Old School RuneScape by Logg from RuneScape Archive

[supernovaleo]

tb and gb after the events of bfdia 19:

[fluffyartbl0g]

Yes, they are all housemates or roommates (except for Vivi who's discord calling in another country RIP)

Part 2

[halopako]

ive reblogged like one voices of the void post but this game genuinely has great models in it

like look at these computers,,,

its also just a great game!! everyone go play votv right now

[youre-dreaming-302]

More Photos from my digital camera (7.2 megapixels)

[anbaisai]

MAMA LEECH AND MERMAID MAYU! MAMA LEECH AND MERMAID MAYU!!

I betcha mayu the favorite but doesn't say it out loud

Be like that gumball meme where the guess the password lmao😭

SO true although you still gotta commend the tweels for their unwavering confidence in themselves

[inkz123]

Chill afternoon while horror preps some stuff for dinnerrr :')

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

The indescribable tension between an overworked and underpaid smut writer, and his biggest fan hater.

(for @frummpets)

[delusionaltoma]

Started playing red dead 2..here's a Arthur sketch..goobie

[pervertedoldwitch]

TITLE: I JUST GOT THE BAD ENDING!!! AND I DECODED SOME OF THE TEXT THAT APPEARED!!

Tried to decode this binary text that appeared in day 4

It was hard to read some of the text since it was glitching but this is what I got:

Erro 01101000 01101001 01101000 01101001 or 00100000 critical 01100001 ero 01101110 oror 01100111 e:/rror 01100101 01101100 unkno

The numbers only would be like this: (it's in binary)

01101000 01101001 01101000 01101001 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100111 01100101 01101100

Literally just translates to "hi hi angel" or "hihi angel"

Erro H I H I or (SPACE ?) critical A ero N oror G e:/rror E L unknown (?)

I thought I'm gonna get some useful lore and information in here game theory makes me overthink 🤑😭😭

Plz give me more stuff to solve I love puzzles like this..

Edit:

I just got here and I got hit with another line of binary, time to work this bitch's education

"ERROR I SEE YOU..."

BRUH DID I JUST FREAKING DIE JWHRBWNBFJNWNFND

Omg when do attempts of staying the night with him he chats to me and it's kinda hot like he is attracted to the actual player and not the person in the game, it's so cool.

My head hurts, what the hell is this?

I can't go any further than this .. and my title screen is all messed up now..

I'll be making a second post because this is too long, I'll be decodint whatever the heck this is if I can.. please help me y'all...

Sorry this is literally my first post and it's so messy..

I will tryta translate the text that appeared in this: I will maybe give a tutorial on how to get the bad ending tomorrow too if I remember. Remind me please!

[mercuriallily]

I'm not really one for naming inanimate objects but my laptop's name is Computron. If you even care