Messages

1

General Software Discussion / Re: Brave: A new browser with built-in adblock and payment solutions

« on: Today at 02:03 AM »

Brave has launched Brave Talk:

Today, Brave launched Brave Talk, a new privacy-focused video conferencing feature built directly into the Brave browser. Brave Talk enables video calls without sacrificing privacy. Video calling is now an important tool for work, school, and social activities, and Brave Talk allows users to collaborate and connect online in a private-by-design environment.

To use Brave Talk, users can initiate a call directly through the Brave desktop browser by opening a new tab and clicking the Brave Talk camera icon, or simply visit talk.brave.com from the Brave browser on desktop or mobile. While calls need to be initiated from Brave, users can invite others to join calls from any modern browser.

Brave Talk, formerly named Brave Together, launched in testing mode in May 2020. Now, Brave Talk is available for free to millions of users for one-to-one video calls, and unlike other video call service providers, Brave Talk features video groupwatch, YouTube livestreaming, and unlimited call times for free version users. For users who are interested in hosting calls for three or more people, Brave offers a premium version of Brave Talk for $7/month, which provides call recordings, hosting tools like participant muting and entry passcodes, and more for calls with hundreds of people. The Brave Android and iOS apps currently feature Brave Talk Premium, and will have the free version as well in the coming weeks.

-https://brave.com/brave-talk-launch/

2

Living Room / Re: ProtonMail deletes "we don't log your IP" after French activist arrested

« on: September 22, 2021, 08:56 PM »

My hope for the internet as a whole is that it starts operating more similarly to IPFS + TOR and as a result all traffic would be more akin to P2P and no one would know if the data you're requesting was for yourself or just to pass on to one of your peers.

Probably a pipe dream...

3

Living Room / Re: I bought an Oculus Quest and I'm blown away by the current state of VR

« on: September 22, 2021, 02:36 AM »

What is a 3D photo? Is that like a panorama/spherical photo that you can look around in many directions?

4

DC Gamer Club / Re: GOG Connect - DRM-free access to your Steam library

« on: September 17, 2021, 07:26 PM »

This thread is pretty much dead, so I'm locking it.

I would suggest to anyone who may want to post about games that show up to claim on GOG Connect should do so in the Latest Game Giveaway thread, since claiming games on GOG Connect is not too dissimilar from a giveaway.

5

DC Gamer Club / Re: Latest Game Giveaway

« on: September 17, 2021, 07:23 PM »

FYI I've just merged all the "Latest [Platform X] Giveaway" threads into one. So this thread is now the place to announce any Steam/GOG/Humble Bundle/Epic/etc. game giveaways. And I would suggest that also includes any future games that show up on GOG Connect, even though I didn't merge that thread into this one, since it has some discussion that I felt should remain separate from this thread.

6

DC Gamer Club / Re: Latest Steam Giveaway

« on: September 17, 2021, 07:04 PM »

In celebration of THQ Nordic's 10 year anniversary, Jagged Alliance 1: Gold Edition and Titan Quest Anniversary Edition are both free if you claim them before September 23 at 10 AM Pacific time.

7

Living Room / Re: DonationCoder & Cody themed art compilation thread.

« on: September 17, 2021, 04:25 PM »

I just noticed that the link in the original post to the DC Games Division and Docoto Defense concept art is long dead. So I'm uploading my copies of all that art to this thread.

Here are some thumbnails of what I think are the best looking images. All of these images and more can be found in the zip file.

8

Living Room / Re: I bought an Oculus Quest and I'm blown away by the current state of VR

« on: September 17, 2021, 02:47 PM »

There's currently a Humble Bundle of 7 VR games (on Steam) for $15:

https://www.humblebu...l-vr-emporium-bundle

9

Living Room / Re: Whoever understands NFTs let's make one for DonationCoder

« on: September 17, 2021, 02:29 PM »

Do you have a piece of art or whatever you want to use for it?

If so, what title do you want to give it? And a description. And tags. And how many copies do you want?

-Deozaan (March 16, 2021, 10:22 AM)

How about one of the cody pictures.

-mouser (March 16, 2021, 10:23 AM)

Without having received any more direction from mouser or nudone on what image or other parameters to use other than what I've quoted above, I took the liberty of minting an NFT on Tezos using nudone's Crystal Ball image from 2007 (slightly modified to remove the now-defunct wtfcody.com branding in the corner). It's a limited edition with only 30 copies. It cost me about $0.50 to create this NFT.

You can view it here: https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/objkt/320908

If it doesn't display properly, try a different browser. For some reason I can't get it to load properly in Brave, even with the Shields disabled. But it appears to work in all my other browsers.

Since I've never done this before, I'm still trying to figure out the intricacies and details. I think I can send some of them to people free of charge. I can also list some of them for sale so random people can buy them up.

It would be nice to hand out at least a few for free to longtime DC members who were interested. But that would require them to set up a Tezos wallet. And since I limited it to only 30 copies, we'd need to prioritize who gets one, if the demand is high enough.

My reasoning for limiting it to 30 was looking at the Yearbook sorted by number of posts and seeing where nudone showed up (#22), thinking we could give out free ones to all the top forum posters down to nudone, and then rounding to the greater 10 to have some extra to list for sale.

I realize that my decision on determining the limit of 30 and who got the free ones was arbitrary and perhaps unfair, so we don't necessarily have to designate the free ones to the top 22 forum members who have made the most posts. It may even be that many of the top 22 are not interested. So I'm definitely open to other suggestions. Also if demand is high enough, or if mouser/nudone have other wishes on how to set things up, I could "burn" this NFT and start the process over again using different values.

I'd love to get some feedback on this.

10

DC Gamer Club / Ludum Dare 49: October 1st-4th, 2021

« on: September 15, 2021, 02:07 PM »

Ludum Dare 49 is almost here! It begins in about 2 weeks.

Unfortunately I have scheduling conflicts this time around, so I don't plan on participating.

But theme suggestions are currently open, which means that anyone who is interested can submit up to 3 themes, even if they're not participating. You just need to register a free account to be able to do so. If you'd like to suggest a theme, you may do so here: https://ldjam.com/ev.../ludum-dare/49/theme





See previous posts on DonationCoder about Ludum Dare:

Ludum Dare 48 - (My team made Let's Go Deeper for LD48)
Ludum Dare 47 - (My team made Chrono Crash for LD47)
Ludum Dare 46 - (My team made Defendeer for LD46)
Ludum Dare 45 Reviews - A thread about LD45 games
Ludum Dare 41 - (My team made It's Not Lupus! for LD41)
Ludum Dare 2017 Thread - A thread about games from LD37 and LD38
Ludum Dare 33 - A thread about LD33 games
Ludum Dare 32 - (I made Time Bomb during LD32)
Ludum Dare 31 - (I made Worm Wars during LD31)
Ludum Dare 30 - (I made Planetary Devourers during LD30)
Ludum Dare 29 - (I made It Came From... Beneath!! during LD29)
Ludum Dare [29] topic for other games - A thread about LD29 games
Ludum Dare 23 - (I made Be Tiny, World! during LD23)
Ludum Dare - Game Programming Challenges

11

General Software Discussion / Re: Croc: Command-line secure file transfer tool

« on: September 14, 2021, 11:02 AM »

Thanks for bringing Croc to my attention! I've been happily using Woof for a few years for transferring files within my LAN. But this looks like it could be useful as a replacement or supplement to Woof, such as if I need to transfer a file to a remote computer.

12

Living Room / Re: ProtonMail deletes "we don't log your IP" after French activist arrested

« on: September 09, 2021, 04:24 PM »

Personally, I don't see anything wrong with what ProtonMail did. They followed the law. An argument could be made that the law(s) should be changed. But they complied as they were legally required to do. And if the person of interest had been a little more careful about masking his IP address, ProtonMail would not have had anything useful to give to the authorities.

ProtonMail still didn't give the contents of the emails to the authorities, because they can't! And if you have read through their FAQs, etc., they were always very explicit (at least in English) in saying which info could be gleaned and which info was encrypted/protected from outsiders (which includes ProtonMail).

13

Living Room / Re: ProtonMail deletes "we don't log your IP" after French activist arrested

« on: September 09, 2021, 12:21 AM »

Thanks for sharing this. I was unaware that this had happened.

I have to admit, I skimmed the article (because I was looking for it to state what Swiss law was broken in France) and it didn't seem like it gave much pertinent information. This article from TechCrunch seems like it does a more thorough job:

https://techcrunch.c...y-swiss-authorities/

There, ProtonMail is quoted as seeming to suggest that if the person had been using Tor or a VPN--including ProtonVPN!--their actual IP address would not have been given to the authorities.

14

Developer's Corner / Clean Code - Uncle Bob (YouTube Playlist)

« on: September 08, 2021, 12:07 PM »

I came across this playlist of videos of "Uncle Bob" lecturing about writing clean code. It looks like the full lecture/seminar is about 9 hours in total. I just finished the first video and am finding it interesting enough that I want to continue with the series.

https://www.youtube....GO839azG_BBw8rkh-zOj

And if you decide to watch it, don't be put off the whole thing by how annoying or useless the first ~3:30 minutes of introductions at the beginning of the first video appear to be. In fact, it may be best just to skip them. Use the chapters/timestamps to get to the right spot.

Oh, and one more word of warning: Unfortunately the video editor kind of sucked at their job and didn't always show the feed from the most useful camera. For example, sometimes Uncle Bob is showing or talking about his slides but the camera is zoomed in for a close up on his face instead of showing us the projector screen.

Great lecture (so far), shoddy video editing work.

15

General Software Discussion / Re: Question, suspicion of a keylogger

« on: September 02, 2021, 05:29 PM »

This smells like spam to me. But on the chance it's not:

1. Make sure you're not using the same username/email/password combo on all your accounts. Use a good password manager to generate strong, unique passwords for each of your accounts.
2. Enable Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) so that even if someone has your login details, they can't login without the time-based code (sometimes called TOTP or one-time code).
3. Check https://haveibeenpwned.com/ to see if various sites where you have an account have been breached.

16

Developer's Corner / Re: Anyone tried the Godot game/graphics library engine?

« on: August 30, 2021, 01:11 PM »

Figures I would forget about this thread after I actually started experimenting with Godot toward the end of last year.

Even though I still know much more about making games in Unity than I do with Godot, I much prefer working with Godot these days. I find it much faster (less bloated) and generally more enjoyable to work with. That said, I'm still pretty new to it, so maybe there are things that I haven't come across yet that I will loathe.

Godot Programming Course temporarily free:

-wraith808 (August 30, 2021, 12:32 PM)

Thanks for this. The target demographic is absolute beginners with no previous programming or Godot experience, so it will probably be a little basic for me, but it might serve as a nice introduction to various aspects of the engine I haven't touched yet.

17

Living Room / Re: Whoever understands NFTs let's make one for DonationCoder

« on: August 28, 2021, 05:58 PM »

A new NFT platform called OneOf is about to launch on the Tezos blockchain. I don't know much about it, but here's a quick little video which gives an explanation of NFTs in general and more specifically as related to OneOf.

https://vimeo.com/592262423

If you want to dip your toes into the NFT waters, they're currently having a pre-registration (requires phone number verification) and will give out a free NFT to all "day zero" accounts when they launch in ~2 days. I've heard the process is (or will be?) very user-friendly and simple, with all the blockchain stuff abstracted (hidden) away from the end-users.

18

Developer's Corner / Re: A decade and a half of instability: The history of Google messaging apps

« on: August 27, 2021, 11:44 AM »

Google Talk was the best! Killing it in favor of Google Hangouts and whatever else has come since then was a mistake.

19

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 11 Announced

« on: August 26, 2021, 03:00 PM »

Looks like the Windows 11 leak was kind of an early kludge of new features, and the changes for the official thing are more extensive that it first appeared:

Windows 11 is bigger than we thought - Linus Tech Tips

20

Living Room / Re: Programming/Coder humor

« on: August 24, 2021, 04:22 PM »

There are two hard problems in programming: Naming things, caching things, and off-by-one errors.

21

DC Gamer Club / Re: Latest GOG Giveaway

« on: August 20, 2021, 02:04 PM »

Quake 2 RTX is free on GOG if you grab it within the next couple of days: https://www.gog.com/game/quake_ii_rtx

EDIT: I just saw that it only includes 3 levels from the shareware version. If you want access to all levels, you need to buy Quake II: Quad Damage (which is currently on sale for $3).

So it's more of a ray-tracing mod that requires you to own the full version separately.

22

General Software Discussion / Re: Earning More with Cryptocurrency

« on: August 20, 2021, 01:43 PM »

Celsius Network

I've been using the Celsius Network to earn 10.51% APY on USDC. They make payments every Monday. I've earned over half as much in 3 weeks using Celsius as I earned from my bank in all of 2020, even though I had 2-3 times as much money in my savings account than what I've put into Celsius. It's nice! I'm not getting rich quick, but at least I'm earning something! And they have options for non-USA residents to earn even higher interest rates.

If this interests you enough to sign up, you can also create an account using my referral link and we'll both gain $30 worth of BTC after you make your first transfer of $200 or more. https://celsiusnetwork.app.link/1176188774

-Deozaan (March 04, 2021, 01:05 PM)

I just wanted to follow up on this now that it has been almost 6 months since I posted about it.

As things stand now, I still have more money in my savings account than I have in Celsius (for now). And Celsius lowered the rate from 10.51% APY on USDC to 8.88% some months ago. But I'm still earning about as much per week in interest from Celsius as I've earned on my savings account for the entirety of 2021 YTD.

A few years ago, I was taking a "general life skills" class and one of the sections of the class was personal finances, and we had to research the various interest rate offerings from our bank and build excel spreadsheets about growing wealth over time, etc. All the examples in the learning material were "really old" and showed things like 2-4% interest rates. Meanwhile the rest of us in class shared the results from our research with each other, and among my group, my bank had the highest interest rate, at 0.75% for the savings account, and something like 1.3% on a 5-year CD. I remember at the time looking at the past year's performance of bitcoin and mentioning to my classmates that it was over 100% and half-jokingly told them we should put our money into bitcoin. But I was still new enough to crypto to think it was too risky to put too much money into it, so I didn't take my own advice.

But the point is, interest rates from the banks have only gotten worse since then. And, at least in my mind, crypto has only become even more of a sure thing.

This experience pretty much cements my opinion that traditional finance is dead. DeFi (decentralized finance) is where it's at! With DeFi you can cut out the bank as middleman, and pool your crypto with others into a smart contract that others can borrow against (fully collateralized, and therefore very low-risk) and repay with interest. And you keep most, if not all, of your share of the interest. Contrast that with the bank keeping >80% of it, or in some cases, charging you for loaning them money (i.e., negative interest rates)!

23

General Software Discussion / Re: Gizmo's Tech Support Alert freeware site shutting down

« on: August 19, 2021, 11:19 AM »

Think it wouldn't be much of a problem to host somebodies data, as long as you and "they" can never know what's inside.
That, plus a BAT tip of sorts for the extra bandwidth.

-dantheman (August 18, 2021, 04:23 PM)

Sounds like you're describing Filecoin, which is another (cryptocurrency-based) file-storage technology being developed by the folks who developed IPFS.

By the way, you can see stuff that uses IPFS here, if you'd like to explore a bit: https://awesome.ipfs.io/

Don't know about a browser but we had a couple of ISPs that provided free internet if you allowed them to show you ads - they didn't last very long.

-4wd (August 18, 2021, 06:09 PM)

In the USA there was one called NetZero. IIRC, they lasted a surprisingly long time, but eventually abandoned the adware model and went to normal subscriptions.



Oh wow. I just did a search and it seems they're still alive. And in addition to their subscriptions, they're still offering 10 hours of free dial-up per month. I didn't know dial-up was still a thing. It probably uses up the whole 10 hours just to load the Google home page on dial-up. . .

24

General Software Discussion / Re: Gizmo's Tech Support Alert freeware site shutting down

« on: August 18, 2021, 01:18 PM »

Not quite sure yet on how this all works but IPFS is sure making the news!
Brave browser seems to be pretty strong on this.

It sounds like a peer to peer thing to me, but if it is reliable and secure... that is the question!

-dantheman (August 18, 2021, 07:58 AM)

I started a thread on IPFS about 6 years ago. To me it still sounds like a really great idea. If you're just a consumer looking to download some files or browse some content hosted on IPFS, then it's not a much different experience than the standard WWW.

The problem, as I see it, is when you want to host some content using IPFS. Until it gains much more widespread adoption, it's basically just you running a fileserver on your own system(s). On the one hand, if what you're hosting isn't very popular, then I suppose it won't take much of your system resources (and possibly ISP-limited data cap) to serve to others. On the other hand, if what you're hosting is very popular, then the nature of IFPS is that it will likely be distributed and "mirrored" by many others who can help offset some of the load.

But maybe a person who was adequately motivated could set up some cloud service such as Oracle Cloud Free Tier and have that running an IPFS server for hosting/serving IPFS content without exposing your personal/home PC to the public like that.

25

General Software Discussion / Re: Help Installing Tray Weather

« on: August 14, 2021, 02:10 PM »

Deozaan how do I get a API  I am not a computer savy can you please tell me the directions to install it please

-sportman12 (August 13, 2021, 06:06 PM)

I don't know. But it looks like there's a link in your screenshot. It probably has instructions. Read carefully and follow the instructions and I think you'll do fine.