Modder, programmer, and all around tinkerer. Yes, I’m that New Vegas and Deus Ex guy.

You can also find me over at kbin.run under the same username. Also kbin.social if it ever comes back from the dead.

  • 4 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 30th, 2023

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  • It’s become harder to get clean(ish) audio captures for theater films, but it’s not impossible. There are still theaters with hearing impaired seating and headphone hookups, still a few drive-in theaters that broadcast via FM (one of those here in Reno, actually).

    If anything, I think it’s because digital rips/DLs seem to come out more quickly. By the time a group has tracked down a clean audio stream and takes the time to sync it with footage, someone’s probably snagged a digital copy and released it.

    Now Telecines, those are basically unseen these days. Almost no theaters still use actual film, and the few that do are way more careful about their inventory management. Gone are the days when a whole film can just get “misplaced” for a few days while someone with a Telecine setup copies it, to say nothing of how few people have the setup for Telecine anymore in the first place.



  • An Xbox 360 with a VGA adapter and Dead Rising. My TV at the time was one of those gigantic old 90s video editing CRTs, the kind that take all sorts of analog inputs like RCA and S-Video and even did HD if you could convert something to BNC, but pointedly would not do Component or HDMI. A few days prior I’d learned that VGA can be repinned directly to BNC, and then when I was wandering through Best Buy I saw they’d gotten some 360 VGA adapters in. I stopped, flipped a coin, called heads, it landed heads, I bought it.

    I’d figured I’d get some minor fun out of it, basically just bought it because I really wanted to play Dead Rising. Instead I wound up using the ever loving hell out of my 360. Still have it, still works, no RROD or anything.
















  • I like to watch TV shows in the background where I’m not going to be watching the screen obsessively, so I have several shows in 480P or sub-480P. There are also some shows where the “official” HD versions are just awful (most 90s sitcoms) or the show was made for 4:3 and has a different feel converted to 16:9 (MASH, The Wire).

    Going beyond that though, I spent years on a really limited connection (2.6m down/400k up) and my instinct for saving bandwidth and storage space is still there, along with my need to pay it forward since I ain’t no leech. I’ve become fond of making what I call “Bonsai Encodes”, where the files are small enough to be sent over damn near anything. With mono Opus and VP9 video you can cram 45 minutes of perfectly watchable content into a sub-25mb file that’ll play in Discord, with VTT subtitles even (though those won’t play in Discord itself). Looks a bit like watching it on an old tube TV, but it’s watchable.


  • Are your smoke detectors linked to each other? Could be faulty wiring in the circuit, or a completely different smoke detector failing and sending out an alarm that triggers the others. The latter happened in my home when I was growing up: the living room smoke detector kept going off a few seconds before the rest of them would chime in, but it turned out it was the one in the nearest hallway that was failing and sending out bad signals. The living room detector was just the next in the circuit.