Demoscene and other crazy technological stuff
Again, I m a bit late to the party, as the game is two years old by now, but over the course of the last few months, I played through Hogwarts Legacy, the open-world action RPG, and I got to say, I really liked it! How come? I m not a true fan of the Harry Potter [ ]
This year was the year of hardware upgrades for me: In January, I replaced my 13 years old Intel Core i7-2600 desktop with a much more modern AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D system, and a few months later, my 8 years old Intel Core i5-6200U laptop showed its first signs of disintegration, calling for a replacement. [ ]
After three years with my Sony Xperia XZ1 Compact, I got myself a new phone, and again it s made by Sony: an Xperia 5 III (pronounced Xperia five mark three ), the smallest version of Sony s current high-end offerings. Here s my first impressions after using it daily for a few weeks. Context This is my third [ ]
(this post is an extended version of a Twitter thread; original is here) Across three days in 2021 (and one cinema visit in 2024), I watched all three film adaptations of Frank Herbert s »Dune« novel: David Lynch (1984) TV miniseries (2001) Denis Villeneuve (2021 / 2024) Here s a summary of what I found interesting when [ ]
(this post is an archived version of a Twitter thread; original is here) I ve been rewatching all 11 »Star Wars« movies (the three Skywalker trilogies and the two spin-off movies) in the past two weeks, in story-chronological order (1-2-3-Solo-R1-4-5-6-7-8-9) and on Disney+ (i.e. in 4K with all post-release modifications). Here s a few remarks. The 4K [ ]
(this post is an archived version of a Twitter thread; original is here) In the past few days, I helped debug an issue in a 486 CPU emulation FPGA core. Here s the Twitter thread that describes the troubleshooting process. So there was this new release of the ao486 PC clone core for the MiSTer FPGA [ ]
For years (actually more than a decade!), the world eagerly waited for a new game in the Half-Life franchise, well knowing that there may never be such a thing. So imagine everyone s surprise when not one, but two games are released within a few weeks in March 2020! One of these is the official prequel [ ]
It started quite innocently with a few Twitter threads about retro DOS gaming. The question was why no games (or any other software, for that matter) that were designed for EGA graphics cards made use of the additional colors EGA could offer. It s widely known that EGA cards had a reprogrammable palette and could show [ ]
I got a new phone for christmas, a Sony Xperia XZ1 Compact, to replace my old (well, not that old actually) Xperia Z3 Compact. After using it for a few months, I d like to share my experiences with this phone. The predecessor: Z3 Compact From October 2014 to December 2017, I ve been a very happy [ ]
Following up on my quest to produce small executables, I turned my findings (along with much more information about general techniques used in size-constrained demosccene productions) into a presentation, held at Deadline 2017: download the PDF file (5 MB)
How small can a valid and useful Win32 executable be? There already are a few tutorials about this topic, but these are either not working on modern Windows versions any longer or only cover the most basic do nothing but return zero program. The goal here should be to do something genuinely useful: a console [ ]
It s already been a few weeks since I held a presentation at Chemnitzer Linuxtage ( Chemnitz Linux Days a small Linux congress held at the university I used to attend). As it s about a topic that might be of general interest, I translated the slides into English and made them available as a download (click [ ]
In this post, I ll present a solution to a common problem that occurs quite often nowadays: Merging photos from multiple people into one continuous, consistent stream. It is definitely not the first solution to that problem, but since I couldn t find a tool that solves this in exactly the way I want, I just did [ ]
There are some advances in technology that are actually steps backwards: features that look nice on paper, but always get in the way when implemented in reality. One of my pet peeves in this category is the Exif Orientation Tag, a little flag present in JPEG files generated by digital cameras that causes all kinds [ ]
After six years, it was time for my good old Fujifilm FinePix S9500 bridge camera to be replaced by a more recent model. It served me well during all the years and still works perfectly. However, it s only equipped with a 1/1.7-inch sensor, which limited its usefulness to the range of ISO 80 to 400. [ ]
(Disclaimer: This posting is likely of no interest to people outside of the demoscene :) The small tool kkapture by ryg of Farbrausch is the only sane way to get a video dump of demos, intros and similar stuff. By grabbing all video and audio output directly from their respective APIs (OpenGL/Direct3D and WinMM/DirectSound) and [ ]
As you may or may not have noticed, I moved servers today. I have my own small (virtual) server at emphy.de for a few weeks now and I finally came around to moving the blog from s2000.ws/s2000.at to its new location. While I was at it, I updated WordPress from the ancient 2.7 version to [ ]
Disclaimer: This article has been written at a time when TrueCrypt was still a viable encryption software. This is no longer the case. TrueCrypt has been discontinued and everybody who has been using it should use one of the maintained forks like VeraCrypt instead. That being said, this article mostly deals with TrueCrypt as a [ ]
There s a wide variety of devices out there which are capable of video playback computers, music players, mobile phones, game consoles, you name it. However, all of them support a different set of formats and there s no combination to catch them all. So if you want to generate a video, you will always have [ ]
A few weeks ago, my father bought a shiny new Canon EOS 550D DSLR camera, not only for capturing photos, but for videos too. Why not after all, the video functions are finally taken seriously by the camera manufacturers and video on a APS-C-sized sensor is a very cool thing in theory. I [ ]