Light pillars are an interesting natural phenomenon in which a vertical beam of light appears to extend above and/or below a light source. The effect is created by the reflection of light off tiny ice crystals slowly falling through the air, reflecting light rays off of them.
While more common in Canada/Alaska and other northern latitudes, they recently appeared in the night skies over Redmond, Oregon on Christmas Eve 2022. Pretty cool!
Windows has finally added a native screen recorder via an updated Snipping Tool – but apparently only for Windows 11.
Simply launch Snipping Tool and switch to the Record mode. Select the area to record and click Start.
The Steam Deck is a wonderful bit of hardware. The software that underpins it uses open-source packages like the Mesa graphics driver, the Vulkan graphics API, and Valve’s own Proton compatibility layer. This means the Steam Deck only runs thanks to open-source developers.
In a recent chat with the Verge, Steam Deck designer Pierre-Loup Griffais mentioned that the company is paying over a hundred open-source devs to work on the various bits of software for the Steam Deck. Valve has them working on stuff like Steam for ChromeOS and Linux, too.
Griffais said Valve’s corralling of open-source devs is part of “a larger strategy to coordinate all these projects and set up kind of an overall architecture” for gaming on Linux.
This also means the Steam Deck may never be “stable” like a traditional console. “I don’t think you should expect that,” says Griffais. “Stable in terms of having a great experience for people? Yeah, absolutely. But I think we are always going to be pushing updates as long as there’s people playing.”
For updates, the team is primarily working off two big lists, says Yang: “things we want to fix, and things we still want to make.”
It’s a fascinating and different way to develop a gaming platform. One I’m happy to play with since I own a Steam deck myself.
The Verge article also has more information from Griffais about hardware fixes, future plans, and other great tidbits of information and insights as to what Valve is planning. It’s worth a read.
Windows Central gives you instructions to show it’s possible to install the Epic Games store and it’s games on the Steam Deck. You use the Heroic Games Launcher to access and install games from not only Epic, but Good Old Games as well. It takes some work and jumping through a number of hoops but seems like a great way to get even more games on your Steam Deck.
Articles
Did you know that Microsoft provides free virtual machine images of the latest version of Windows – with developer tools, SDK’s, and samples all pre-installed? Microsoft provide regularly updated virtual machine images for VMWare, Hyper-V, VirtualBox, and Parallels.
A few important points. The images are not activated and cannot be activated – even with a valid product key.
If you want to install and run a Linux distro (Ubuntu for example), you can use Virtualbox/VMWare or the built in Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). With WSL, you get a Linux command prompt mounted on your local Windows filesystem and can launch X-windows apps that pop up on your Windows desktop in separate windows.
The experience is kind of a weird mash-up of Windows and Linux on the same system at the same time. Kind of like a better/embedded version of cygwin. It’s not as contained as a virtual machine host app like Virtualbox/VMWare that keeps all your windows in the virtual machine host app; but this might be enough for most people.
I haven’t done any experiments, but would love to test out some OpenGL/Vulkan apps to see if you get full GPU accelerated rendering.
Polybius is an urban legend about a video game that appeared in arcades in the 1980’s around the Portland, Oregon area. It caused people to migraines, have hallucinations, hinted at mind control, cause knife attacks on others, and government conspiracies.
Like most things, if you dig in there is very little concrete evidence. Instead, it appears to be a collection of events that were all real and related to video games of the era.
The Why Files does a pretty decent job digging into the legend and gets a good collection of the facts behind the legend.
This one is definitely better than the fake documentary from a few years back – a reminder that documentaries need to be verified too.
Kid Klava wanted to sing a song he wrote, but realized his chops really weren’t up for the task. So why not get John Lennon sing it – with Paul on backing vocals? He claims it was surprisingly easy and it only took a few minutes to generate. If you’d like to have a go yourself, there are dozens of great YouTube tutorials.
Captain Disillusion shows you the various modern video techniques that create the popular videos of very busy and populated locations that appear utterly devoid of people.
The Mythbusters made a truck with square wheels, but it was an understandably jarring and less than optimal driving experience.
The Q has a much better approach to making square wheels that is much better. I would love to drive this down the streets and see some heads turn.
Snook on YouTube did a video that covers just about every major urban legend and famous conspiracy.
Here’s a list of subjects he covers in his 70 minute video:
| Gray aliens Loch Ness Monster Area 51 Bigfoot Boogeyman Men in black Bloody Mary Candyman Spider bite The hook The kidney thieves Glad you didn’t turn on the lights Killer in the back seat Humans can lick too Body in the bed Body in the water tank Man under the car Halloween hanging Cropsey Corpse in the chimney Toxic fumes lady The goat man Dog boy Mothman | Black eyed children Chupacabra Techiteki Lo Llorona Charlie no face Slitilated woman The Jersey devil Krampus Springhealed Jack The Monkey Man Paul is dead Red cloak The red room Walking Sam Seven midnight jogger The night marchers Stolens gateway to hell The well to hell Fatal flair Foreign dreams The rat king Water babies Pond monster Pinky pinky |
This guitarist is pretty good – then he starts dancing!