This actually happened to me, but fortunately I never actually used the domain. I registered tweed.dev intending to use robert.tweed.dev as a personal blog. It wasn't classed as a "premium" domain and the first year was £5 or something IIRC, which was half price compared to the normal renewal fee.
The next year they decided it was premium after all, and wanted to charge £492,000 for renewal. I still have a screenshot of that, although needless to say I don't own the domain anymore.
They operate the registry, but are not a registrar (bad choice of terminology) since they sold off that part of their business to Squarespace. Unclear to me who actually raised the price here since you can register a .dev domain with many registrars.
That's insane though, I assumed renewal prices were more or less locked in after you own a domain. Even the premium ones that go for thousands say they renew at the standard $12 or whatever.
The reason I remember this is that it inspired me to spend ages implementing Gouraud shading in my own graphics library (written in assembly language), only to discover that flat polygons look better most of the time.
Unless you mean pre-rendered backgrounds, there was no Gouraud shading in that game. It does seem to have a little texturing on some parts of the model, most likely ramp lighting and pretty expensive as they could not texture the whole character. E.g. here you can see each triangle in the model in whole untextured flat-shaded glory :) https://www.mobygames.com/game/325/alone-in-the-dark/screens... except the textured collar lit by recomputing the palette colors.
Some items in the inventory, such as the knife, and the book appear to have some kind of "metal shading", which was typically implemented as a modified Gouraud shader. It could all be texture mapping of course, but somehow I doubt that.
We can only do two things now: contact the original author, or reverse engineer the binaries! Does anyone know if there is a DOS emulator that allows you to visualize and override RAM access easily?
Yeah, it had different algorithm to render inventory and also could add/remove some objects to the background (those figures in dresses do not move if I recall, only toggle in and out). The inventory was not free camera with only controls to zoom, so you could do a lot of tricks with pre-computed shading. The general purpose rendering of the animated character and items they held was flat shading though.
Note that both Little Big Adventure (also called Twinsen's Adventure) and Alone in the Dark were created by the same person, Frédérick Raynal!
There is a very nice presentation [1] in which Raynal shows some of the old tools that were used to create Alone in the Dark. I'm still not entirely sure what kind of rendering is being used, but the editor sure looks nice (in 640x350 EGA). Perhaps there is some more background information on LBA out there as well?
Every time I view one I think to myself "I really should make a userscript that changes the '/short/' to '/v/' in the url" but I never view them often enough that this annoyance has manifested itself in action.
Agreed. It's like a different video playing application popped up in the middle of YouTube. Also weird when you exits shorts, the previously watched long video starts playing.
The Youtube app (on android at least) now lets you use more of the normal controls (particularly seeking and adding to playlists) on shorts as of a few months ago. I thought the lack of those controls was intentionally permanent but I was relieved to find out it wasn't.
Ah, I only skimmed the article and missed that. The BBC RSS feed was the main example I referred back to while I was learning XSLT around 2010-ish.
AFAIK it's the only major implementation of this technique. Most other big sites that provided an RSS feed didn't bother, and most of those RSS feeds are dead now. The BBC one has hardly changed since those days and it still works really well as a dual-delivery system.
I'm not a frequent XSLT user but I'm aware for example that, for example, you can add any text you want to the presentation of the feed with <xsl:text>. Can you add script, images, and basically end up with something similar to a modern webpage?
You have to wonder. What would the world look like if more publishers had gone the route of styling RSS or Atom feeds, and maybe supported and extended the relevant standards in the places they found those standards to be deficient?
Could we have ended up with a world where content delivery was all RSS, the relationship was exclusively between you and the publisher, and we didn't need Meta as the middle-man sucking publisher profits dry while convincing our daughters to kill themselves?
...Nahhhhh, I'm sure that going full neanderthal, RSS LOOK SCARY, clubbing it over the head and removing it from a website is the better approach. /snark
I've never really liked JSON as replacement for XML. Had we continued with RSS, Atom and XML, not only would we make peer to peer distribution far easier, we'd have a very easy publishing mechanism.
But we threw out XML for JSON.
With JSON we need loads of custom, client side code to turn it into a DOM that the user can look at. With XML we only need XSLT. It won't work for all cases, but the majority of sites wouldn't need a single line of JS to renders sites. Yet here we are: shadow DOM, event listeners, useeffect, JSX, progressive hydration, and so forth and so on. To build web-experiences that we could deliver back in early 2000 but were deemed too complex and too daunting.
Not sure if I understand correct, but the things I listed (event listeners, AJAX, etc) are things needed to be implemented so that you get what XML+XSLT in a browser give you for free.
To be clear: there are lots of things that XML+XSLT cannot do, but which JavaScript+HTML can do (in an HTTP context).
But for the most typical HTTP usecase: a website presenting information, XML+XSLT is fully up to the task, yet we forego that, and instead pull out the big, complex "guns", entire JS frameworks. A knee-jerk reaction that I blame on the bad rep XML got, and the praise it's incomplete but simpler replacement, JSON, got.
JSON is great, but lacks one feature that XML and its ecosystem has - extensibility and deep standarisation. XSLT, XML Schema, XML signing and encryption, native support of ids and refs, etc. All that missing points are doable with JSON or were added quite late, but yeah, standarisation is important.
> Can you add script, images, and basically end up with something similar to a modern webpage?
Sure, you can use anything you would on a regular HTML page. I was consuming my local news website via their RSS feed in my browser, as it looked like a regular website (but without all the fluff). Unfortunately, they've dropped the custom view completely, and it's now back to raw XML content :(
How is it in terms of heat & condensation build-up? Is there a certain amount of time after which it starts getting uncomfortable?
Also, is passthrough good enough for things like typing, so you don't get an uncanny valley sense of the keys being just slightly off visually compared to your proprioception & touch?
Heat and condensation build up is a complete non-issue due to the built in fans! I've never once felt hot or stuffy inside the Vision Pro, and I totally do on other VR headsets.
I don't really look at my keyboard while typing so that's also a non-issue. For stuff where you really need hand-eye coordination it's totally fine at normal arms-length but gets worse as you get closer to your face. Finding a key on the keyboard with your eyes is not a big deal but if you try to drink from a glass of water you'll likely spill it on yourself the first time (and then eventually get used to it).
To be honest I'm not entirely sure what reprojection is like on the final device or even if it exists at all, so my experience might be off. There may have been things that changed since I left and I'm not sure what the final plans were.
I didn’t necessarily mean reprojection but whatever ‘trick’ is done to hide that the cameras aren’t in the same physical location the users eyes are without the headset on.
So you can pair bluetooth peripherals to it.. thats good to know, I assumed it but maybe missed that in the initial preso (i was watching while in a meeting). That's one thing i hate about my index. It's impossible to drink a soda while wearing it without a straw, the geometry just isn't compatible.
I don't have a green laser, but I just tried shining a 365nm UV torch on the various bottles of oil in my kitchen.
My good EV olive oil in a glass bottle goes a sort of pinkish colour. With the natural colour of the oil & the way the glass reflects/refracts light, it makes it look like copper.
I don't get the same effect with cheapo refined olive oil in a plastic bottle. I get a bit of fluorescence - the normal violet colour and much less than say a white piece of paper - but all or most of that is just from the container.
Make sense. Plastics are notorious for absorbing in the UV range- for most useful spectroscopy experiments below ~400 nm we have to go straight to quartz cuvettes.
Hey. I wondered about that, too! Because of the slightly green tinted bottle.
Used about 1 fluid ounce, first in a 'Schnapsglas(s)', then in 2 different plastics. In an otherwise dark room.
Still pinkish shine, but different hue. Hard to tell because the light is so BRIGHT and I didn't want to use more oil in other containers. Just what I needed for cooking anyways ATM ;-)
So... reading the wikipedia-article about them and their (former?) practices, and the bottle which says mixture of olive oils from the EU, makes me wonder if this is useful at all?
Or is it just a 'good' mixture?
Edit: I mean, it's ok for my taste and sense of smell. But what does that say about the biochemical quality of the oil?
Interesting. I wonder if this technique could be used as an olive oil purity/quality test of sorts? Maybe correlating a few samples of various kinds, along with some external form of verifiable testing, it may be possible to figure it out.
I'm definitely taking my UV torch to the supermarket next time. However, most good olive oils come in dark glass bottles, so I don't think it will be possible to check those. Might be interesting to look for variation among the cheaper EV ones.
The article mentions differences between brands, but IDK if there's a specific correlation with quality other than that fake olive oils certainly won't turn red/pink.
I think your instinct is right: the dark glass is going to negate any test.
I always assumed that products like olive oil sold in thick green bottles were sensitive to degradation by (UV, sun)light, so if that is true then by definition a casual in store test is not going to work. But perhaps green bottles mean nothing vis a vis light.
I do recall that brown bottles were a thing in brewing to prevent beer from becoming funky by the action of light, but perhaps oils aren't susceptible to that.
It’s the same as beer. Light degrades the beer or oil. My olive oil research says a lot of cheap oils are already going rancid by the time you buy them. Very good quality bill oils, like Costco’s EVOO, will go rancid before you can use it all.
Why not just a scanner app for your phone? They work pretty well. I have a flatbed scanner that I keep stored away most of the time, until I need to scan a bunch of stuff quickly. If I need to scan the odd receipt, I use Tiny Scanner.
The main reason was I had 2 filing cabinet drawers filled with paper and wanted something that could be relatively hands off. I was able to do double sided paper and load multiple pages at a time (24 pages before it didn't work well) so it was easy to burn through the them. I've tried a scanner app before for one off things and have had okay success with them. I guess now the backlog is burned down I can compare the two for things that are just a couple of pages.
I always (and only) use named colours for debugging. For example border: 1px solid red; around some element that isn't rendering as expected.
This makes it hard to accidentally forget about a rules that just just put in temporarily. Real colours will always match some design, which will have a carefully-chosen hexcode.
Fun, didn't know that. I recall both games, Maniac Mansion on C=64. Impossible Mission is the first game I recall with working terminals inside (but those terminals didn't play a full game although it likely could be done).
The next year they decided it was premium after all, and wanted to charge £492,000 for renewal. I still have a screenshot of that, although needless to say I don't own the domain anymore.