The Spam Thread!

[cpd2009]

It's becoming more obvious that the 3DS' days are numbered. Nintendo Europe announced that 3DS and Wii U systems will no longer allow users to add funds via a credit card from sometime in September. People think it has something to do with the PSD2 payment mandate the EU is introducing on September 14th. Nintendo simply can't be bothered enough to update the 3DS/WiiU firmware to cope with this change. If European players want to add funds, they now have to go to a special Nintendo website that lets you add funds through a browser.

http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2019/08..._in_europe

American players aren't affected by this change, but it goes to show you Nintendo is giving all it's resources to the Switch.

[huckleberrypie]

Considering how there's already been a mainline Pokemon game for the Switch lately, that would make the 3DS a little redundant nowadays. Not to mention that the rise of mobile games has made traditional handhelds irrelevant anyway save for the Switch.

[cpd2009]

Protip: Rubberized coatings from early/mid-2000s electronics sometimes don't hold up well. I recently found a mostly complete Kodak Zi6 720p video camera at a garage sale for a very good price. The color is red. The unit looks pretty good... except the red colored plastic had a rubber coating that's now become extremely sticky. I was able to get some of it off the lower front of the unit using leftover disinfectant wipe liquid and a clean sock (I was out of wipes proper). The plastic doesn't appear to have been scratched, but there's more of the stuff that needs to come off the back and the sides. It's going to be a weekend project of sorts.

The Kodak Zi6 along with similar cameras like the Flip Video were popular in the late 2000s to early 2010s. Online video streaming was on the rise, yet early smartphones couldn't take HD video just yet. Hence these one-handed cameras came on the scene. They were small for the era, and normally came with software that let you edit the videos or upload them to YouTube. These cameras tend to lack optical zoom due to their size, making up for it with digital zoom.

Once smartphones became capable of HD video recording, these cameras have largely died off. You don't really find these brand new in stores today, at least in America. Used ones can be easily found along with new-old-stock. I already have a Samsung HD video camcorder, but the Zi6 has the ability to shoot 720p video at 60fps. My Samsung is limited to 30. If I can get the gooey rubber crap off the camera, I can test the thing without getting my hands sticky.

[huckleberrypie]

Yeah, I dunno what got those companies to use those rubberised finishes that go disgustingly sticky over time. I think Goo Gone can take care of them, though a bottle of one can be a little on the expensive side. It's worth the investment though, as I managed to remove the stubborn glue RTV glue residue off a Nabi SE touch panel when I did a swap of those last year.

[cpd2009]

I have been bitten by the Ubuntu bug, again.

So yeah, Windows 10 was good, but since I figured that I now know how to get one of my video capture devices working under Linux, I decided to give Ubuntu another try. I'm using the standard Ubuntu 19.04 distro with the customized GNOME 3 desktop.

It's been good so far, except for the Nvidia drivers. They work, but sometimes the GUI won't load at startup, hanging at a terminal output screen. A workaround is to drop to a tty shell with Ctrl-Alt-F2, and then hitting Ctrl-Alt-F1. Then GNOME 3 starts up. This issue does not happen with the Nouveau drivers.

While the Nouveau driver isn't as good as the official one, I may have to use that for the time being, until a newer proprietary driver is released or when I upgrade to 19.10 next month.

[cpd2009]

That was quick. I got the Dazzle DVC100 working again, though at first I had no sound. After spending about an hour searching for a solution, something suggested plugging the device into a USB2 port. My DVC100 was in a USB3 port, and the post suggested that some USB audio devices don't play nice with USB3 ports under Linux.

So I unplugged the webcam and put the DVC100 into the USB2 port, and sound works now. Video capture is also rather good too. The program I am using is Guvcview, meant for webcams but it can also use Video4Linux capture sources, and it records into MKV format. It has a lot of control and effect options you can apply to the video.

[huckleberrypie]

I have been bitten by the Ubuntu bug, again.

So yeah, Windows 10 was good, but since I figured that I now know how to get one of my video capture devices working under Linux, I decided to give Ubuntu another try. I'm using the standard Ubuntu 19.04 distro with the customized GNOME 3 desktop.

It's been good so far, except for the Nvidia drivers. They work, but sometimes the GUI won't load at startup, hanging at a terminal output screen. A workaround is to drop to a tty shell with Ctrl-Alt-F2, and then hitting Ctrl-Alt-F1. Then GNOME 3 starts up. This issue does not happen with the Nouveau drivers.

While the Nouveau driver isn't as good as the official one, I may have to use that for the time being, until a newer proprietary driver is released or when I upgrade to 19.10 next month.

Given your use case, I presume Proton for Steam would be quite useful whenever you need to run Windows games, too.

[cpd2009]

Well, I have to move on from Ubuntu. I can't really get used to GNOME 3 no matter how hard I try. And those Nvidia driver bugs were getting annoying. But instead of trying another Ubuntu based distro, I went for something more unusual... Mageia Linux.

Mageia is a fork of the defunct Mandrake/Mandriva distro, created by many of it's former developers and members. It ends up retaining a lot of features the old Mandrake/Mandriva Linux had, such as the integrated Control Center app and it's RPM package management system.

As with Ubuntu, I'm able to get my Dazzle video capture device working. It takes a bit of setup, but once it's running, it appears to record well with the program I use, guvcview. I initially tried the KDE flavor of Mageia, but later settled with the Xfce desktop.

The Nvidia bugs are still present here, but they are also different. I can install the drivers fine and the desktop UI starts up on boot, but some programs like guvcview will not start using the Nvidia driver. Terminal output complains about missing OpenGL components. Video capture only works with the Nouveau driver.

Though Nouveau isn't really the best solution for Nvidia cards, it should suffice for Pearl's 750Ti and the applications I plan to use it with.

[cpd2009]

And, I managed to fix the Nvidia driver issue with Mageia. It's basically the same problem as this one regarding Steam on Ubuntu, which can throw up the same error.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/834254/s...-t/1154964

It seems to be a common issue with the Linux Nvidia drivers. They provide their own libGL files, but some programs will still try to use the Mesa libGL drivers rather than the Nvidia ones, and either deleting or moving the offending libGL files will fix this issue. Now the V4L2 test program and the video capture app work fine.

[cpd2009]

Oh yeah, this exists.

http://mmario.sourceforge.net/downloads.htm

Found this in the Mageia repository. It's a very floaty Mario fan game. Based on the SourceForge forum posts, it's been around since at least 2003. Surprised Nintendo hasn't gone after this yet, as the game rips a lot of Mario sounds and music, and features redrawn sprites. There's even a blood option, though it's cheap looking pixel blood.

This is Mario for grown ups! Mario has never been so serious in rescuing the Princess... eh, his brother Luigi. Onward, and yonward!