WTF Bites
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@cvi would you eat bread that has green all over it?
It's called avocado toast, and yes. :hipster:
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in WTF Bites:
@GÄ…ska If the gamer bread has 240 Hz refresh rate, does it go stale slower or faster than lowly peasant bread?
Faster. That's why games buy replacements more often.
(The logo in the image is Razer's. Their bad build quality is only outdone by their horrible drivers.)
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(The logo in the image is Razer's. Their bad build quality is only outdone by their horrible drivers.)
And yet every competitor of theirs for half-keyboard gaming pads with an 8-way hat has either gone out of business, stopped making the pads, or gotten bought out by Razer. So discerning MMO players whose thumbs are too big for a Naga-style mouse are just stuck. Or have to hope their MMO has good controller support.
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(The logo in the image is Razer's. Their bad build quality is only outdone by their horrible drivers.)
And yet every competitor of theirs for half-keyboard gaming pads with an 8-way hat has either gone out of business, stopped making the pads, or gotten bought out by Razer. So discerning MMO players whose thumbs are too big for a Naga-style mouse are just stuck. Or have to hope their MMO has good controller support.
Don't I know it. I cherish my logitech G13.
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(The logo in the image is Razer's. Their bad build quality is only outdone by their horrible drivers.)
And yet every competitor of theirs for half-keyboard gaming pads with an 8-way hat has either gone out of business, stopped making the pads, or gotten bought out by Razer. So discerning MMO players whose thumbs are too big for a Naga-style mouse are just stuck. Or have to hope their MMO has good controller support.
Don't I know it. I cherish my logitech G13.
I found the G13 just slightly too big and flat for my comfort. The Razer Orbweaver was actually an amazing piece of hardware, but they just decided to orphan it for driver support and they introduced some sort of bug where having both versions of the control software (if you had a newer headset or keyboard or whatever that needed the v3 software) would result in the Orbweaver blocking your screensaver / power save when plugged in.
Whoever decided to discontinue the Orbweaver for the Tartarus v2 and greenlit that stupid mouse scroll wheel in place of the most convenient button on the entire keypad needs to be shot. From a cannon. Into the sun so hard that he just continually orbits through the sun and back out the other side.
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@izzion I occasionally check if someone else has produced something, but generally all I find from non-razer use normal left-side-of-keyboard layout where the only thing the thumb can reach is the spacebar.
I was in a scare recently because one of the keys on my G13 stopped working, but luckily it turned out it was my WoW keybindings which had got messed up.
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@PleegWat
We just need to commission @HardwareGeek to build us the WTDWTFMMO keyboard.
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@izzion The thing is I'm unsure how large the market is. Many games have controller support, and all use the same perfectly-workable WSAD based layout. Or they use the semi-standard ARPG/MOBA layout based on 1-5 and Q-T. It's pretty rare to actually need more than 12 or so 'blind' keybinds.
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@PleegWat
Yeah, I'm probably just an old man shouting at the clouds on this. And FFXIV's controller support is decent, albeit winds up making your alternate hotbars 2+ additional trigger/bumper button presses to get to additional buttons, which seems so inefficient compared to just having CTRL or ALT or SHIFT hotbar modifiers and calling it a day.At least I get lots of free blood pressure raising self-medication every time I think about Razer.
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@izzion FFXIV too? I thought it was mainly WoW.
I'll probably quit WoW when my G13 breaks, since I'm not going back to not having 66 bindable hotbar slots off one hand.
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@dkf Are they physicists? Physicists are required to excise their sense of humor as part of entry into grad school. It's why I can only make puns.
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@PleegWat
Yeah, it's pretty big in the FFXIV community, for similar reasons - most jobs need 30-35 buttons to function at their peak performance (more if you get into macroing certain buffs to target specific players in the party or such), and the controller hotbars really only work with 32 buttons max. Plus healing on a controller is an exercise in being able to soft target quickly, which I'd much rather just be able to play mouse whack-a-mole (or have enough extra keybinds on my Razer that I can use F-key based targeting).FFXIV's producer/director actually worked with Hori on a branded version of the Tactical Assault Commander that works for both computer and PS4/5, and it sold out super quickly, but I've stayed away from it for mostly the same reasons I disliked the G13 - the 8way hat is flat and the controller is a bit big.
Hori's non-branded TAC is decent from a button layout perspective, but the 8-way hat is pretty bad - I physically broke mine within a month of getting it (it would just randomly lose calibration and "stick" in some random direction), and their support was very difficult to work with and they basically wouldn't warranty it without a big song and dance for verifying it wasn't a driver problem etc. From searching online, apparently older versions of the TAC actually had a switch for recalibrating the hat, but the new one doesn't and they don't have drivers, it's just a Bluetooth app on your phone to reconfigure it, and that app doesn't have a calibration routine either.
So yeah, it's Razer or bust for me at the moment :(
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a Bluetooth app on your phone
Phone? Why does a phone enter into a PC peripheral? Or is that to do with the PS4/5 bit?
the controller is a bit big.
I feel your pain - in the opposite direction on mice, which are often smaller than I would like.
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a Bluetooth app on your phone
Phone? Why does a phone enter into a PC peripheral? Or is that to do with the PS4/5 bit?
the controller is a bit big.
I feel your pain - in the opposite direction on mice, which are often smaller than I would like.
Yeah, the easiest way to make a controller pad work for PS4/5 or XBox is to make it a bog standard HID that has its own software for what keystroke to send for which button. So what the Tactical Assault Commander does in lieu of having driver & configuration software on your PC is to have a phone app that you use to configure the device, and then the software to do the keystroke translation is on the device itself.
Their app also does not do well at reconfiguring the diagonal movement directions, so if you've left the default WASD with QE for strafing keybinds in your software and usually just reconfigure your gamepad to match the strafing keybinds, well fuck you, the TAC Pro can't do that.
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Whoever decided to discontinue the Orbweaver for the Tartarus v2 and greenlit that stupid mouse scroll wheel in place of the most convenient button on the entire keypad needs to be shot. From a cannon. Into the sun so hard that he just continually orbits through the sun and back out the other side.
Can we also launch the guy who's responsible for the Razer crapware? I'd probably aim at the cannon such that there are a few more mid-trajectory impacts with hard objects before reaching the sun, because the Razer software is very crap.
I used to have one of those half-keyboard gaming pads that worked fine without any software running (it'd remember the configuration locally). My disappointment was ... immeasurable when I at one point had to get a new one.
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@Zerosquare Check if running (Word or Excel) and not any development tools?
I dunno, Intellij users appear to be pretty humorless.
Using non-joke tools'll do that.
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@loopback0 What makes it particularly suited for gamers‽
Ridiculous price.
And it's shiny.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in WTF Bites:
@GÄ…ska If the gamer bread has 240 Hz refresh rate, does it go stale slower or faster than lowly peasant bread?
Wait until you get the HDR version. When it goes stale, it really goes stale. (Unless you got a fake HDR bread, in which case you probably won't notice any difference.)
As an IntelliJ user, I'd like to remind you that this is just a restatement of Zeno's arrow - the rate of real change is not affected by the sample rate for this macroscale case.
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@Gribnit Ah, I wasn't referring to the rate of change, but rather the extremum state it reaches (and, indeed, the rate of change goes to zero at that point).
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@cvi Fair clarification, of course. Although if we assume differentiability across the domain prior, this result will also converge. Now I am scheduled to look away from the screen for 45 seconds.
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@loopback0 said in WTF Bites:
Peanut butter for gamers.
Not unrelated:
(In particular Scotland, slang) Faeces; a piece of excrement.
Just a few notes:
- We have a specific thread for gamer-targeted crap.
- We also have a specific thread for ADDED SUGAR (and yes, this thing does have a sugar listed as an ingredient)
- The accessories are not yet offered in a coloredLED variant, so... we're only halfway there.
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in WTF Bites:
We also have a specific thread for ADDED SUGAR
Didn't it get automatically deleted when someone rage-quit WTDWTF?
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
@Kamil-Podlesak said in WTF Bites:
We also have a specific thread for ADDED SUGAR
Didn't it get automatically deleted when someone rage-quit WTDWTF?
Well...err...um...not...exactly automatically.
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@boomzilla said in WTF Bites:
@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
@Kamil-Podlesak said in WTF Bites:
We also have a specific thread for ADDED SUGAR
Didn't it get automatically deleted when someone rage-quit WTDWTF?
Well...err...um...not...exactly automatically.
Hey, at least Ben's not the only mod who wiped out 2 weeks worth of post history.
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@topspin
I bet you can do it too!
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@Luhmann fuck, I hope not.
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Fun thing I learned today:
HP printer firmware update utilities work by "printing" the firmware file. True shit.
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@Polygeekery said in WTF Bites:
Fun thing I learned today:
HP printer firmware update utilities work by "printing" the firmware file. True shit.
I suppose if you have the channel you might as well use it. Canon printers (at least they used to a decade or so back) send all maintenance commands as print jobs.
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@Watson you know what they say - when you're a hammer, everything looks like a print job.
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@Polygeekery I read/heard about this before, possibly in one of the BlackHat or CCC talks. I think that was the only time I've seen somebody have fun with a printer.
IIRC firmware update files are signed. But on the other hand, they're signed by printer manufacturers,and in a format also defined by said printer manufacturer.
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@Polygeekery said in WTF Bites:
Fun thing I learned today:
HP printer firmware update utilities work by "printing" the firmware file. True shit.
My very first reaction to that was "That seems like it's begging for abuse." And then I read @cvi response
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So does that mean anyone (any local user without administrative rights) can apply printer updates? Being "signed" doesn't prevent that.
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@topspin probably, if one can produce a file “signed by HP”
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@topspin probably, if one can produce a file “signed by HP”
It may still be something you don't want. Like if Canon produced a firmware that ignores the DRM chips in their cartridges because they can't get enough chips, you may want to keep that firmware a little longer and not have J. Random Luser break your cartridge refill system by installing the latest genuine, signed post-pandemic update.
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@topspin probably, if one can produce a file “signed by HP”
It may still be something you don't want. Like if Canon produced a firmware that ignores the DRM chips in their cartridges because they can't get enough chips, you may want to keep that firmware a little longer and not have J. Random Luser break your cartridge refill system by installing the latest genuine, signed post-pandemic update.
That's what I meant. "Signed" only means it's produced by the printer manufacturer, but not that it's approved to be installed by the admin. And non-privileged local users usually still have privileges to print.
I mean, this might be less of an issue in the age of Microsoft unilaterally deciding "i said we installing updates today", but still.
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@topspin Daddy Satya knows best.
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@Polygeekery said in WTF Bites:
Fun thing I learned today:
HP printer firmware update utilities work by "printing" the firmware file. True shit.
I suppose if you have the channel you might as well use it. Canon printers (at least they used to a decade or so back) send all maintenance commands as print jobs.
If I'm being honest about it, my first thought was:
My next thought was:
"Nevermind. That actually seems like something I would come up with."
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@topspin I would guess that there's a whole slew of devices out there that you could technically walk up to with a USB stick and apply updates without extra credentials.
At least for the printers, they might be set up through a central printer server that also does authentication. There's a lot of "maybes" in here, but technically that one would then be responsible for not forwarding a firmware-job.
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The idea is pretty clever, actually. It avoids the need for custom software tools, works regardless of how the printer is connected, and makes remote deployment of firmware updates easy.
What the feature lacks is access control to prevent any random user from using it. If should be protected with a password or something similar.
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
If should be protected with a password or something similar
There's the rub. The signature is that line of defense and is all of it. A locally specified non-fixed secret is the spiffic missing bit.
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@topspin "
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
The idea is pretty clever, actually. It avoids the need for custom software tools, works regardless of how the printer is connected, and makes remote deployment of firmware updates easy.
It actually is pretty clever. Lead off the file with some manner of header and signature so that the printer firmware can intercept those "print jobs" and pipe the appropriate bits to the firmware update utility.
Want to know what they totally left out, besides authentication?
You have to do each firmware update individually and there is zero batch processing.
We have a client that has a ton of these LaserJet M102w printers littered throughout the building, because people are fucking lazy and won't walk 50 feet to a centralized printer that has a per page cost that is 1/50th of those little desktop units.
So there's less than I had thought, but still six of those little bastards:
The update process is:
- Open the firmware update utility (every time, for each printer)
- Select the printer from the dropdown
- Send (print) the firmware update
- Wait for it to finish
- Close the firmware update utility
- Lather, rinse, repeat
There should be a way for sysadmins to do all of them at once. But no. Or if there is, it is not readily apparent.
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@Polygeekery Yikes. And with Windows having no scripting capability, what are you gonna do?
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@Gribnit Windows has several. The reality is that likely the firmware utility disrespects all of them because fuck you, that’s why.
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@Gribnit Windows has several. The reality is that likely the firmware utility disrespects all of them because fuck you, that’s why.
This.
I have looked for any sort of documentation about command line switches for their firmware update utilities and have never found anything.
You can unpack the utility with something like 7-Zip, and find the actual firmware file that it is sending but without there being some way to send it, or pass command line arguments like printer names or IP addresses or whatever to their utility you are basically on a moving body of feces with no means of conveyance.
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the firmware utility disrespects all of them because fuck you, that’s why.
It's a printer utility for printer firmware written by a printer company for updating printers. I think you can see the problem.
Filed under: The "I Hate Printers" thread is