I have been really into Half-Life 1 and just recently finished the first 2 expansions.

Opposing force was awesome. I loved all the new weapons. The expanded lore into the kinds of research that Black Mesa was doing was nice. And the HECU squad mates were so much more helpful than the scientists and Barneys.

Blue Shift on the other hand was much shorter and didn’t have any new weapons but it did have a bigger focus on the lore of black mesa and had references to Half-Life, Opposing Force, and even Decay. Dr. Rosenberg did a lot of exposition to explain the lore further as well. Overall it was a good experience with very little downtime compared to Half-Life.

I’ve even started playing Decay now with my 8 year old and we are having a lot of fun with that. Its mission structure compared to the unbroken chapter structure of the rest of the games is quite the difference but it works with the co-op gameplay. We are only about 4 missions in but I look forward to experiencing more of it. Dr Rosenberg is back too so I love that it’s another perspective of the events that happened in the other expansions and base game.

I just wanted share my thoughts and maybe here more of the community thoughts as I just love Half-Life despite never really experiencing it until last year

On behalf of all the dads, sons, or daughters; if you are a mom, thank you!

Moms are a miracle. My kids remind of that. I just spent an hour wrestling with the kids at the dinner table because they wouldn’t eat the Mother’s Day lunch I prepared them. Thank you to all the moms who put up with us as kids because we are getting it back now. And thank you to the wives’ who this is their daily reality.

Do I take the job? This weird guy keeps asking me to choose!

This may be somewhat obvious advice but it makes a huge difference. If your iPhone says the battery is degraded (under 80% battery health) then take it to a repair center and replace the battery. Even if your phone says it’s at “Peak Performance” despite the battery health.

For context, my iPhone 13 mini (purchased at launch in 2021) was at 74% battery health and the battery menu said it was degraded and to seek service despite also saying “Peak Performance Capability”. I could tell because my phone would become hotter than the surface of the sun if I used it for more than 10 minutes. It would also become so slow if trying to use the internet as it struggled to load all the JavaScript and ads and such when loading websites.

I decided to get the battery replaced at the Apple Store (and they decided to replace the screen as well for no additional charge) for a total of $89 before tax. It runs like it is brand new and I could totally see me getting another 3 years out of it.

If anyone is considering buying a new device or just repairing their existing device, I can’t recommend replacing the battery enough. It really made an impact in my experience

A really good explanation that I felt deserved to be highlighted.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/15246802

Afterplay.io now has retroachievements support!

Afterplay.io is a web-based retro gaming emulator with support for SNES, GB, GBC and GBA (Premium includes support for even more consoles including N64, PS1, and DS).

The latest update just added retroacheivements support. As far as I know, it’s the only emulator that supports them on iOS that doesn’t require sideloading.

I’m looking for a recommendation for making gifs on iOS. Preferably one that lets you add text and with the option to remove the watermark with a one time purchase instead of a subscription.

Does this community have any advice? I tried a bunch on the App Store but there’s literally dozens and most of them either don’t let you add text or have like a $20 a minute subscription or obnoxious ads with no option to remove

I know that the source is more focused on retro gaming as a topic but the topic of this post is Google and its pagerank algorithm which is more appropriate for this community.

We’ve all noticed the enshittification of Google Search over the last few months, but it’s still hard to hear how it is affecting content creators and putting them out of business so we can see 20 AI generated spam pages about whatever our query is.

I conquered Koholint island finally! I really enjoyed my time playing Link’s Awakening. I can’t believe they fit a whole Legend of Zelda game on Gameboy! I really enjoyed it

I ended up getting stuck trying to get the bird key. I could not figure out how to get the flying rooster. I tried bombing the weather cock, lifting the weather cock, pulling, using the hook shot, using the magic rod, digging every tile in mabe village, getting the boomerang, giving back the boomerang, tried every key item I could think of. I ended up beating level 8 before level 7. I even made this map of the entire game in google sheets to try to figure it out.

Oh well, I don’t count it as time waste. If anything else it was a great excuse to keep playing. I’ve never played a 3D Zelda before so I am looking forward to OoT

I hope a little self promotion is ok. Thanks to all of your help a few weeks ago, I was able to get an RSS feed set up for my blog. For reasons I still don't fully understand, a year and a half ago, when I moved my personal website from github and Azure App Services to Google Sites; I decided to just hack Google Sites into a blog rather than do the logical thing and start a blog on Wordpress or Blogger.

As I was documenting the process of hosting a feed using Google Drive and automating it with Google Apps Script, I decided to turn it into a full blog post on the journey I took to get things working.

If you do have some morbid curiosity on the actual steps to take to host, automate, and update RSS using Google Apps, I do have a full guide with instructions but can't say I recommend doing things this way to anyone but the truly delusional.

The whole post is about a 20 minute read. Despite having started my blog 18 months ago, this is only my 11th post, I'm still kind of new. I'd appreciate feedback for anyone that would be willing to offer it.

I've never dealt with RSS before on a personal level. I've pretty much always used social media to discover blog posts. I'm wanting to set up RSS for my personal blog but since I have no experience, looking for some guidance for best practices. I'm currently setting up a script to automatically update the xml when I publish new posts.

Am I supposed to include the entire post in the description field? Or just a summary? How do I handle the markup and formatting of the post?

Am I supposed to delete items from the feed or do I just keep appending items to the bottom of it?

Its it good practice to include a thumbnail image or anything with the item in the feed? How is that possible.

How do I distribute the feed beyond adding a button on my site?

Thank you in advance to anyone for their advice.