TIL: Today I Learned

It's almost as if the deck were stacked against people other than preferentially male predatory psychopaths.

 

Today I learned that some electronics such as the Xbox 360 and Nintendo Switch have eFuses, which are deliberately burnt when upgrading firmware. This can prevent the user from later downgrading the firmware.

 

All I can think of now is a FPS where you are the Quaker Oats guy.

 

There was already Chex Quest

 

The Quaker Oats guy is supposedly William Penn, so his video game is Sid Meir's Colonisation.

 

I'm sure that aimee can locate a Half-life mod where you do exactly that.

 

I feel like there eventually was a Halo RTS game but it was meh.

 

Halo Wars, the last game made by Ensemble Studios.

 

Yeah, Halo Wars. The problem with it though is that it didn't have depth, but that was kind of a necessity since it was a RTS designed specifically for consoles.

 

Speaking of Chex, they now have a peanut butter variety (I have a couple of boxes of it in my cupboard, but haven't tried it yet).

 

I had Command & Conquer 64. Star Craft was also on the 64. You can do console RTS without sacrificing depth.

 

And there's also Halo Wars 2. I have both on PC

 

Neither of those were very good ports though. Neither was the C&C 3 port to the 360. At least in my opinion they weren't very good. Mostly because I felt like the controls weren't reacting as fast as I'd like them to, especially compared to their PC counterparts. Halo Wars didn't really have that problem though. Quite the opposite in fact. Halo Wars was awesome on console, but when it finally got ported to the PC a few years later, it was kinda garbage. Mostly because the controls didn't really conform to the "standard" of PC RTSs, kinda like how an FPS that doesn't conform to the "COD" standard control scheme just feels...wrong.

I don't know about Halo Wars 2 though as I never played it.

 

Today starts a trial in the basque country about Archaeological forgery in the site of Iruña-Veleia

TIL that this forgery would include fake Egyptian hieroglyphs

 

I suppose this is fair. C&C 64 was literally the very first RTS I ever played so I wouldn't have noticed the controls back then. I did notice the game had a serious tendency to chug - but this was made infinitely worse by my Gameshark.

 

There is a tradition in basque country of wearing a cord necklace blessed by Sain Blaise, which allegedly prevents from throat conditions.

TIL that a Basque politician has claimed that with this cord, there would not exist any coronavirus.

 

TIL the Soviets frequently targeted the US as the site for emergency landings of their Soyuz capsule. It makes perfect sense given they need large tracts of flat, mid-latitude ground for the landings but it's still kind of surprising. They included warnings and instructions on how to deal with the capsule in English on the capsule itself since they did not want to openly communicate these plans to the US.

Amateur radio operators figured all this out when they deciphered contingency landing instructions that were broadcast to capsules in orbit that were undergoing technical issues. The critical piece of information that helped them decode it was the phrase 'landing angle' which was Soviet jargon for the ground distance the spacecraft would cover during reentry. The amateur radio operators ran into a cosmonaut at a conference and asked him what that phrase meant and when he explained it, they were then able to decipher the meaning of these transmissions as the landing angle would have placed the capsules in position for a touchdown in Texas. Today, you can see some of the English instructions painted on the capsules that are museum pieces.


Also TIL: The next standard of over the air broadcast (ATSC 3.0) will include the ability for channels to be blocked if you picking up signals that are outside the market area of the broadcast. They also have the ability to force people to sign in to unlock channels as well. In other words, the fragmentation we're seeing in the streaming arena may soon spread to over the air broadcasts soon.

 

Today I learned that, due to one of the fixes made to fix Y2K, there were various software glitches on January 1, 2020.

 

Today I learned that spacecraft that have reached the end of their life are often deorbited over a region in the south Pacific Ocean because it's far from land and not likely to hit anything. (I learned this from the explanation of recent XKCD comic.)

 

It's called Point Nemo and it's the farthest point from land on the planet. Helpfully, there is a deep trench there though I'm sure scientist will someday prove we've been destroying some fragile ecosystem or something. Most spacecraft don't survive reentry or at most come down in small, pretty harmless pieces of metal.