Have been thinking it over for a few weeks and finally decided I wanted to go ahead and get in on the first batch.

Not sure if the receipt number is PII, but better safe than sorry.

Originally released for the Sony PlayStation in 1998, Resident Evil 2 came on two CDs and used 1.2 GB in total. Of this, full-motion video (FMV) cutscenes took up most of the space, as was rather common for PlayStation games. This posed a bit of a challenge when ported to the Nintendo 64 with its paltry 64 MB of cartridge-based storage. Somehow the developers managed to do the impossible and retain the FMVs, as detailed in a recent video by [LorD of Nerds]. Toggle the English subtitles if German isn’t among your installed natural language parsers.

Instead of dropping the FMVs and replacing them with static screens, a technological improvement was picked. Because of the N64’s rather beefy hardware, it was possible to apply video compression that massively reduced the storage requirements, but this required repurposing the hardware for tasks it was never designed for.

The people behind this feat were developers at Angel Studios, who had 12 months to make it work. Ultimately they achieved a compression ratio of 165:1, with software decoding handling the decompressing and the Reality Signal Processor (RSP) that’s normally part of the graphics pipeline used for both audio tasks and things like upscaling.

Texture resolution had to be reduced for the N64 port.

In the video you can see the side by side comparisons of the PS and N64 RE2 cutscenes, with differences clearly visible, but not necessarily for the worse. Uncompressed, the about fifteen minutes of FMVs in the game with a resolution of 320×160 pixels at 24 bits take up 4 GB. For the PS this was solved with some video compression and a dedicated video decoder, since its relatively weak hardware needed all the help it could get.

On the N64 port, however, only 24 MB was left on a 64 MB cartridge after the game’s code and in-game assets had been allocated. The first solution was chroma subsampling, counting on the human eye’s sensitivity to brightness rather than color. One complication was that the N64 didn’t implement color clamping, requiring brightness to be multiplied rather than simply added up before the result was passed on to the video hardware in RGB format.

Very helpful here was that the N64 relied heavily on DMA transfers, allowing the framebuffer to be filled without a lot of marshaling which would have tanked performance. In addition to this the RSP was used with custom microcode to enable upscaling as well as interpolation between frames and audio, with about half the frames of the original dropped and instead interpolated. All of this helped to reduce the FMVs to fit in 24 MB rather than many hundreds of MBs.

For the audio side of things the Angel Studios developers got a break, as the Factor 5 developers – famous for Star Wars titles on the N64 – had already done the heavy lifting here with their MusyX audio tools. This enables sample-based playback, saving a lot of memory for music, while for speech very strong compression was used.

Video

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency won't attend the annual RSA Conference in March, an agency spokesperson confirmed to The Register. Sessions involving speakers from the FBI and National Security Agency (NSA) have also disappeared from the agenda.

"Since the beginning of this administration, CISA has made significant progress in returning to our statutory, core mission and focusing on President Trump's policies for maximum security for all Americans," CISA spokesperson Marci McCarthy told us. "CISA has reviewed and determined that we will not participate in the RSA Conference since we regularly review all stakeholder engagements, to ensure maximum impact and good stewardship of taxpayer dollars."

McCarthy declined to comment on whether the decision had anything to do with former CISA director Jen Easterly being named chief executive of RSAC last week.

Catherine O’Hara, one of the funniest people to ever set foot on planet Earth, died on Friday at the age of 71. TMZ broke the news.

WTF? 😢

I was planning on starting a Schitt's Creek rewatch but I don't know if I can now. Such a gut punch.

Comcast's attempt to slow broadband customer losses still isn't stopping the bleeding as fiber and fixed wireless competition intensifies. In Q4 2025 alone, Comcast lost 181,000 broadband subscribers, even as it leans harder into wireless bundling and other business lines like Peacock and theme parks. Ars Technica reports:

The Q4 net loss is more than the 176,000 loss predicted by analysts, although not as bad as the 199,000-customer loss that spurred [Comcast President Mike Cavanagh's] comment about Comcast "not winning in the marketplace" nine months ago. The Q4 2025 loss reported today is also worse than the 139,000-customer loss in Q4 2024 and the 34,000-customer loss in Q4 2023.

"Subscriber losses were 181,000, as the early traction we are seeing from our new initiatives was more than offset by continued competitive intensity," Comcast CFO Jason Armstrong said during an earnings call today, according to a Motley Fool transcript. Comcast's residential broadband customers dropped to 28.72 million, while business broadband customers dropped to 2.54 million, for a total of 31.26 million.

Armstrong said that average revenue per user grew 1.1 percent, "consistent with the deceleration that we had previewed reflecting our new go-to-market pricing, including lower everyday pricing and strong adoption of free wireless lines." Armstrong expects average revenue per user to continue growing slowly "for the next couple of quarters, driven by the absence of a rate increase, the impact from free wireless lines, and the ongoing migration of our base to simplified pricing." Comcast Connectivity & Platforms chief Steve Croney said the firm is facing "a more competitive environment from fiber" and continued competition from fixed wireless. "The market is going to remain intensely competitive," he said.

You'd think I'd be used to it by now but nope. Every. Time.

With the powerful off-the-shelf hardware available to us common hardware hobbyist folk, how hard can it be to make a smartphone from scratch? Hence V Electronics’s Spirit smartphone project, with the video from a few months ago introducing the project.

As noted on the hardware overview page, everything about the project uses off the shelf parts and modules, except for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 (CM5) carrier board. The LCD is a 5.5″, 1280×720 capacitive one currently, but this can be replaced with a compatible one later on, same as the camera and the CM5 board, with the latter swappable with any other CM5 or drop-in compatible solution.

The star of the show and the thing that puts the ‘phone’ in ‘smartphone’ is the Quectel EG25-GL LTE (4G) and GPS module which is also used in the still-not-very-open PinePhone. Although the design of the carrier board and the 3D printable enclosure are still somewhat in flux, the recent meeting notes show constant progress, raising the possibility that with perhaps some community effort this truly open hardware smartphone will become a reality.

There have been a couple of posts somewhat recently asking what can be done to attract new users to the Fediverse. My answer was basically "make it something new people would want to see and stick around for". The crux of that was basically less news, less politics, less rage and more, well, anything else.

So, I would like to propose a challenge to all: Let's try that. At least for a week.

Sound good? Here's how you can participate:

1. If you're one who posts a lot of news/politics...stop or at least slow down. Post literally anything else. Or try to post less rage-inducing news and try to dig up the good news that's happening. Sorry !upliftingnews@lemmy.world but it's the regular news communities that are flooding the zone with every single bad thing that happens anywhere in the world, so we may be stealing some of your content with this one.

2. Think before posting something. Are you only posting it because you're mad about it and you think other people should be mad about it too? If so, maybe post something else. Is there already similar coverage of that? Chances are, we don't need more of it.

3. If you're a lurker, post something. Add your voice.

4. Refrain from upvoting / booting all the negativity. Yes, it may feel good to upvote for visibility because "people need to know this" but the end result is the feed turning into a list of things to rage about. If you see good/non-rage news, upvote that for visibility. I've seen many posts like that languish with a few tens of upvotes at most while the rage-inducing news gets hundreds of upvotes.

5. Post what makes you happy rather than what you're angry about.

6. Avoid dogpiling on people if they express a different opinion. I'm not saying feed the trolls or pat them on the head, just merely "disengage" or avoid the impulse to virtue dump on them and such.

7. If you have a hobby, share it! There's plenty of hobby communities that would greatly benefit from additional contributors. If you're boring like me, well, there's !Dullsters@dullsters.net or !dull_mens_club@lemmy.world (the latter welcomes all as the name is just a reference to the original)

8. If you're already doing the above: THANK YOU ❤️. Maybe consider posting a little more unless you think additional contributions would be spammy.

9. Anything else you can think of to make the homepage/experience feel more welcoming and less like an angry mob (suggestions in the comments are more than welcome).

I know not everyone will participate, and that's okay. Simply adding more positivity and posting/boosting less rage can have a positive effect on what shows up on /all which is what potential new users see by default.

So, let's try this for a week and see what happens. Who knows? Maybe the established userbase will find it refreshing as well.

Who's with me?

Note: Summary is from Hack-a-Day since this is long but interesting read about how modern computerized air traffic control evolved.

It is a movie staple to see an overworked air traffic controller sweating over a radar display. Depending on the movie, they might realize they’ve picked the wrong week to stop some bad habit. But how does the system really work? [J. B. Crawford] has a meticulously detailed post about the origins of the computerized air traffic control system (building on an earlier post which is also interesting).

Like many early computer systems, the FAA started out with the Air Force SAGE defense system. It makes sense. SAGE had to identify and track radar targets. The 1959 SATIN (SAGE Air Traffic Integration) program was the result. Meanwhile, different parts of the air traffic system were installing computers piecemeal.

SAGE and its successors had many parents: MIT, MITRE, RAND, and IBM. When it was time to put together a single national air traffic system the FAA went straight to IBM, who glued together a handful of System 360 computers to form the IBM 9020. The computers had a common memory bus and formed redundant sets of computer elements to process the tremendous amount of data fed to the system. The shared memory devices were practically computers in their own right. Each main computing element had a private area of memory but could also allocate in the large shared pool.

The [9020]* ran the skies for quite a while until IBM replaced it with the IBM 3083. The software was mostly the same, as were the display units. But the computer hardware, unsurprisingly, received many updates.

If you’re thinking that there’s no need to read the original post now that you’ve got the highlights from us, we’d urge you to click the link anyway. The post has a tremendous amount of detail and research. We’ve only scratched the surface.

*The original article on HaD had typo'd that to 9200 which I fixed here.