Teslazar

Great article. I particularly enjoyed the approach to creating gibs. Although it was a tech demo, I created something like this around the mid 90s. One thing I did that I don't see mentioned in this article was I used 8x8 (or 16x16) light maps on the textures, which allowed me to easily have things like flickering torches and rockets that lit up the hallways as they shot down them. Lightmaps can also be used to "bake in" lighting if desired. Since the light map is "only" 8x8 you can afford to do some math on each luxel (each unit in the light map) to calculate distance and line of sight to light sources to determine a brightness value. When rendering the texture, the luxel was used with a lookup table to determine the actual color of the pixel being drawn. The light maps were updated 15 times a second if I recall correctly to help performance. Thanks to DJGPP, I was using inline assembly for the rendering. Since floating point math was slow at the time I used fixed point math which optimized well. The rendering was surprisingly performant on computers of the day.

To install Windows 11 with a local user and/or to install it without the TPM 2.0 requirement, what I found easiest was using Rufus to prepare a flash drive with the Windows 11 ISO. Rufus asks if you want to create a local user and what the user name is. It also asks if you want to skip some of the Windows 11 requirements. Then when you install Windows 11 using the flash drive it just works.

Install the browser extension Unhook. It hides all recommended YouTube videos, so when you watch a video you aren't looking at a bunch of other videos to watch. It's very customizeable, so you can choose what to hide.

Create a list of what you want to be doing and consider attaching it to your monitor or putting it just to the side so that you can easily look at it. When you feel stuck, look at this list and do something on the list. Ensure the list includes some easy to do things on it like maybe "go for a walk", "read a book", "play instrument" etc.

When trying to change habits, start off small and simple. For example, if you want to start running each day you might start by putting on your running shoes and walking to the end of the driveway and back. Start off so small that your brain can't talk you out of it.

I create daily todo lists and feel satisfaction from checking them off.

Try some ideas and see what works for you. Good luck!

I gave Firefox a try for a month, but ran into enough issues that I ended up switching back to Chrome about a week ago. Here are some of the problems I encountered that I can recall at the moment and doesn't include the many issues I managed to fix:

Copying content doesn’t always work on certain sites. For example, you can't copy an image from Photopea.com, which I rely on frequently. Saving the image to a file instead slows down my workflow too much. This is a known bug which has been around for a long time.

Password autofill was inconsistent. It didn’t work on some sites, like when accessing a Pi-hole dashboard. Maybe there’s an about:config tweak to fix this, but by that point I had already spent a lot of time troubleshooting other issues.

The bookmark menu closes after opening a single bookmark. If you like opening multiple bookmarks in a row, you have to keep reopening the menu and navigating to the next one each time, which is frustrating.

Twitch videos loaded slowly. I managed to fix this by deleting a specific file, re-creating it as a blank file, and setting it to read-only. This appears to be a known bug the developers are aware of.

Loading custom extensions is inconvenient. You can only load them temporarily unless you launch Firefox with a command-line option for each extension.

If this case reaches the Supreme Court, one key consideration is the potential pressure to support the growth of U.S. AI companies. Rather than imposing strict legal restrictions that could hinder their ability to compete globally, especially against companies in countries with more lenient regulations like China, the Court may be inclined to take a more permissive stance.

I took 1 mg of molybdenum daily for about 3 weeks and then tested out drinking coffee. By this point I had tried many other interventions that did not help. I wasn't expecting the molybdenum to help but figured it was worth a shot since it was about $6 for a bottle. After the fourth day of drinking coffee, it was clear that something had changed; the coffee was no longer the issue that it had been. I'm now able to enjoy a regular coffee in the morning without any negative issues. I didn't change my diet or supplements during this time or anything else I can think of that could possibly have contributed to this change.

When I was sensitive to coffee I felt just wrecked and exhausted by the coffee. I couldn't sleep well at night. Several days in a row of drinking one coffee in the morning and I'd get to the point where I would wake up feeling jittery the next day. Now, this is completely resolved.

My blood tests for commonly tested health markers such GPT and GGT have always been fine and tend to be tested about once a year. I had the coffee sensitivity for quite a few years until recently when I finally resolved it.

I do have some minor gut issues, so I'm guessing this is to blame for any nutritional deficiencies (I eat a healthy diet of "real" food).

There are stimulating compounds in coffee other than caffeine, so I've pondered that people who find decaf stimulating may be reacting to some of these other compounds.

Another consideration is that people seem to often report that coffee is more stimulating than caffeine pills, even if the amount of caffeine is similar.

I had a similar problem. Coffee, decaf, even dark chocolate would be very stimulating and would mess with my sleep, even a single cup in the morning. I tried quite a few things to solve this and ended up discovering that supplementing with molybdenum solved it. Molybdenum is an essential element important in the metabolization of some compounds, including caffeine. It's cheap and may be worth trying.

Also, I found that L-Theanine helped but only for maybe a week or so before it became less and less effective. For me, it was obviously a band-aid solution that wasn't correcting the underlying problem.

Thanks for the info!

How long did it take to see significant improvement and how long did it take before you figured you had restored perfect function? Can you elaborate on what you ate?