Topic: The Chit-Chat Thread

@AlohaPizzaJack Shhh let the mid life crisis in and waste your family funds on extravagant things you don't need.

@ReaderRagfish Technically JP layout keyboards aren't very different from US layout keyboards. There are a few symbols in different places,（￥and such are easier to get to and more properly positioned), or changed, but it's mostly just a US keyboard with the alt func mode that it mimics a kana keyboard. That makes certain things like the "small" versions of characters like っ easier to deal with.

There are real kana keyboards, but nobody actually uses those anymore outside specialized business purposes like medicine, research, etc.

But if trying to type Romaji, yeah, the JP keyboard makes life a lot easier. Oddly JP layout is less useful for typing Japanese than typing Japlish.

@AlohaPizzaJack So you're not an urban cowboy after all? I thought every office worker needed a half-ton duelie diesel with dual stack turbos to travel on an interstate in a tie and blasting the A/C, to arrive at their job auditing cashflow excesses?

@Morpheel As frugal as I am, my midlife crisis is bound to be splurging on a bow tie instead of neck tie.
@NEStalgia Granted, there’s enough wannabe country boys and girls at the college with their loud lifted trucks to offset me. I prefer function over form. I don’t have a supercharged V8, but I’ve got a sturdier 315 Magnum V6 with a Holley carb airhat. I don’t have flowstackers or quad outlets, but I’ve got a 2 1/2” flowmaster with no cat. I don’t have a fancy extended cab, but I’ve got a bed that can carry a ladder over 3 feet long. And I don’t have fancy high fallutin’ tech, but I don’t have to pay $2000 to a dealer when a computer goes nuts 😂

@AlohaPizzaJack "ut I don’t have to pay $2000 to a dealer when a computer goes nuts" I still firmly believe computers have **NO** place in automotive. That's the dumbest location I can think of for sensitive electronics. Same with absurd LED headlights that cost $1000 to replace but should last "lifetime"....as-if.

@NEStalgia Agreed. My favorite vehicle was a 1987 Honda CRX with a carburetor motor. One day I want an old 70’s Ford F-100 or 60’s Chevy Truck. They were so simple. Vacuum lines were a pain, but the easy solution is to rip and plug, then adjust your idle screw and injector. Done. Forever.

Turns out the Blockbuster "opening up in my local area" was really HBO using a closed store to film an upcoming mini series or something. They HAD a casting call for locals to be apart of the scene, including speaking and nonspeaking roles. Notice how I had HAD in all caps lock, well, when I found out about the location and found out they had casting calls, they closed them down. Now my IMDB page will forever remain about me doodling stick figures and having this $50,000 budget which I wouldn't mind having.

@AlohaPizzaJack Everything they make "better", they make worse. It's more precise, but works less reliably for a shorter space of time, and then off to the landfill it goes. Then we get told we shouldn't waste so much.

"60's/70's truck" The Johnny Cash Special.....

@Anti-Matter It's not about reading the reply, it's about giving a useful answer to it, or at least a polite acknowledgment. And of course, if you did choose to give Instagram a go, then we wouldn't mind hearing about it.

@NEStalgia I dunno. I only check by alerts, in the upper right corner of the page. The emails get sent to one of my anonymous email accounts, that I only visit once or twice a month.

As for those keyboard differences: typical, didn't know that. I figured that since we use the exact same key mapping, we should also be able to type the same letters and/or accents on letters. And what else is the use of being able to select other key mappings? All of that works perfectly fine on my end.
Short cuts outside of the <alt-number combination> also don't work on your end?

For example, type a double colon, and immediately after that an e, a, u or o and you should get this:
ë, ä, ü, ö.

On a side note: ASCII codes aren't standard learning here either, but I did learn about them when I did my IT/helpdesk/telesales education back in the day, and we're talking 2000 here, so quite a while ago already.

I figured most of us would actually know about these. My bad for making that assumption then, I guess.
I do now immediately wonder how the heck anyone in the States is able to order an über...
Nah, just kidding. I know it isn't spelled like that. But it did make for a decent joke, though

On a more useful an interesting note: Nintendo World Report just put up a comparison video of Mortal Kombat 11 Switch vs PS4. The differences are minimal, the most evident being no HDR and subsequent effects/advantages on the Switch version on the left, and an ever so slight difference in resolution, but hardly noticeable, except for the more resolution sensitive OCD types...

That frame rate is buttery smooth, though, so a job well done by mr. Boon and his team, far as I am concerned.

Have a look, everyone:

That Kano fatality. DANCE!!!

In comparison it looks great.

@SheldonRandoms we live in a time where blockbuster is a custom-made set piece for historical dramas.

@ThanosReXXX I've got my keyboard set to ''British English'', and it removes the ability to add diaereses on vowels. No idea why; but since I do 95% of my typing in English, it's a lot easier this way, since it also defaults every dictionary to English.

@ThanosReXXX Ahh yeah, I go by the emails. I haven't actually opened my alerts panel in years...I have a few thousand up there

Nope, those typing shortcuts do nothing. The OS has to be set to a non-US language for that kind of thing to work. But then it of course messes up other things like date formats and currency formats not being US format, and expected US behaviors to not work right, etc. It's a mix of the keyboard hardware and the OS settings that sets what character shortcuts you can get and how. With US_Eng OS and US 85 keyboard (like most laptops) you're stuck with MS Office or copy and pasting each accented character. With US 105 keyboards you can do the alt+ sequence, but that leaves out non-numberpads (I hate numberpad 105 boards just for the ergonomics of it, as well)

The lack of easy ability to type umlauts is probably the reason it isn't written like that.

We have a simple character set with English, but we make up for the simplicity of character variety with an absurd amount of oddly specific yet always conditional grammar rules. Asian languages may be hard and difficutlt from English, but I really feel for them trying to go from that to English. Going from simple characters to thousands of individual characters is painful memorization. Going from thousands of individual characters to 28 that somehow makes several hundred times the number of sounds and doesn't actually have consistent grammar rules must be truly painful if it's not your first language.

@Morpheel Hard to believe. I still think of Blockbuster as the monolithic corporate chain crushing the real stores under their streamlined corporate same-ness. I also think of it as the store that required a credit card back when people didn't tend to have credit cards....

@Octane In Office, you mean? That's just a one time setting, so hardly worth the trouble switching standard key mappings for. And I'm a US native, so that at the very least should have you wondering how I can get along just fine with the standard US keyboard setting in Dutch versions of Windows. (although I do have the system language in English, but it still registers as a Dutch OS in general)

@NEStalgia Well, I suppose it is/can be confusing for Asian people, but English, or actually most Western languages are FAR less complex than Asian ones. Not just because of the smaller alphabet, but also because of the relative stability of the languages over the ages, ignoring for a small moment my earlier musings on the idiocy of some countries wanting to modernize/change words in their language, just for the sake of change itself...

As for those keyboard settings, it still doesn't make any sense to me. My OS (Vista. And yes, I know, but it is a highly customized one, that has all the security and modern abilities that it needs) is in English, keyboard is US American (QWERTY), key mapping is US American as well, and so are all related formats such as time and dates, so I've got all the same settings as you, probably. And ASCII codes are international, no even universal, so they should work all around the world. It's probably just a software setting somewhere, nothing more, since all PC's are basically the same in that regard.

But anyway, enough about dry musty topics like key mappings and weird Windows OS settings. How about that Mortal Kombat comparison video, huh?

EDIT: Kinda weird and/or even slightly moronic to not use the alerts/new messages panel on the site you're on, if you ask me, since that's what it's here for. And it's far easier to use as well, since while you're already here, it would be rather weird not to, and having to first go to your mail account to see if you have an NLife reply seems kinda superfluous, if you ask me.

That's two sites you need to log on to, unless you're always logged into your email, which no sane person should do, by the way. Screw desktop Outlook...

But in all seriousness: I use a second account for hobby related sites and forums, to keep my private life away from that. And of course also my business correspondence, although that's something that just came in handy later on in life. I've always had this second account, so I could more easily keep everything apart.

Eh, MK comparison isn't too interesting to me. I liked MKX, but DoA6 and Tekken 7 are the fighters that have my attention at the moment

I'm much more likely to see emails than proactively checking a different panel in a specific website for updates. And yes, my email is always open Seems weird to me to not be always in your email. Both home and work, I've always had it always open....since Eudora was the main mail client, and usually instantaneous responses to everything are needed. Though the account that gets these messages isn't always the primary one up, so I do have to change tabs to read those, because, like you, I have a few different accounts for a few different things, though I run the domain for most of them

@NEStalgia Don’t worry, at the end it was us store managers getting crushed by our Dish Network overlords.

I use an American English keyboard and keep all sorts of things out of my bowels. That’s my contribution to that conversation.

@ThanosReXXX
I understand.

@Anti-Matter From now on, I'm going to call you the master of short answers...

@NEStalgia No, YOU'RE weird...

But seriously: I just like to keep work and private life separated, so I'm sure as hell not going to be logged in to my mail account all the time. After office hours are mine, and mine alone. People that really need to reach me, have my smart phone number anyway, so that takes care of that.

I still don't see what's so difficult, cumbersome, troubling and/or whatever you wanna call it about clicking on a panel with your own avatar thumbnail on a website that you're already bloody on anyway.
Whenever I go to NLife, the upper right corner is the first thing that I see and open. What else is an account for,
if you're not using it on the site itself, as intended?

And here I was, thinking that only young people were doing the whole "why do things the easy way, if you can do them the hard way" thing...

@AlohaPizzaJack Wait, what? When did bowel contents become a topic on here? Or wait, was that a couple of pages ago, when @NEStalgia mentioned almonds and @Octane tried to sell his fake tofu yogurt to us?