Redkey

"NPM install" isn't going to be the direct result of a race condition in JavaScript. And while I'm not familiar with Python, I'd guess that an "Indentation error" wouldn't be one either. A missing library or syntax error that's only discovered by executing a particular branch is still just a missing library or syntax error, not a race condition.

Also, while Node.js is popular, it isn't an integral part of JavaScript in the way that the other errors are integral to their respective languages.

For 2, one of the few pieces of Windows software that I haven't been able to replace in Linux is GetRight. Many HTTP servers support downloads starting at an offset from the beginning of the file, and GetRight uses that to allow download pausing and resumption.

It was a real life saver back when I had an extremely flaky Internet connection.

EDIT: Thanks for all the suggestions, I'll definitely take a look at them. Simply resuming downloads is why I initally started using GetRight, but it also came with a bunch of other useful tools that I came to rely on. While I've been able to replicate some of the basic functionality with individual browser plugins or programs, I haven't seen anything that integrates it all so well, with such a smooth interface. I haven't looked for a long time, though, so maybe one of your suggestions will be the one!

Who else remembers seeing images like this -- that would've taken a few seconds to a few minutes to render even on high-end graphics workstations of the time -- presented in gaming rags as examples of what PS1/N64/Saturn and later PS2/GameCube/DreamCast/XBox were "going to be capable of producing"?

A potential ley line blockage that's cleared by a ritual performed every winter solstice by a hobbyist spellcaster who lives on a farm in the middle of nowhere?

"... [it] isn't actually necessary... the whole spell falls apart without it for some reason."

That's peak cargo cult ~~programming~~ spellcasting right there.

I was confused at first, because I saw this post less than an hour after it went up, but the game wasn't free. Then I read the top post by developer and found that the game is free with ads through some other site/service called "Playmanity".

Here's a direct link.

This looks like an attempt to copy the "Hello Neighbor" concept wholesale, although the most trustworthy looking review has much worse things to say about it. The majority of the reviews are pretty obvious shills, but I'll give a special shout-out to whoever wrote this line that made me laugh (I don't think I've seen it before):

"Made me cry but the tears came out of my underwear."

Yep, I put an Afterburner mod in mine back in the day and got the best of both worlds: a screen you can see without standing outside at midday, and a comfortable, wide layout that doesn't make your hands cramp up.

I don't know if I'd say it's the worst, but it must be in the top 10: The cookie baking puzzle from Still Life.

TL;DR The author of the puzzle mocked complaining players for not having basic cooking knowledge, but I think that the more you actually know about cooking, the less likely you are to find the "correct" solution.

The player character has promised to make a batch of Grandma's special Christmas cookies. However, Grandma wrote her method in code (e.g. "a cup of love", "a tablespoon of romance"), and while the PC can remember the list of ingredients, she can't remember which is which.

Now, some things are pretty clear; the recipe isn't going to call for two cups of ginger and a teaspoon of flour. And there's only one item given without a quantity, so that must be the egg (even if it goes into the mix at the completely wrong time). But there are literally no other hints in the game, and the puzzle's author confirmed (more on this later) that you're supposed to solve it by having some real-world, basic cooking knowledge.

The problem is that the author didn't seem to know quite as much about cooking as they thought they did. Also, there are places where swapping ingredients would be perfectly acceptable (it would change the flavour, but how is the player supposed to know how the finished cookies are meant to taste?)

When I played the game, I did have some basic cooking knowledge. I'd made (from scratch) cookies, cakes, soups, stews, and even done a couple of roasts. I tried to solve this puzzle on my own multiple times. And the game won't tell you you've got it wrong until you've mixed everything and put it in the oven. I'm sure this would've been annoying enough with a mouse, but I was playing with a controller on an OG XBox, moving a slow pointer around with a thumbstick. Ugh.

Anyway, after spending far too long on it, I hit the net for a walkthrough, but in the process I found an interview with the author, in which this very puzzle was discussed. The interviewer mentioned that a lot of players hated this puzzle, and asked if the author had any response. As much as smugness can be transmitted through plain text, he smugly stated that it wasn't his fault if players didn't have basic life skills like simple cooking.

I won't go into details, but the more I've learned about cooking in general, and baking cookies in particular, the less sense the method of that recipe makes.

I recently wasted multiple evenings going through this with my partner's photos on both OneDrive and Google. It was a nightmare, trying to disentangle their systems from the cloud, and delete stuff from the cloud (they were hitting the free quotas, which was causing problems) without also deleting that content locally.

I ended up doing a full backup from the cloud to an external drive and unplugging it just to be sure, then carefully using the awful web interfaces to delete a bunch of photos and videos from the cloud after deactivating all the auto-backup "options", which is apparently the only way to do it without also wiping your local media. There doesn't seem to be any way to do it while using the "service" normally on the device; any attempt to delete from the cloud will also delete your local copy.

People have called me paranoid for seeking out and removing/deactivating these "services" with extreme prejudice on my own devices, but this experience was even worse than I'd imagined.

Assembler, BASIC, Old C code, Cobol...

...Pascal, Fortran, Prolog, Lisp, Modern C code, PHP, Java, Python, C++, Lua, JavaScript, C#, Rust...

The list is infinite.

Show me a language in which it is impossible to write spaghetti code, and I'll show you someone who can't recognize spaghetti code when it's written in one of their favourite languages.

Even crazier, the C64 version was only distributed in North America, ignoring the majority of potential buyers. And it apparently runs OK on PAL machines without modification.

One of the big draws of the game was all the detail in the backgrounds, and the little touches of animation. The C64 version being disk-only allows it to retain a surprising amount of this. As a tape game, the already long inter-level load times would've blown out and ruined the game.

I don't think that an NES or Master System port could've covered the game even as well as the C64 version. But I agree that it is strange that there was no Mega Drive or SNES version. The SNES in particular could've replicated a lot of the arcade's scaling effects with a minimum of trickery.