I’m beautiful and tough like a diamond…or beef jerky in a ball gown.

– Titus Andromedon

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Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: July 15th, 2025

I bought it on Xbox 360 marketplace forever ago, and at some point, it disappeared from my games list and local drive. When I tried to re-download it, it no longer showed up in my purchases. This was a few years ago and before Xbox Live shut down for the 360, and all my other digital purchases were available, just not Syndicate.

Fast forward to now, and I can’t find the game available anywhere (Gog and Steam at least).

I remember it having an all-star cast (Brian Cox and Rosario Dawson, specifically) and some really cool game mechanics and story.

Did that game just get memory-holed? Wikipedia says it was banned in Australia, but that doesn’t apply to me.

Edit: There are used copies I can buy on eBay for the 360 (mine somehow still works) but I was looking to buy a PC version for longevity/future proofing since I like to revisit old games every so often and my 360 is already on borrowed time.

  • If it’s a relatively recent laptop, it should be fine.

    Many of them will let you set custom charge limits. If yours supports that, limit it to like 60% or thereabouts. Long enough that you can get some UPS use out of it but not full enough it’s ever gonna go spicy pillow on you.

    If it won’t let you set a charge limit, they’ll still kind of float around full charge but not stay at 100% all the time. Even plugged in, mine will drop down from 100% to eventually 92% before it will start charging back to 100 again. That’s over the course of several days to a week.

    If the laptop is older than about 2017 or so, or still has a removable battery, you might want to just take the battery out and use an external UPS as those typically don’t have the extra charge management features newer ones do.

    To run them full time, you either want to remove the screen or “tent” them because a lot of heat is dissipated through the keyboard, and it’s normally expected to be open while running because of that. By “tent”, I mean open it halfway and put the screen facing down so it’s standing up and shaped like a tent.

What’s something you add to (most of) your dishes that gives it a signature taste or a special kick?

I like to throw a pinch of chicken bouillon in a lot of different dishes, sometimes in lieu of salt or in addition to. The bouillon I use also has onion, garlic, and paprika so it gives everything a subtle but welcome kick.

The Wii U console and gamepad communicate via 5 GHz 802.11n WiFi, but in order to deter other parties from simply hopping onto the access point, Nintendo slightly obfuscated this WiFi standard. Specifically the WPA authentication was modified by a byte swap in the PTK, rendering every existing WiFi stack incompatible with the Wii U.

Knowing this, the key is to use a platform that allows one to pre-break WPA in a similar fashion, such as is possible on e.g. Linux and BSD. Along with the use of the hilariously insecure WPS that is triggered when the gamepad’s sync button is pressed, this enables one to connect a modified Linux system to a Wii U console. After this the console starts sending h.264 (AVC) encoded video to the ‘gamepad’, and a binary packet can be sent back with the controller inputs.

Suffice it to say that this finding was immediately turned into a GitHub project called Vanilla Wii U, that enables a Steam Deck to be used as a gamepad, as well as any Linux – and presumably BSD – system with a compatible WiFi adapter.