Audiobellum My favorite trick is to down coffee and do something until sleep takes you. If it doesn't work, you should see a doctor.
My other favorite is an herbal substance that's legal in my state, but could be taboo here. It's probably fine to mention it it's medicinal, right? It was a doctor that suggested it to me in the first place, I think that counts as a prescription.
If you want to avoid drugs in general whether it's caffeine, melatonin supplements, or federally questionable plants, try going for a walk. Walk where it's dimly lit and smell the night air. Your body should take care of the rest. Wear a coat to stay warm if that's a problem. Doing anything that raises your body temperature like running will get in the way of the production of melatonin, the sleepy (sometimes sad) brain chemical.

    Audiobellum It just gets worse with age. I was fine till I started working night shifts. Now I usually sleep 3 or 4 hours at night and take a nap or two during the day. Oh that used to be so nice getting all my sleep at once.

      Hmm... yeah. I have this weird sleep disorder or something. I can stay up for a week straight, just napping like an hour or two here and there. Then I will have to do the opposite, basically sleep for a week and wake up for a few hours to take care of stuff. Luckily I work from home and I'm my own boss, but I've lost jobs in the past because of it. Sort of why I ended up in the freelance thing. Thankfully I just woke up today, got a lot of work done I've been putting off. I do take medication for it, it was much worse before that. But I kind of got used to it even though I know it's likely not good for me.

      Does anybody at all remember Senses Fail? Do I remember whether or not I already asked? The answer to one of those is "no"

      duane There are Haskell bindings for Godot, but I'm lucky to do what I do with Gdscript. My games are hardly mission critical.

        Also Rust. About to become second Linux kernel language, though it may stretch a bit the pure functional paradigm. And I am waiting for a "how to shoot yourself in the foot with Rust" :-)

        Has anyone here dabbled with google's carbon language yet ?

        Dear NSA, we're not always of the same opinion, and I always expect second thoughts from the likes of you, but in this specific case I grudgingly agree 😬

        As soon as my OS has Rust natively in the Kernel (next major release, I believe) and most of the libraries are rusty as well or at least offer bindings, I'll switch.

        😎

        I kinda don't really like C/C++ anymore. I use it because it's typically the only (or best) choice for low-level stuff or integrating SDKs.

        Rust looks pretty nice, actually, just read some tutorials. Still will take a while for everything to be updated. Also Google is pushing Carbon as a C++ replacement.

        And C# is nice as a language, I just don't like the disconnect between using managed and unmanaged code. But I think it's fair to say C/C++ is on the way out.

        Does anyone know of any free software that can increase the resolutions of videos?

          I don't know of any specific software to upscale or upsample videos, but there surely are several converters or so out there. Would have to search for your OS.

          Without checking, I'd say FFMPEG can do everything. Everything ? Everything. But has a learning curve.

            Audiobellum https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve

            nevermind he uses a feature in the paid version. Kinda akward since they already have a resolution limit on the free version limiting you to 4K exports. Bah.

            edit 2: I did recall correct, the feature used to be in the free version without watermark before they added the AI enhancer to it. Download version 15 non studio flavor(thats the free one) from here leftmost column scroll down:
            https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/support/family/davinci-resolve-and-fusion

                Pixophir The answer to everything is FFMPEG, and yet I have never bothered to learn it. That's a lie, I know you convert file type by changing the file extension in the output. I use that and optipng to jam as many assets in my HDD or whatever is inside this laptop.
                I think it's flash based PCIE something something. lsblk returns nvme0n1, and I'm obviously a linux magician, so I think I'm right.

                  Speaking of hard drives, I have 3 naked ones I use when flash drives aren't big enough. I'm listening to whoever has a good way of storing and handling them with little chance of them breaking.
                  I just dropped a 500GB back up drive of old project files, and typing this as I'm recovering from mild cardiac arrest.

                    You can get USB enclosures. This will keep them safe, and also allow USB access. However, if they are traditional spinning disks, they don't last long. I think in the 10 to 15 year range before you start to lose data. Flash drives and SSDs are more stable (no moving parts, less room for wear and tear). You can probably get a good 512GB drive for like $50, and then transfer everything important to that. I actually bought an M-Disc drive, which is a form of Blu-Ray and lasts 1,000 years. Yes, one thousand years. The discs are DVD/Blu-Ray shape and go up to 100GB. The issue is that they are just a pain to work with, and you can't really used them as a USB disk, they are for archiving or writing once. Plus, even if the disc lasts for 1,000 years, it's doubtful there will be any working drives or computers as we know them to read the disc in the year 3022.

                    packrat

                    Last time I checked LTO tapes are still king for long term storage and you can probably pickup an old LTO 5 drive/tapes for cheap (3TB per tape). If it's really sensitive then keep them in a Faraday storage box to ensure they don't degausse during the next X+ class solar flare lol.

                    If you want plug and play day to day expandability though, I've seen versions of these caddies that support 4 drives:
                    https://www.umart.com.au/product/simplecom-sd322bk-dual-bay-usb-3-0-aliminiumdocking-station-for-2-5in-and-3-5in-hard-drive-35336

                    They often come with nice features like a drive cloning button too which is cool.

                        My favorite part of game development? Throwing paint like a 6 year old to piano renditions of My Chemical Romance I found off torrented files from who knows where.
                        Yours?

                        Bimbam I am using one like that as we speak, only there's no features beyind flashing the blue light when a disk is being read.
                        As for safely handling them, all I found was WD orientation videos boiling down to "less butterfingers, discharge static before touching"

                          Saw this on youtube for the shader deficient like myself. He just gives his code to paste in there.

                          I heard that movie was good and I like Tim Burton. Might have to check it out.

                          packrat

                          As far as I know, every hard drive made in this century ships its heads automatically when power is removed, and most do so after x minutes of inactivity even when power is on. You'd have to hit it with a big hammer to do any damage, though if it landed really badly, you could break the circuit board. I'd worry more about static electricity.

                          I've got about 20TB of data, accumulated over the years, and hard drives are the cheapest, highest density, and most reliable solution for archiving. Some of my drives date back fifteen years, and I've never lost any data from any of them. I checksum everything, looking for changes, but I haven't found any. As long as you store them vertically and run checks on them every few months, they'll keep going. I keep them in conductive bags, in cardboard drive storage boxes.

                          I'd love it if someone would start making really high density (TB) optical discs, but the movie people would never allow it unless it was hideously crippled so they could pretend that it couldn't copy their blurays. I guess if m-discs really store 100GB, I could burn 400 of them (got to have at least one backup) and theoretically store them in roughly the same space as my hard drives, if they were in cake boxes, not regular cases. 🙂

                              duane I've never had a hard drive fail. I've had a fair number of computers fail but not a hard drive. Seems like you could keep it in most anything really. If you have some 1/4 inch plywood make a little box for it and add some foam around the sides, or just a shoe box or whatever you have or find some plastic box at walmart that's about the right size.

                                  fire7side

                                  I had a hard drive crash before the turn of the century, but only one. And I saw a cdc hard disk pack catch on fire once, when the drive failed catastrophically. Got to watch some operators sprinting for the halon abort switch. (I was too young and dumb to know what to do at the time.) 🙂

                                    I've had tons of drives fail. But I've also owned my own computers since 1999 and typically have at least 3 I use regularly, and a bunch in the closet. Right now, I might have 10 or 15 computers, most of them low-end that I use for testing stuff. Not sure why, I could probably survive with 1 desktop and 1 laptop, but I really love computers.

                                    One time years ago, I had two computers crash with fatal hard drive failure, and the other one out of commission due to a RAM failure (my fault, though, cause I was overclocking and didn't know what I was doing). So basically 3 computers die in the same week.

                                    That said, I found one of the first games I ever made from 1998 on a 3.25" floppy drive, and it amazingly still worked. Got a USB floppy drive for $15 off Amazon, and all the files were still good. Sadly it was made in a really old version of Java and I couldn't compile it. Might have to either put together an old virtual machine, or just take the assets and code and port it to Godot. Might be a fun project.

                                    cybereality Is this post broke, or is it some kind of web script my lobotomized computer won't run?

                                      No, the post is fine. You probably have an ad blocker or something.

                                      https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08FSZT2J7/

                                        Yes, it is add blocker or tracking protection. Can't see the links either.

                                        cybereality That's what I thought too, but a raw firefox didn't work either. Wacky. First time I ever saw that happen.
                                        I almost forgot to say something bad about Amazon. That would have been tragic.

                                        ...
                                        I have nothing clever this time. I know, it's shameful. Big corp bad.

                                        Another edit.
                                        I think I know why it doesn't work. My computer just doesn't want to touch Amazon.com. I didn't teach him this, he's doing it on his own. He takes after his father, and I couldn't be prouder.

                                          A heads up for the interested (I am), tomorrow at 3:30 utc (that is in 5 hrs at the time of writing) Nasa will start their live stream for the third attempt to launch the SLS Artemis mission.

                                          I mean they'll start the life stream. If they launch the rocket, that remains to be seen 😎

                                          Why is it that we want to go to the moon again? I forget.

                                            First this is a proof of concept. Second, planned is a permanent station in a high orbit around the moon. Third is about testing the effect of deep space (outside of earth's magnetic shielding) on astronauts (Mars mission prep). Fourth prep for an eventual ground station on the moon. Fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth about science, exploration, economic benefit(?), and inspiration(??). Ninth and tenth as well.

                                            Vamos a ver :-)

                                            DaveTheCoder Same two reasons we ever went anywhere. It looks cool, and there's probably something cool we can do there.

                                            Ya see, Pixophir agrees. He just used a lot more words.

                                              Megalomaniak I would, but I'm real poor and I have 12 years of harvested HHDs.
                                              Maybe if I had money, I would still stick to the HHDs. I like the whir whir soft clicky sounds they make.
                                              I am still sticking to what I said about main station guts. Arch boots in less than 10 seconds with flash based storage and I couldn't be happier. I lied, I am even happier, the two HHDs docked next to it make all the whir whir sounds I'd possibly want. It's really a great setup.

                                                I think it's cool we're going to the moon, but I doubt we will find anything. It's just a rock.

                                                And all the deep space stuff, we probably won't get there for at least 50 to 100 years, but you have to make small progress to make big progress.

                                                @duane I've wanted to say this for a while but I keep forgetting. I listen to a ton of punk, and everytime I see your face on this forum, there's a dude screaming in my speakers and it's not a far stretch to imagine it's you. I wanna let you know that in my world, you have a great voice. <3 (not gay, just masculine admiration(unless all this time you've been a 19-25 year old girl(in which case, whats your number?)))