Tags: apple, apple arcade, sony playstation plus, nintendo switch online, nintendo, sony, microsoft, microsoft game pass, renting not buying, games, games as a service

Apple has a platform known as Apple Arcade which is very similar to the Microsoft Game Pass, Sony's Playstation Plus and Nintendo's Switch Online platforms. Hell, even Google has Play Pass.

Games as a service are here. You don't technically own anything anymore. You simply rent it for a period of time and play it while it's made available to you.

Thanks Steam for bringing us down this road. Originally, I was against the idea of what Steam was, but never thought it would get this bad.

So Apple had a bunch of games that were on this rental service and now they're removing these 15:

• Atone: Heart of the Elder Tree


• BattleSky Brigade: Harpooner


• Cardpocalypse


• Dead End Job


• Don't Bug Me!


• Dread Nautical


• EarthNight


• Explottens


• Lifeslide


• Over the Alps


• Projection: First Light


• Spelldrifter


• Spidersaurs


• Towaga: Among Shadows


• Various Daylife

The agreement between the devs and Apple was that for a period of time those games would be on the arcade and they would be available to be played for anyone subscribing to the service. The terms are now up and people who play those games will eventually - 2 weeks? be met with a message saying no longer available. The dev can decide if they want to put the game for sale for full purchase on the store after that. People who had the game through the service will need to buy the game to continue playing it.

This raises all sorts of questions regarding ownership and preservation and the like. It still boggles my mind that people are willing to do it this way.

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5 Comments
Alex - Man, these just keep getting weirder and weirder
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Tags: abandonned villages, hermits, hiking, japan, culture

This sounds so fascinating.

There is an old Japanese village that was cut off from the rest of the world. To get to it, there's a single derelict road that ends at a marina / pier of sorts used by the technicians of a hydro dam. Apparently the only person still living there is a single old man in his 80's.

I found this video of a guy who hikes to remote places. He contacted another guy who is part of a committee to preserve the village - side note, not sure how that's going.

When I say this village is out of the way, that is an incredible understatement. You have to hike for hours from the closest point of contact just to get to the village. The path is so overgrown because no one travels on it anymore and so you can very easily get lost or killed by falling into a ravine or mauled by a bear.

I'm still trying to find the village on google maps but having a hell of a time. The guy doesn't really give much to go on.

3 Comments
andrew - haha, if I found something really cheap, I would definitely consider it Act...
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Tags: Apple, macos, catalina, dosdude1, catalina patcher, late 2011, macbook pro, unsupported macs

There's this guy, dosdude1 who is instrumental in reducing the cost of new macs and bringing new life to older macs.

I have a late 2011 Macbook Pro 15" that has been an incredible machine since I got it. This thing has been to hell and back, in a sense survived floods, dead graphic cards and now had an OS that Apple specifically does not allow on this type of machine is currently running on it.

Basically dosdude1 created a tool that does most of the work for you, it downloads the Catalina installer, will install the installer on a usb key or external hard drive or even install Catalina directly onto your main drive.

Then, there's a tool that's included in the softare that patches the system to add things that were removed during the upgrade so that the older hardware will work again.

This is also the same dude that discovered that you can bypass the dedicated graphic cards in this model machine, which was notorious for kicking the bucket. I've posted previously about the workaround here.

There's one catch to all of this that I honestly have hit a dead end with. My Macbook Pro will not sleep at all. Close the lid and the machine stays on, backlight and all. Tell it to go to sleep and it will but then it doesn't wake up. Let the machines sleep timer kick in and the same thing happens.

I've tried everything I can think of to fix this, scoured the internet for any information I can find but most results come up with a bug in catalina that doesn't really apply to me as far as I can tell. Catalina has an issue with replacement nvme drives - mine can't take an nvme though I have replaced the hdd and dvd with 2 ssd. I think this might be a cause but have no real way to test it.

I have 2 more theories but won't be able to test one of them until I get back to St. Kitts.

1. The gpu work around I'm using - disabling the dedicated AMD Radeon HD 6750M - might have something to do with it. I can't enable the gpu because the bloody thing doesn't work so the machine won't boot with it.
2. Install a fresh copy of catalina and see if that'll fix it. Maybe something in the process of upgrading from Mavericks to Catalina instead of doing a clean install is the culprit. But I don't really have anything to back up onto just yet to try this.

I've thought about downgrading but I need the machine for work right now and despite the no sleeping thing, the machine is purring along like a kitten. It's actually quite surprising how well this thing runs catalina.

I've been able to upgrade all of my apps to their latest versions as well, firefox, office, thunderbird, steam, you name it. Just a pity I can't really play anything intensive with my integrated card...

I might go pick up a 1tb hard drive, there's a place selling them here for 30euros so I figure why not. If I do, I'll try backing up etc and doing a fresh install and see if that helps. I could also wipe the 2nd ssd I have but would nee to copy things over.

I'll post more as I figure things out.

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