asty.org – the homepage of Chris Allegretta

Malware is a Humorous Game About 90’s Windows Software Installer Add-Ons

Posted on September 20, 2024September 20, 2024 by chrisa

The question is how much fun can you extract from defeating evil software bundles?

When I saw the trailer for Malware, I was immediately transported back to the late 90s, when you just wanted to install a piece of Windows software, but had to navigate a hellscape of tiny additional checkboxes, each offering very vague but often ultimately useless or outright malicious ‘add on’ programs.

Virtual RAM ‘expanders’, download ‘optimizers’, offers to set your homepage to some website you’d never visit intentionally, ad ‘blockers’, which in many cases added more ads to your browsing experience, these were the inevitable add-ons (today we’d call them opt-out options) shoved into Windows software installers in that era. This originally started harmlessly of …

Watching my revenue crater due to IP changes, and hosting company policies.

Posted on September 12, 2024September 12, 2024 by chrisa

Apparently making your AdSense earnings crater is as simple as changing your IP address for your site. Wheee!

For those interested, I used to have a shared VM and did some hosting for my sis in law’s WordPress instance. Which is fine, but in the last few days she was soliciting help from someone on Fiverr to add some things to her website, and they apparently tried to install a backdoor on her site – I believe unsuccessfully – but it was enough for me. That was all the incentive I needed to split the sites onto different VMs, and ensure nothing we did affected the other. But now my earnings are in the toity, since in doing this the …

Unihertz, it’s Not Too Late to Save the Jelly Max!

Posted on August 19, 2024August 19, 2024 by chrisa

But they MUST embrace LineageOS (IMO), regular updates matter

I can already hear the reviews of the upcoming Jelly Max in YouTube – “….a great phone, probably the best so far from Unihertz, but one you probably shouldn’t buy…”. It drives me crazy to know that’s coming, but it will, if Unihertz continues their track record of not supporting phones with at least security updates – if not entire major Android versions – for 2 or 3 years minimum after release. It doesn’t have to be this way!

The Max has a lot going for it. It’s a reasonable size, which gets you fans right out of the gate – first a perfect screen size at 5″. Everyone else is …

Maniac is a nearly perfect game for just $5

Posted on August 9, 2024September 10, 2024 by chrisa

If you don’t mind excessive violence and a few input glitches, this game is an absolute gem

Maniac by Transhuman Design immediately reminded me of a conversation with my friend Murray about the GTAIII-era games back in the early aughts. He described one of the GTA games as his ‘favorite murder simulator’. Seeing how violent many games have gotten in the last few decades, Maniac may not actually stand out all that much of its level of blood ‘n guts, especially with its top-down perspective and cartoony graphics. What does stand out is how much fun it is, even with in the first minute of firing it up.

[Minor spoilers for post-game unlocks below]

Premise

The premise …

Small phones are almost completely dead, and this is a shame

Posted on July 25, 2024July 25, 2024 by chrisa

I was pleased to find out the Moto Razr (2024) was available, and I’ve since purchased it for a review. But only because I want to use it 90% of the time folded in. I hate big phones!

And yes, I’ve been in tech long enough that anything over 5.5″ feels too big. Need I remind everyone that the iPhone line came with a 4.7″ screen for 6 years (iPhone 6 – 9 and SE) and we all got along just fine with it. Why on earth do we now all want a minimum 6.5″ screen on something we have to try and hold comfortably in one hand?!

A Moto Razr 2024 sitting on a MagSafe dock, displaying a web page while folded.

Samsung still produces something approaching hold-able with their Galaxy S line, and …

Games I almost completely love: SpellRogue (on sale to boot)

Posted on June 3, 2024June 1, 2024 by chrisa

A new series

I’ve actually been trying to write this review for some time. I originally wanted to contrast it with Balatro, which is one of those games which seems to have taken over the indie and deckbuilder communities, and seems to be loved by virtually anyone, myself included. But I think that’s a bit pointless, especially at this point. After all, SpellRogue hews closer to Slay The Spire after all, so let’s talk about it from that perspective.

To be clear up front (aka tl;dr): I like this game quite a bit. I’ll discuss what I think are minor flaws or drawbacks with it, but in general it’s very good and worth a try.

The good news about…