I know it’s a long article guys, but it worth your time. This summary is a mess and completely removes crucial details, including all the quotes the summary alludes to. If you’ve got 30 minutes and are genuinely interested give it a read or a listen.

That patent is what I was referring to when I mentioned a novel approach.

Nintendo doesn’t hold a patent on the JoyCon joysticks. As far as I am aware they are an off the shelf component.

A company already makes hall effect joysticks that are JoyCon sized and they claim to hold a patent for them. I haven’t taken the time to verify, but even if they don’t have a leg to stand on they could still take Nintendo to court.

I find that the JoyCons work fine for most games, granted I have small hands. As for power adapters and carrying cases, I don’t carry an adapter and the case I use is very slim. Just enough to protect from drops really.

Using the larger, potentially more durable, joysticks would mean a larger potentially less portable Switch. Given that portability is the core feature of the Switch I can understand Nintendo’s reluctance to implement them. Especially when other companies are experiencing similar issues with their sticks. In my opinion a novel approach is the way to go here. Hall effect is nice, but it is costly and could potentially present some legal challenges at the moment.

I’ve encountered two noticeable issues while using these. The first is probably just shit tier QA, but the second could be that or a design flaw. I haven’t taken the time to tear one apart and reverse engineer it, so I can’t say for sure what the cause is. Anywho, about a third of my sticks will wig out and send complete garbage data when they are pushed to their maximum on one axis. Sometimes it is the X, sometimes it is the Y. Either way it makes the impossible to use and I actually did remove those and replace them. Of the remaining sticks a number of them will depress the under stick button if pushed all the way in one direction. It’s pretty easy to avoid this and it rarely matters so these ones I left alone and didn’t bother to count how many displayed the behavior.

They probably don’t want to use that particular design anyway. I’ve run into a good number of headaches with those joysticks. Not bad enough for me to pull them back out, but certainly enough to be annoying.

On my PC I have 8TBs split across various SSDs (both NVMe and SATA). All of them have games folders. My Switch has 64GB of internal storage and a 512GB microSD card, though I do have a 1TB card ready to go. Just haven’t taken the afternoon to pop it in and redownload my games yet. My PS4 is sitting stock with it’s 500GB internal drive. My Wii U has a 2TB external HDD hooked up to it (I was very optimistic about its potential library). The PC has over 2TB of just games on it. To be frank, it could very easily have a full TB more. But I don’t feel like hunting down all the various launchers’ folders at the moment. Honestly this is largely data hoarding. I only play a few of the games regularly. I keep telling myself I’ll get to dealing with my backlog eventually, but I never seem to find the time for it. The Switch is nearly full, I could fit maybe two more retail games on it. Mercifully Switch games are still pretty small as a rule, I have a library of about 80 games installed on it. Once again this is a case of data hoarding. The majority of the games are ones I have either beaten or played my fill of. I just keep them installed for no particular reason. The PS4 stores more dust than games nowadays, but if I recall I had five games downloaded and they used up somewhere between 300 and 400GB. I’ve honestly considered selling the thing, but I can’t imagine anyone wanting to buy it given its condition. The Wii U, as you might imagine, has vast quantities of space available. Still, I somehow managed to use up a bit over 100GB on the external drive. The largest game I have installed on it is Breath of the Wild at 19GB.

For sure, I’m not saying we have to entirely ban cars. And small cars are much better than large cars. But neither should be everyone’s first thought for “how do I get around town?”

That is barely even the start of what we need. It would do us better to embrace public transit and densification. If we all just switched to small cars instead it wouldn’t solve the underlying issues with car dependent infrastructure. We’d still have wide swaths of useful land buried under miles of concrete and asphalt. We’d still have urban spaces that are hostile to anyone not in a automobile (admittedly somewhat less so). My commute time is nearly doubled simply because all of the parking lots I have to walk through. There’s no need (outside of accommodating drivers) for everything to be separated by so much empty space.

Looks like a centralized alternative to a bank card. Rather than using an existing network like Visa or MasterCard as the backbone it appears that their intent is to build their own separate system. The project is still in the planning phase though, so what it eventually looks like (if it ever happens) is anyones guess.