It takes a lot of pressure to trigger an anti-tank mine. I don't think that you'd manage it just stepping on it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPP-B_Wierzba_mine
This is a current Polish anti-tank mine. WP says that it's apparently similar to the Soviet TM-62.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TM-62
Operating pressure: 150 to 550 kilograms (330 to 1,210 lb)
I imagine that there is one for marketing additional accessories to.
Normally on a controller, that's up to you. Linux will report button presses. Games might or might not have configurable gamepad bindings -- they almost always used to do so before controller layouts were standardized, but in 2024, it's often common to just have a fixed layout or maybe an option for it. You can also set up software yourself that could use it.
I have an F710 which I used and enjoyed for years, but it uses a proprietary 2.4 GHz protocol, and at some point, something wireless near me started interfering with it -- occasionally, it'd stop responding to me for a second, which was frustrating in action games. I didn't see the problem with Bluetooth controllers.
Pretty much any USB controller will work. Don't normally need any special software support, and USB specifies the protocol, unless you've got some kind of oddball features on the thing. You can't go too far wrong.
Of the ones that I've used, I've currently settled on the 8Bitdo Ultimate Bluetooth (there's also a non-Bluetooth Ultimate controller that they make, but it doesn't have Hall effect thumbsticks, which I want). Only downside is that it's only available with a Nintendo face button layout, whereas I'd prefer the Xbox face button layout. They do sell replacement buttons, and Steam lets you flip the layout for games using Steam Input. Works with both USB and Bluetooth, and it comes with a charging cradle if you use it wirelessly.
If you seriously want to set something like this up, you're going to need a device that can emit the smells that you want.
This instance of a device looks like it uses atomizers hooked up to different tanks:
https://www.amazon.com/Automatically-Releases-Immersive-Compatible-Platforms/dp/B0CNMXSN2K
I'd imagine that one run as many tanks as one wanted.
One limiting factor is that scent isn't going to immediately change when you change your virtual environment. I'd guess that emitting the vapor close to your face, maybe running a hose up towards it, would help. Probably want some kind of exhaust to purge the previous smell from the room. My guess is that the reason that the reason that a "booth" is used in the submitted article is to minimize the airspace surrounding the user and thus clearing time.
Second, some form of computer control. Maybe some device that has relays controlled via USB. A relay is an electromechanical switch that can can cut power to an atomizer on and off, could run it to the atomizer.
Those guys sell USB devices with up to 64 relays. I haven't looked, but it probably looks to the computer like a virtual serial port, takes text commands.
Then you need some kind of daemon running on the computer to send these commands at appropriate times.
And lastly, you need some way to trigger the daemon when the game is seeing some sort of event. Could monitor the game's logfile if it has one and contains the necessary information -- I recall some Skyrim-hooking software that does this -- take a screenshot periodically and analyze it, or identify and then monitor the game's memory, probably either a technique called library injection (on Linux, library interposers are a way to so this) or using the same API that debuggers use.
If the hentai game that your friend is after is Ren'Py-based -- a popular option for visual novels, which many such games are -- and the game includes the Python source .rpy files, which some do, then the game's source itself could simply be modified. If it contains only compiled .rpyc files, that won't be an option.
You're going to need to obtain whatever scents you want to emit as well. You can get collections of essential oils -- the aromatherapy crowd is into those -- and mix them up to create blends that you want, stick 'em in the atomizer tanks.
One issue is that hacking it into an existing game is going to mean that the game isn't intentionally designed around the use of scent.
If you're going to add scent to something to perfume your body, it seems to me that it makes more sense to put it in something that you aren't in the process of mostly washing away at the time of addition. Almost everything there, aside from the deodorant, is scent added to some form of detergent.
To be fair, he's always smiling and his predecessor had to be the world's least photogenic Pope, so it's probably something that he's focused on doing himself.
Vinegar is nasty
I like salt and vinegar potato chips.
Ah, gotcha, thanks.
The thing the guy is poking at is a synthesizer, a device that lets you compose music and synthesizes the audio.
He got a service manual that showed some technical information about a similar synthesizer that indicated that some of the pins on one of the chips were used for a standard interface used to diagnose problems on devices, called JTAG. He guessed correctly that his similar synthesizer also used the same pins for this.
He made some guesses about what functionality was present, and was able to identify the microprocessor and download the device firmware using this port.
He then went looking for interesting bits of text in the firmware. What he ran across was something that appeared to be a diagnostic shell (I.e. you enter commands and can see a response) as well as the password to access it.
He didn't know how one reached the shell. He went digging in the firmware further and discovered that the device -- which acted as a MIDI device over USB to a host computer -- took in special MIDI commands that would go to this shell.
Now he had a way to access the shell any time he had one of these synths plugged into his computer via USB -- he didn't need to physically connect to the diagnostic pins on the chip.
One feature of the shell permitted modifying RAM on the synthesizer. It wasn't intended to let one upload executable code, but he uploaded it into some unused memory and then overwrote the frame pointer on the stack used by the shell program to point to that code (which a processor uses to know where to continue executing after running a subroutine) and then returned into his code, which let him get to the point where he could not just upload code to the microprocessor but also run it.
He wrote his own transfer program for high-speed data transfer over USB and modified the in-RAM code that displayed video.
This then let him upload video to part of the display and display it at a relatively high frame rate, which is the anime video shown in the last section. I believe that the laptop in the foreground is showing the original frames.
My understanding from two articles recently posted here is that it is a fad for hardware hackers to play this "bad apple" anime video on all sorts of old and low end devices.
I think that California should take keeping itself competitive as a tech center more-seriously. I think that a lot of what has made California competitive for tech is because it had tech from earlier, and that at a certain threshold, it becomes advantageous to do more companies in an area -- you have a pool of employees and investors and such. But what matters is having a sufficiently-large pool, and if you let that advantage erode sufficiently, your edge also goes away.
We were just talking about high California electricity prices, for example. A number of datacenters have shifted out of California because the cost of electricity is a significant input. Now, okay -- you don't have to be right on top of your datacenters to be doing tech work. You can run a Silicon Valley-based company that has its hardware in Washington state, but it's one more factor that makes it less appealing to be located in California.
The electricity price issue came up a lot back when people were talking about Bitcoin mining more, since there weren't a whole lot of inputs and it's otherwise pretty location-agnostic.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/30/this-map-shows-the-best-us-states-to-mine-for-bitcoin.html
(Prices are higher now everywhere, as this was before the COVID-19-era inflation, but the fact that California is still expensive electricity-wise remains.)
I think that there is a certain chunk of California that is kind of under the impression that the tech industry in California is a magic cash cow that is always going to be there, no matter what California does, and I think that that's kind of a cavalier approach to take.
EDIT: COVID-19's remote-working also did a lot to seriously hurt California here, since a lot of people decided "if I don't have to pay California cost-of-living and can still keep the same job, why should I pay those costs?" and just moved out of state. If you look at COVID-19-era population-change data in counties around the San Francisco Bay Area, it saw a pretty remarkable drop.
https://www.apricitas.io/p/california-is-losing-tech-jobs