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brenticus

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brenticus ,

Honestly? Bash. I tried a bunch a few years back and eventually settled back on bash.

Fish was really nice in a lot of ways, but the incompatibilities with normal POSIX workflows threw me off regularly. The tradeoff ended up with me moving off of it.

I liked the extensibility of zsh, except that I found it would get slow with only a few bits from ohmyzsh installed. My terminal did cool things but too slowly for me to find it acceptable.

Dash was the opposite, too feature light for me to be able to use efficiently. It didn’t even have tab completion. I suffered that week.

Bash sits in a middle ground of usability, performance, and extensibility that just works for me. It has enough features to work well out of the box, I can add enough in my bashrc to ease some workflows for myself, and it’s basically instantaneous when I open a terminal or run simple commands.

brenticus ,

The art direction seems kind of off, but sometimes that can shake itself out in game.

The tone of the trailer is definitely not the Dragon Age vibe. Lighthearted Oceans-style crew selection to deal with what looks like some sort of world-ending calamity? Yeah, that’s not right.

Things could work out but I’m sure not feeling optimistic.

brenticus ,

My prediction is that people will overhype it with lots of hopes for super complex systems, call it shit when it has fewer mechanics and civs than 3/4/5/6 with all their DLC, and then eventually decide it’s good after a couple years of DLC and patches.

You know, the usual Civ cycle. I’ll probably buy it day 1 assuming it isn’t actually broken, per usual, and dump a couple hundred hours in it, per usual.

brenticus ,

On principal I don’t use cloud-based password management solutions like this, but Proton Pass does make it somewhat tempting, especially since I have a Proton Unlimited subscription anyways. KeepassXC + syncthing do well enough, but PAM integration would be kind of nice some days when I’m opening and closing my vault a ton.

What are some excellent free games/total conversions that are worth playing the whole thing?

I used up play a ton of Doom mods years ago and a lot of the TCs were fun but lacked substance beyond the surface. Some of the new ones are cool but overly complex. (The Sonic cart game has an hour long tutorial before you start). I was a big fan of Simon’s Destiny, the Castlevania mod for Doom....

brenticus ,

Mount and Blade: Warband has multiple incredible total conversions. I’ve dumped a lot of time into Prophecy of Pendor and The Last Days, probably more than the base game.

For actually free games there are so many options that it really comes down to taste. Unciv is a fantastic reimplementation of Civ 5. Super Auto Pets is a fun casual auto battler. HoloCure is a really good Vampire Survivors-style game themed after Hololive vtubers. There are tons of MMOs and shooters that are F2P and good, but I know most of those from hearsay rather than experience.

An Important Hypothetical - What Android Apps Do You Install?? (sh.itjust.works)

You’re twelve years old on Thanksgiving at six thirty in the morning. You’ll be leaving for Grandma’s in about a half hour, and she’s lives a three hour drive away, going in one direction. You have nothing to prepare yourself on this journey, other than a tablet running Android Eleven. Beware, the speaker is broken and...

brenticus ,

Unciv works perfectly fine on a phone if you feel like risking significant amounts of your time (:

brenticus ,

This is how I do it. I may never stop actually having that gmail account in use due to the number of accounts tied to it, but I at least can use other services going forward without losing tons of stuff.

brenticus ,

Honestly, it’s halfway correct, if I need to go into the office I’d rather be able to interact with people IRL. Most of my work unit tries to be there on Mondays for that reason.

The caveats are that I’d still rather not be there at all and that our office sucks so most people are at least as effective at home anyways.

brenticus ,

Nord Light was also pretty good when I tried it. I waffle back and forth between light and dark themes now and then and there’s always a few good options that brighten the space without flashbanging you.

brenticus ,

My most direct use of fzf is to search large result sets for something I can’t 100% remember the name or location of, so this actually sounds nice. I’ve managed to get fzf to slow down a few times and… well, I’m sure as hell not organizing that folder structure.

brenticus ,

There’s been some controversy around the governance structure and culture with NixOS that has a number of people unhappy. I’m honestly not sure of the details but it’s ptesumably less about the software than the people.

brenticus ,

I only played a few hours of Dome Keeper but it was quite a bit of fun. There’s already a fair amount of variety possible in the runs but not so much that this isn’t appreciated.

brenticus ,

Framework is a private company so they need to agree to be bought. I don’t know enough about the leadership to be able to say the likelihood of accepting an offer, but it’s not just a thing that automatically happens because Dell has a lot of money.

brenticus ,

I’m curious to see where they go next. A lot of modern consumer electronics have repairability and upgradeability problems, but I also wouldn’t expect they’d be able to crack into the phone market as easily as the laptop market, so presumably there’s some more niche target they have.

brenticus ,

As a wee lad I rented it a few times. I never actually figured out how to play it, I just ran around and died but I liked the vibe of it.

brenticus ,

What is the current state of the Early Access version?

“Most planned core features of the game have been implemented. Single-player and multiplayer modes are fully functional and we have a separate dedicated server tool if you want a server running 24/7. There are currently six fully developed biomes out of a planned total of eight (plus the Ocean). There are hundreds of different items (weapons, materials, armor etc) in the game, to be found or crafted by the player. We have over 200 building pieces, and about 50 different types of creatures including monsters, animals and bosses.”

It sounds like the game’s getting Ashlands plus one more biome, but not much for new features. So depending on your definition of feature complete it’s at least pretty close anyways. From this point on it’s theoretically more of the same.

I’m pretty much on the same page as you, although I started playing a couple months ago with a couple friends. The game is obviously not abandoned, and it’s a pretty full game even with more to come. We finally built a hot tub on the weekend and I don’t know how I’m supposed to expect more from this game than chilling in a tub with your naked viking bros.

brenticus ,

Having seen the tube the chicken nuggets are extruded from at a meat plant, at least in Canada they’re pretty much just chicken. Looks like refried beans, sure, but it’s chicken.

brenticus ,

I was going away for a few days and picked up one of my cats to say bye. His reaction was to immediately kick himself off my chest and sprint downstairs. He was also meh about my return. Gotta love him.

brenticus ,

Usually I hate this, I’m using man for a reason, but sometimes I’m scrolling through a novel-length man page thinking that maybe most of this information needs to be anywhere else.

brenticus ,

Got a fancy new Timemore Sculptor 078s grinder this week. Noticeable upgrade from my Baratza Encore, but I’m still working on sorting out grind settings and general methodology. Static is definitely more noticeable now, hot loading is a new concept for me, still sorting out what the RPM settings are doing, etc.

Was at a farmer’s market where Catfish Coffee was selling bags so I’ve been drinking their Sunny Side Up roast this week. It’s a “normal” tasting light roast, I’ve never gotten any super exciting flavour profiles out of it, so it’s actually kind of nice as a way to play with the new grinder. I can play around quite a bit and still get a pretty solid cup of coffee, but I know it well enough that I can sort of tell whether I’m doing better or worse.

brenticus ,

If I would stop spending so much time modifying (read: breaking) it it probably would be more productive. I love the ergonomics of my setup.

But also wouldn’t it be cool to add just one more fancy widget to my already janky-as-fuck eww bar? No? Well I’ll do it anyways.

brenticus ,

The reason you don’t see a lot of love for Manjaro is because your experience isn’t quite typical. Manjaro is notorious for taking Arch and making it less stable. It’s mostly Arch with some defaults and software to make it easier to set up, but the few cases where it drifts from Arch tend to cause more issues than if you just used Arch directly.

brenticus ,

I spent a whole sick day blasting through a good chunk of the games a while back. It’s weirdly fun. I basically just bought it for the pin pull game that always infuriates me in ads but spent several hours getting all the stars in the parking lot game instead.

brenticus ,

It’s a good philosophy, to be sure. It doesn’t take many migrations to realize that keeping your files in open, easy to read formats is preferable.

I also use obsidian, but I do sometimes worry that the linking and metadata will be difficult to work with in the future when the software goes away. It’s all there in the files, but my vault is slowly linking together in interesting ways that rely on obsidian functionality.

brenticus ,

It’s tricky for sure. The plain text is great, and all the functionality is built off of plain text (even the canvas!), but replicating the functionality isn’t trivial by any stretch of the imagination. Migration is easier because of the text files, but will it be as easy to see the links between notes? Or query all the notes I need more detail in? Or map it all out visually?

I think reimplementing the core obsidian functionality in a FOSS clone would be fun… except I already have a queue of projects and not a lot of time, so here I am complaining instead 🤷

brenticus ,

Logseq is a great alternative. It’s very much not a clone, though. It has a different paradigm on how it views notes and the functionality isn’t exactly 1:1.

brenticus ,

I installed steam by going into my discover app, searching for steam, and clicking install. This is how I get most things, excepting a few appimages I downloaded that just work. I change my settings via GUIs that came with KDE. The only extra configuration GUIs I installed were pavucontrol (just like it for some reason) and protontricks (for doing weird stuff with games most people never need to do).

I don’t know what distro/de/wm you’re using right now but what you’re saying doesn’t need to be the case. Linux desktop is honestly working better than windows for me lately.

brenticus ,

The discover store comes with KDE nowadays. GNOME has a similar store. Most recommended distros will preinstall one of those two. Ubuntu has a similar snap store, I think.

I guess the steam flatpak is unofficial. Works, though. Very simple, lazy solution. Could have gone through the fedora repos, too, where they’ve gone through the effort of repacking the deb for their users.

Dunno what your package manager problem is. Don’t even know what you’re running. Mine works fine, and certainly better than the windows store 🤷

Appimages sure aren’t recognized as system apps. They’re basically like an exe on windows. I’d rather manually add my rare appimage to the menu than go through the installer hell windows has.

Your point seems a little silly because, honestly, my experience is that developers have largely made the Linux desktop experience so simple and stable that it works better than any windows machine I’ve used in the past decade. I’m sorry this hasn’t been your experience, but in the last couple of years I’ve pretty much only needed to open the terminal because I want to, not because I need to.

brenticus ,

Uh, I kind of assume you’re trolling at this point since a) you got notably more unpleasant in a hurry, and b) if you think exes work the same way every time you have lived a weirdly blessed life.

I hope you sort out your package management problems sometime but this has clearly gotten unproductive. Cheers!

brenticus ,

40% are verified as at least playable on the steam deck. Another 40% seem to have no rating at all.

74% are at least gold tier in user ratings, which basically means they run fine.

brenticus ,

Have you ever followed a group account?

It’s basically that, but with what sounds like some functionality to make them easier to create and find for users of their app/server/API.

The couple I’ve seen boost my posts in the wild seemed more like bot accounts that just boosted what they saw in the hashtags I used, but it sounds like some of them are probably a bit more curated.

brenticus ,

I’ve happily paid $70 CAD for games significantly shorter and smaller in scope than Shadow of the Erdtree looks. Plus I’m wanting to jump back into Elden Ring anyways and I more than felt like I got my money’s worth the first couple of times. So $56.16 CAD (what my receipt says it cost me) is pretty much fine for that.

This might be a weird take, but I don’t really care whether I’m paying for a new game, a DLC, a microtransaction, or even a gacha pull. If it seems like it’s somehow worthwhile, whether that’s by fun or hours played or novelty or whatever, I don’t really worry that much about what form it takes. This usually means I just buy new games (how often is a microtransaction at all reasonable to pay for?) but I don’t really worry about DLC pricing if it looks good.

brenticus ,

SMTV nailed the general gameplay for me better than any other SMT or Persona game, so I’m interested in better performance on PC and what looks like a semi-functional story. Despite all its flaws I’ve been wanting to play through again, this would make that feel less wasteful.

… But I do wish I didn’t need to rebuy the whole game.

brenticus ,

Honestly? I just let the hype train roll me into the steam store. Not gonna pretend it was a smart decision, certainly not gonna advise anyone else do it.

What were the serious technical flaws at launch? I remember some performance issues but nothing super serious.

brenticus ,

I finished playing through with a friend a few weeks ago. Act 3 wasn’t notably more buggy than the rest of the game for us, and most bugs we came across were fixed by a quick restart anyways.

Great game, highly recommend even if it’s probably overhyped to some extent. We clocked over 100 hours in our playthrough and still want to keep playing.

brenticus ,

Man, OSRS dodging most of the scummy monetization has been fantastic and has contributed greatly to it being relatively lively for so long. I can’t imagine a new owner won’t want to extract every possible drop of value from it, especially an investment firm.

Remaking Podcasts For Text - Podcasts are far and away the great example of how RSS can empower creators. Today’s thought experiment: How can we bring these benefits to written content? (tedium.co)

I haven’t thought enough about it to endorse these ideas, but it seems like a really interesting discussion and one the open source development community ought to be thinking about...

brenticus ,

I think this article starts with an interesting premise (basically: RSS works to support podcast content creators, how can we make it work for written content creators?) and… misses the point.

Podcasts can make a lot of money off of sponsors and advertising that listeners are less likely to skip over. Maybe you’re busy doing something else when the ad comes on, maybe you don’t clue in that it’s an ad right away, maybe you just don’t know how long it is so as you skip around you hear enough anyways. Advertising works in an audio format.

Text content can’t advertise as effectively. Your eyes can just skip over to the next part you care about. Adblockers work pretty well. A reader is way less likely to engage with advertisement, so it’s going to pay less, so written content creators are going to make less. Usually to the point that they can’t support themselves with it.

None of the author’s points really address that. The problem isn’t with the RSS standard, it’s with the format and how it can make money.

brenticus ,

Since release I’ve been playing BG3 every week with a friend and we finally beat the game on Saturday. Great game, but man we’ve been playing it for a long time.

Picked up Viewfinder yesterday. Fun little indie puzzler. Very cool concept, don’t know how much I care about the plot or anything but it’s got some of the same trippy fun as Superliminal.

Oh, and I played a couple hours of Against the Storm and have been hesitant to pick it up again because I’m pretty sure it’s going to be problematic for my already busy schedule.

brenticus ,

For my V60 pourovers I mostly set my Encore to 16, sometimes varying by +/- 2 for different beans at different ages.

I think this is neat idea, but some days I’ll just vary it based on what I’m feeling, nevermind any fixed variable, so I personally just like knowing the starting point to play with for different grinders/brew methods.

brenticus ,

Hope you enjoy! It’s a very satisfying way to make coffee, even on those days where something doesn’t taste quite right.

brenticus ,

I picked up Binding of Isaac: Rebirth and have been doing runs now and then. I played the original when it first came out and couldn’t get into it; the years of development seem to have done it a lot of good, feels much more playable than I remember.

brenticus ,

Chants of Sennaar. Thought it would fun, turned out to be probably my favourite thing I played this year.

BG3, TOTK, and Vampire Survivors are all very up there as well. Really great year for games.

brenticus ,

There are actual use cases for satellite internet. I heard from an evacuee from the Northwest Territories in Canada here that he was basically only able to get updates on what was happening—i.e. what roads weren’t on fire and where evacuation centers were—because of a couple of people with starlinks. There are huge areas up there with little to no internet infrastructure, and this summer much of that was damaged in the fires.

Ground infrastructure is expensive to run out to extreme rural areas, and it’s also vulnerable in different ways from satellite infrastructure. In the US, yeah, it’s dense enough that ISPs mostly need to get their shit together, but there are very large areas where running a cable has a lot of problems.

brenticus ,

Shit, that picture outside Edmonton is hardly even distant, there are a bunch of communities in northern Alberta and BC that don’t even have roads going to them because they’re too far away.

brenticus ,

For your first case while evacuation and such, there are alternatives and you shouldn’t need full internet access for situations like that. (obviously this isn’t the case right now)

People absolutely need internet access in evacuation situations. They need information to know where it’s safe to go, where they can get help, what routes are still open, whether it’s safe to return home, whether their home still exists… in some cases the only communication methods are either internet-based or literally flying a plane in, there aren’t even roads to some communities that need to be evacuated. There is way too much information people need to be able to rely on local communication methods like radio.

And that’s really one of the only other options in these situations. The fibre line (pretty much singular, because the cost to run fibre over thousands of kilometers is enormous) going through the NWT was destroyed in the fires as a fire was approaching Yellowknife. Cell towers can literally melt from the heat of some of these fires. Ground infrastructure is vulnerable to all of the climate disasters our world is currently facing. And that’s ignoring it getting destroyed by actively hostile actors like in Ukraine.

Do Starlink and Musk suck? Absolutely. Fuck them. But satellite internet is increasingly showing itself to be a necessity, and to think otherwise really underestimates the size of our world and the vulnerability of our infrastructure. We need better management of it, but we definitely need it.

brenticus ,

A definition I saw recently that I like is that time is the direction of entropy. You follow time one direction and you get the big bang where everything is chaotic and happening, and in the other direction you get the heat death of the universe, where everything has settled into a base state and nothing’s happening.

brenticus ,

I wish I had a link, I think acollierastro talked about it briefly in one of her videos but I think it was a sidebar on something else so I have no idea which one. It was just one of those things where I heard the statement and it clicked on some weird intuitive level.

I probably used “chaotic” inaccurately, but entropy strives towards maximum disorder in that there is energy holding things together and that energy won’t hold forever. The big bang was basically a big explosion where a whole lot of order was imposed on the universe, for example by forming particles, and since then there’s this general trend towards things falling apart. Energy can be used to fuse a particle, but left alone that particle will eventually fall apart, even if it’s not moving. That’s entropy. So time is that quantity where, given enough of it, things fall apart.

Does that make sense? I have no idea if I’m explaining it properly, my physics background is super scattered.

brenticus ,

I’m not sure that’s quite right in the sense that entropy is still meaningful on the level of individual particles—phenomena like proton decay, for example. But yeah, fundamentally it’s an emergent property from the way energy works, and on a grand scale that tendency is a way to view time.

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