@troyunrau@lemmy.ca cover
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troyunrau

@troyunrau@lemmy.ca

Centrist, progressive, radical optimist. Geophysicist, R&D, Planetary Scientist and general nerd in Winnipeg, Canada.

troyunrau.ca (personal)

lithogen.ca (business)

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troyunrau ,
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No one commenting on your playlist? You're cathartic music experience is showing :)

troyunrau ,
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Early computer aided art and programs I've written, dating back decades.

In the mid 1990s I used ImpulseTracker to create music. The music sucks. But losing the original source .IT files would be heartbreaking.

Likewise, my first programs, written as a child in MS DOS batch files circa 1991 -- basic menu driven interfaces that facilitated launching my installed sharware... I don't have the games the program points to anymore, but that isn't the point ;)

troyunrau ,
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Fourth panel. AI trained on all the above, floods it all with generated content rendering the signal-to-noise ratio too terrible to tolerate, even for corporations.

troyunrau ,
@troyunrau@lemmy.ca avatar

That reminds me...

In circa 1995 I was running a dial upBBS service -- as a teenager. So if course, it was full of bootlegged video games and such, and people would dial in, download a game, log off.

Someone uploaded Descent or something like that. But they had put "deltree /y C:" or similar into a batch file, used a BAT2COM converter program, then a COM2EXE program, then padded the file size to approximately the right size with random crap (probably just using APPEND)... And uploaded it. Well, fortunately for the rest of my users, I say the game and said: oh, that's neat, I should try it and copied it to another computer over my internal network and launched it. It started deleting files right away and I hit CTRL-C to abort. I lost only a few dozen files.

Banned the user, deleted the package. Got lucky.

troyunrau ,
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Network interruption would cause it to run then. Or an API change. Dangerously causing it to actually run.

troyunrau ,
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Just make it ridiculous. Like instructions to get an artifact that will resurrect you from a museum in France... Then if it goes off by accident, it is comedy.

troyunrau ,
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I still go to Reddit for some communities that don't have critical mass on Lemmy. Sure you can talk about programming or Linux here, but the more niche ones (like specific mods for specific games) are entirely absent.

But when I want to post something or create content, it goes here.

troyunrau ,
@troyunrau@lemmy.ca avatar

4D conspriacy theory: was actually killed by Airbus, because the negative press for Boeing will push the Airbus stock price up...

I feel bad for the guy. This is going to put a wet blanket on future whistleblowers, regardless of the actual cause.

troyunrau ,
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I've met the devs in person. They keep turning down literal suitcases full of cash from people who want to bundle adware and crap in one of the most popular programs ever. Don't assume VLC is going down that road -- they've stuck to their ethics for decades.

troyunrau ,
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Not bells either ;)

troyunrau ,
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So has anyone done a read through and has thoughts? Someone in my D&D ground sent me a Tiktok video about it, but (to quote Sinatra) "my generation is showing".

troyunrau ,
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Very cool as a tech demo. Terrible as a product.

troyunrau ,
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The kindness of admins is a requirement of pretty much all internet infrastructure. Email servers are the same, no? And it gets even harder with proprietary networks -- if the admins are being unkind, you can just switch discord servers or whatever. Anyway, I digress.

troyunrau ,
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Seriously, it feels like 1999 internet. And I'm loving it!

troyunrau ,
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Ouch. I know Bandcamp isn't owned by its founders anymore, and the new owners in theory are sketch... But it's still close to the best webstore ever conceived for music. The payment processing alone is worth it. What is Faircamp in that space?

kde , to KDE
@kde@floss.social avatar

The Plasma 6 Megarelease is just 2 weeks away! Have you signed up for your local party yet 🥳?

KDE is organizing parties around the globe to celebrate the megarelease. Join us in the celebration with a party in your city or town!

https://community.kde.org/Promo/Events/Parties/KDE_6th_Megarelease

@kde

troyunrau ,
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Oooh, I wish I had time for this. :)

troyunrau ,
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All six people who still play Diablo 4 probably bought it though...

troyunrau ,
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Does it have a microSD slot? Can't tell from the article

troyunrau ,
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Damn. That's like my minimum purchase criteria. It looks nice otherwise.

troyunrau ,
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Not a shill. Don't like Nvidia. But, this drop-in replacement is more like a framework for a future fully compatible drop-in replacement than a fully functional one. It's like wine from two decades ago to windows -- you might get a few things to work...

troyunrau ,
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DM trying to get you to pass the bottle.

troyunrau ,
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As a long term slackware aficionado, I agree that it meets the criteria. But it also is significantly different from other distros in enough ways that you may find yourself relearning things you took for granted. And that is off-putting for a lot of users.

troyunrau ,
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Such a good comic. There should be more swords in them though 🗡️

troyunrau ,
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Mommy issues is not a sickness... Unless it is.

troyunrau ,
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Happens in published campaigns just as much, but you can at least use the book as a hammer and keep slapping them with it until they're back on the rails.

Homebrew is fantastic because you can steer where your players go, provided they go somewhere interesting.

troyunrau ,
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My favourite published campaigns are the most sandboxy. The Lost City had a sanctioned hardbound 5e conversion by Goodman Games. It's just this underground city with dozens of temples and other locations in immediate proximity to one another, and you can sort of do them in whatever order. But there's hints and suggestions about where to go next.

https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/b43a2e9d-0646-4eb1-8298-d572409219c4.jpeg

troyunrau OP ,
@troyunrau@lemmy.ca avatar

Have another. One of our tents is sneakily in this one, the a few white pixels in top right -- to give a sense of scale.

https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/88987cc1-8779-42ef-bf4a-abbc8855b2c5.jpeg

otl , to Programming
@otl@hachyderm.io avatar

Why We Can't Have Nice Software

https://andrewkelley.me/post/why-we-cant-have-nice-software.html

From Andrew R. Kelley, he's the author of the Zig language

@programming

troyunrau ,
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Hey, a lot of open source software is really warty too. But you could probably also blame that on capitalism if you tried hard enough :)

troyunrau ,
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No, it didn't. But open source software follows the same cycles sometimes. The Gnome 2->3 transition is a simple example -- they de-invented whole sections of the software to make a worse but newer dishwasher.

troyunrau ,
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Lemmy (like its predecessors) is temporally arranged content. Think of it like having a discussion in a pub. Imagine bringing up a topic and someone said: but we discussed this 5 days ago, so we cannot discuss it now. Your obvious response would be: but I wasn't here five days ago. It's okay to repeat a conversation.

If you want more of a hierarchical structure, use wikipedia article conversations. Then each conversation only occurs once (ish). Not encouraging repeated conversation here will lead to slow content death -- like on StackOverflow.

troyunrau ,
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In this thread: a bunch of people making it more complicated than it needs to be.

Grab an old laptop, grab a user oriented distro that has a live-USB boot option. Play and learn.

Live USB options that should be user friend enough. Choose at random -- because you like their logo or whatever.

https://pendrivelinux.com/put-mandriva-2010-on-a-usb-flash-drive-windows/

https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Live_USB_stick

https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2230389

https://linuxmint-installation-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/burn.html

troyunrau ,
@troyunrau@lemmy.ca avatar

Play a Dwarf civilization in Anbennar (EU4 mod). It's epic. Almost this epic: https://youtu.be/34CZjsEI1yU

troyunrau ,
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So. Starfield then

troyunrau ,
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The safety program makes sense if it was designed by a kobold...

troyunrau ,
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It's a fantastic little adventure platformer, wrapped up with cat physics. Some of the missions you end up doing don't seem catlike at all, but I forgive them -- most cats wouldn't properly move a plot along without the prompting of their robot friend either. ;)

It's a very nice game, and at a good price point. :)

troyunrau ,
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Robot opens door for cat. Cat sits and looks

troyunrau ,
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BG3 still. Just started Act 3 for the first time. Astarion as my main.

troyunrau ,
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Yeah. If you're a conpletionist like me, you just run around picking up junk to sell to vendors so that you can buy one of every available named weapon (and store it in camp and never use it)...

Oh, there's plot? Sorry, busy systematically looting an entire castle... I kid. A little.

I'm really enjoying how each character has a good arc, and that those arcs feel so substantially different from one another.

troyunrau ,
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These pokemon are getting out of hand!

troyunrau ,
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Line the apples up next to each other, I guess. Sort of like taking a single slice through multiple carrots on the cutting board at once. Harder to do with apples given their shape, but I'd the knife is big enough, or you're counting a slice as "single continuous motion" then it is probably valid.

I can't think of any other physical solution that isn't a joke, so this is the most probable puzzle solution. In a D&D setting I might require a slight of hand check with a very low DC to pull off the single slicing motion.

troyunrau ,
@troyunrau@lemmy.ca avatar

Check if your instance is running 0.19 (scroll to bottom)

troyunrau ,
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If you're using a web browser, just add the image host domains to your Adblock or ublock origin Blacklist.

troyunrau ,
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I think "/pictrs/" is in the path for the image hosting. That might be rule-friendly.

troyunrau ,
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I remember it and was there, on the KDE side of it. Summarized half-remembered version.

Corel WordPerfect had been ported to linux late in the 90s and they got this notion that people only bought Windows to use MS Office. So if they made their own OS, people would buy it just to use WordPerfect. They had grand plans to take KDE and linux and package it as a consumer grade OS. The closest other competitor doing that at the time was Caldera, and they were seeing some success, so why not eh?

They hired two people to "fix" KDE. But the people they hired had no idea how open source worked -- how to interact with a community that functioned more like a meritocracy than a managed hierarchy. They showed up on the mailing list and tried to make demands -- work on this, fix these bugs, adhere to our standards for this other thing, etc. When KDE didn't jump to their whimsy, they sort of got annoyed and just decided to maintain a patchset or something.

The distro flopped hard. And it started with their management. They could have instead hired a half dozen KDE developers that were already contributing, started feature or bug bounty programs (like Google Summer of Code, which was great but came later), and possibly have pulled something amazing together.

troyunrau ,
@troyunrau@lemmy.ca avatar

You're not wrong. KDE 1.x very much aimed at the Win95 market. They even directly targeted the windows userbase with jokes. The ordinal Win95 had a little fly-in animation that said "Where do you want to go today?" with an arrow pointing at the start menu. KDE 1.0 had this too, but it said "tomorrow" instead of "today". Etc.

KDE also stole good ideas from wherever they were found. Trash is thus called because of Apple. The virtual desktops came from CDE. Etc. Sometimes it stole too much, and we would have discussions about flying too close to the sun, and tweak something so it would be just different enough not to raise the ire of lawyers.

Corel Linux was a KDE distro, so it largely had that familiar Win9x look, even if it felt different once you were actually using it. KDE later developed it's own identity, but it retains its history and the baggage that comes with it.

troyunrau ,
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Heh, that's amusing ;)

We did do the high version numbers for alpha, beta, RC etc. leading into 4.0 as well.

You can find some of that here: 4.0 release schedule - go through the version history of that page. Fun times. (Makes me nostalgic.) You'll note that the release date got pushed back a few times as more betas and things were inserted. You'll also see version numbers like 3.97 for release candidates.

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