captain_aggravated

captain_aggravated, 4 days ago

There is no requirement that I am aware of for college professors to have any training in the fundamentals of instruction, and it SHOWS.

captain_aggravated, 4 days ago

Based on my experience migrating from Mint to Pop!_OS, the next step is migrate back to Mint.

captain_aggravated, 6 days ago

I think I’m leaning toward pine as well. You could cut into it and smell, I imagine most people now the scent of pine since it’s a popular air freshener/household cleaner scent for some reason (I’m from a pine forest, pine doesn’t smell ‘clean’ to me.)

captain_aggravated, 6 days ago

This is not fiction. This is how it works.

captain_aggravated, 6 days ago

I don’t give the first two half-flaccid thrusts of a reluctant pity fuck what number the clock says when the sun rises or sets. 4, 5, 6, 11, don’t care. It’s the practice of changing the clocks twice a year that needs to die in a fire.

The logic should be “Let’s open our business from 7 to 4 instead of 8 to 5 so that we have more free time during sunlight hours in the evening” not “Let’s change all the clocks everywhere so that the sun is two fingers higher in the sky when the clocks say 5 so that we have more free time during the sunlight hours in the evening.” You want to vary YOUR routine with the seasonal change in sunlight hours? Great. “Summer hours 7 to 4, winter hours 8 to 5” or whatever. Managing this by changing all clocks everywhere causes more problems than it solves. I don’t know if I could intentionally invent a stupider solution to the “problem.”

captain_aggravated, 6 days ago

I think we were the first with metric money? We still pay for things in centidollars.

captain_aggravated, 6 days ago

Each and every time this comes up. I say that I am familiar with the metric system and use it for quite a few things, but I specifically prefer woodworking in fractional inches because working in base 12 and power-of-two fractions is closer to the tasks I need to perform in the wood shop than base ten decimal math does.

I give real-world examples like “divide 19mm, a commonly used stock thickness, by three to make a tenon, you get something point 3333 repeating of course” and they 1. downvote and 2. Invent sizes that we don’t conventionally mill stock to thinking they found a “gotcha.” “Well what’s 2 inches divided by three?” we don’t mill stock to 2 inches thick, we’d use 1 1/2", a third of which is 1/2". Y’all actually do use 19mm.

But Americans use inch fractions so inch fractions must be dumb and bad, right?

captain_aggravated, 6 days ago

You want to show me a tape measure, caliper or micrometer marked in thirds of a millimeter?

captain_aggravated, 6 days ago

An automatic car has no clutch; automatic transmissions aren’t just manual transmissions that do the work for you. It has a thing called a torque converter which is kind of a hydraulic pump and hydraulic motor in one unit which allows the engine to deliver torque and yet still slip.

captain_aggravated, 6 days ago

*grunned.

captain_aggravated, 6 days ago

It is my understanding a lot of people maintain their unhealthy relationship with Windows as a prerequisite for keeping their unhealthy relationship with Adobe.

To be fair, the FOSS community in this area has categorically failed. GIMP’s mission statement is 1. be hateful to use and 2. be capable of editing photographs I guess. Inkscape can’t support CMYK colorspaces so just forget it if there’s an outside chance if it’s going to be printed, Krita can’t draw a circle, Pinta crashes every other thing…hell I wonder if Adobe pays the GIMP team to keep it unusable.

captain_aggravated, 6 days ago

GIMP literally sucks on purpose. Anyone waiting around for GIMP to do what Blender did and suddenly become usable has missed the point.

captain_aggravated, 5 days ago

GIMP has a well deserved reputation for responding to “this is not nice to use” with “Good!” There are lots of ways to design image editors, sure. Many of those ways are awful.

Blender used to suck, too. Then they made a decision to improve. Which GIMP is bound and determined not to do. So it needs to go in the box with HURD and someone needs to do better from scratch.

captain_aggravated, 7 days ago

Maybe a “play bot” is like, when you run the practice mode the game pits you against bots instead of real players. I’ve seen cases of older games starting to spawn in bots like that so that the few remaining players don’t realize how empty all the servers are.

Then there’s cheat bots which…I’m not sure why people do that?

captain_aggravated, 7 days ago

Cheers for TheDude!

captain_aggravated, 7 days ago

Well yes, largely for the same reason people are driving around on bald tires, paper thin brake pads and three drops of oil in the sump. It’s because the education system has failed them in one way or another.

I have noticed two trends over time:

You’re increasingly likely to be told to edit the registry to customize a Windows machine. Back in the 98/ME/XP days, you just didn’t hear about the registry. You might have known it existed if you were some kid with your dad’s hand-me-down Pentium III HP Pavilion, but you NEVER touched it. Sometime around Windows 8 you started to see guides talking about “If you want to put it back to behaving like Win 7 did, just add this registry key.”

You are decreasingly likely to be told to open the terminal and run some arcane command to customize a Linux machine. GUI tools in distros designed for newcomers, casual users or gamers (things like Mint, Pop!_OS or Nobara) are increasingly complete and rely on users manually editing config files or running commands for fewer and fewer “typical” tasks.

captain_aggravated, 7 days ago

I used a Pi 4 as a desktop computer for awhile. If you’re going to do that, get the most RAM you can.

I also ended up using Ubuntu MATE rather than Raspberry Pi OS. PiOS didn’t hold up do daily use, their PIXEL desktop isn’t particularly well made.

captain_aggravated, 7 days ago

Ritchie’s Basilisk.

captain_aggravated, 7 days ago

Was a Windows user up through Win 7.

I started to play with Raspberry Pis and mostly Raspbian on the side largely related to my amateur radio hobby.

My laptop died, I bought a new one. Windows 8.1. Figured I’d rather use that slow-ass single core Pi 1 running Debian Wheezy than this.

First I tried Ubuntu Unity. I thought “Okay this could work, let’s keep shopping.”

Next I tried Mint Cinnamon. “Here we go.”

I’ve taken a look at Manjaro a couple times over the years. I have stopped this.

I briefly tried to run Pop!_OS when I first built my desktop, that lasted 3 weeks.

My desktop and laptop run Mint Cinnamon, I’ve got a tablet running Fedora Gnome. I kinda found my home fairly quickly and I’m not really interested in moving out.

captain_aggravated, 7 days ago

The notion that everyone must earn their own living is going to be a problem soon.

captain_aggravated, 7 days ago

The house on the giant stump is where Catherine is being held captive.

One of the things about the original game is you were locked to certain viewpoints which made it a lot easier to make sure players picked up on details; you couldn’t just walk through an area staring at the sky etc. but you couldn’t take in your surroundings. There’s a lot of details about the environment that was always there but is difficult to know about because there aren’t any perspectives that look at them.

Looks like they did a great job keeping the visual aesthetic of the game, fairly realistically rendered environments and textures. It looks like Riven.

captain_aggravated, 7 days ago

This video from DavidXNewton’s playthrough of the game shows him arriving there at about the 12 minute mark. The only way to get there is from a linking book in Gehn’s…world? And I believe it’s the last new location you visit in the game.

There are features I don’t recognize, like on the bottle village island there’s some large beehive looking structure I don’t remember, there’s also a structure in the middle of the lagoon I don’t recognize, and the withered looking tree with the walkway around it right near the end, so I suspect it has been slightly retooled.

captain_aggravated, 7 days ago

At 4 seconds in the trailer above, player character is walking out of the low cave and looking up at the bottle village, and above is a beehive like object up on top of the cliff; top-center of the frame. I don’t remember that being there.

At 1:05 we get a look at what I’m talking about, I know the chair we’re sitting in from the original game, I think Gehn would preside over executions from here, he would open the trap door in the floor to either drown the Rivenese or feed them to Wharks. The player has to use this control to close the trap door so they can stand there and ride the dunk manacles up to the jail cell. But that’s not what I’m talking about.

Here is the same vantage point from the original game (at around the 2 minute mark). The “cage pyramid” is similar in both along the near wall of the lagoon with the town opposite. But in the new trailer, there’s an additional alter-like structure in the center of the lagoon that wasn’t there before.

Both of these may just be additional background scenery or they may be altered gameplay features. Both of these details I notice are from a fairly early stage of the game so I wonder if they might add some guidance to players in the early game?

captain_aggravated, 9 days ago

In the fact that they offer several DEs with one being their flagship, and then having one or two weird other things going on, like Silverblue or LMDE? Yeah that’s similar.

The presentation is very different, with Mint being way less bullshit about it. Go to Mint’s website, click Download and you’re presented with three choices, from top to bottom: Cinnamon Edition, Xfce Edition and MATE Edition, with brief descriptions of each. Cinnamon Edition is at the top and says it is the most popular/primarily developed for Linux Mint, so it heavily indicates that’s the flagship flavor. LMDE has a separate page.

If you click on “New Features” you are given a list of specific features, like the stuff they’ve done to the Hypnotix internet TV viewer, or new features of Cinnamon 6.0. Everything here is factual and verifiable.

Go to Fedora’s download page and you’re presented first with a big useless graphic that says “It’s your operating system”, with choices for Workstation, Server, IoT Cloud, and CoreOS below that. The short marketing blurb says Workstation is “…for laptop and desktop computers” so let’s click Learn More. And we get a page full of ultimately meaningless marketeering wank like “Reliable, Beautiful, Leading Technology” with very few verifiable facts at all. The word “Gnome” is not mentioned anywhere.

So it’s difficult to learn that Workstation ships with Gnome from their website, and it’s also not 100% intuitive to find out how to get the other DE versions, which are farther down on the page in a different looking section titled “Want more Fedora options?” under Fedora Spins. It would be much more intuitive if the “Workstation” button led you to a page with the Gnome Edition on top with a blurb about it being the most popular, flagship edition, with alternative choices listed below.

Similarly, people on forums casually talk about Fedora Silverblue, which is the immutable file system container-based version. Except you will find nowhere on the main downloads page that says the word “Silverblue.” You’ll find it under Atomic Desktops. Silverblue is specifically Gnome Atomic. KDE Atomic is called Kinoite, which is a word no one will say out loud correctly. They didn’t bother coming up with wanky branding for Sway Atomic or Budgie Atomic.

They’re really trying to channel Apple here, with Retina displays and Airport cards and Magic mice. And I’m trying to channel Tantacrul; as I’m typing my inner voice has adopted an Irish accent, and the next thing I’m going to say is my frustration at all of this makes me want to RAM AN ATOMIC SPIKE STRAIGHT THROUGH MY FACE! Okay, dial it back a bit…

Fedora’s attempt at branding has made it difficult to understand what you’re getting when you click on something on their website. There’s a lot of Fedora-only branding like “spins” that I would get rid of, and go with something like “Fedora Gnome Workstation” “Fedora KDE Workstation” and then “Fedora Gnome Atomic” “Fedora KDE Atomic” etc. That would make it much easier and straightforward to shop.

captain_aggravated, 8 days ago

Question: did you build the grate to be removable or is it fixed in place?