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Are you using GOG games on your Steam Deck?
  • I'm running a Steam OS like experience on my Lenovo Legion Go. Not quite a steam deck, but very similar.

    You should be able to use the heroic launcher. And you should be able to install it as a flat pack or a snap. That will make your GOG games as easy to download and install as a steam game. If I recall correctly, it even automatically adds entries for steam.

    I regularly play Bomb Rush Cyberfunk on this device using the GOG edition.

  • Rocket Knight Re-Sparked! Collection | Pre-Order Trailer
  • Huh, now that's a classic I never thought would get a remaster/re-release! I played this a ton when I was a little kid in the 90s on my Sega Genesis.

    Though I'll probably stick to purchasing on Steam. I'm steering clear of Nintendo where possible.

  • Deleted
    Why I Hate the Telephone
  • For me, the quality of the Audio makes all the difference. Plain Old Telephone (POTs) is utter garbage and I miss so much to my audio processing issues. The VoLTE and Wifi calling quality is often far and away better and I can better understand the subtleties of whats being communicated.

  • Demand ad companies take security seriously first and maybe we'll talk.
  • I normally would, but my wife has the same problem and she's done that 3 times in the last 6 months. In fact, her problem became MUCH worse because the "clean slate" was far more impressionable. She'd search up beauty routines, only to find that Youtube thinks she now wants to see "popping" videos, even though she's now searching for dinner recipes.

    So yeah, I saw her experience and decided "no thanks".

    To be fair, MOST of YouTube I watched can be found on Nebula and Floatplane, both of which will likely not have this issue since it's not a user-content platform. Not to mention, the creators likely make more from those platforms anyways.

    YouTube is basically unavoidable though, so now I just view everything through a piped instance if I absolutely need something that can only be found there.

  • Demand ad companies take security seriously first and maybe we'll talk.
  • I used to subscribe to YouTube premium as of just a few days ago. Even without the ads. There was something very seriously wrong with the suggestion algorithm.

    I was getting cartel violence videos, and dead animal videos. Never watched one before in my life. Yet. YouTube seems to think that I should want to watch this crock of shit. This started coming up about 6 months ago. Until now I've been reporting each video as they come up. But that doesn't seem to help at all.

    At this point I think YouTube is a danger to society - if it's recommending cartel violence videos to me unsolicited, what are they suggesting to my nieces?

    I have completely nuked it from my life. Almost all of the YouTubers I like are on Nebula or Floatplane so it doesn't feel like I'm missing much.

  • The Fallout show's been a pleasant surprise
  • It's just my client. Boost for Reddit doesn't appear to show it correctly. It's the opposite though. It just shows the text. Spoiling it for me.

  • The Fallout show's been a pleasant surprise
  • Your spoiler tag doesn't appear to be working.

  • It's all "ableism is bad! Support people with mental disorders!"...
  • Yeah, we suspect my sister is either Borderline or NPD. This is exactly the post she might make equating acceptance for neurodivergent personalities with her own traits that actively hurts others.

    And it's to the point that many posters fell for it. I saw this thread much earlier and just couldn't view this as a good-faith statement to even start from - so I didn't engage.

    Kinda wish the rest of the fediverse didn't engage with it - I certainly don't view it as an "important conversation" it's laughably manufactured and in bad faith. I have a sense that Beehaw's admin response artificially inflated the importance of this as well.

    Quick question, who in the heck is benefiting from this discussion? To me it looks like the trolls are getting the most out of it.

  • Scientology Church Opens In South Loop, Raising Concerns Of Columbia College Students Living Next Door
  • I have personal experience with these "churches" after my time in Portland. They were far and away worse than the homeless. They will harass and abuse you on the street ESPECIALLY if you dare express cynicism towards their spiel.

    They will follow you, and verbally abuse you unless you bee-line straight for a police station too.

    Why these charlatans are able to masquerade as a religion I'll never know....

  • Need good solutions for sharing photos with family
  • yeah…

    They asked for easy, or newbie friendly - and didn't particularly mention privacy concerns.

    Other than that, if they don't have a port 80/433 ingress from their ISP there are scarce simple solutions that don't require another server that also needs management, either by them or a corporate entity.

    back when i was on a DOCSIS modem, i noticed concurrent downloads would disrupt uploads and vice versa. i think this may depend on the type of connection OP has.

    I used to work at a cable company, that was either a problem that people with low SNR had. Either from external factors (tree branch on a cable line) or in-home ones (bad splitter). A modem will ramp up it's gain in order to offset this (to a point), and in so doing, create a lot more interference between channels. OR they were hitting their ingress rate limit (which is quite agressive on residential plans because DDOS'es). It's surprisingly easy to hit your ingress rate limit for modern http/https webservers hosting complex web apps. Lots of concurrent connections open up to try to download all the resources when you go to any website in a modern browser and while it's not a TON of data, the short period of time causes the traffic to easily hit the PPS/BPS rate limit that ISPs employ.

    But yeah, it all depends on the ISP.

  • Need good solutions for sharing photos with family
  • I'd argue that the cloudflared daemon is even easier to use than a static wire guard or openvpn tunnel. It's basically set and forget. The downside is that you must use cloudflare. This may, or may not be a big deal depending on OPs needs.

    I moved from a place with symmetrical gigabit to "gigabit cable" with 30mbps upload, it definitely wasn't good enough for my small family. Photos are quite large these days - not to mention videos. Though it likely has a lot more to do with the bandwidth shaping my ISP does than the 30mbps rate.

    Also agree that it's not perfect, but very likely the most newbie friendly solution at the moment. Especially from a deployment scenario vs going piecemeal.

  • Need good solutions for sharing photos with family
  • It's raining down votes! How dare I educate someone and have an opinion!

    If this thread doesn't pan out, you might want to post in programming.dev - way less elitist pricks there.

  • Need good solutions for sharing photos with family
  • The best "bang for the buck" in your use-case is to use Nextcloud - Nextcloud Talk is your Jitsi replacement, and the files feature can be extended with the Nextcloud Photos plugin (https://github.com/nextcloud/photos).

    As for your domain question:

    1. You should use any computer you'd like that meets the Nextcloud recommendations, the key is of course isolating this machine on your home network so any "funny business" stays on the server. You can do this with VLANs or an entirely separate LAN connected to a different WAN (ISP).

    2. Many places, I like porkbun.com for real custom domains for cheap, but for your use case, you might be able to use a Dynamic DNS provider for free. It just likely won't be an easy to remember URL (or at least, as easy as a root domain only). If you have a newer ASUS or Netgear router/modem they both have Dynamic DNS built in and you can select from a few different providers that have both free and paid tiers. ALSO it might be better to use Google Domains (now squarespace domains) since, IIRC, many DynDNS configs for routers support Google Domains too. Cloudflare can also be a decent registrar, and I'd recommend using them if you use any other cloudflare services (see below).

    3. Other things to consider: Your ISP may block port 80, meaning lots of issues. If this is the case, you might want to use a tunnel of some sort. Cloudflare has a great solution here. Even if they don't block port 80, they may aggressively throttle and shape your incoming traffic - causing issues. Again, the tunnel is a good solution here. And, of course, your upload bandwidth matters a lot, you'll need something around 100Mbps upload for a decent experience when accessing your stuff over the internet. The 30Mbps that's typical of DOCSIS modems won't cut it. Outside of these concerns it's all about making sure you isolate your server from your "home stuff" to keep things secure.

  • Nintendo sues Switch emulator Yuzu for ‘facilitating piracy at a colossal scale’
  • With today's announcement, I'm super happy you did this 4 days ago. Time to make a few clones myself.

  • New York Times: "Could Trekkies Decide the Election?"
  • Paywalled. Can anyone paste the text here?

  • The end of Linux Gaming Central
  • I mean sure maybe 10 years ago. But most static sites like blogs and such can fit entirely on a cloudflare page worker under the free tier. Or heck, even the free allotment on AWS S3 or other object storage providers.

    I mean, perhaps this isn't a static site and it's built on some sort of CMS and has a postgres database in the background. In that case it probably runs around $5 to $10 a month.

    Of course, this all presumes that the person setting this up is fairly savvy about the offerings available. I see a lot of people making silly decisions in this space, thinking that they need some full fat virtual private server, when all they really need is an object storage bucket behind a DNS c-name.

  • The end of Linux Gaming Central
  • I guess I didn't really see the pressure that they were under.

    I hope they heal! But it's a bummer that such an excellent resource will be taken down.

    I wish more creators were willing to hand their creations to someone who wishes to continue it. But oftentimes, I fear that it's far too entwined with a person's identity for that to be common occurrence.

  • good luck little buddy, see you in 5 years
  • I've tried it before, it's fine but had issues running on wayland last I tried. Did they fix the wayland issues? Looking at the issue tracker it seems like there are still a few open Wayland issues.

    kiTTY by contrast has had Wayland support for about as long as I've used it.

  • good luck little buddy, see you in 5 years
  • He did this thing where he unified his shell history across thousands of hosts - it was super handy given our extensive use of Ansible playbooks and database managment commands. He could then use a couple hotkeys to query this history within a new open document. Super handy for writing out shell command steps or wrapping things in a bash script you're working on. Unfortunately I don't really have a link to HOW to do this, I just remember thinking "Oh my god, that would save me SO much time".

    Nowadays, I just have this giant document with hundreds of our runbook commands and enable Github Copilot to make it SUPER easy to do the same thing without establishing an SSH session in the backend.

  • good luck little buddy, see you in 5 years
  • Eeeehhhh, I was kinda jealous of one of my coworkers Doom Emacs setup. He had automated like 80% of his own job with it. Still haven't bothered to try to learn it myself. One of these days...

  • PSA - If your Pixel no longer connects to your wifi after the most recent update - disable WPA3 on your router.

    Obviously this is still a Pixel issue - but at least I can connect to my home Wifi again.

    I previously posted saying that Wifi was broken in general, but I mistook my ongoing Xfinity outage as being unable to connect to any wifi. Thus I removed the post.

    When the outage ended, I could connect to some other networks and couldn't figure out why.

    It wasn't until after a painful factory reset process that I tried going from WPA3/WPA2 mode to just WPA2 on both of my APs and suddenly everything is able to connect again.

    It seems that the recent OTA update borked WPA3-Personal in a way that doesn't allow it to navigate the "compatibility mode" of WPA3/WPA2 either.

    Edit - Looks like this might even be something Verizon specific - UQ1A-20231205.015.A1

    Edit2 - Also mine is a Pixel 7 Pro - a Pixel 6 Pro user reports no such issue - YMMV.

    15
    Is it just me, or is Sci-Fi experiencing a sort of cultural renaissance right now?

    I just realized that every streaming platform seems to have a couple heavy-hitter big-budget sci-fi series these days. Most of them turn out to be critically acclaimed as well.

    Sure, we all know that there are Star Trek fans who dislike Discovery and Picard, or Foundation fans who dislike Apple's adaptation. Even though much of what is on TV is still decades-old franchises, it seems that we're getting more original sci-fi along with it.

    • Scavengers Reign
    • For All Mankind
    • Invasion
    • Cyberpunk: Edgeruners
    • Tales from the Loop

    I could go on...

    No longer is it simply a single channel on cable tv that was also 50/50 with horror content, plus Star Trek and a handful of others that other networks syndicated.

    Today there's a rich tapestry of new ideas, concepts, and just plain art in media that was normally reserved for paperbacks published by Tor and others.

    Don't get me wrong, I still love me some SG1, TNG, DS9, B5, and others - all shows I grew up with; but I'm so happy that we get so much more now!

    21
    Trying out the different Arch based distros for fun and science - Why does Garuda perform so bad?

    Other Arch Flavors I've tried (some are no longer with us) include:

    • ArchBang
    • EndeavourOS
    • Manjaro
    • Chakra

    So with that out of the way, I've found my Garuda experience incredibly painful. From messy repositories (Chaotic-AUR plus their own stuff), to an overly involved upgrade process (when using the helper) - the distro screams of a team that has no freakin' clue how to maintain an actual distribution.

    It's basically Arch on hard mode with so many settings rolled into their own packages which need to be removed before customization.

    Then we get to the purported performance enhancements and, honestly, this is the worst performing distro I've ever used, by multiple miles. I'm not sure if its the scheduler settings, or something with the zram settings - but this distro hitches and hangs constantly. (5950x, 64GB of Ram, Samsung 980 Pro drives, NVIDIA RTX 3080Ti - NOT a weak machine by any standards)

    I'd normally chalk it up to compositor issues on Wayland (yes, I prefer Wayland and it works fine for most Arch derivitaves even with Nvidia). However the performance issues even crop up on basic terminal commands on a TTY with lots of weird hangs and lags.

    The ONLY thing that was easier on this distro was installing the various Proton GE builds and other specialty stuff found in the Chaotic-AUR. But given the above, it's definitely not worth it when one can configure an Arch box to do the same things without all of the problems.

    Perhaps I'm not doing something right? Given all the praise for this distro, perhaps it shouldn't perform like this?

    To be completely and utterly clear - I'm an advanced user trying out these distros for fun and discovery. I can indeed "just use a different distro" but wanted to give this one a fair shake before moving on.

    20
    How would you describe your neurodivergent idiolect?

    As an AuDHD person with Echolalalalalalalalalia 🙃, I find that my accent/idiolect has changed as I've aged and been exposed to different accents of all types in the U.S.. I just kinda pick up certain things I like.

    For example I like:

    • The British pronunciation/spelling of Aluminium and Banana
    • The Irish pronunciation of three (my grandfather who was not at all born in Ireland also used it though)
    • Upper Midwest sayings and phrases - Ope!, Oh ya sure!
    • Extended "Wwweeeelp"s
    • I bounce ALL around my register in speaking sometimes. I've sometimes been described as sing-songy.

    But also dislike certain aspects of things and seek to avoid them at all costs....

    • Cot/Caught, Pen/Pin - NO MERGERS! Ever. They must be different sounds.
    • Glottal Stops in place of consonants are a no go - pronounce the whole thing dang it!

    There's a whole lot more of course, but I need to finish this post so I can go be an unregulated mess after a long (and particularly annoying) day of work.

    So what about y'all? I'm super curious to know!

    4
    As an SRE, what do I do about Alerts caused almost entirely by poor customer communication or misuse of a product?

    A bit more context there since you might wonder why customers can cause Sev1's.

    Well, I work for a Database Technology company and we provide a managed service offering. This managed service offering has SLA's that essentially enforce a 5 minute response time for any "urgent" issue.

    Well, a common urgent issue is that the customer suddenly wants to load in a bunch of new data without informing us which causes the cluster to stop accepting write loads.

    It's to the point where most if not all urgent pages result in some form of scaling of the cluster.

    Since this is a customer driven behavior, there is no real ability to plan for it - and since these particular customers have special requirements (and thus, less ability to automate scaling operations), I'm unsure if there is any recourse here.

    It's to the point that it doesn't even feel like an SRE team anymore - we should just instead be called "On-demand scaling agents". Since we're constantly trying to scale ahead of our customers.

    All in all, I'm starting to feel like this is a management/sales level issue that I cannot possibly address. If we're selling this managed service offering as essentially "magic" that can be scaled whenever they need then it seems like we're being setup for failure at the organizational level. Not to mention, not being smart about costs behind scaling and factoring that into these contracts.

    So, fellow SRE's have you had to have this conversation with a larger org? What works for something like this? What doesn't? Should I just seek greener pastures at this point?

    P.S. - Posted c/Programming due to lack of a c/SRE

    19
    What earplugs do y'all recommend? My sensory issues putting things in my ears makes most of them unpleasant for me.

    I've tried foam earplugs, but those are impossible to use socially as everything's too muddy. Also they'd end up sliding out eventually.

    I eventually bought audiophile grade earplugs and they are FANTASTIC but the flange tips irritate my ears so bad.

    I know circumaural headphones work great, but people have a harder time understanding I'm just using them as a filter to even hear them.

    21
    Awww yeah, my copy of Cities Without Number just arrived!

    Not much to say quite yet, but the book is REALLY nice and compliments the offset print version of Stars Without Number quite nicely.

    4
    [FoundryVTT Module] - New Version of the ChatGPT description plugin - Now supports GPT-4 and other small fixes.
    github.com Release v3.0.0-alpha · th3raid0r/FoundryVTT-AI-Description-Generator

    Merges in some minor fixes from upstream, upgrades to the GPT-4 API (No support for older models planned)

    Release v3.0.0-alpha · th3raid0r/FoundryVTT-AI-Description-Generator

    Hi All,

    For those of you using FoundryVTT, here's the latest pre-release of my fork of PepjinMC's FoundryVTT-AI-Description-Generator.

    For those who haven't heard of it, it's a neat module that allows users in your FoundryVTT instance to get quick descriptions of characters, items, and actions with a single button click. Initially it only supported the D&D system, but my fork extends it to work with any system, provided you know the mappings.

    For D&D mappings see the settings on my merge-back branch - https://github.com/th3raid0r/FoundryVTT-AI-Description-Generator/blob/dnd-mergeback/scripts/settings.js

    For other mappings, you'll likely need to poke around the data yourself and update things manually. If you do this, please send me your system and mappings so I can begin to create a library for less technical folks.

    Hope it's useful to some GM's out there! I use it almost every session!

    0
    Trying to figure out the museum I went to as a kid in Chicago in the summer of 1999 - Maybe someone can help?

    So, back when I was about 9/10 ish (1999) I remember going to museum with my grandparents that contained a few key things that stood with me over 2 decades later.

    The first, and creepiest was an animatronic of a homeless/drug addict in an alley or on a bench. This is the “anchor” memory, it’s hard to forget such a creepy thing.

    The second was a more hands on focused kids area where I spent a majority of my time.

    The last was a restaurant with some TVs installed around the eating area somewhere in the building - I distinctly seeing ads for the new Tarzan movie, so I’m thinking this was the summer of 99ish.

    It could also have been the Chicago Childrens Museum, but when looking at older pictures absolutely nothing stands out to me as memorable - additionally they don’t have any on-site restaurants that I can see from my research.

    After lots of internet sleuthing, I think but can’t confirm, that it is the Museum of Science and Industry. Some of the pictures of some of the exhibits seem really familiar.

    I suppose the key thing preventing my brain from saying “This is the one” is lack of anyone else mentioning such an animatronic at any of these places.

    I asked my grandma, but she’s pretty deep in dementia and doesn’t really recall those experiences anymore. 😢

    So /c/Chicago, are any of you old enough to remember such an exhibit from 99? If so, what museum was that?

    5
    What is this bug? Photo taken on Mt. Lemmon, AZ. Looked it up and couldn't find much.

    Spent some time looking for what specific bumblebee, digger bee, or carpenter bee this might be. Couldn't figure it out.

    0
    Jeff Geerling made his book "Ansible for DevOps" Free on linkedin today.
    leanpub.com Ansible for DevOps

    Ansible is a simple, but powerful, server and configuration management tool. Learn to use Ansible effectively, whether you manage one server—or thousands.

    Ansible for DevOps

    No Idea if this will be a permanent coupon link, but figured I should share here.

    source

    0
    Hypersomnia and Lucid Dreaming + Autism/ADHD makes getting out of bed every day so difficult.

    So yeah, anyone else have a harder time getting out of bed than should be reasonable?

    Like, sure I have insomnia issues at times, but most of the time I'm fine on the falling asleep end - it's just getting up that's difficult.

    First - I don't think my ADHD part of my brain wants to let go of all the fantastic things that happen in lucid dreams.

    Second - no matter what I do, I never seem to feel rested in the morning anymore. Weekends can see me sleeping 10+ hours before I feel a semblance of "normal".

    Some might say "oh you should just get up and get started" and I do sometimes! But you just might find me dozing off in a chair a couple hours later.

    FWIW - It's been like this most of my adult life. Ever since adolescence particularly. You could find me napping, completely upright, in the back of a classroom. (My teachers never cared because I'd still come in the next day and ace the finals/midterms).

    I desperately miss the perceived energy of my youth. I'd be up at 4AM to watch super early cartoons (Sonic, Sailor Moon, Animaniacs - in that order) and never felt the need for a nap in the day. It wouldn't even matter if I feel asleep late back then - getting up was just that much easier.

    Anyone here with similar issues? How do you cope?

    0