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commodorez · 11 months ago

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Hi! I'm so sorry if this has been asked before, but I'm completely clueless on computers, but I want to learn about them. Any places you'd recommend starting for bare bones beginners? I'm also interested in early-mid 90's tech particularly too. I'm guessing I have to figure out the basics before I can move onto specific tech though, right?

You're really knowledgeable and nice so I figured I'd just ask. Any help at all would be appreciated. Thank you! :]

That's an excellent question, I don't think I've been asked it before in such a general sense. I was raised with the benefit of being immersed in computers regularly, so providing a solid answer may be a bit difficult since for the basics, I never had to think about it.

I had computer classes of various types throughout my school years. We learned how to use a mouse, typing, word processing, programming -- and that was all before middle school. We got proper typing, html, and general purpose computer science courses in middle and high school, and you can bet I took those too. I also have the benefit of a bachelors of science in computer science, so you'll forgive me if my answer sounds incredibly skewed with 30+ years of bias.

The biggest suggestion I can give you is simply to find a device and play with it. Whatever you can get your hands on, even if its not that old, as long as it's considered past its prime, and nobody will get upset of you accidentally break something (physically or in software). Learning about things with computers in general tends to have some degree of trial and error, be it programming, administrating, or whatever -- try, learn, and start over if things don't work out as expected the first time. Professionals do it all the time (I know I do, and nobody's fired me for it yet).

Some cast-off 90s or early 00's surplus office desktop computer running Windows would be a good start, just explore it and its settings. Start digging into folders, see what's installed, see what works and more importantly what doesn't work right. Try to find comparable software, and install it. Even the basics like old copies of Microsoft Office, or whatever.

I recommend looking through the available software on winworld as it's an excellent treasure trove of operating systems, applications, games, and other useful software of the time period. I'd link it directly, but tumblr hates links to external sites and will bury this post if I do. If you're a mac fan, and you can find an old G3 or Performa, there is the Macintosh Garden's repository of software, but I'm not the right person to ask about that.

Some of you might be like "oh, oh! Raspberry Pi! say Raspberry Pi!" but I can't really recommend those as a starting point, even if they are cheap for an older model. Those require a bit of setup, and even the most common linux can be obtuse as hell for newcomers if you don't have someone to guide you.

If you don't have real hardware to muck about with, emulation is also your friend. DOSBox was my weapon of choice for a long time, but I think other things like 86Box have supplanted it. I have the luxury of the real hardware in most cases, so I haven't emulated much in the past decade. Tech Tangents on youtube has a new video explaining the subject well, I highly recommend it. There are plenty of other methods too, but most are far more sophisticated to get started with, if you ask me.

For getting a glimpse into the world of the 90s tech, if you haven't already discovered LGR on youtube, I've been watching his content for well over a decade now. He covers both the common and esoteric, both hardware and software, and is pretty honest about the whole thing, rather than caricaturish in his presentation style. It might be a good jumping off point to find proverbial rabbits to chase.

I guess the trick is to a find a specific thing you're really interested in, and then start following that thread, researching on wikipedia and finding old enthusiast websites to read through. I'm sure there are a few good books on more general history of 90s computing and the coming internet, but I'm not an avid reader of the genre. Flipping through tech magazines of the era (PC Magazine comes to mind, check archive dot org for that) can provide a good historical perspective. Watching old episodes of the Computer Chronicles (youtube or archive dot org) can provide this too, but it also had demonstrations and explanations of the emerging technologies as they happened.

There are so many approaches here, I'm sure I've missed some good suggestions though. I also realized I waffle a bit between the modern and vintage, but I find many computing troubleshooting skillsets transcend eras. What works now can apply to 10, 20, 30, or sometimes even 40+ years ago, because it's all about mindset of "this computer/program is dumb, and only follows the instructions its given" . Sometimes those instructions are poorly thought out on the part of the folks who designed them. And those failures are not necessarily your fault, so you gotta push through until you figure out how to do the thing you're trying to do. Reading the documentation you can find will only take you so far, sometimes things are just dumb, and experimentation (and failures) will teach you so much more about the hard and fast rules of computers than anything else. I'm rambling at this point...

So, let's throw the question to the crowd, and ask a few other folks in the Retrotech Crew.

@ms-dos5 @virescent-phosphor @teckheck @jhavard @techav @regretsretrotech @airconditionedcomputingnightmare @aperture-in-the-multiverse -- anything big I missed?

#retrotech crew

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silvercat-the-daydreamer · 5 months ago

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right touhou13 experience yeah

(post with considerable delay since i was first waiting for my friend to come back to tumblr, can't just hoepost without them y'know, that'd be rude-- and then i procrastinated on that for several more days,,, you know how it is.)

OH OKAY THIS SHITS EASY ALRIGHT-- I DID ALMOST 1CC IT ON EASY FIRST TRY (n then got it on the second). that's hardly anything. i did get to miko's last attack on the first try without using any continues and then i died there. kinda wet and soggy compared to byaku. like come on miko my guy, how can you live with her being harder than you...

(maybe i should have started with this one, but maybe attempting to figure out the controls while also having to frequently dash up to the top of the screen to grab the things would not be the best idea. who knows. hard to find out now.)

yeah, well, just because i was taken over by the sudden and overwhelming need to look at miko, i went and played touhou13. i'm sure you understand. i just think she's neat.

in any case the gimmick of this game is Interesting for sure. more grab-the-fuckin-things. i love these sorts of things actually. then there's also something neat about being basically dead when you get hit but still being around for a few more seconds but then inevitably dying anyway. very cool. i just haven't really figured out how to use that efficiently i think...

MUSIC GOES REAL HARD TOO. IT'S GOT PECULIAR NOISES HELL YEAH. now that i actually have something to describe that with instead of just "really interesting". futo's theme beloved. stage 2 theme too. and of course miko's theme is a real banger as well even tho it doesn't have that peculiar noises. directly after watching my friend beat the game on stream a few days before i played it i listened to it on loop for an hour while working on a spreadsheet. bless

...that being said, miko's theme does go hard but despite being really speedy and stuff it also feels strangely calm. maybe... "focused" is a more appropriate word. interesting for sure.

now, i really appreciate how interesting the spellcards of this are. fuckin kyouko's with the reflecting? would probably confuse the fuck out of me on higher difficulties but i love it. also the several spells in this game where someone just brings in their buddies. in which i also really appreciate the detail of seiga moving to her pet zombie to heal her if she's knocked out. that's kinda cute.

however. yoshika's.

listen.

I Like The Concept. but. hooo fucking boi are those spellcards where she heals herself annoying. like jesus fuckin christ dude especially the last one can i please get through that without timing out thank you. waurgh.

apart from that there's also that one part in stage 4 where there's a bunch of guys comin at you from the sides at high speeds and throwing things at you, and i really enjoy that part bc there's so much going on and the speediness of the soundtrack works nicely to bring out the vibe of great nyoomage. hell yeah.

(also is it just from me playing this game on linux or does anyone else get a fuckton of graphical glitches playing this. nothing gamebreaking but sometimes just displays unrelated graphics on some bullets which seems to happen most often on kyouko's spells and miko's final one in which it displays big stars for a few frames sometimes. not something that happens with any other touhous i played.)

so anyways miko's birthday is coming up soon isn't it. wonderful fuckin timing. (almost as great of a timing as when i first played touhou15 and then looked out the window after i beat it to see the wonderful full moon. that was really cool. we should all appreciate such small but neat things.) i need to like draw her or smth.

#touhou #i like miko. i enjoy her strange cat-ear-hair and her immeasurable Swag. bless.

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andmaybegayer · 9 months ago

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Last Monday of the Week 2024-09-23

I have a normal number of tabs open

Listening: Went to a metal show I knew nothing about because my partner was going and I figured it would be a good way to hear what they're into.

Nest of Plagues is a Hungarian outfit, which I liked a fair amount. Bad mix from their sound engineer but otherwise fun. I have no idea what any of the songs they played are so here's a random one:

Next up, Lone Survivors, a French prog metal group. Really fun, great bass

Then Science of Decay, Swiss group. Probably the most consistently good.

And the headliners who were Orphaned Land, an Israeli pan-religious peace themed band? Bizzare on many levels. What is the point of non-blasphemous metal.

Pretty good show all around, I'm not a huge metalhead so other than like "pretty good, some of this is nice" I have very little to say.

Reading: A Desolation Called Peace which is a delicious little thing. A really different book from Memory, and makes very efficient use of its scenes to handle a lot of information very deftly.

It's a bold move to do the like, barest intimations of a relationship in book one, ends with a single kiss. Book two: starts with them deeply estranged on the other side of the galaxy from each other, midpoint fucking, endpoint ???????.

The Eight Antidote scenes are clever! The sanitized self-concept of the empire in this one kid. There's a bit about the "Atrocities Teixcalaan had smartly given up committing" it's such a great line

Watching: Finished Mobile Suit Gundam. which was interesting and educational for multiple things, for one just as a reference for a bunch of other media I've consumed.

I want to compare it a little to Avatar, which is good but suffers heavily from the constraints of being a Western Children's Show, Gundam is a toy advert like Transformers but it doesn't feel the need to lean into "here is your moral lesson of the week" stuff so it can do some really thoughtful storytelling about war and duty.

The instrumentalization of the whole White Base Crew where they're just taken on as an expendable force by Earth is so great because it keeps them at a distance from both sides while still putting them on A Side.

The Newtype stuff towards the end both focuses the story and sort of weakens it? It moves you away from the drama and struggle of the crew into building this universe lore.

I'm probably going to jump ahead to Witch from Mercury and then maybe watch some of the past seasons.

Making: Some abortive microscope stuff, ran into weird power issues, need to fix that. Fiddling with VR projects but nothing meaningful, I wanted to try and work on some 3D curve visualization stuff but I mostly got bogged down remembering how VR on Linux works again.

Playing: Fell off Tactical Breach Wizards but I'm back, pushing through the final act. It's going well and I'm getting Rion under me, he's pretty finicky at times but very powerful.

Tools and Equipment: A consideration for you: if you have weird neck pain check your pillow. Ever since my partner spent a few nights at my place they found their neck pain gone because I use good normal pillows made of firm foam rather than bullshit sad feather sacks that compress down to one centimeter thick and do fuck-all for your neck. I do not know who thought down pillows was a good idea, stop doing that. You need to keep your neck supported!

#last monday of the week #Bandcamp

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desertleviathan · 1 year ago

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Today, June 5th 2024, is the 20th anniversary of the death of Ronald Reagan.

Which seems to me an optimal time to mourn the dissolution of the GURPS Fantasy Presidential Knife-Fighting League some time before the Gipper became eligible to participate.

What, you may ask, was the GURPS Fantasy Presidential Knife-Fighting League?

Before I go on, let me make clear the spirit of this post; Fuck every last US President, living or dead, they're all mass-murdering pieces of shit. Even Jimmy Carter. Even Abe Lincoln. None of them hold up to any serious moral scrutiny, although a couple at least had the decency to seem ashamed. The United States of America is and has always been an engine of barbaric cruelty. There is no point in this country's history during which it hasn't had its boot on someone's neck. Slavery was never really abolished, we just rebranded it as Prison Labor. Genocide and erasure of Native Americans is still very much a policy goal, even if the current approach is a passive long-term economics game rather than a hot war. And every step of enfranchisement of citizens in the Imperial Core has been counterbalanced by expanded exploitation of foreign workers, pinning vast portions of the rest of the world into poverty, starvation, and political turmoil so that we can keep costs cheap for our coffee beans and iPhones. The United States of America is a relentless and unambiguous force for evil, and fuck anyone morally perverse enough to take the Captain's Chair of this rotten enterprise without having the backbone to try to sink it.

Thus, a big part of what made the League fun was how cathartic it was to imagine this batch of indefensibly rancid sons of bitches trapped in a custom-tailored Hell, damned to spend eternity puncturing each other for the amusement of merciless gods. If you disagree with that premise, nothing that follows is going to be particularly palatable to you.

ORIGIN OF THE LEAGUE

Back when I was in high school I got into GURPS (the Generic Universal Role-Playing System by Steve Jackson Games) in a big way through a friend in my school's TTRPG club. GURPS is kind of like the Linux of TTRPGS, nigh-impenetrable to the novice, but if you put in an enormous heap of work you can get it to do pretty much anything. Could purpose-built systems usually do it better? Oh hell yeah, almost always, but the main thing you were paying for with GURPS was flexibility, because what it really wanted you to do with it was run crossovers between dramatically different genres and/or historical time periods. That's the edge case where I really advocate for it specifically, rather than my endorsement just being a matter of personal familiarity.

Anyway, GURPS was a lot of work when I was new to it (and still a lot of work now that I'm an old vet), so when I was first getting a feel for it I went looking for tips in various online enthusiast communities, some of which were more helpful than others. You know how TTRPG communities are, and even the most caustic communities today seem downright idyllic compared to the kind of garbage fires I was investigating in the 90s. But there was one forum I found where the moderators had a much more solid grasp of how to maintain a positive community vibe, so I concentrated my time there even though they were more interested in the Historical Fiction/Tactical Wargame style of play compared to the Fantasy Adventure style I preferred.

This community had a pretty lively sub-forum dedicated to figuring out best guesses for historically accurate setting details. You wanted to know what skills would likely be known by a phalanx of Athenian Hoplites? You wanted good guidelines for the equipment carried by Prussian Mercenaries hired by both sides during the American Revolutionary War? You wanted a list of just what type and quality of alchemical laboratory materials John Dee would have had access to when he was Court Magician for Queen Elizabeth I? These forum folk loved nothing more than digging up answers back when that involved physically going to the library a lot more often. They knew where to find the info, and more importantly when they posted it they would thoroughly document their citations, which was a tremendous part of what kept that place from devolving into standard TTRPG forum bickering. If someone came along with a better source, the community standard of what actually constituted a "better" source was well enough agreed on that everyone was able to play nice together. We all seemed to be too excited to learn new things to get bitter about having our own expertise challenged, since everyone admitted from the beginning that we were only going off of the best info we'd found so far.

It was honestly a paradise the likes of which the Internet will probably never see again.

So anyway, in that sub-forum there was a very active thread about making stats for actual Historical Figures who your player characters in a Period Game might Forrest Gump their way into encountering. And at one point after I'd been a regular there for quite a few years, I and a handful of other regulars decided to just preemptively fill in the rest of a roster of individuals who would probably all get requested eventually anyway: former presidents of the United States of America. In assembling our research, priority was given first to disclosed medical data, followed by military service records or job history in similarly demanding fields, followed by things like family and peer anecdotes about physical fitness and temperament, followed by general public anecdotes and press accounts. We did not hold a very high opinion of the notion of "impartial" press in that forum, although some sources earned much better reputations than others.

We quickly figured out a couple things. Firstly, that George Washington and Abraham Lincoln had both been so heavily mythologized that it was next to impossible to agree on what constituted credible data, and since any character sheet we compiled for either of them was going to have too many footnotes to actually feel authoritative, we just wouldn't bother. Secondly, a lot of these guys had pretty decent Combat Stats. Like... none of them were any kind of one-man army. Well, few of them were. I can probably guess which two you're thinking about, and we'll get to them specifically in a minute. But quite a few of them could demonstrably handle themselves in a brawl, according to sources we considered trustworthy. And quite a few more of them were invested in projecting the appearance of being able to handle themselves in a brawl.

So the idea of the league evolved from there. I forget who suggested a battle royale, but I'm definitely the one who proposed Knife Fighting as the medium for the conflict.

GENERAL RULES

1.) Each combatant was issued one knife with ordinary GURPS combat knife statistics.

2.) If a combatant had served two consecutive terms, they were issued a second identical knife.

3.) Battles concluded when one opponent was slain, had surrendered, or was rendered incapable of fighting further in the opinion of the referee (the GM).

4.) Players were assigned Presidents at random, but honestly individual player skill didn't really come into it since everyone could solicit advice from the whole forum before taking each turn. We were way more interested in "What would President [x] have done here?" than in "What would Player [x] do here using President [x]'s stats?" Usually we had enough players that no one was controlling more than two Presidents. If a player controlling multiple characters found two of them facing each other, one of them would be chosen at random and reassigned to another player (with the exception of the special rule for Grover Cleveland below). Whoever was in control of a character when they won a match would continue to control them afterwards.

5.) Each combatant was informed before entering the Arena that if a victor failed to emerge within 24 hours, Space Aliens would vaporize the whole planet Earth. That would be a pretty insane outcome given the 1-second combat rounds in GURPS, though. Also each combatant was informed that if they personally surrendered, they would be euthanized.

6.) In all following tournaments, the memories of all combatants were erased of previous battles so they would not find their willingness to kill or die influenced unduly by the knowledge that their tormentors were capable of resurrecting them on a whim. (Again, the special rules around Grover Cleveland presented an intriguing edge case for this.)

7.) A contestant's in game statistics were to be generated based on the best health they showed while in office. Good news for William Henry Harrison, whose fatal pneumonia didn't settle in until shortly after his ill-advised coatless inauguration speech during a chilly March rainstorm. But bad news for John F. Kennedy, whose carefully cultivated public image of youthful vigor was in stark contrast with the medical history that's been declassified since his assassination, where he was being proscribed a staggering amount of drugs to stay functional.

8.) Running "out of bounds" in an arena was permissible, in as much as some of the maps had sections that were more clearly "intended" combat spaces, but trying to leave the venue entirely by moving off the boundaries of the map we had prepared would result in disqualification.

9.) In any venue with appropriate seating, civilian spectators were present to full capacity. While it was considered unsportsmanlike, the rules did not specifically forbid a combatant from taking hostages to try to force a surrender from their opponent.

10.) Each match would take place in one of the following locations, randomly chosen by rolling 1d6. * (1.) A featureless and borderless gray geometric plane, with lighting, gravity, temperature, atmosphere, friction, and other physical properties sufficient only to ensure no bonuses or penalties to combat mechanics. A hypothetical out-of-bounds would only occur if one President ran far enough that the GM in charge ran out of sheets of graph paper. * (2.) The Roman Colosseum. 50% chance between a fully restored version with a roaring audience, or a modern ruins version with scattered tourists. * (3.) Denver's Mile High Stadium, of which I had detailed maps because one of my Shadowrun characters had once been hired to excavate the remains of a demon buried under the 50 yard line. * (4.) The Oval Office, with some controversy about just what arrangement of furnishings to use until we agreed to base it on the configuration featured in the first season of The West Wing. * (5.) The Boxing Ring at Madison Square Garden. * (6.) Air Force One, in a holding pattern over Dulles International Airport. Combatants would start at either end of the plane's interior, but technically there was nothing preventing them from opening a hatch and trying to take the fight to the roof.

11.) A President was only eligible for participation if they had been dead for more than 10 years. The forum held it as an unofficial guideline that it was a bit ghoulish to generate game stats for anyone who hadn't been dead for at least 10 years, but the mods had the foresight to warn us very specifically that this was going to be a hard rule for our particular project if we wanted to talk about it there. Everyone still remembered that the Secret Service had once raided Steve Jackson Games HQ on suspicion that "GURPS Cyberpunk" was actually a real life guide to Elite Hacking Secrets instead of a complete work of fiction, and we were of the opinion that participating in a GURPS forum at all probably meant that the Feds would interpret whatever we were up to in the poorest possible light. By the time we got everything lined up for the first tournament, Carter, Ford, Bush Sr., Clinton, and Bush Jr. were still alive, while Obama, Trump, and Biden hadn't been President yet, and Reagan had just died. Nixon barely made the cut though. Ford had also died by the time the fourth and final tournament was held. If we ran a fifth tournament today, we'd still be waiting six more years for Bush Sr. to become eligible.

SPECIAL RULES FOR SPECIAL PRESIDENTS

Additionally, the following Presidents were subject to special rules:

1.) As I mentioned, the legacies of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln have fallen into a state where weeding out the myths, propaganda, and outright silly lies was causing too much strife in our otherwise sedate community. So we set them aside. We talked about having them do sports commentary throughout the matches, but the timing of forum-based GURPS combat wasn't really conducive to that.

2.) The first time we ran the tournament, it became clear that letting Teddy Roosevelt and Andrew Jackson compete with the rest of these guys was like watching the Harlem Globetrotters play basketball against a bunch of Junior High kids. We put them off to the side as well, but were happy enough with their respective stats that we held a feature "TITAN MATCH" between the two of them as the capstone to each annual tournament. The winner of the regular tournament got to pick which of them they would play, and the second place from the regular tournament would play the other.

3.) Making Franklin D. Roosevelt fight was, in our unanimous opinion, pretty fucked up. We did not like how we felt when making a simulation of a polio victim roll his wheelchair around a bloodsport arena, even if he would have had four knives. He was exempted from participation.

4.) Grover Cleveland served two non-consecutive terms, and therefore was entitled to two knives... but not both at once. Our compromise was to allow Grover Cleveland two different starting positions in the tournament brackets. In the event that the Grovers Cleveland found themselves matched against each other, they would merge into a single Grover Cleveland with two knives who would be declared the victor and continue from there. If two different players were each at the helm of one Grover Cleveland, they could decide between themselves who would maintain command of the merged Grover Cleveland, with the option to carry out the duel between their Grovers if they really wanted to, or to request that a GM randomly select one of them. Sadly, circumstances never permitted us to witness any variant of the Grovers Cleveland meeting. An additional wrinkle was the possibility that the existence of Multiple Grovers Cleveland would alert another President to the existence of cloning/resurrection technology, in the event that they defeated one Grover Cleveland and then later got matched against the other Grover Cleveland. We saw this happen once, where Herbert Hoover regrettably failed to do anything particularly interesting with this knowledge before the second Grover Cleveland managed to avenge the first with a third-round throat slash.

RESULTS OF THE TOURNAMENTS

TOURNAMENT ZERO: THE BATTLE ROYALE The first time we ran the GURPS Presidential Fantasy Knife-Fighting League, it was as a free-for-all where all Presidents were dropped into the Colosseum at once, we ran down the initiative list, and we brawled until there was one man standing. Surprising absolutely no one, it was Teddy Roosevelt, but only once Andrew Jackson's berserk corpse finally accepted that it had reached 0 HP several rounds earlier. It took forever to complete, and we decided to swap to Brackets so we could run concurrent one-on-one matches after that, and also to recruit three assistants for the one extremely harried GM. It wasn't an official rule, but the top 4 players each year volunteered to be the GMs the next year. I was one of the GMs years 2 and 4, but never the tournament winner. Coincidentally both years I made it to the final 4, one of my two characters was Richard Nixon, but in neither tournament was Richard Nixon the character I got to qualify for the final 4 (James K. Polk and Dwight D. Eisenhower). During the first Battle Royale I piloted John Adams and John Quincy Adams, then after they both died very early on I took over Andrew Johnson and James Garfield for another player with scheduling conflicts, but neither of them lasted very long either.

TOURNAMENT ONE The first proper run of the tournament using the updated rules was later that same year, and we ran it again three more times before the community lost momentum and eventually disbanded. Without the Presidents who were excluded from the league due to special rules or lack of eligibility, but plus the two Grovers Cleveland, we had 32 participants, a very convenient number for this style of event. And then there was the TITAN MATCH between Roosevelt and Jackson at the finale. This is the year I ran Nixon and Eisenhower. Nixon was at a pretty stark disadvantage because other players would just go apeshit at him for the memes, and died his second round in - won against Kennedy (which I'm sure would have thrilled him), then lost to Chester A. Arthur of all people. Eisenhower made it to the final four, vanquishing Andrew Johnson, Grover Cleveland 1, and Herbert Hoover, but losing to that year's champ. First year champion Lyndon Johnson was an infamous bully, a big sturdy man only half an inch shorter than Abraham Lincoln, and not at all afraid to throw his weight and superior reach around. It was close fought, but the fact that he was well-documented to be among the most aggressive and confrontational of this cohort turned out to be just as strong of advantages as his stature. Ulysses S. Grant was the other finalist and made Johnson work for it though. The first TITAN MATCH went to Theodore Roosevelt. Teddy was just... absurdly sturdy. We dialed some of his stats back a little after year 1, but not much. We still had to try our best to genuinely reflect a man who was once shot in the chest by an assassin and decided to finish giving his speech before seeking medical attention. Andrew Jackson got in like five or six stabs, but Roosevelt was still able to stay on his feet.

TOURNAMENT TWO This is the first year I was one of the GMs, and I didn't play any of the contestants personally. I did GM the final match though. Harry Truman was one of history's most prolific mass-murderers, arguably the US President with the highest death toll, and his proficiency at dealing slaughter was not greatly diminished by our tournament insisting that he do it with his own hands. Genuinely, fuck every last one of these guys and I hope they're all burning in Hell, but I hope Truman has it even worse than the rest. In his second round match with Thomas Jefferson they both tried to throw their knives at each other and wound up grappling unarmed until Truman could choke Jefferson to death. Truman's opponent in the finals was Eisenhower, who I was cheering on having piloted him the year prior, but Truman kept landing vicious called shots. The TITAN MATCH gave victory to Andrew Jackson. I don't think we overcompensated when we reduced Teddy's HT score and ranks in the "Hard To Kill" advantage after year 1, I think the guy who was piloting Old Hickory was just on top of his game, and the dice liked him better. But this was the only time Jackson ever won, and I don't think that's a mistake. The two of them were very close in Point Value as characters, but Teddy's assets were much more suited to this specific type of conflict. To elaborate, Jackson was a glass cannon. He was tough as hell because of willpower and viciousness, but by the time he was president he was falling apart. His mobility was shit, he had two bullets still inside of him (one of which was finally removed while he was in office and one of which he took to his grave), and he was being dosed regularly with mercury because it was a popular Malaria treatment back then. Strategically, he had two real show-stopper moves. The first was to let the other guy hit first, grit his teeth through the pain, and take his sweet time lining up his aim to ensure his retort was a kill shot, a tactic far better suited to a pistol duel than a knife fight. The second was to go in with a berserk all-out attack the second he was in melee range, holding nothing whatsoever back in the pursuit of doing as much harm as possible. The player was able to land an especially lucky strike during one such flurry and stun Roosevelt, then took his time to line up a deathblow while the Bull Moose was reeling.

TOURNAMENT THREE A player once again, the dice gave me Richard Nixon a second time, and James K. Polk the first. Both my fighters made it to the Final Four, and it looked like I was going to have to surrender one of them to another player for the endgame, but Tricky Dick got sliced and diced by the eventual tournament winner, and Polk advanced to the final round to give me a second shot at him. I don't remember everyone they squared off with on the way, but I do remember that I had Nixon try to bite Franklin Pierce's nose off in the first round "to send a message to the other fighters". The GM didn't let me finish though because Pierce was already dead. Ulysses S. Grant was called "The Butcher" both by enemies and admirers. We were never super happy with his combat stats because so many stories about him had untrustworthy origins due to widespread Confederate propaganda. There's a popular perception of Grant as just a catastrophically depressed alcoholic who only knew how to fight by grinding away with numerical superiority, and the reality may have been a lot more nuanced. Overall I'd say that Grant benefited a great deal that year from getting placed in arenas that gave him defensible terrain to play around with, and a couple clever uses of environmental weapons to supplement his knife. Grant and Nixon skirmished at length on Air Force One before Grant backed my Nixon into a corner near the lavatories and finished the job, then In the final match he threw his knife into my Polk's hamstring, then brained him with a piece of Colosseum debris while Polk was writhing in agony. Over in the TITAN MATCH, now that we'd all seen how rough Jackson's opening volley could be if he caught you at close range, Teddy's player this year wasn't having it. We did all agree that strafing tactics would have violated the spirit of his "Code of Honor: Good Sportsmanship" disadvantage, so instead he just got in Jackson's face and launched his own devastating all-out attack first. Jackson did bite Roosevelt that time though, that was pretty memorable. And I was playing him. I guess I was just in a biting mood that year.

TOURNAMENT FOUR Once again I was a GM, but this time I let someone else run the main tournament finale so I could sit back and watch, and then I took over to GM the TITAN MATCH. Lyndon B. Johnson again. What can I say, the guy was a huge belligerent jackass. A real arrogant piece of shit. At least most of these other guys had the sense of decorum not to do things like literally whip out their dick and slap it against a desk as some kind of primate dominance display, or force people giving them briefings to follow them into the toilet and talk to them while they pissed. Johnson's biggest advantage was that he didn't respect anyone else even a tiny bit, and he fought like it. The aliens probably didn't even need to threaten the earth with annihilation for him to do it. Every time one of his opponents would start going "Perhaps we need not be foes, can we find no common cause against our tormentors?", Johnson would tackle them to the ground and slam his knife through their eye socket. The fourth TITAN MATCH was the closest we ever ran. Both combatants ended the final round immobile with their knives in each other's bodies. But Teddy was just plain bigger and had more HP to drain via ongoing bleeding damage before falling unconscious, so he won in the end. My decision to keep the match going after they were both down and bleeding was controversial at first, but eventually a consensus was reached that if anyone was going to struggle back to their feet, it was one of these two.

IN CONCLUSION

If I ever found enough fellow GURPS players who were willing to participate, and tracked down where I had everybody's stats written down now that that forum is long defunct, and made satisfactory new stats for the competitors who have become eligible since the last tournament, I would love to get this thing back off the ground. As far as newly eligible competitors go, I think Gerald Ford would do well for himself because he was a pretty big dude and a college football player, and his reputation for clumsiness seems to have mostly been manufactured by a scandal-obsessed media. On the other hand I think Reagan would fold like an absolute chump even with stats based on his time in office before the Alzheimer's became unmistakable, because his entire political career was about delegating everything and then claiming personal credit, and any physicality he managed to project had the reek of stagecraft rather than sincerity. I think he'd be completely lost in any situation more complicated than a photo op without some underling to do all the work for him. Maybe he could ask Nancy's astrologer to suggest some good moves though.

#GURPS #Wall of Text #The GURPS Presidential Fantasy Knife-Fighting League

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paradoxcase · 11 months ago

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Sorry for the extended absence. The Riven 2024 remake came out on the 25th, then I went on vacation to see my aunt, then we all got covid from me going through the airport, I spent like a week and a half recovering from covid and eventually finished Riven, and now I've been decompressing a bit from all that by booting up Stardew Valley 1.6 for the first time since it came out. Eventually I will reboot back into linux and finish listening to the other two Locked Tomb audiobooks, maybe I'll do that this weekend.

Here's some Riven remake thoughts under the cut:

I dislike the animated characters compared to the live action from 1997, but I like that they kept most of the original recorded dialog (from what I've seen, I think the only rerecorded dialog was Atrus?), but the animated characters weren't as bad as I was expecting, so I guess there's that. I'm guessing they probably had to do this because they didn't have 3D recordings in 1997 that would have looked good with the free movement during cutscenes and VR?

I didn't like that the camera angle was locked to the cursor at all times, I feel like they could have done what they did in Exile and Uru and had right click unlock the cursor, that system worked perfectly in those games. It got a little odd during the cutscene where Gehn shows you the trap book, since I guess they wanted you to be able to click on the trap book without moving the camera, maybe because moving the camera significantly during the cutscene triggers the cutscene to end? I didn't play with it a lot, so I'm not sure. But during that cutscene, there was a weird thing where the cursor could move freely, but the camera would follow it slightly after a delay, and it was kind of disorienting

I like the new number system. It never really made any sense that the Moiety would be using D'ni numbers in their puzzle to enter Tay, or that Catherine would use D'ni numbers in her personal journal. I think the Rivenese numbers are much better incorporated into the animal puzzle than the D'ni numbers were in 1997, actually, and I like that you still have to figure out the D'ni number system even though it's no longer used in the specific puzzles it was used in in 1997

I really love the new conception of what the domes are, and why they exist, and how you use them to travel between islands. I also kind of like that you can access Prison Island before accessing Age 233, and actually have to access it before solving the animal puzzle

There was so much potential to the remade animal puzzle, but I feel like the actual implementation fell on its face. The lens was perfect for the puzzle, and so was the idea of using it to find the clues and the numbers, and the numbers themselves were perfect for the puzzle, but the clues were just not it. I was not able to make the clue for totem #1 appear in the game, even when following a guide, I suspect the game is just bugged in this particular place. Totem #6 showed me the wrong animal picture for some reason, not sure if this is a one-time glitch or an actual bug, I'll have to check when I replay the game. Totem #3 and #5 both had a moth as their clue, but obviously it's not possible to choose the moth twice, so this was what ultimately lead me to look in a guide. Apparently #3 is the moth, and #5 is for some reason the frog. After completely the whole game I still don't know what the frog had to do with the moth or how I was supposed to say, hmm, yes, a moth, obviously I'm meant to choose the frog for this one. Also, one of the guides I came across described the sunner as a "toucan", like, dude, have you literally ever seen a picture of a toucan, do you for some reason think a toucan is an animal with four flippers and no wings and flat duck bill, what on Earth would cause someone to describe that shape as a "toucan"? Anyway, I think this part of the game definitely could have been better

I'm a bit confused by the redesign of the prison. The in-game text now identifies the prison as being Gehn's former office before he moved to Age 233, and so I guess it was redesigned so that the elevator no longer has bars for that reason. But we still have information in the game that Gehn would go up to interrogate Catherine periodically - I feel like he would have modified the elevator to allow him to use it without releasing her, the way it worked in the 1997 version. Instead, in this version, we have this thing where you have to go through a railing, off the beaten path, all the way out to the Moiety totem, and then climb a series of ladders and parkour across some precariously placed boards to talk to Cathering through the bars on the outside of the prison. The proximity of all this to totem made me initially think that the Moiety were coming out here to talk to her (since the domes are no longer protected with a password and the Moiety know how the solve the fire marbles puzzle according to Catherine, and must therefore also know how to use the domes to travel between islands) and Gehn was unaware of this route. But since it's now the only way up there without freeing her, Gehn must have been using it, too. I really can't see him assembling this whole parkour arena to get up there, he would have at least built a stairway or another elevator or something. During the course of the game, you discover another rift into the star fissure on Temple Island, and it gets patched up with honest-to-god metal plates after a pretty short period of time. When Gehn needs to get stuff built, he seems pretty efficient about it, and I get the feeling that Catherine has been imprisoned for a while now. There's also kind of a odd thing about the elevator - the elevator can't even be called on the first floor without the password, which does make sense if this was Gehn's private office originally. There seems to be another place to enter the code upstairs too, but it's been broken. Naively you might guess that the code was needed to leave the office, too, and that's how Catherine was imprisoned (which is dumb and also a fire hazard, but I think it's actually totally in character for Gehn to create things which are dumb and also a fire hazard), but this doesn't work, since after Catherine leaves the prison you are still able to call the elevator back up so that you can leave after her. So I'm not sure what the broken code entry is supposed to mean, there

I like that we got to see a bit of Tay and Age 233, although there wasn't a lot to do there. I wonder why Gehn had the smaller wooden Moiety totems on Age 233? Seems out of place

I haven't played through all the bad endings, and still have nine locked achievements on Steam. When I eventually get bored of Stardew again, I'll probably go back and 100% it and see the bad ending content

#irl #riven #riven remake #riven 2024

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myconetted · 2 years ago

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macbooks last for like 5-10 years tho lol. i'm not even an apple fanboy, they just objectively give their hardware a long lifetime with software/OS support that goes surprisingly far compared to everyone else. when i look at a pile of old thinkpads, macbooks, HPs, dells, acers, etc, i'm gonna pick the thinkpads and macbooks.

you may genuinely prefer having a hulking beast of a computer, but most people don't! i'm most people in this regard. i once thought i wanted a hulking beast until i got one. 17" of laptop, it was a damn nightmare to fit in my bag, and made me not want to haul it around—kind of defeated the purpose of a laptop. let all that chonk stay with your desktop.

and yeah sorry moores law says you're never gonna have something built to last 50 years. sure, design the parts themselves to last, but that's gonna cost you extra, and for what? the standards for how computers fit together will have changed; it'll be a pain in the ass to even keep the chassis. the bottom line here is that shit changes and you have to get used to it.

for repairs and upgrades: these are already options!! helloooo thinkpad. hello framework. they both release extremely detailed repair and maintenance guides! thinkpads have ports out the yin yang and the framework lets you mix n' match with little usb thingies that slide into the laptop. it even goes ker-chunk! don't know why the fuck you would want a lever to turn it on though. that sounds like a part just waiting to fail and allow junk to accumulate in the crevices it'd require.

for software, use linux! it doesn't do the stupid UI overhaul thing every three months. i've used the same desktop environment for over eight years, babey! don't like it? too hard to use? too bad! figure it out! that's what it looks like when you don't have a fancy product team polishing everything (and then deciding to redesign). you may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.

i'm just sayin', the nice things are already out there. you already have a choice to escape the clutches of le silly valley's evils. but if you don't like the options you've got, then i dunno what to tell ya except that it's nice over here and i hope you'll join us eventually :)

You know what, fuck it, I don't *want* some frivolous, artisanal, lighter-than-air computer with no customizability, no upgradeability, no reparability, no ports, and a lifetime of *maybe* 3 years if you're lucky. I want a fucking great BEAST of a computer that's designed to last a minimum of 50 years, with ports up the wazoo and optional drives for every kind of media! I want modular components that you can drop in a bog for a year, dry them off, and have them still work fine! I want them to make a noise like "ker-chunk!" when you slide them into place! I want a switch that you pull to turn it on! And I don't want software that constantly forces you to get a pointless, cosmetic "upgrade" every few months either! I want durability! I want longevity! I want satisfying haptics! I want Silicon Valley to go fuck itself!

#my:poast #compute

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newbiecli · 15 days ago

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Picking a Linux Distro

So, you've finally decided to install a Linux distro on your computer, eh? Well, the first hurdle most newbies face is figuring out which version of a distro to go for. Some distros have many versions, and a few even pop up more than one a year! It's a bit different from Windows, where you only get a version every few years.

To clear up that confusion, there are two key things you should consider before making your choice:

First: Hardware

Distro versions might keep evolving, but your computer's hardware specs usually stay pretty much the same. You'd be hard-pressed to find someone upgrading their memory, processor, graphics card, sound card, or even motherboard every single year. If a distro version is way too new, your hardware might not be able to keep up, leading to a shameful performance. And then, inevitably, you'll end up blaming Linux as a whole!

Now, how you check your hardware specs depends on your current operating system. If you're on Windows, you can hit the Windows key + R on your keyboard to open the "Run" dialogue box. Then, type "msinfo32" into the box and either press Enter or click OK.

Another way on Windows is to press the Windows key + R again. Type "dxdiag" (without the quotes) into the dialogue box and hit Enter. This will open the DirectX Diagnostic Tool. You can find all the important hardware info in there.

Once the dxdiag window pops up, you'll see a few tabs like System, Display, Sound, and so on.

Next, you'll need to check the releasing year for each of those hardware bits. Just use a search engine or an AI to look up the year your processor, memory, graphics card and other hardware were made. For example, if they're all roughly from 2010, then you should aim for a distro version that was also released around 2010. A distro version from late 2010 or even a year newer would be fine; the main thing is that the distro version shouldn't be older than your hardware.

Second: Software (or the heaviest/trickiest apps you'll install)

Usually, 3D animation or games software are the most finicky types of programmes. If your computer has an older distro version than its hardware, but your software is much newer, you'll likely run into compatibility issues with drivers. The drivers provided by an older distro version probably won't be able to handle the software's commands. Even updating drivers from GitHub or a repository isn't guaranteed to fix this. Updating the kernel would be the same story. The worst-case scenario from updating drivers or the kernel is a corrupted GRUB, leading to a failed boot. That's quite scary and can take ages to fix!

Another problem is if you've matched the distro version's year with the software's year, but the hardware can't handle the commands, which is another sad ending. The software still won't run smoothly and might crash often. And guess what? Linux will get the blame again!

Even if you decide to sacrifice the software version to match the distro and hardware release year, you can certainly do that. However, you might struggle to use the software if a desired feature isn't available, or if most of the tutorials out there are for the latest software versions, not the older ones.

For instance, say you want to install software version 25 (released in 2025). But because your hardware and distro are from 2010, you ditch that idea and install software version 10 (released in 2010) instead. You'll probably miss out on loads of software features compared to version 25. Plus, most software tutorials are usually for the newer versions, which often have a completely different look from the old ones.

At this point, don't you dare think that installing Linux is complicated. It's not! Installing Windows is just the same because all three components (software, hardware, and Windows version) need to be compatible with each other. It doesn't matter what OS you install, everything has to be compatible.

Note: The image shown in this post is illustration using the Ubuntu distro. All brands and types mentioned are not promotions; they're purely for illustration to help readers easier to understand the advice in this post. Happy choosing the most suitable distro version! 😉

#tips #linux #ubuntu #open source #operating systems #windows #distro #distros #operatingsystem

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auspicious-voice · 1 year ago

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Fuwa Maria AI & Fuwa Mario AI for DiffSinger Progress Report (February 2024)

It's been a while since I made a post like this, but I figured it's time to make another post for DiffSinger development shenanigans. I haven't uploaded a full cover in almost two months and I'm slowly working on Maria and Mario's 8th anniversary project alongside my other OC projects...which have been receiving lots of tending to thanks to being hit with new ideas and concepts. January was a productive month for me, so there's much to be discussed about what's going on with current DiffSinger voicebank development.

As usual, the bulk of this report will be under the cut!

Voicebank Progress

Still, I do not have any audio demos just yet. But the development is coming along well so there's that? I haven't even done the training part...

Fuwa Maria AI

I finally labeled Maria's ENTIRE dataset nearly after a month's worth of labeling! I had to deal with the pain of listening to my own voice for hours on end, so I'm hoping once I get to the training part, Maria will at least sound decent.

The only things left to do are to use SlurCutter on the dataset, but I'm having major troubles with especially when it comes to installing parselmouth on my Windows PC...I'm still new to using Python...but I am contemplating on doing all the SlurCutter work on my Linux PC if all else fails, otherwise setting up everything before autopitch training is plain frustrating 😭😭😭 If all else fails I might not train autopitch w/ SlurCutter at all...so in that case, hopefully my singing will at least suffice. Looking forward to vocoder training, however, so I might fine-tune the new HiFiPLN vocoder that came out recently!

I'm still holding off from training the dataset, as I am still waiting for the tension parameter to be implemented into the main branch...But once that gets done, I am also implementing parallel training for additional language support in the stable version! English is among one of them, and I'll probably throw in a Japanese dataset for improved pronunciation or w/e, and Chinese and Korean support would be nice too, but IDK if I'll ever use those languages LMAO...but perhaps I might train a beta version w/o tension and parallel learning soon? Let's see if Colab will be kind to me haha, and I don't have a PC powerful enough for local training...

Update: I in fact did train a beta voicebank for Maria! you can listen to a short snippet of what she sounds like here. Since the tension param won't be implemented for a while, I thought it'd be best to at least train a more stable version of Maria's DiffSinger voicebank with English crosslang and autopitch for public release, and perhaps work on a new version with tension implemented...but also I saw on DiffSinger's to-do board with rap and tone support AND attack and release...I'm excited for whatever DiffSinger has in store for new features :>

Fuwa Mario AI

I finished recording Mario's entire dataset (normal, power, and soft modes), and as of writing this post, I just started labeling it. He's more tolerable to listen to compared to Maria, but he's my natural voice anyways. I'm on my 4th song, and labeling isn't that much of a tedious process anymore...

Not much I can say, but expect him to also receive additional English support and such! Let's hope he'll sound good after training! I'm also hoping to finish labeling around the time tension is properly supported, but I don't really know when that will come out. Hopefully before their 9th anniversary arrives...

Character Progress

Designs

I STILL don't have a solid character concept for Maria and Mario, and that includes their design. Well at least I know what their hairstyle will look like...

I do have some concepts in hand but I don't know where I put them...

Profiles

I think I'll just stick to Maria and Mario's current character information...I just don't want to make up new lore for them as they've already gone through so many revamps.

Signing Off

I'm still into OCs as usual! But with new DiffSinger voicebanks releasing coming out, I'm more inspired to finish my own, so it feels like I'm in my UTAU noob days from 2014...and HOLY SHIT it's been 10 years since I got into UTAU...

I'm still treating vocal synths as a hobby, but sometimes it's nice to check up on what the folks are up to these days. Plus I got a new gunpla model kit and it's so pretty ^^ I think I built three so far!

See you around,

-- HIRATELIER

#DiffSinger #Voicebank Development #Fuwa Maria #Fuwa Mario

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maacwanowrie · 2 years ago

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Skills Required for an Animation and VFX Artist

An enhanced visualization or VFX diploma encourages students to figure out how to control images on the screen to create things that can't be captured in real life. A VFX institute in Pune training will prepare you to become an expert at mastering the comparable

There is a reason why people feel the need to enrol in an animation school in order to acquire the knowledge and abilities necessary to succeed as a VFX and animation artist. These young aspirants become the greatest in their field because to the subtleties that these colleges educate through their panel of industry professionals.

You may study VFX very easily if you have a degree in media technology, mass media, photography, or graphic design. You can learn VFX rapidly if you have even basic school-level skills in design, painting, or even something as simple as arithmetic, computer science, or physics.

The following are some of the abilities you'll need to improve your VFX craft:

technical expertise in programmes like Microsoft Office, Houdini, Linux/Unix, UI design, Adobe Creative Suite, Prototyping, Photoshop, Maya, and Javascript.

the capacity to visualise different situations and convert them onto a screen. You would therefore require imagination.

a deep love of storytelling, movies, cartoons, and drawing.

the ability to pay attention to the little things that endear them to the reader. You must be able to distinguish between individual hairs, freckles on someone's cheek, and subtle variations in light and shadow.

a good eye for detail so you can react quickly and accurately to mirror reality as precisely as possible.

Excellent organisational abilities are also essential because you will need to work with many different departments. Please be aware that animation is a team effort. In order to produce an effective end result, you would need to interact and communicate with several departments.

a spirit of cooperation because you would need to work with numerous staff members.

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bigmickswingin · 3 months ago

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I'll just do it here.

Linux FAFO

this method is going to be a bit slow compared to what you're used to, but this is the price we pay for virtualization.

1.) download and install virtualbox

2.) download linux mint

3.) launch virtualbox and set up a virtual machine

here's how:

Your left panel will likely be blank, don't worry about it, press NEW

type a name, anything you feel like

select the iso you downloaded in the ISO Image dropdown, it should figure out the rest for you, but if it doesn't Type: Linux, Version: Ubuntu are fine. Mint is based off Ubunutu.

I changed the username and stuff on the left, but I don't think I needed to.

this is asking how much RAM and how many cores (if you have more than one) you want to use for your homunculus computer. stay in the green and you should be fine, but you can keep it at the default too. don't worry about EFI

how big do you want your homunculus hard-drive? KEEP IT LESS THAN YOUR ACTUAL EMPTY SPACE

the next screen will be a summary of everything we've done so far, press finish.

gz you configured a virtual machine.

to start it:

Select your machine of choice, and press Start, then it will boot up. The first time, I got a thing that said it couldn't find an optical drive or something, with a dropdown; I would have picked the same mint iso as we did earlier for the dropdown, but I accidentally closed it. when I opened it again, there was no problem.

chances are it will slowly open you in to a linux desktop. this is because Mint isos are live discs, meaning they load linux in to your ram and you can fuck around without installation, but it's usually a bit slow and somewhat limited

in our case it will be a virtual environment inside a virtual environment and will suck, so just click the install from either the corner menu or the shortcut on the desktop.

installation was literally so easy i basically just pressed next all the way through, but i did capture some things I thought might be less intuitive for neophytes.

yea, go ahead, won't hurt

you'll see some screens about what language you speak, what your keyboard language is, and that sort of thing, set it up accordingly or just don't touch anything.

this sounds scary, it's not, it's talking about the homunculus simulated computer which currently has nothing on it, this is safe

you'll get a confirmation about the changes it's writing to the disc, etcetera. unless you know what you're doing just use the defaults.

this is around the last screen, set it up the way you want, just make sure you can remember the username and password you want for your sim computer.

continue, finish, etc. it will put you back on the desktop from before and give you a thing that says you should restart, go ahead and do that

there, you now have a tiny computer running inside your computer. you can use you sim computer to fuck around without worrying about screwing up your main computer.

either use it like a normal person or go around breaking and trying to fix stuff.

ubuntu has official tech support, some of that will translate to mint, although I never needed to go further than the user community. mint has it's own forums also, and there are generic all-linux forums like linuxquestions

that's your beginner friendly app store, click the corner menu button --you know exactly how that works -> Administration -> Software Manager. you can find open source linux stuff there, and you can also find certain other things like Discord, Spotify, etc.

anyway this is just intro stuff, you can customize the ever-living fuck out of linux and do some cool shit with just a little bit of experience with the technicals, if you want to, or just use it out of the box.

I'll follow up on that technicals shit later i guess.

25 ways to be a little more punk in 2025

Cut fast fashion - buy used, learn to mend and/or make your own clothes, buy fewer clothes less often so you can save up for ethically made quality

Cancel subscriptions - relearn how to pirate media, spend $10/month buying a digital album from a small artist instead of on Spotify, stream on free services since the paid ones make you watch ads anyway

Green your community - there's lots of ways to do this, like seedbombing or joining a community garden or organizing neighborhood trash pickups

Be kind - stop to give directions, check on stopped cars, smile at kids, let people cut you in line, offer to get stuff off the high shelf, hold the door, ask people if they're okay

Intervene - learn bystander intervention techniques and be prepared to use them, even if it feels awkward

Get closer to your food - grow it yourself, can and preserve it, buy from a farmstand, learn where it's from, go fishing, make it from scratch, learn a new ingredient

Use opensource software - try LibreOffice, try Reaper, learn Linux, use a free Photoshop clone. The next time an app tries to force you to pay, look to see if there's an opensource alternative

Make less trash - start a compost, be mindful of packaging, find another use for that plastic, make it a challenge for yourself!

Get involved in local politics - show up at meetings for city council, the zoning commission, the park district, school boards; fight the NIMBYs that always show up and force them to focus on the things impacting the most vulnerable folks in your community

DIY > fashion - shake off the obsession with pristine presentation that you've been taught! Cut your own hair, use homemade cosmetics, exchange mani/pedis with friends, make your own jewelry, duct tape those broken headphones!

Ditch Google - Chromium browsers (which is almost all of them) are now bloated spyware, and Google search sucks now, so why not finally make the jump to Firefox and another search like DuckDuckGo? Or put the Wikipedia app on your phone and look things up there?

Forage - learn about local edible plants and how to safely and sustainably harvest them or go find fruit trees and such accessible to the public.

Volunteer - every week tutoring at the library or once a month at the humane society or twice a year serving food at the soup kitchen, you can find something that matches your availability

Help your neighbors - which means you have to meet them first and find out how you can help (including your unhoused neighbors), like elderly or disabled folks that might need help with yardwork or who that escape artist dog belongs to or whether the police have been hassling people sleeping rough

Fix stuff - the next time something breaks (a small appliance, an electronic, a piece of furniture, etc.), see if you can figure out what's wrong with it, if there are tutorials on fixing it, or if you can order a replacement part from the manufacturer instead of trashing the whole thing

Mix up your transit - find out what's walkable, try biking instead of driving, try public transit and complain to the city if it sucks, take a train instead of a plane, start a carpool at work

Engage in the arts - go see a local play, check out an art gallery or a small museum, buy art from the farmer's market

Go to the library - to check out a book or a movie or a CD, to use the computers or the printer, to find out if they have other weird rentals like a seed library or luggage, to use meeting space, to file your taxes, to take a class, to ask question

Listen local - see what's happening at local music venues or other events where local musicians will be performing, stop for buskers, find a favorite artist, and support them

Buy local - it's less convenient than online shopping or going to a big box store that sells everything, but try buying what you can from small local shops in your area

Become unmarketable - there are a lot of ways you can disrupt your online marketing surveillance, including buying less, using decoy emails, deleting or removing permissions from apps that spy on you, checking your privacy settings, not clicking advertising links, and...

Use cash - go to the bank and take out cash instead of using your credit card or e-payment for everything! It's better on small businesses and it's untraceable

Give what you can - as capitalism churns on, normal shmucks have less and less, so think about what you can give (time, money, skills, space, stuff) and how it will make the most impact

Talk about wages - with your coworkers, with your friends, while unionizing! Stop thinking about wages as a measure of your worth and talk about whether or not the bosses are paying fairly for the labor they receive

Think about wealthflow - there are a thousand little mechanisms that corporations and billionaires use to capture wealth from the lower class: fees for transactions, interest, vendor platforms, subscriptions, and more. Start thinking about where your money goes, how and where it's getting captured and removed from our class, and where you have the ability to cut off the flow and pass cash directly to your fellow working class people

#open source #linux #virtualbox #virtualization

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myautisticpov · 3 years ago

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Okay, so, I'm gonna ask a tech question and everybody needs to be aware that my tech ability taps out at installing Linux and replacing my graphics card - so try to keep it simple

Obvs, the cost of living crisis is, you know, and I need to figure out ways to reduce power usage

Anyway, my biggest power consumer will be my PC (which is a Dell XPS 8700 that I bought back in 2015) that I run Windows 10 on

Now, when I had my old laptop (which is now my sister's), I replaced Windows 10 with Lubuntu and the battery started lasting 3-5x as long

Now, does power on a PC work the same way? Because 90% of the time, I'm just running Firefox and Discord, so if I dual booted my PC with Lubuntu and Windows 10, and used Lubuntu 90% of the time, would it reduce my power usage?

Or is that just not how PCs work compared to laptops?

I should probably dual boot anyway because this PC is 7 years old and reaching the point where I normally swap to a Linux distro to keep it chugging along

The other option is trying to replace Chrome OS on the new little laptop I have with Lubuntu (it's my writing laptop and I write in Google Docs anyway, so I don't mind it being Chrome OS, but I would mind if I used it for anything else) and figuring out a way to easily swap my two monitors between my tower and my laptop

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noodlegirl-googlyeyes · 3 years ago

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hey! im noodle, or Ellie, and i was tagged to answer some questions abt myself by the wonderful and very rad @theprocfilesystem, thank you so much!

relationship status: single and not at all looking. i don't know if i ever will be, tbh, mostly just because i don't see myself as the kind of person who would want to. but, since it's late, i'll go ahead and overshare that i do have a regular hookup going with my main gal lliJ (im left handed) that meets my needs for sexual expression quite adequately

favorite color: for a long time it was deep purple! it was my sadboy color for sure. now that im a girl, though, it just feels sad, so i decided my favorite color would be yellow! so, yeah, its yellow :>

favorite food: carne adovada, a New Mexican dish made with Hatch red chile and (usually)pork! red chiles are dried and ground, as opposed to the green variety, which is usually roasted fresh. sauces made with red chile tend to have a very dark, smoky flavor, and have a particularly exquisite spice to them. there are many varieties of a protein in a sauce eaten in/on some carbs, but a carne adovada burrito really stands alone, for me <3

the song stuck in my head: unfortunately, it's 'Hip to Fuck Bees'

the last thing i searched online: i had to start typing in the word 'etiquette' because i couldn't remember how to spell it, but the last actual search i made was 'wired switch controller'(im just gonna get the gamecube style one probs)

the time right now: 11 pm exactly

dream trip: honestly it's less about the location and more about me being somewhere with someone who knows the area and culture well. partially it's because i won't enjoy anything if i don't feel safe, and/or if i feel alone, and partially because i hate being a tourist. i just wanna be there.

something i want: ive wanted to get a PC for awhile, it's been years since i had one. it doesn't have to be super fancy, just something that can handle a half-decent DAW and, like, be able to play my metroidvanias (lone fungus is out now btw and it looks amazing!) cherry on top would be someone to help me get started using linux, bc windows and apple can both go fuck each other.

thanks again for tagging me UwU i appreciate u! i would like to nominate @star-crossed-animals , @spoopyscaryalien , @dominoscarsidedelivery and @zoeadrien but u dont have to if u dont want to! also if u wanna do these kinds of games but no one ever tags u, u always have my permission to say i tagged u :>

in addition i'm adding another question: whats a piece of media(book, movie, show, album/song, etc.) that you feel represents you or an aspect of you that you haven't seen a lot of representation for? i know it's kind of wordy, sorry. but for example, mine is bojack horseman. when i was deep in my dark times, there were so many things about myself i hated. i started watching the show around season two, and i saw some of those parts of me in bojack in a way i'd never really seen before in media. in diane i saw some too, as well as some of the things i'd forgotten i loved about myself, but it was mostly bojack. he is not a good character, or role model, and the fact that i related so much to him was disturbing, sure, but also strangely comforting at the time. as the show continued to air, i grew as a person. i never finished the last season. by the time it came out, my values had diverged so much from his that it was kind of hard to watch. and for all my mistakes, i'm so proud of who i am today compared to that lost, lonely, angry figure slowly torturing himself to death.

like i said, its late so im oversharing lmao anyways ty again and peas and love on planat earf ✌️

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boegy · 2 months ago

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This is an awesome guide and I want to add a few of my personal choices to it and provide more resources.

Note: I am, by no means, an expert.

Disclaimer: Some of the suggestions below may be missing features you are used to. It's free, roll with it. 😎

Level 1:

Another browser extension you should know about is LibRedirect. With it, you can pass links over to alternative sites to view the content. Be aware that the majority of the alternative sites are run by volunteers and enthusiasts; they don't always work 🙁 Small note: The name "Libre" gets used a lot by privacy-respecting and open source alternatives where previously they might have used "Free" or "Open".

Level 2:

Adobe Alternatives DuckDuckGo uses Bing for results, I also use StartPage for Google results. There is a desktop app for watching Youtube content called FreeTube that I recommend. It's a front-end for YouTube and Invidious servers (which re-stream YouTube content).

Level 3:

AdGuard is fine but if you are setting up a Raspberry Pi anyway, consider Pi-hole as an alternative option.

Level 4:

If, for some strange reason, you disregard the above guide and think that putting AdGuard on your phone is a reasonable alternative to the suggestions here, I would suggest that you DON'T. It may be different now but when I tried it the Android app it asked me to install a certificate. It does this so that it can modify websites you visit to block more ads. The downside is that it also allows them to read everything that would normally be encrypted. They may not be doing anything nefarious with it, but it's a risk I'm not taking. So, if a third-party you don't trust asks you to install a certificate, DON'T.

Level 5:

Awesome Piracy If you don't want to sign up for usenet and prefer to use torrents, get a good VPN and lock the torrent client down to only use the VPN connection. There are torrent tests you can do to see if your IP is exposed. In your VPN client, pick a country where copyright isn't a word! 😉

Level 6:

In addition to ReVanced, I want to also promote the app NewPipe which can be downloaded from the F-Droid store. F-Droid is an app store for your Android phone that hosts open-source apps and tells you every dirty detail of what each app does, privacy-wise. NewPipe is a YouTube alternative/Invidious front-end for Android.

Level 7:

Custom Windows playbooks are awesome and while I don't know Revi very well, but I will definitely check it out! Just browsing the docs I noticed that they default to the Brave browser. This is a personal opinion but I don't trust Brave as much as open-source alternatives. They have tried some interesting attempts at monetization in the past that make me suspect. Use the browser you are comfortable with instead and use a well-known, good adblock like uBlock Origin or uBlock Origin Lite. In addition to Firefox and its derivatives there is also Chromium and Ungoogled-Chromium if you want something familiar to Chrome.

Level 8:

Seriously, use Linux if you can (and if you do, make backups of your important files first!). Ignore Linux users that tell you to use Arch or an Arch derivative, it's not for beginners. When stuff breaks you just have to figure it out. Ubuntu, Mint, and Pop! are great for beginners but if you play games they may not be the most up-to-date for that. (Pop is especially behind at the moment 😭 but I'm hoping that changes soon) I personally use Fedora which is also great for beginners, is very up-to-date, and never gives me problems. However it does require one post-install setup step to replace the media codecs with "non-free" ones to make some media playback situations work. Other than that, it works so well that I actually find it boring compared to the usual amount of tinkering I'm used to! Fedora has two notable derivatives: Nobara, which is slightly tweaked for improved gaming performance and includes the media tweaks, and Bazzite which is similar to SteamOS but for general hardware (it's for gaming-specific setups like handhelds and living room gaming where you need a controller-focused interface).

Level ???:

You can host your own websites (webapps) made by others! I fell down this rabbit hole after Google killed Reader and I found self-hosted RSS alternatives. Later, I set up Docker and now I run dozens of useful webapps for all sorts of things! Try stuff out!

Hopefully this is helpful to someone. Feel free to ask me general questions about any of the above. If you have setup questions or technical issues, please contact the creators of the above projects first, as I can't cover everything everywhere. I try to, though! 😂

In case anyone is curious, I'm a software developer (mostly in web development) with a lot of general IT skills and troubleshooting experience and I spend a lot of my time tinkering with Linux, FreeBSD, self-hosted apps, open-source software, and supporting Windows systems that are all over the place. I have experience going back to MS-DOS, using Linux since the late 90's and have been running Linux as my primary system for over 5 years now (since Valve released Proton).

Thanks for reading!

genuinely wild to me when I go to someone's house and we watch TV or listen to music or something and there are ads. I haven't seen an ad in my home since 2005. what do you mean you haven't set up multiple layers of digital infrastructure to banish corporate messaging to oblivion before it manifests? listen, this is important. this is the 21st century version of carving sigils on the wall to deny entry to demons or wearing bells to ward off the Unseelie. come on give me your router admin password and I'll show you how to cast a protective spell of Get Thee Tae Fuck, Capital

#open source #microsoft windows #linux #self hosted #software #computing #if buying isn't owning then piracy isn't stealing #support small creators whenever possible

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loadingtropical204 · 4 years ago

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Cmake Makefile

Description

Makefile Syntax. A Makefile consists of a set of rules.A rule generally looks like this: targets: prerequisites command command command. The targets are file names, separated by spaces. Typically, there is only one per rule. The concept of CMake. CMake makes your makefile. Cmake relies on a top level file called CMakeLists.txt; now we can first delete our makefile and out in the previous section. First check our cmake version. 1: cmake -version: You can also use the command cmake to check the usage.

This is a very simple C++ Makefile example and associated template, that can be used to get small to medium sized C++ projects up and running quickly and easily. The Makefile assumes source code for the project is broken up into two groups, headers (*.hpp) and implementation files (*.cpp). The source code and directory layout for the project is comprised of three main directories (include, src and build), under which other directories containing code would reside. The layout used in the example is as follows:

Directory Purpose Project / include Header files (*.hpp, *.h, *.hxx, *.h++)Project / src Implementation files (*.cpp)Project / build / objectsObject files (*.o)Project / build / apps Executables

The Makefile

The Makefile supports building of a single target application called program which once built will be placed in the build/apps directory. All associated objects will be placed in the build/objects directory. The following is a listing of the Makefile in its entirety:

The Makefile and a complete example including source code and directory layout can be downloaded from: HERE

Makefile Commands

The following commands can be used with this Makefile:

make all

make clean

make program

make build

make release

make debug

make info

Example Run

The following is the expected output when the command 'make clean all' is executed:

CMake Version

A CMake based build configuration of the above mentioned project structure can be found HERE

Preface Introduction Under the hood of Visual Studio GNU/Linux Equivalent Visual Studio to Make Utility mapping Example Source Structure Build Run Makefile Details Targets Dependencies Contents NMake Conclusion External Links

If you develop software only on Windows using Visual studio, it’s a luxury. Enjoy it while it lasts. Sooner than later, you will come across Makefiles, maybe exploring some software on Linux or the misfortune of having a build system that uses make with Cygwin on Windows.

Now you figure out that Makefiles are text files and open it in an editor hoping to get some insight into its workings. But, what do you see? Lots of cryptic hard to understand syntax and expressions. So, where do you start? Internet searches for make and Makefiles provide a lot of information but under the assumption that you come from a non-IDE Unix/Linux development environment. Pampered Visual Studio developers are never the target audience.

Here I will try to relate to the Visual Studio build system which will hopefully give an easier understanding of Makefiles. The goal is not to provide yet another tutorial on makefiles (because there are plenty available on the internet) but to instill the concept by comparison.

Visual Studio provides features that are taken for granted until you have to read/create a classic Makefile. For example, Visual Studio auto-magically does the following.

Compiles all the sources in the project file

Create an output directory and puts all the intermediate object files in it

Manages dependencies between the source and object files

Manages dependencies between the object files and binaries

Links the object files and external dependent libraries to create binaries

All of the above have to be explicitly specified in a Makefile. The make utility in some ways is the equivalent of Visual Studio devenv.exe (without the fancy GUI).

Visual Studio is essentially a GUI over the compilation and link process. It utilizes an underlying command line compiler cl.exe and linker link.exe. Additionally, it provides a source code editor, debugger and other development tools.

A simple win32 console application project in Visual Studio is shown below. You have a solution file which contains a project file.

Invoking a build on the solution in Visual Studio calls something like the following under the hood. Yes, it looks ugly! But that is the the project properties translated to compiler/linker flags and options.

It is very similar in GNU/Linux. The equivalent of a compiler and linker is gcc, the GNU project C and C++ compiler. It does the preprocessing, compilation, assembly and linking.

Shown below is a very simple Makefile which can be accessed from GitHub https://github.com/cognitivewaves/Simple-Makefile.

Invoking the make command to build will output the following.

Below is a table relating Visual Studio aspects to Make utility. At a high level, the Project file is equivalent to a Makefile.

Visual Studiomake UtilityCommanddevenv.exemakeSource structure Solution (.sln) has project files (typically in sub-directories)Starting at the root, each Makefile can indicate where other Makefiles (typically in sub-directories) existLibrary build dependencySolution (.sln) has projects and build orderMakefileSource files listProject (.vcproj)MakefileSource to Object dependencyProject (.vcproj)MakefileCompile and Link optionsProject (.vcproj)MakefileCompilercl.exegcc, g++, c++ (or any other compiler, even cl.exe)Linkerlink.exegcc, ld (or any other linker, even link.exe)

Download the example sources from GitHub at https://github.com/cognitivewaves/Makefile-Example. Note that very basic Makefile constructs are used because the focus is on the concept and not the capabilities of make itself.

Source Structure

Build

Visual Studiomake UtilityBuilding in Visual Studio is via a menu item in the IDE or invoking devenv.exe on the .sln file at the command prompt. This will automatically create the necessary directories and build only the files modified after the last build.Initiating a build with makefiles is to invoke the make command at the shell prompt. Creating output directories has to be explicitly done either in the Makefile or externally.

Cmake Command Line

In this example, to keep the makefiles simple, the directories are created at the shell prompt.

The make utility syntax is shown below. See make manual pages for details.

Execute the command make and specify the “root” Makefile. However, it is more common to change to directory where the “root” Makefile exists and call make. This will read the file named Makefile in the current directory and call the target all by default. Notice how make enters sub-directories to build. This is because of nested Makefiles which is explained later in the Makefiles Details section.

Run

Once the code is built, run the executable. This is nothing specific to makefiles but has been elaborated in case you are not familiar with Linux as you will notice that by default is will fail to run with an error message.

This is because the executable app.exe requires the shared object libmath.so which is in a different directory and is not in the system path. Set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to specify the path to it.

Makefile Details

The basis of a Makefile has a very simple structure.

The (tab) separator is very important! Spaces instead of a (tab) is not the same. You will see rather obscure error messages as shown below. Makefile:12: *** missing separator. Stop.

Targets

Here target is a physical file on disk. When the target is more of a label, then it has to be tagged as .PHONY to indicate that the target is not an actual file.

Visual Studiomake UtilityVisual Studio by default provides options to clean and rebuild a project or solution.Clean and rebuild have to be explicitly written in a makefile as targets which can then be invoked.

A typical case would be to clean before rebuilding.

Dependencies

Dependencies can be files on disk or other targets (including phony targets).

Visual Studiomake UtilityVisual Studio by default supports implicit dependencies (source to object files) within a project. Library(project) dependencies have to specified in the solution fileEvery dependency has to be explicitly defined in makefiles

Cmake Makefile Generator

For example, the target all, depends on app.exe which in turn depends on libmath.so. If you remove app.exe, make is capable of recognizing that libmath.so need not be built again.

Contents

Cmake Makefile Link

File: Makefile

File: math/Makefile

Cmake Makefile Difference

File: app/Makefile

NMake is the native Windows alternative to the *nix make utility. The syntax is very similar to *nix makefiles. However, this does not mean that *nix makefiles can be executed seamlessly on Windows. See Makefiles in Windows for a discussion.

Makefiles are very powerful and gives a lot of control and flexibility compared to Visual Studio, but the content is not easily understandable. As an alternative, CMake has adopted similar concepts but the script is much easier and more readable. See CMake and Visual Studio.

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