Domi

I have exactly the setup you described, a Raspberry Pi with an 8 TB SSD parked at a friend of mine. It connects to my network via Wireguard automatically and just sits there until one of my hosts running Duplicati starts to sync the encrypted backups to it.

Has been running for 2 years now with no issues.

I would argue that even restricting sales to your own store is anti-competitive tying. You’re avoiding competing on the merits of a store using exclusive licensing of a creative work.

A creative work which you made yourself, which you can sell wherever you want.

Should you sell it everywhere so as many people can play it as possible? Sure. Do you have to? No.

Again, not a fan of the tactic, but they are trying to break an entrenched monopoly with a ton of network effects which is near impossible.

Let’s reverse the roles for a second: EGS is the big player and Steam is just getting started. EGS suddenly starts paying all publishers to only publish on their platform. Does that sound like competition to you? You don’t break a monopoly by using tools used by monopolies.

Their launcher is perfectly fine.

Fine? Yes. It does the bare minimum of being able to buy a game and start it. Does it do everything I expect a modern game launcher to do after existing for almost 6 years? Nope.

But they are. They’re not losing that much money, even with a tiny portion of market share. Valve having far more market share means they should be able to do it for an even smaller percentage than what epic is using, especially since Valve has 21 years of infrastructure to lean on.

They are “not losing much money” while providing a fraction of the services Steam does. They say 30% is too much, we can do it in 12% and yet they severely lack in social features, have no modding support, no VR support, no in-home streaming, no Remote Play Together, no Big Picture, no Family Sharing, a barely functioning Steamworks alternative, no Steam Deck support, no Linux support and absolutely zero open source contributions. That’s just the obvious stuff I can think of right now, every single menu you open in Steam you find a barebones menu in the EGS.

They don’t even need 21 years of infrastructure for most of these, they just need to fund development of it. Which they seem to be unwilling to do so.

I’m not saying you should, I’m saying it doesn’t make them villains or a bad company.

But it does, paying third parties to not publish on your competitors platform is the oldest anti-competitive behaviour in the book.

It would have been completely fine if they started out with actually funding development of new games and only releasing them on their store.

I would have even given them some slack for their bad launcher since they were new to this.

Instead we are here, almost 6 years later. Their launcher is still trash, their exclusive deals were a complete money sink, EGS is still not profitable, they burned all bridges to Valve and are not one step closer to their claim that 30% is too much and they can do it with 8% 12%.

They should have spent those millions to fund development of a store that can actually compete with the competition and studios that produce games, which they then can sell on their own platform.

Instead they snatched up every new release on the way to Steam while still not being able to provide the basic necessities of a modern PC store front.

So why should I bother purchasing something from them? They have nothing to offer and actively make it harder for me to play games through their store with their anti-Steam Deck stance.

Great to see that Epic didn’t snatch that one up.

I love Remedy and their games but their publisher choice is always atrocious.

Monday Night Combat

Well, that’s a name I haven’t heard in a while.

This had terrible consequences

Ha, they never learn. They also blocked most of Cloudflare in Austria a few years back.

Fun fact: It was the first IP block they tried. They haven’t tried again since then.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/consequences-of-ip-blocking/

I still remember how confused I was when story DLC was announced for a game which I considered to be complete story wise.

Turns out the story was not complete.

It’s a hard game to get into. Played for 2 hours on my first run and didn’t know where to go.

After 2 weeks or so I tried again because everyone was recommending it to me. Now it’s one of my favorites, even though it took another 2 hours before I had any idea what I was doing.

That is normal, you have to set the SDR color intensity slider further up in order to get “proper” colors for SDR content.

Still, I would not recommend running the desktop in HDR mode.

Thanks for the tip! I took a look and it seems like Recognize uses this: https://github.com/jordipons/musicnn

Last update was 4 years ago but will give it a try this weekend.

Once again, the format doesn’t work for me when the main topic is about a fad that nobody talks about anymore.

It worked in South Park for a long time because they had a relevant episode a week or two after it happened. In Futurama, not so much.

The Bender story was pretty neat though. They could have left out all of the NFT stuff and focused just on the Bender plot and it would have been a significantly better episode.

I bought the game on release purely to support the studio and I would definitely recommend waiting.

It’s an excellent game being made but you can really tell that they didn’t quite know where to go with this game. They pulled together mechanics from various genres that don’t fit together that well.

The waiting mechanics are a non-issue since you are usually playing “the real game” while side stuff is happening in your town.

Graphics, art and music are all fantastic, as expected from a game by Moon studios, but performance is an issue. Greatly improved since launch but still not where it should be.

They are listening to feedback though and I’m sure they can get everything in proper order in a year or so.

Damn, it’s 20 bucks now? You have to play a lot of different games to make that worth it.

I’m thinking of Ripping my CD collection again. I’m researching a way to use a LLM to tidy up the metadata.

If you ever figure out how to use AI to determine the genre(s) of a song, let me know. Have been looking for something like that for quite a while.

But why does it end up washing out colors unless I amplify them in kwin? Is just the brightness absolute in nits, but not the color?

The desktop runs in SDR and the color space differs between SDR and HDR, meaning you will end up with washed out colors when you display SDR on HDR as is.

When you increase the slider in KDE, you change the tone mapping but no tone mapping is perfect so you might want to leave it at the default 0% and use the HDR mode only for HDR content. In KDE for example, colors are blown out when you put the color intensity to 100%.

Why does my screen block the brightness control in HDR mode but not contrast? And why does the contrast increase the brightness of highlights, instead of just split midtones towards brighter and darker shades?

In SDR, your display is not sent an absolute value. Meaning you can pick what 100% is, which is your usual brightness slider.

In HDR, your display is sent absolute values. If the content you’re displaying requests a pixel with 1000 nits your display should display exactly 1000 nits if it can.

Not sure about the contrast slider, I never really use it.

Why is truehdr400 supposed to be better in dark rooms than peak1000 mode?

Because 1000 nits is absurdly bright, almost painful to watch in the dark. I still usually use the 1000 mode and turn on a light in the room to compensate.

Why is my average emission capped at 270nits, that seems ridiculously low even for normal SDR screens as comparison.

Display technology limitations. OLED screens can only display the full brightness over a certain area (e.g. 10% for 400 nits and 1% for 1000 nits) before having to dim the screen. That makes the HDR mode mostly unuseable for desktop usage since your screen will dim/brighten when moving large white or black areas around the screen.

OLED screens simply can’t deliver the brightness of other display technologies but their benefits easily make it worth it.

I don’t think you can import pfSense configurations into OPNsense. I switched from a DIY pfSense box as well and redid the config.

You can look for a converter or install pfSense onto it though.

Because it’s dope.

Also, according to their website the 10 and 25 Gbit/s packages cost the same per month.

Also, still cheaper than my 1 Gbit/s connection.

The RFC you linked recommends that no new X- prefixed headers should be used.

The paragraph you quoted does not say you should use the X- prefix, only comments on how it was used.

See section 3 for the creation of new parameters: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6648#section-3

I still work on software that extendively uses X- headers.

I wouldn’t worry too much about it. The reason they give is mostly that it is annoying if a X- header suddenly becomes standardized and you end up having to support X-Something and Something. Most likely a non-issue with real custom headers.

We don’t have many unit tests that test against live APIs, most use mock APIs for testing.

The only use for this header would be if somebody sees it during development, at which point it would already be in the documentation or if you explicitly add a feature to look if the header is present. Which I don’t see happening any time soon since we get mailed about deprecations as well.