When they were installing the alarm at my house I noticed that the main guy had nextcloud on his phone and it sparked a nice conversation about privacy. He has no technical background but managed to self-host it on his old laptop with one of those distros that have an easy UI for self-hosting (don’t remember which one exactly). He’s a pretty cool guy.

Imagine using pirated software and allowing it to go online. Loco 🤯

I’d say ffmpeg is a good example, it’s used by almost every piece of software that has to manipulate audio or video (including messaging applications), yet not many people know about its existance.

I tried using VS Code but the fact that it’s not fully open source (VSCodium has limitations) bothers me a lot, as does the presence of telemetry.

I like some of the convenience features, like having a file picker when you’re writing paths, my students use it a lot, but I’m sticking with Kate.

Ok, I had no idea they were the first to do that lootbox shite, I’m not into multiplayer games. That could be considered worse than allowing third party DRMs, since it pretty much introduced kids to gambling.

That has to be one of the dumbest articles I’ve read in a while.

While I personally use Steam very rarely (I prefer to use DRM-free versions of games), Steam has done very little to be considered on its way towards enshittification.

The macos situation is completely irrelevant because at this point its market share on steam is lower than linux and it makes no sense for them to invest only to be constantly screwed over by apple changing things on their platforms. My guess is it will be dropped within the next 3-5 years.

The author points out the deprecation of Steam on older platforms, but fails to mention the fact that this wasn’t always their choice, for instance the recent drop of Windows 7 support was caused by the fact that there’s an embedded chromium browser in it and google dropped support for Windows 7 around that time. A similar situation happened for Windows XP, which was dropped in 2019, a full FIVE years after Microsoft dropped support for it, and at this time Steam on XP was only used for retrogaming, it made no sense to keep supporting it, there are better ways to get old games on XP.

There’s barely a mention of all the good things that Valve has done for Linux gaming, but the article complains about Steam being 32 bit (which is still a requirement for wine to run, at least until the new wow64 mode becomes stable, and steam comes with its steam runtime specifically to avoid distro compatibility issues); they could have made proton only work with steam, they could have made their dxvk and vkd3d forks proprietary like nvidia did, but instead it’s all open source and very easy to build on all platforms and I use my own fork every day to play games without steam. Heck, there are even competitors for the steam deck that run proton.

Also, can we mention the fact that Steam has not turned into yet another subscription service like some of its competitors?

If I had to point at something that Steam absolutely did wrong, I’d say it’s allowing third party DRMs on the store, it’s a consistent source of issues, especially for old games. I understand that when they made the choice we didn’t have cancer like kernel level anticheat and denuvo, but still, Steam launching a launcher launching another launcher that launches the game is a trashy gaming experience and adds points of failure as we’ve already seen several times when big titles launch and their DRM servers go down, or when games get old and the DRM servers are shut down permanently.

While I’m sure Steam will eventually become enshittified, I don’t see that happening any time soon, maybe after Gabe retires, and that’s why you should keep a collection of DRM free games on your drives and not rely solely on Steam and other stores.

Just my opinion of course, feel free to disagree.

People think I can hack anything ever created, from some niche 90s CD software to online services

Super Mario Bros on an old NES that my cousin gave me when I was a kid in the mid 90s

I’m italian and I’m absolutely ashamed to say that I use an italian ISO keyboard for programming. It’s missing some symbols like the backtick but I can’t get used to US ANSI so I just configured some macros to type the missing characters.

I’m surprised that no one has mentioned Life is Strange 2, there are some tough choices and the outcome is not obvious at all.

The first time was in Mass Effect 3, when Liara shows you her project in your cabin. For me, this was the first time in the trilogy where I felt that we could really lose the war against the reapers.

Another very good moment was in Life is Strange Before the Storm, when Chloe finds her dad’s car in the junkyard. That hit hard.

Talos 2 is very promising in terms of gameplay, the first one is one of my favorite games and I played through it many times, and I’ve already played this demo 3 times.

This one is more ambitious, the environments are bigger, there’s more content, the art style is fantastic, BUT… I can’t help but feel a deep sense of technical jank that is shared by many players. The game is a constant state of desperately loading stuff and stuttering due to shader compilation, and you can feel all of it every time you turn around or walk in a new area. Even on ultra with native upscaling, the game only looks good if you stay still, as soon as you move you get smears from every object, the grass stops moving, you can clearly see problems with lighting like shimmering and bleeding, the water and vegetation have no physics whatsoever (the first one at least had water ripples), and despite using raytraced AO they’re still using those horrible screenspace reflections (the first one had actual reflections). To top it all off, settings don’t always apply correctly until you restart the game, and sometimes the game reverts them to whatever it feels more appropriate for your hardware with no indication whatsoever that it’s happened. I’ve yet to see an UE5 game that doesn’t have these issues, that engine just… doesn’t look good in motion. To quote AVGN, it feels like driving an old beat up car, you’re always afraid it’s going to break down.

Also, one of the developers said they don’t want to support Linux, not even through Proton, then another one said they’ll try to get it to work. Get your shit together, the first one had a native port!

This is based on my experience with a 5800x, and a 6900xt, in 1440p, so your mileage may vary and I know they’re hard at work to improve the situation.

So yeah, respect for croteam for making what it’s undoubtedly going to be a great puzzle game, but shame on them if they release it in this state.

Got myself an Eaton as many of you suggested. The fan is noisy af but I can probably replace it, other than that it's perfect.

From neutral to ground there seems to be just some noise and a bit of DC.

Yes, I tried different outlets, doesn’t make a difference. I checked the wiring inside the plug too, the connection seems solid.

I tested live to ground, live to neutral, both in and out of the UPS, and I couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

The input signal isn’t a clean sine wave but it’s not dirty either, I’d say it’s sine with some extra harmonics and a little bit of noise. There were no sudden peaks or meaningful variations even while the UPS was switching furiously.

I don’t have CFL bulbs, only LEDs. I can’t think of anything else that could be causing interference. I’ll try contacting the power company as suggested by @[email protected]

Thanks for all the replies.

Cool stuff, now add some physics to those branches :)

In your situation I would probably buy an AMD 7700x with 32gb of DDR5 6000, and if you can get them where you live, an AMD 6950XT (they’re really cheap here right now, equivalent to about a 3080ti-3090). Make sure to get a decent NVME SSD too.

For me it was a combination of factors: Windows has been going down the shitter for at least 10 years now, FOSS software has been getting better and better, and I’ve learned to use more FOSS tools as I grew tired of dealing with Windows.

If I had to point at one project that made me go “Wow, this is amazing”, I’d say ffmpeg. Even in my Windows days, I’ve always enjoyed digital preservation, when I discovered ffmpeg around 2015 it was an eye opener, so many features, so many options, I’ve been using it on a daily basis ever since.

It’s extremely easy to set up with docker, I’ve been using a self-hosted instance for about 2 years now. Contact me if you need help setting it up or if you just want to test it.

Hardware requirements depend on how many users will be using it, I use an old i3 NUC as a home server and it can easily handle a room with a dozen people, especially if it’s just audio, it gets heavier on the CPU if a lot of them have their webcams on but generally speaking if you have a decent internet connection you’ll be fine.

Follow these instructions: https://jitsi.github.io/handbook/docs/devops-guide/devops-guide-docker/ You will need to set up HTTPS unless you’re already using a reverse proxy.

I had a lot of fun playing A Way Out, you can play with two controllers or keyboard and controller