Riker catches an alien “virus” (from a plant) and lays down naked under a shiny blanket for the rest of the episode. Pulaski forces Riker to dream of the most boring and worst segments from season 1 and 2.

Most shows have flashback episodes that feature highlights. TNG had a clip show that showcased the worst segments. It was the most lackluster finale episode of any Star Trek season. And this was even well after Riker “grew the beard”.

Merlin wasn’t available here when I checked at some point in time (last year?)

whoBIRD does use BirtNET, from Cornell, so it’s basically the same backend (although it may be an older version).

I recently tried out Merlin (which is now available here) and it’s amazing. It’s definitely more featureful than whoBIRD, although both have the core “recognize bird directly using your phone” features.

For anyone OK with non-FOSS apps, Merlin is great. For anyone who wants a FOSS app for bird detection, whoBIRD is still pretty good.

Either way, identifying apps using ones phone is nice. 👍 Big things to Cornell for making the ML for both of these apps.

Oh, nice! Then there are two great FOSS keyboard under maintenance again! Thanks for mentioning that.

whoBIRD

An app that recognizes birds singing near you, all on device, and has an option to show a photo of the bird too. It’s exclusive to F-Droid (not on Google Play), and the only bird recognizing app I know of that does it all immediately on your device (without sending it to a server). https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.woheller69.whobird/

Organic Maps

Highly detailed OpenStreetMap maps local on your device. Wonderful for walking directions, as it has on-device routing and maps out walking pathways (which is something that even Google Maps does not do well) https://f-droid.org/en/packages/app.organicmaps/

AntennaPod

The best podcast client also happens to be Free Software and on F-Droid. https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.danoeh.antennapod/

HeliBoard

This is the best FOSS keyboard that’s under active maintenance. It even supports swiping, but that requires a non-free binary library from Google. (Maintained fork of OpenBoard.) https://f-droid.org/en/packages/helium314.keyboard/

Breezy Weather

Good weather app that has so many details (including pollen too) and fetches from multiple sources. It looks great as well. https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.breezyweather/

It does work in Proton, but without audio.

There’s a bug open @ https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/7612

ProtonDB also lists the lack of audio, without workarounds (so far): https://www.protondb.com/app/2512840?device=any

Hopefully there will be a fix and/or workaround very soon; the game looks fun.

I basically gave up on podcasts on the desktop and only use AntennaPod on my phone. When I’m at my desktop, I have my phone paired with my computer via Bluetooth and play that way. I can pause it on my computer via KDE Connect (GSConnect on GNOME).

Bluetooth audio from phone to desktop works on Fedora Linux quite well. It probably works on other Linux distros too. I’m guessing it might also work on other OSes like Windows and macOS.

KDE Connect is available on Android, iOS, KDE (and can run on other desktops too), GNOME (via the GSConnect extension), Windows, and macOS.

This solves the syncing problem by sidestepping the need for it. My podcast state is always correct and I always have my podcasts with me, even when out and about.

Docker on Windows and Mac also runs containers through a VM though. (It’s more obvious on Windows, where you need WSL (powered by a VM) and Hyper-V (a way to run VMs on Windows). But on a Mac, VMs to run Linux are also used to run Docker containers inside the VM.)

Podman Desktop helps to abstract VMs away on Windows and macOS: https://podman-desktop.io/

For the command line, there’s “podman machine” to abstract away the VM. https://podman.io/docs/installation (installing on macOS is mentioned on that page and Windows has a link to more docs which also uses the podman machine command.)

As for Docker compose, you can use it directly with Podman too: https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/podman-docker-compose (there’s also podman-compose as well). The only thing Docker compose doesn’t support with Podman is swarm functionality.

Docker compose can even work with rootless Podman containers on a user account. It requires an environment variable. https://major.io/p/rootless-container-management-with-docker-compose-and-podman/ (it’s basically enabling the socket for podman and using the environment variable to point at the user podman socket)

You can do this with the Flatpak version of Steam, but you have to give it access to the disks.

Flatseal is the easiest way to do this.

1. Open Flatseal
2. select Steam
3. scroll down to the “Filesystem” section
4. click on the + icon on the “Other files” area
5. either put in the full path, or use something like “/run/media” to give it access to all user-mounted storage devices (this value may vary depending on how the disk is mounted)

Restart Steam (if it was running). You should be able to access additional devices.

the driver’s for my brother laser printer

I have a Brother printer + scanner too (MFC-L2750DW). Many Brother printers (and a lot of non-Brother printers too) are supported by default in Fedora using a "driverless" method. It's part of "IPP Everywhere" (https://www.pwg.org/ipp/everywhere.html), AirPrint (Apple), and Direct Print (Microsoft), and most printers support it these days, and Fedora supports all of these. (Other distros likely do too.)

At least in GNOME (on Silverblue here), if it doesn't already show up and work, you can click on "Add Printer…" and it should find and add it. KDE and other desktops will likely be different — although hopefully not much different.

Scanning with "Document Scanner", aka: "Simple-Scan", detects my networked Brother printer for scanning without having to do anything too. https://flathub.org/apps/org.gnome.SimpleScan

I hope this helps!

undervolting requires turning off secureboot or a patch

I haven't looked into undervolting much. I know some people have mentioned CoreCtrl; I haven't managed to figure it out yet.

If it requires turning off secureboot or a patch, that's a bummer and might be why I couldn't find the settings in CoreCtrl. I haven't seen this when looking it up a while back, however (but the Internet is big). CoreCtrl setup docs @ https://gitlab.com/corectrl/corectrl/-/wikis/Setup don't mention either.

I do see that it requires setting a kernel flag, which on ostree-based distributions is:

rpm-ostree kargs --append=amdgpu.ppfeaturemask=0xffffffff

(And then reboot.)

It’s not necessarily that smoking is a larger percentage of the population. It varies, but stats show a similar percentage more or less… it is a bit higher in Europe on average than in the US on average — but both places are large with varied amounts of smokers. It’s more that people are outside near each other more in Europe.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/smoking-rates-by-country

In Europe they’re walking down the street, sitting outdoors at cafes, hanging out in the city center, etc. Whereas in the US, people are often driving from place to place to go to a destination, so you don’t notice the smoking as much. Plus, smoking sections are a concept that exists in the US (even outside), whereas they don’t in Europe. Thankfully, in much of the US and EU, most places are finally non-smoking indoors now.

This is a gross overgeneralization. It’s different in different parts of the US and different parts of Europe, of course.

(FWIW: I totally agree with you that it’s gross. And it’s far too common to run into in Europe.)