BananaTrifleViolin

I’d totally forgotten this trick - I used to use this when I was a kid after I heard about it. Was never quite sure if it was real because I remember also later being told to use it in Win 98 too and it didn’t do anything afaik.

Wow it really is heading towards crisis point when you have people saying “keep feeding the beast or it’ll eat us”.

During the OpenSuSE install you can choose custom package collections (or packages). So you can install any of the DEs available and multiple DEs if you want. You can deselect the default DE and chose something else entirely.

It’s not put front and centre as an option like CachyOS seems to be doing but is easily accessed in a submenu.

Only the healthiest of relationships use whatsapp to accuse their partner of theft

The Microsoft strategy often seems to be “It worked well, but we completely redid it because we need to justify out existence. Now it barely works with new bugs”

The price does seems about right to me. The whole sale prices are currently about £75 but looking back prices are usually a bit higher and apparently post-2022 energy shock, average around £80-£94 (ignoring the peak of the energy shock itself). They’re well above the pre 2022 prices, but I don’t think it’s thought likely prices will be coming back to those levels in the near future.

This is run under the “Contract for Differences” framework - when the price is below the minimum price the producers get a subsidy to close the gap (so if it’s £75, the producers get £15 per MWh) but if it’s above the £91.20 minimum price they pay the difference back. It’ll encourage build out, gives the developers stable revenue and predictability and helps smooths out volatility in prices overall.

This is only really a bad price if the average wholesale price is likely to go substantially back down below £80 long term. That doesn’t seem likely as we still have the major drivers of high energy prices: UK wholesale prices are driven by gas prices (as the marginal producer), with reduced cheaper piped gas supplies due to the Ukraine causing a likely permanent reliance on expensive LNG as the new floor for gas prices. So it’s unlikely we’ll go back to the old cheap gas prices from prior to 2022 - even if the Ukraine war ends tomorrow, Europe strategically is not going to rely on Russian gas and will continue to use LNG, and LNG stays the marginal producer (not piped gas even if we use more). That’s not even taking into account the green side of this.

UK whole sale energy prices won’t drop substantially until gas is permanently replaced as the marginal producer (i.e. the last most expensive supplier to provide energy is no longer expensive gas power stations and something cheaper). That won’t happen until wind and solar are ubiquitous and we have good energy storage infrastructure to ensure we don’t need gas whenever renewable production is below what is needed moment to moment. That seems a long way off still (although this wind build out should help move closer) - in the meantime LNG will likely set the UK wholesale prices, and it’s unlikely to get much cheaper than where it is now. If anything, if there is anothere energy shock, it’ll go up.

Apparently cost - made from recycled paper which looked grey as poor quality, so they added a little red dye to make it look better. Then it became a standard, partially as it easily stood out from white and yellow paper in offices. TMYK

Yeah I think he’s kind of right. The problem is it was successful as a British TV show, but it popped off in a small way under Matt Smith in the US, and so then it became “can this be a big export franchise?”. We’re in an era of everything being looked at as IP and franchises.

Doctor Who might get rested but it isn’t going anywhere now; it’s too financially important to the BBC and also they (and other studios) think it has the potential to become a mega franchise that spins and spins money. The problem is it’s fallen into an “action adventure” trap, with ever higher stakes and a need to top the last idea with something bigger and better.

It’s a bit like Star Trek in that regard. What made it successful initially was that it was a decently written Sci Fi show, story of the week, sometimes hit sometimes miss. When Star Trek was good though, it was VERY good. Same with it’s various spin offs like TNG, DS9 and to a lesser extent Voyager, etc. It always had some action but the films and competition with Star Wars also set it heavily down an increasingly action-adventure route instead of sci-fi or smaller people focus. When it came back it focuses on silly fan service while being lots of action sequences connected together rather than focusing on plot. Discovery was ok in parts but full of it’s own self importance, ridiculous kung fu sequences and trying to raise the stakes all the time to be a compelling action show. It also went down the mystery box route, but the mysteries also had to ramp up the stakes constantly. Star Trek has lost it’s way. Strange New Worlds started decently but again is gradually falling into the same trap - raise the stakes. It’s basically narrative inflation, and it ultimately makes bad stories.

Doctor Who has been doing that for a while - constantly raising the stakes and getting further and further away from the characters being important. The Doctor is basically a god in the current series; he never was in the original. The way he’s treated by other characters and the story arcs just makes it impossible to focus the show back down and humanise him. When the stakes become the literal multiverse every week, it’s hard to care about smaller stories, and the characters smaller personal motivations and arcs just appear selfish or pointless. Who cares about a character’s personal struggles, if the stakes are the death of everyone? It makes a huge disconnect for viewers between the characters and the story around them. And it’s also hard to sell a show like Doctor Who to new viewers without focusing on the action and the set pieces. You start watching Doctor Who and you get told “here is this god, saving the universe”. It’s honestaly a crazy thing to ask people to jump into.

Doctor Who at it’s best was just like Star Trek - smaller stories with compelling ideas and characters. But now it’s having to be not just “monster of the week” (which was already a bad enough trap to fall in) but now super-hero story of the week. Each episode has to focus on building up hype for the ending, and connecting action set pieces. There is no room for character and story - and so it’s become frankly boring and unwatchable.

It needs a complete reset - it needs to be a smaller show, with a much more focused story with lower but more important stakes. For me an obvious arc is the Doctor journeying to find his missing grand daughter. Instead of saving the universe from some mysterious threat, he should be travelling for a personal reason and having smaller adventures that showcase interesting settings and characters. We don’t need monster of the week every week; it can be what the show used to do well - explore personal stories in a historical or sci fi setting. It can ground itself in a more realistic aesthetic and allow the characters and story to shine. The Doctor on a personal journey to find Susan opens so many possibilities for character development, and stakes that would allow us to empathise and connect with the character.

That’s what I’d do anyway.

I think it’s really matured in the last few years. I’ve used linux on and off for the last 20 years, but things only tipped in favour for me at least about 2 years ago. For me it’s a combination of the polish of KDE, and the maturity of Wine/Proton for gaming. Before that I was dual booting but spending most time in Windows because I’d get in the habit whenever I started playing a game.

So I think despite the jokes, now really is the “year of the linux desktop” because it’s finally tipped over to being an all round 24/7 good choice for most people.

More likely he’ll become bitter and blame Biden. If only Trump has gotten in sooner!

So on my linux PC, I have made a KVM (Kernal Virtual Machine) using QEMU and made a Windows 11 machine inside it (and I bought a digital license for it), which I have work office and email set up. I personally only need to use it occasionally. If you give it enough resources it works decently & runs all windows software; although as it doesn’t have a dedicated graphics card it won’t look as slick as native windows 11 machine and run GPU intense software well (you can get it it’s own dedicated video card and pass it through but really isn’t worth it for just using Excel). It means I can main linux but use Windows occasionally if I really have to. It means you can have a full Windows machine with work Microsoft account set up for Office, One Drive etc - depending on your employers policies of course. You can cut down the resources you allocate it if you want to be switching between the Windows machine and other software in Linux, but Windows can be laggy without enough resources as it’s so poorly optimised.

There are sites that guide on setting up a windows 11 machine in linux, but essentially you need to install KVM modules and Virtual Machine manager in linux (available on all distros). You do need to access your PCs bios to ensure the settings that allow virtual machines to access the CPU are on (slightly different name between AMD and Intel CPUs).

Then you create a machine in Virtual machine manager, give it plenty of resources (especially if the idea being when you use it if it’s the only think you’ll be doing, give it access to most of your CPU cores and the majority of your RAM), and create a decent size virtual hard drive file (I’d say minimum 128gb or more as Windows is bloaty - you can set the virtual drive file size to be flexible so it has a max size but the actual file size is only what is used by the guest system but some file systems still use the whole space unfortunately; not sure how Windows behaves). Download the Windows 11 installer ISO, and then add that file as a virtual CD drive for your guest machine, boot the guest machine, and you should get the Win 11 installer. The VM can only see the virtual hard drive file, so you can install Win 11 safely onto the drives it sees with no risk to your PC. Then reboot and you should have a new Windows install; test it - if it works, buy a digital license (if you want…) and install Office using your 365 account OR if you have old CDs then pass those through to the virtual machine and install as on any Windows PC.

My guess would be the unrest in Iran and the regimes attempts to shut down the internet in that country to prevent organisation?

Yeah it can be confusing; Flatseal makes it easier as it’s a GUI way of doing what is otherwise command line with flatpak itself but it still assumes some knowledge about what you’re doing and can be a bit of trial and error. The more you expose to the sandbox, the more “native” performance you can achieve but it’s at the expense of security.

In Flatseal you can set global options for all apps, or individual apps. For graphics, in the Device section, toggling the option to make the GPU available to the sandboxes may be needed - “GPU Acceleration” in the Device section. That one option can be pretty effective as GPU hardware acceleration is often important, if not essential, for programs like Handbrake (which are video transcoding).

This is equivalent to “device=dri” when launching the flatpak via the commandline.

I game on Linux but these are all FOSS and multiplatform:

• DosBox-X - For my older Dos/PC games
• UAE - For old amiga games
• ScummVM - for my old Adventure games (preferred over Dosbox)
• Wine/Proton - for the vast majority of my gaming on Linux now
• RetroArch - a good all-in-one tool; it uses Libretro as a backend which is basically a distribution method/API to give access to other emulators like Dosbox, ScummVM etc.

There are also dedicated open source engines for old games like OpenTTD for Transport Tycoon Deluxe, and OpenMW for Morrowwind

I support KDE, Mozilla and a fediverse instance currently. A small amount to each, each month, but it is worth it to me. I pay for VPN, email, and password manager, so contributing to KDE, Mozilla and the fediverse feels just like another small set of subscriptions.

I’m lucky I can afford to do this; I think any financial contribution of any size is appreciated by the FOSS world.

EDIT: In terms of things I’m thinking of - Jellyfin and maybe Piefed. Mozilla is a bit of a question mark for me with the AI stuff; but I still value Firefox immensely.

My rebuttal is “your mom is a b***h”. Cut contact as soon as you can; you don’t need someone like that in your life. She doesn’t value other human beings, and she doesn’t have empathy for the suffering of others. She sounds like a nasty person to be around and all she will do is bring you down - either through her constant negativity or though her hatred of others.

You don’t need to rebut her words - she is an adult and has made her choices - you just need to accept she is not a good person and move on as soon as you can.

Well the good news is it’s damaged Salesforce’ reputation, and their business.

This is fascinating research and does offer some hope for future research but is far from being applicable in humans. This is based on mouse models - mice don’t get Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) as the article says, so we’re inducing a similar illness in them via genetic engineering by messing with genes that are associated with AD in humans. It does not follow that this is the same condition that we see in humans. So reversing the articifically created AD-like disease in Mice does not mean that it has any relevance to humans.

Also while the mice saw “full recovery”, even those who were treated after disease onset, that also does not necessairly apply to human AD. This kinds of experiments will have been run for weeks or months, while AD in humans has years of onset. The mice may not have had the same kind of fundamental damage seen in human AD. Mouse cognitive function is also quite different from human cognitive function - we are significantly more intelligent and complex beings.

The research does have value, and does add further evidence to the role NAD+ might play in the disease or treatin the disease. But unfortunately this is a long way from relevance to treating people with AD now. This could be a useful finding or it could end up being an irrelevant curiosity - such is the nature of research. It should also be noted that this is a news article, not a peer reviewed article and is more of a “PR” piece; this research is being commercialised by those involved so the motivation is to talk up their findings. A dose of healthy scepticism is needed on the coverage for this. Fingers crossed this comes to something meaningful in the fight against Alzheimer’s Disease.

Yes but I wouldn’t recommend a Deck for streaming. The interface is geared for “on the go”. It’s great for gaming on the TV but it is a little clunky for streaming. You can open a browser and use that for streaming but it’s best done in Desktop mode. You can actually add Chrome as a custom “game” in Gamescope mode and set it up to launch a website like Netflix but I find it a little unreliable on filling the screen in that mode.

I do have a mini PC that I use for both gaming and streaming, and it works well. You can get something more powerful than the SteamDeck (as it doesn’t need a screen nor to be mobile), and put pretty much any desktop on there. I personally use KDE with a remote keyboard and mouse, but if you want prefer a full screen interface, then probably Kodi is your best bet. For streaming you can add a Browser Launcher plugin to launch Firefox or Chrome, so you can run Netflix etc. But a mouse & keyboard is still probably needed as an interface.

HDR viewing is an issue on Linux devices currently though. It’s improving but can be hit and miss depending on hardware and software.

There are also other TV interfaces coming - like KDE Plasma’s Bigscreen; but it’s got a way to go as it’s only recently been resurrected.

I’m not aware of general Linux specific tools for this (game specific ones do exist). However:

• Vortex does work on Linux: https://linuxvox.com/blog/vortex-mod-manager-linux/
• So does Curseforge: https://linuxvox.com/blog/how-to-install-curseforge-on-linux/

They both work by you running them in wine and pointing them to the game files created by Steam (or Gog or any windows game installed via Wine or Proton) in the Linux filesystem (e.g. /home/yourname/.steam/steamapps/common/game) instead of windows filesystem (e.g. C:\program files\game)

Modloaders with “bootstrap” fixes will also work; they just have to be installed and run in the same proton/wine prefix as the game. I.e. if you install Cyberpunk 2077 via steam, the bootstrap type mods need to be installed into the game folder or fake-windows file system that Proton makes for the game. It even has it’s own “drive C” folder for the rare times you need 3rd party tools. You also put tools into the game folder as you would on windows. If it has it’s own custom exe you can tell wine/proton to run that instead of the game or even before the game in the same prefix.

I mod games extensively on Linux; they work just as they do in Windows. I’ve played heavily modded Cyperpunk 2077 to completion (all the mod tools work via proton - that takes a little tweaking to get working but is doable - and many mods you just drop into specific sub folders; I played with about 50 mods and I didn’t find a single one that didn’t work on Linux specifically), Stardew Valley, Rimworld and Minecraft for example of bredth. Stardew, Rimworld and Minecraft even have linux specific tools to help.

This is less a case of games run via Linux not being moddable, and more that it has it’s own learning curve (in the same way modding on Windows has a learning curve). Once you understand how the linux filesystem and how proton/wine work, the world is your oyster. Protontricks and Winetricks are not just useful for getting games running or tweaking them, they’re a modders best friend.