• 8 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • If you JUST want to read pirated ebooks? Kobo is probably the best bang for your buck. But you can also pretty easily sideload ebooks to any kindle via the email interface (which I believe Calibre can utilize).

    That said? I have a mix of ebooks I got from legal and less than legal sources. And some of those legal sources include amazon kindle because the prices are REALLY good.

    So I like my Onyx Boox. Yeah… it is jank as hell and it allegedly comes with a free 5g modem so be wary of what personal info you put on there. But it works well as I can use the kindle app (which also syncs with my phone) for amazon stuff and the native ereader for any epub files. And because I use a webdav to sync my notes, grabbing new books is as simple as remembering to scp a folder to my nextcloud periodically.



  • They worked great for 4x games and even slower paced real time strategy games or grand strategies. And they are an excellent shim for more action oriented games that are built around M+KB and don’t support a gamepad.

    The problem is that this came out at the time when EVERY PC game was rapidly getting gamepad support. And with very few exceptions (Terraria and Stardew come to mind), it was a worse experience to set up your own mess rather than just use the bindings that let you play civ on an xbox controller anyway.

    But yeah. If we can get both this time? That would be perfect AND encourage people to really dig deep on their setups for steam deck games. I know I would use the trackpads and even back buttons more if it wasn’t learning a completely different scheme for a game I also want to play at my desk or in front of my TV.

    That said, I am also very wary of fitting all those controls on a single controller. Most of the mock-ups people make have HORRIBLE ergonomics. But… Valve knocked the Steam Deck out of the park so day one.


  • And yet?

    Mastodon is full of actual conversations between people. Someone says something. Someone else replies and an actual conversation happens where people respond to each other.

    Lemmy? It almost always devolves into people trying to one up each other and aggressively talk at each other. It is like we speed ran reddit and went from “How dare you have a different opinion” to “I am going to cherry pick a sentence and build a whole fucking straw city from that”.



  • Honestly?

    I vastly prefer almost everyone I have interacted with on mastodon over basically every lemmy user. Because lemmy still thinks it is reddit but also is totally over their ex but do you think he is thinking of me and can I send him a picture of your dick to show it is bigger?

    Whereas mastodon? People kind of just want to talk. We largely understand that twitter has been a shithole for… most of its existence. So rather than try to reinvent it (bsky and threads) we are learning from it in the same way cohost learned from tumblr (and died even faster…).

    And the lunatics who need to scream about what federation is and why it is The Future? They aren’t talking about basically anything else. They are keeping to themselves and talking about how amazing the community can be… while the rest of us are actually being a community.


  • That is not at all what I said.

    Sell software. But customers need to understand they are being sold a license with terms. That was the big controversy on Steam semi-recently and that will continue to be a big controversy because people always forget because nobody wants to think about it

    And yes, I do think providing offline installers is good (it is why I still re-buy games on GoG). But unless people have massive amounts of dedicated storage, they are not going to keep all their games downloaded. AND, because there is rarely a notification of an update, they are going to not even be keeping all their games and will instead have “launch” versions of some.

    And, as GoG themselves demonstrated, when the site goes down you aren’t getting all your games out in time.

    So… you have a license with terms and you are going to go download some torrents when the service shuts down. So… what is the meaningful difference against a Steam or EGS game (assuming there are no additional DRMs on top)?


    Or we can just get angry and yell at each other because someone… said they liked your favorite store? Do I need to say why that is fucking stupid and self defeating?


  • How else would you do ‘buy to own’ for software

    I wouldn’t for anything where I don’t 100% own the license and rights in perpetuity.

    Because GoG has already lost the right to sell many games (I want to say they lost Interplay two or three times?). And it is a matter of time until a publisher demands a game be fully revoked (which has happened on Steam a handful of times?).

    Don’t promise things you can’t deliver on.


    As for something where I do own the license and it will last the lifetime of my company? Bare minimum, I would provide a way to be properly notified of whenever an installer is updated. And I wouldn’t have quite so many “secret” serials required for games (like UT or OFP or whatever).


  • Good on GoG and I do genuinely love most of what they have done.

    But the “buy here and you own it” bullshit is a real laugh. It is still just a license that can be revoked at any point. And the “just download it and have it forever” is untenable for larger libraries and… the French Monk Debacle already demonstrated why.

    For those not aware, in the first year or so of gog’s existence, they pretended they were shutting down the website and told everyone they had like 48 hours to download everything. People lost their shit, hug of death, etc. CDP immediately apologized and then put a “fun” character in The Witcher 2 that referenced that.

    But… that is the reality. If the site goes down, you are only getting a fraction of your library, if that. And GoG have always been horrible about letting you know when a game is updated if you use the standalone installers. So, regardless, you are pirating shit when the site goes down. Same as Steam.


  • Because the mastodon evangelists are horrible.

    Back when there was any question of what platform to migrate to? Threads and bluesky were “Get an invite and make an account”

    Mastodon was people insisting that EVERYONE needed to understand what federation is and the underlying philosophy. When really they should have just said “Sign up for one of these instances. It is like email where it doesn’t really matter what provider you have”. Countless times I tried to explain to folk on a message board or discord and would say “Just make an account on one of these four or five instances”. And, like clockwork, someone would “well ackshually” me and insist that people can’t use Mastodon without understanding the fundamental concept of federation and how picking the right instance is important and people can just delete and remake their accounts until they are satisfied.

    So when it was time for the big influencers to move? They went to where people were already congregating and where they didn’t need to host an educational seminar to tell someone how to make an account.


  • I think, in general, the shift to having MOST functions be on the touchscreen is a good one.

    When driving? You should generally only be futzing with (off the top of my head):

    • Windshield wipers
    • Climate control
    • Not the music but let’s be honest here
    • Turn signals and headlights

    And the rest make perfect sense to keep behind menus you deal with when you are parked. And with modern cars, climate control stops being about balancing the knobs and becomes about setting the preferred temperature and MAYBE tapping the defrost/circultaion button. Which actually also makes sense to not need direct button access.

    But yeah. Still 100% need physical buttons and knobs for the rest.


    I think it is Subaru who have the big display screen and then a small row of dedicated buttons below it?









  • Highly doubtful.

    The few times I have bothered to ask technical questions I mostly get one of the following:

    1. Ideological ranting. “The problem is you aren’t running arch linux in that corporate environment with proprietary hardware you need to interface with”
    2. Complete refusal to read the question. “I totally didn’t read that you said Foo was not viable for reasons XYZ but you should use Foo”
    3. Complete nonsense

    Reddit has a lot of that too but ALSO has the institutional knowledge of people who actually care enough to answer. Similar to stack overflow.

    I try to help where I can but this is an enthusiast “site”. So you have all the people who suggest all the crap they heard on linus tech tips rather than “Okay, for my day job we use X but no sane person should use that at home. Look into Y”.


    That said: I have said it before and I’ll say it again. The age of the online message board for tech support is long gone. Because the super useful results might be talking about a bug from five years ago rather than a bug from today. The answer really is ephemeral discord servers.



  • We have decades of examples of people standing up for what is right or true.

    Journalists get shit on because “fake news” or “they are just writing clickbait” and people actively shit on their livelihood. Activists get the shit beat out of them, are maimed for life, and often go to prison. And people post pictures on facebook where they have a background in solidarity before they take a new duck-face picture and overwrite it.

    The purpose of journalists are to seek and speak truth on behalf of The People. When The People have made it clear they don’t give a shit and can’t be bothered to even read the article someone had to go into hiding for?

    So why stand up and make yourself a target?


  • Yup. That is the problem.

    Fascism is on the rise around the world. And the countries that have stood firm in the face of it? They are juicy targets for strongman leaders needing an easy win.

    At the risk of showing my indoctrinated “american excellence” ass… the US is really a big factor in global security. Because (unless you are on our side) we have a ridiculously large and over funded military and love proxy wars.