captain_aggravated

captain_aggravated, 18 hours ago

Helicopters and IMC don’t seem to mix particularly well.

captain_aggravated, 17 hours ago

Given how little story they were willing to put into the last two games they made I’m not sure what they’re going to do with the runtime of a movie, and if I’m honest I think I’d rather just watch an orchestra play selected pieces from the series’ soundtrack than whatever they’re going to do here.

captain_aggravated, 18 hours ago

You know, I think you’ve got it. The pitch for Enterprise was “What if we went back in time before even TOS when everyone was significantly shittier?”

captain_aggravated, 1 day ago

I’ve been daily driving Linux Mint for 10 years now. The answer to this question is “for what most people consider everyday usage, you have to use the Linux terminal about as often as you have to edit the Windows registry.” And in fact over the 10 years I’ve been a Linux user, GUI tools in Linux are increasingly available, and I’ve heard Windows normies talking about the registry more.

When I started out, Mint shipped with Synaptic Package Manager, and a lot of distros didn’t include a GUI at all. Now GUI package managers are the rule rather than the exception and most have bespoke polished app store -like things. You of course can still use apt or dnf or pacman or whatever, but you decreasingly have to.

I never once touched the registry on my Win 98, Win XP, Win Vista or Win 7 machines. Win 8 required a couple registry keys to turn off that…curtain that you had to click away to get to the login screen? and a few other “tablet first” features Win 8 had, and now I hear “just go and add these registry keys to put the start menu on the left, turn off ads, re-enable right click and retract the rectal thermometer.”

Linux is becoming more normie friendly while Windows is genuinely becoming less normie friendly.

captain_aggravated, 1 day ago

Using screenshots, demonstrate to me how the current edition of Linux Mint’s Software Manager application is “garbage” and show me how the Apple App Store, Google Play Store or the Windows Store is better.

I can agree that there are not great software managers out there, Pop!_Shop always felt like it was malfunctioning to me, and Synaptic Package Manager works but has some significant klunk, but…what’s wrong with Mint Software Manager that anyone else gets right.

captain_aggravated, 1 day ago

Microsoft is one of if not the biggest and richest companies in the world and they got that way on a strategy based on the public’s fear and hatred of reading comprehension.

captain_aggravated, 1 day ago

The flaw is in the question: terminal apps practically always include more functionality especially for batch processing and automation of tasks.

I’ll give an example: Find me a GUI application that can quickly convert a gigabyte of .doc files into .pdf format. Pandoc can do that with a single command.

Also: You’re probably comparing the process of “using” a GUI app with “using” a terminal app, in other words, if you spend 8 hours sitting in front of Premiere or KDENLIVE clicking a mouse, you expect to do the same job with ffmpeg by sitting in front of it for 8 hours typing commands, right? But that’s not how it’s designed to work; it’s designed for you to write scripts that do the things you commonly do, which takes time to do once, then you run those scripts, maybe even from the GUI.

I’ll give a real example: the software I use for my personal journal is called RedNotebook. This stores the data in a human readable markup format (I think it’s YAML?) and displays it in rich text, including the ability to display inline pictures. I like putting pictures in my journal.

First problem: what it actually does is store a relative path to the location of the picture in your file system; if ever I was to change the location in my file system where I store the journal or my pictures, or change operating systems, this would break. So I created a Pictures folder within the Journal folder to copy all pictures there.

Second problem: My phone takes 12MP or larger pictures and the journal displays them at full scale so they take up the whole screen. I’d like to shrink them.

Third problem: The app’s “Insert picture” funcionality opens a file browser window written in QT which is different than the one from most of my GTK-based desktop apps use and I’d have to manually find the file.

Simultaneous solution: I wrote a short bash script that calls ImageMagick to shrink the image among a few other cleanup details, and builds the appropriate string to paste into my journal and puts that string in the primary buffer. I then wrote a Nemo Action so that the option to run this script appears in the context menu iff I right click on exactly one image file. Now I can add an image to my journal by browsing to its location in my file manager, right clicking, clicking Add To Journal, and then middle clicking in RedNotebook where I want to paste the picture.

There are hundreds of tedious little things I would do over and over again clicking through endless menus, windows and dialogs that I can script away, like paving my own bypass lane.

captain_aggravated, 1 day ago

And there it is.

captain_aggravated, 1 day ago

I would also wonder how this would work with MMOs where the server side, both in processing power and in bandwidth, is not insignificant. I mean I suppose “are required to publish the code, no requirement that it’s feasible for others to run” but…yeah.

captain_aggravated, 1 day ago

I’m aware of good old fashioned multiplayer where an average Pentium 2 rig has enough grunt to host a multiplayer session and be one of the client machines, obviously games of that scale should be able to be run by enthusiasts. I’m talking about, what if something like WoW shuts down?

captain_aggravated, 1 day ago

Which is why it should be considered bad practice to use the word “chemicals” as a synonym for “poison.”

captain_aggravated, 1 day ago (edited 1 day ago)

Oh is that like bankofarnerica.com or whatever, hoping the r and n look enough like an m for at least some people to click?

edit: under absolutely no circumstances click on the above link. Your bank will be robbed and your foreskin soldered shut. To very don’t.

captain_aggravated, 1 day ago

Stardew Valley was released in 2016. My understanding is it took 10 years to make (Eric Barone worked at a movie theater, and when he wasn’t at work he was working on the game) and he’s been supporting and releasing new content for the game for 8 years now. The Wiki pages for the characters contain the artwork for the characters he’s drawn, and redrawn, and redrawn over the years.

He basically won the cozy farming genre, it’s time to move on, for his own health if nothing else.

captain_aggravated, 3 days ago

I think you can get there in TF2 when considering subclasses via weapons loadouts. Demoknight for instance is a completely different play style than normal pipe/sticky demoman.

captain_aggravated, 3 days ago

Welcome to the world according to Republicans.

captain_aggravated, 3 days ago

I always liked this game’s theme song.

captain_aggravated, 4 days ago

It’s more like pfffff rather than brrrrrr but yeah.

captain_aggravated, 3 days ago

with a bucket, a mop, a broom and dust pan, a shelf with some bottles of Windex and Soft Scrub and other S.C. Johnson® products, a stack of furnace filters against one wall and the front one always falls over, and probably a vacuum.

captain_aggravated, 5 days ago

It is the horns of meowdor!

captain_aggravated, 6 days ago

Does it really need to make the news when a grown adult uses profanity?

captain_aggravated, 5 days ago

Your terms are acceptable.

captain_aggravated, 4 days ago

Well like, I am a woodworker. I haul several barrels of sawdust to the dump every year, and I’m only going to make more as time goes on and I start selling my work. I’m thinking of installing a pellet stove in my house and making my own wood pellets, which would save me a couple hundred bucks a year on gas AND the $30 or so I spend at the dump every year hauling out sawdust. I could further detach myself from the fossil fuel industry and the evils therein. This would require purchasing a machine that cost about what my table saw did, or about my take from the sale of one Morris chair.

captain_aggravated, 7 days ago

I think Syncthing specifically does not work with iOS.

captain_aggravated, 7 days ago

Idea 1

I’ve been looking for a journal/to-do/checklist app that isn’t completely thumb chewing stupid. I’ve yet to find anything as good, flexible and feature complete as what you’d get on PalmOS devices in the early 2000s.

I often use my journal for brainstorming and planning, and basically the best I can do is bulleted lists. I would like a checklist section that can do things like recurring tasks, one-off tasks, daily tasks, and persistent tasks. (Daily tasks: Feed cat. Each day it puts a task with that name in the Tasks window for you to check off. Persistent tasks: Fix the kitchen drawer. This same task remains in the Tasks window until it is checked off, and then stops appearing.) I would also like “take 5 loads of yard debris to the road 0/5” and be able to click to advance it to 1/5. Marry this with a journal app so that you can keep track of progress on stuff like fitness goals or whatever.

And please. Even if it is stored as human-readable markup, please. PLEASE. Let the user edit it in rich text mode. Too many of the “journal” apps out there require you to edit in markdown mode and then you can switch to a “view” mode to see what you’ve done. Also: Don’t be that guy whose app cannot be themed. I don’t want some light mode Gnome lookin’ bullshit in the middle of my dark mode Cinnamon.

Idea 2

Do a fully local fitness tracker. Apple/Google/Samsung health apps are there primarily to invade your privacy and no one should ever use them. I get that this one is more useful as a mobile app running on a device with MEMS sensors, possibly rigged to a smart watch with biometric sensors, and there is no such thing operational in the GNU/Linux world, but still it might get some use.

Idea 3

You asked for it: Woodworking CAD. This “seems quite complex.” The best workflow I can find is in FreeCAD, which is too complex and cumbersome for the job. It’s a general purpose engineering CAD system and it’s designed to work in abstract absolutes; you can’t think in terms of “put a mortise and tenon joint here” you have to think “create a sketch on this face and constrain a rectangle to this edge with these dimensions.” And then it doesn’t give you things like automatic cut schedules, materials lists, templates. FreeCAD is allegedly extensible, it is allegedly possible to create your own workbench to add more specific features. I even tried. There is no documentation, they didn’t write down what they were doing as they were doing it, so…I’m not sure why they bother at this point.

I’ve been interested in a CAD package that works the way a woodworker works. I’ve thought about trying to implement this in the Godot game engine, but even then the project strikes me as “monumental.”

captain_aggravated, 6 days ago

Oh I know, I use Syncthing on 4 devices for various things, it’s really convenient. But my understanding is that iOS is the one major platform that doesn’t run it, and the OC specifically asked for iOS compatibility. It is my understanding that iOS isn’t open enough to allow it.

captain_aggravated, 6 days ago (edited 6 days ago)

I’m after a thing that can work as a journaling, brainstorming and task managing tool, and I’ve yet to find the thing I’m after.

I used to work in rapid prototyping, we offered our services to the general public, and we’d get the occasional “citizen inventor” off the street with some napkin drawings or a mockup taped together out of cardboard, they’d describe their “invention” to me, and there was nothing I could do to convince them that it wouldn’t work because it would require two solid objects to pass through each other or something else against the laws of kinematics. Your imagination allows you to think about impossible shapes. And that might be what’s happening to me, that I want software that changes what it does to match what I want it to do at the time.

Also, just searched Mint’s software manager for “todo” and came up with this:

TodoList: To-Do List & Tasks. Does not function without creating an account with…someone. Worthless.

Gnome-todo Like most Gnome applications, absolutely barebones, nowhere near enough features. Is also apparently known as “Endeavour”. I’m guessing there was a backlash to giving software cute but not particularly descriptive names (like gnome’s PGP keyring tool being named Seahorse? For some reason?) and so at some point they changed the names in some but not all places so the namespaces are nasal fucked. Great, thanks Gnome.

Getting Things GNOME! Hey, something that bears Gnome’s name that isn’t below minimum viable. Has a kind of Trello vibe, and if I were ONLY building checklists for things this might do but I"m also looking for note taking/journaling/brainstorming and this isn’t it.

OpenToDoList Has a few of the features I’m looking for, but the UI is baby punching terrible. Lots of icons that aren’t obvious what they’re for with no tool tips and…it’s just combative, it’s trying really hard to be a pain.

Sleek So apparently there is a thing called a “todo.txt syntax” which is a plaintext format for arranging a todo list for cyborgs, and someone wrote a baby punching terrible GUI front end for it. A note for todo list app developers: When you click the little circle to check off an item, it should become checked off, not wait until you refresh the view in some other way like change to a different tab.

Adventure List Launches to a blank white window with a “Sign in with Google” button in the middle and no other controls. Worthless.

That seems to be it; lots of other stuff in here that doesn’t seem relevant.

I mentioned PalmOS I think. Old PalmOS devices came with some default organization apps like a to-do list and a notes app and a calendar/clock and a contacts list, all burned into ROM. But really it was more like different facets of the same app; you could make a to-do list and then put it in your calendar, etc. It all worked together in a surprisingly seamless way I’ve yet to find since.

captain_aggravated, 6 days ago

As I look through Flathub, maybe KOrganizer is the closest thing to what I’m looking for, although it’s got KDE’s disease of being hideously overcrowded with every possible feature.

I think what I’m after is somewhere between KOrganizer and RedNotebook. I currently use RedNotebook to keep my journal, which in my case takes the form of talking about my day, what I did, what I’m thinking, and sometimes what I’m planning. It has no todo list functionality, but I can use it as a sort of note to self thing, it has a search function that allows me to easily look back. I almost always have it open and running on my computer.

imagine RedNotebook, but with some todo and checklist functionality so that I get today’s page, there’s a blank page for a journal entry so I can record what I did today, and maybe a separate side pane for daily tasks, maybe several panes stacked vertically for “regularly scheduled” where daily stuff like “change cat’s water dish” or weekly stuff like “garbage day” or monthly stuff like “water bill due” could pop up, and it would serve not only as a reminder to do those things, but a record of having done them. And maybe another pane for ongoing stuff, like…say I want to list all the things I want to build in the wood shop this summer; this might not be time based but just a running checklist. It would be kind of cool to be able to look back at that and see when things were added, checked off, or removed.

Lifeograph might be designed for this but 1. damn if I can figure out how it works and 2. it won’t stop shining bright white rectangles at me.

captain_aggravated, 6 days ago

It should also be common or required practice to make note of “Google account required” or something in the app’s description.

captain_aggravated, 6 days ago

Especially on something like Flathub and especially for apps that can plausibly run locally. Like, I kinda know beforehand I’ll need an account with Discord to use the Discord app, because it’s primarily for communicating with other people. But a todo app? Dafuq does that need the internet for?

captain_aggravated, 5 days ago

I’m starting to think, especially with high contrast and high brightness flat panels, having working light and dark modes are an accessibility feature. Apparently folks with bad astigmatism or some other such struggle with light text on a dark background? Me I’m just very light sensitive and a modern LED backlit monitor showing large areas of white is physically uncomfortable for me to look at.

captain_aggravated, 7 days ago

There’s one thing they did right that most other open world games do wrong: The map starts blank and it fills in as you explore. Others in the genre, you’ll Ubisoft that tower and then it fills in with all the icons of things to do here, so now follow the minimap to them all. In BotW, you Ubisoft the tower, you get the topology map, and now it’s up to you to find stuff in it, and when you do you get an icon on the map telling you you’ve done it.

I’m pretty sure the Rito quest wasn’t complete in time for launch so they had to rush to throw something together. The Hebra region is distinctly empty, I’m sure we were going to have to go on an arctic adventure to find Teba’s favorite cuttlefish bone or something, but they didn’t have time to finish it because the Switch was coming out so they said ‘Fuck it, build something that runs and ship it.’

There isn’t much variety in the enemy types, a lot of encounters are monotonous, a lot of the systems are so basic that they’re easy to break, and they were so afraid of telling a story out of order that the game doesn’t have a story of its own; “Link fucks around all over Hyrule for awhile then decides to defeat Ganon.” Meanwhile it tells you a different, somewhat related story.

Then there’s TotK, which they tried to make a sequel to BotW out of BotW’s bones, and it didn’t work as well.

captain_aggravated, 7 days ago

I think at least part of Breath of the Wild’s design comes from Nintendo listening to their fans. I think Nintendo genuinely does listen to their fans, especially regarding the Zelda franchise. But they’re also Japanese and thus anatomically incapable of doing anything halfway. After Wind Waker, they heard fans say they wanted a darker, more adult Zelda game, and then they published Twilight Princess. All games published after Ocarina of Time strictly prevent sequence breaking, and players said they wanted a less linear game and have some choice in which order they do things.

Nintendo responded with the least linear game in history. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild will walk into your bedroom at night, hold you down, squat over your face and non-linear right in your mouth. It’s not so much that you’re allowed to do things out of intended order, but they went to excruciating pains to make sure there IS NO intended order. In the few places where NPCs list the divine beasts, the past champions, their modern day counterparts, their races, their villages, or the biomes they’re found in, they’re never listed in the same order twice for fear of establishing a “canon” order. And virtually all of the game is optional, the tutorial and the final boss are all that is required.

What the fans were saying was “remember when I was playing OoT, and I decided to do the water temple before the fire temple, and it totally worked? Good times.”

captain_aggravated, 7 days ago

A Link to the Past is not completely linear; once you have the hammer from the Palace of Darkness, you can choose between the Swamp Palace, Skull Woods or Thieves’ Town, and Thieves’ Town unlocks the Ice Palace and Misery Mire. Granted, the game tells you what order to do them in, but you are occasionally free to choose otherwise. Not so in, say, Twilight Princess, which is extremely flaggy.

I do think that TotK was very sloppily handled. On the one hand it’s an amazing piece of software, that the physics systems they made actually…work. I’ve seen them take flak for re-using BotW’s map, which I don’t mind. The thing is, they did it very hamfistedly. In BotW, it makes sense that no one knows who you are because you’ve been in stasis for 100 years, there’s only a handful of people alive who recognize you. In BotW, you’re an interloper. TotK seems to take place 6 years after BotW (Given how some of the children like Nebb and Riju have aged, Bolson/Rhondson having a ~5 year old daughter, etc, plus that’s the time between the games’ release dates) and Link has been living and working in Hyrule this whole time…except he apparently hasn’t. Zelda seems to have appropriated the house in Hateno Link bought, so where does Link live? Too many people outright don’t recognize him when they see him. It feels like they wanted to make a clean-sheet game and not a sequel.

Frankly it also feels like any idea anyone came up with ended up in the game. “Let’s have a cavernous underground.” Okay, the lazy way to make that is to invert the terrain map of the surface which doesn’t make logical sense, and then do extremely little with this very large environment. “Let’s have islands in the sky.” Okay, here’s some cookie cutter islands floating in the sky that are difficult to reach and traverse with large expanses of emptiness and the ability to make flying machines that don’t last long enough to actually move around. “How about a sidequest where an NPC asks Link to put some wheels on a cart for her? I’ve already written 90 pages of related dialog.” Yes, put it in the game completely unedited.

captain_aggravated, 11 days ago

You ever play Subnautica? You know how some characters are given to using business lingo in their personal lives? The business lesbian in that one audio log in the first game and the doucheboss in the second? Apparently that shit’s real.

captain_aggravated, 11 days ago

1. Play Subnautica, it’s great. Go in as blind as possible.
2. To be more accurate it’s either an “everyone’s pan in the future” setting or there’s at least one business bisexual. There is a recording of two women, one dumping the other, so she can spend more time with “That dumb guy and his dumb robot suit.” The sequel features at least two homosexual relationships and one heterosexual one; there’s a guy who mentions his husband a few times, a couple of women who sorta pair off, and a man wrestling with his relationship with his wife and daughter. None of these are major plot points to either game.

captain_aggravated, 11 days ago

Okay, what’s the catch? Doesn’t work on North American networks? Touch screen doesn’t work so you have to carry around a keyboard, mouse and USB hub? Doesn’t send or receive calls?

captain_aggravated, 11 days ago

Yeah okay on the slim chance it makes it to market it will never reach a state of unqualified no asterisk Usable. Ignoring.

captain_aggravated, 11 days ago

I hate the telephone as much as the next guy my age, but it’s still quasi-mandatory to have a functioning telephone to exist in this world. Like…why’d they bother mentioning it in public in this state?

captain_aggravated, 11 days ago

Unity is the weird one here, and I’m really hoping it is entirely replaced by Godot and Unity just fucking dies.

Most other game engines like Unreal or Source or CryEngine etc. are designed in-house by a larger game developer for some big project, like, well, Unreal, or Half Life 2, or Crysis. They made their money from the sale of that game, and licensing the engine out to other studios is an additional revenue stream.

Unity on the other hand had the same role as Adobe. They make the tools, but don’t produce anything with those tools themselves. Unity doesn’t make games. They rely entirely on B2B transactions and their cut of baked in advertising in games. And greed will eventually destroy this business model; I would argue it already has.

captain_aggravated, 12 days ago

x works with my touch screen laptop via Mint.

captain_aggravated, 12 days ago

If I’m honest, it’s because Pop!_OS isn’t really that good. What does Pop!_OS do particularly well other than “download this one for Nvidia drivers”?

captain_aggravated, 11 days ago

It’s not hard to feel premium compared to Ubuntu these days. Canonical gave up trying to be an end-user desktop OS years ago. Look at their corporate garbagepuke website these days. Ubuntu is now merely the other Red Hat; it’s an enterprise grade thing that normies should ignore.

Mint runs circles around Pop!_OS in the “just works, just keeps working” department.

captain_aggravated, 10 days ago

In my experience?

Mint has been around longer and has had more of the lumps smoothed out. Mint, and their flagship DE Cinnamon, has always been about actual usability. There’s a pragmatic streak that runs through Mint that isn’t there in some other distros.

It has been my experience that Mint is usually the one that “just works” and the one that “continues to just work.” Cinnamon’s UI strikes a balance between KDE’s “ALL THE FEATURES! MAXIMUM CLUTTER!” approach and Gnome’s “Nuance doesn’t exist, implement as little functionality as possible so the window stays empty and beautiful” approach. You won’t find yourself asking “why can’t it do this?” the way you do with Gnome-based distros. You don’t have to start installing extensions just to get things that were considered basic features twenty years ago. You aren’t sent to the terminal particularly often, you can genuinely manage most of the system from the GUI.

I would also say that Cinnamon is going to be more familiar to a Windows user than Gnome. Trying to use Gnome the way Windows users are used to handling things, say by minimizing and maximizing windows, is deliberately a pain in the ass on Gnome, and has a tendency to make newcomers think “Man this shit is unusable.” Cinnamon doesn’t have that problem; it’s still fun convincing people that I’m running Windows 9.

captain_aggravated, 12 days ago

for me there was a peak in the late 90s. Ocarina of Time and Half Life in 1998 alone.

captain_aggravated, 12 days ago

hahaha a three hour round trip is an overnight stay hahaha ha that is goddamn adorable.

captain_aggravated, 13 days ago

Pretty sure that’s called a baculum.

captain_aggravated, 13 days ago

It is my understanding that the Three Mile Island incident was a meltdown, that the fuel rods got hot enough to melt themselves and pool in the bottom of the reactor vessel but did not escape containment, unlike Chernobyl whose reactor core is currently a big lump in a sub-basement.

captain_aggravated, 13 days ago

What do you think a “meltdown” is?