I've installed two KDE+Tumbleweed machines in the past two days. One for a friend into retro gaming and the other time for older family into solitaire/youtube. KDE is an easy drop-in for Windows. If you have a better recommendation than Tumbleweed for new people, I'm open to looking into it, but so far it's been easy and I'll probably be the one to support it.
Flatpak works pretty well. I try to prioritize my distribution's repositories but some software is not packaged. I've taken the easy way out and installed the flatpak. I guess I could go and package them, but I've been too lazy so far.
I think the fact that you try to prioritise the distros repos shows that it probably isn't quite ready. Presumably that's because you know that they'll work reliably but you aren't so sure about Flatpaks.
I can't speak for GP but the number one reason I prefer my distro's repos over flatpaks has nothing to do with Flatpak as a technology.
Most distros have a fantastic track record of defending the interests of their users. Meanwhile, individual app developers in aggregate have a pretty bad one; frequently screwing over their users for marginal gain/convenience. I don't want to spend a bunch of time and energy investigating the moral character of every developer of every piece of software I want to run, but I trust that my distro will have done an OK job of patching out blatantly user-hostile anti-features.
For Flatpak, I use vscodium to strip Microsoft telemetry out of vscode.
It works really well, the one downside is that vscode extensions are pretty intrusive. They expect system provided SDKs. So you then have to install the SDKs in the Flatpak container so you have them. If vscode extensions were reasonable and somewhat sandboxed that wouldn't be a concern.
All that is to say, Flatpak works well for this purpose too.
Venezuela just flew their fully armed F-16s over a US destroyer.
F-35 is a right tool to detect/eliminate those from afar. It can do land targets as well, if needed.
I like this tool a lot and think it's superior to my own automation tools to generate giant host file blocklists. So, I'll be looking into switching to sinkzone. That said, my understanding is that applications can still make direct connections where an application connects using an IP address (without looking it up via DNS). I guess I use firewalls for that but haven't gotten around to adjusting anything from the defaults. Also could use a reverse proxy but haven't taken the time to set one of those up yet either. Does anyone have recommendations for a 'second step' on the network security path? Setup a PF router?
I'm in favor of spending more resources on research projects like building a probe to intercept one of these interstellar objects. It would be worth the investment to go and see, and it looks like the Vera Rubin will give us several targets.
I selfishly would rather invest in mining asteroids so that we may one day be qualified to manipulate their movements and prevent strikes of any planets in our solar system and to get rich of course. Even if it takes a few hundred years to become qualified for such mining that is a tiny blip in this spacetime and could mitigate at least some civilization ending events. The process of heading that direction is likely to result in many advancements in technology and slightly safer playgrounds to develop more intelligent androids assuming they don't get hacked resulting in dragging and flinging 20+ mile wide metal asteroids at us.
We don't quite have the technology. It was spotted a month ago, will cross inside Martian orbit in another 2 months, for another 3 months. The fastest we can get to around Martian orbit is 7 months.
> The fastest we can get to around Martian orbit is 7 months.
This is not accurate. Viking got there in <4 months, and we have the technology to do it even faster, if needed. The long duration transits are often the least energy (Hohmann transfer) and that's why we use them. Planetary alignment is also a big factor.
Anyway, there are currently proposals to have probes lingering in high orbits and intercept interstellar visitors (maybe not as fast as 3I), and Rubin should give us plenty of targets when it gets online.
As an interesting tidbit, 3I was found in the Rubin data ~2weeks before it was spotted. Should be a perfect exercise in refining the discovery algorithms.
Do we have enough headsup on these to even plan such a mission? Was under the impression that by the time we realize they're there, they're already halfway out the door...
What's the minimum time to intercept something like this? Do we need 6 or 7 years, or is 3 years enough?
No. This is the one day I never operate. It’s a shit show. Seems to be an excuse for people in the countries with crappy regulation enforcement to fire up their kw+ transmitters and monster HF antennas and blast them past us trying to hit the US.
Different people find "fun" in different things. Field Day is fun for the planning, deployment, and operation of ham stations in the field. Some community outreach, some teamwork, some emergency preparedness, and some good practice.
I agree that actually operating during field day is less fun than at any other time of the year, unless you're in "competitive mode" and are trying to win the most contacts in your class. During these three days, the conversations are very short and mostly all the same, so there's not much "rag chewing" going on.
Field Day can also be fun in the sense that you may get permission to do things that you ordinarily could not do, such as operate a station in a public park, and camp there with it for two nights. Another "fun" element is improvising with what you have, such as setting up a station on the top floor of a parking structure in a metropolitan area.
> Field Day is fun for the planning, deployment, and operation of ham stations in the field. Some community outreach, some teamwork, some emergency preparedness, and some good practice.
All things that can be done at any other point during the year and you have the added benefit of being able to hear other stations.
As someone who only has a 5w transmitter, I avoid field day and major contests. I love doing Parks on the Air when camping, and that ends up being a lot more enjoyable.
First off, dont look at the outer wilds discussion on here, just play the game. Second - they didnt say how many letters we need to encode all of the observable supernova in a given year! So 100 billion galaxies, 1 per year per galaxy, we have around 1 billion to encode. Sorry two edits this moring, first one was right. due to math without coffee. 1e9/26^6 is about 3, 1e9/26^7 is less than one. So we might see 'SN2050aaaaaah'!
I bought Outer Wilds based on recommendations like yours and I found it kind of boring. The world is mostly empty and the repetitiveness wore me down. I didn't finish it.
It's a great looking game though and the first hour or two I had a blast.
Same here. I found the controls to be frustrating and the game-play loop to be kinda dull. The story on the other hand, is very good. I get that the game-play is meant to illicit certain feelings, but it just didn't do it for me. I did enjoy reading a synopsis of the story on the wiki though.
This is a common complaint, but I think the controls are actually very tight. Usually the issue is that the player is struggling with travelling in a vacuum with a ship that can quickly get up to tens of thousands of km/h and it's very difficult to judge distances in space. I realise you're unlikely to go back if you've read a story synopsis, but for anyone else I would highly suggest locking on to your target and using the two numbers (your current speed relative to the object and the distance from the object) to judge how hot you're coming in.
Question for you and commenter above, do you play games with controls similar to Outer Wilds often? Do you play many games in general? I've seen this comment a few times and I'm curious why this is such a common talking point. I thought the controls were very intuitive, so I'm curious if it's a familiarity issue or something else.
The thing about Outer Wilds for me is that it's a game about exploration, but most attempts at exploration are punished (limited time frame, sands suffocating you, "ghost matter" kills...). They stuck with a "hard scifi" control scheme where you control your character in 6dof with inertia, which makes some things unnecessarily hard and did not (IMO) add anything to the game itself. The things you interact with in the world are also annoying to use, like the machines where you need to slide a ball around by locking it with your sight... Just let me press a button already!
I think there were two separate puzzles where I had identified the correct solution, but the mechanics were so clunky that my attempt failed. Making me waste time exploring elsewhere. Had to consult a guide just to see that I had unknowingly botched the physics. Which is an awful experience for a puzzle game. Especially when the clock is working against you and some of the set pieces require very specific timing to interact with them (where doors are only open for a certain few minutes in a run).
The game is definitely a unique experience, but some of the design elements hamper the experience.
I did not play with a controller, which made Dark Bramble effectively impossible to finish because the keyboard is all-or-nothing thrust. Had to cheat to get past it. They should have said that using a controller was mandatory, not recommended.
It's not mandatory, there's 1 part in Dark Bramble where you can go a little faster if you use a very small amount of thrust. You can just use the momentum you came in on though, there's still plenty of time
This is tragic. It's one of favorite games of all time--heck, one of my favorite media experiences, period. It's worth pushing through until you get hooked.
LOL just started replaying OW for the first time in years, and my immediate reaction to seeing this headline was to go to the comments and make an OW reference
Here is some background info on the act from wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Fakes_Act.
[0] https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts/blob/master/readme.md