This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

Recently I was watching the World War 2 series "Masters of the Air". In one of the last scenes, there is an American prisoner of war who climbs up the flag pole and replaces the German flag with the American flag as American troops liberate the camp. I thought it was a powerful aesthetic image: A battered flag of freedom replacing a flag of oppression.

The American flag looks very nice to me, especially used in dramatic art. But I think that's mostly the connotations of my upbringing. If you look at the aesthetics of it without any history of it, it looks like a striped tablecloth sewn to a starry apron or something. And to a lot of other people in the world it looks like greed or violence or oppression or something else again.

I'm sure these aren't original thoughts, but the use of this flag as a symbol has been bothering me for the last 8 or 10 years. It's been co-opted to mean something different than before, inside the very places where it previously would have much more positive connotations. If I see that flag on a big pickup truck, I have a strongly negative connotation with it. Or if I see it defaced with a blue line on it. Or if I see it on the pin of a politician. Or on a pole in a used car lot. Or in any advertisement.

This is more about my own naivete about whatever the United States was actually about, separate from what we are taught as children and the stories we tell ourselves. But I'm guessing a lot more people have these thoughts than did a few years ago.

I remember some people a few years ago were telling progressives to "Take back the flag from the right wing". I guess I don't know if that's going to work, there seems to be a poisoned well now and anyway everyone always brings their own experiences to such symbols and your display of positivity may have the opposite effect on others.

Solved

I was idiotically installing a legacy driver instead of the current driver. I installed the current one and it is now working.

Background on Tildes

For background I posted about distro recommendations a few weeks ago: https://tildes.net/~tech/1ji6/switching_to_linux_looking_for_distro_recommendations. I settled on Fedora KDE Plasma.

Steps taken before the problem

I installed Fedora onto an unallocated space on my SSD, alongside Windows 10. I have tested that Windows 10 is currently working, and that Fedora starts normally. I have also used the boot media to install onto my laptop with no issues. However, on my desktop before installing GPU drivers for my GTX 970, I found Fedora to be quite buggy. This would include the session freezing and needing to be restarted , or my screen would go black with text saying something along the lines "desktop session cannot be unlocked, press ctrl + alt + f3 and login and run a command (I cannot remember the command)" and then I could switch back to my previous session. Overall, it was a buggy mess. My thought process was that it may be a GPU driver issue, and so I started the process of installing RPM fusion and installing the driver from there. I have a GTX 970, so I followed the section titled "Legacy GeForce 8/9/200/300" on this page: https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/NVIDIA?highlight=%28%5CbCategoryHowto%5Cb%29. The commands I ran after installing RPM were: sudo dnf update -y and sudo dnf install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-340xx akmod-nvidia-340xx and followed all the prompts provided as necessary. I would then leave my computer for about 30min, before returning and restarting (thinking that a restart may be necessary to be fully using the drivers).

Current Situation

After going through the process listed above, I turned my computer on and booted into Fedora. My screen would hang on a black screen with a flashing white underscore at the top left corner. The computer would not get past this point, no matter how long it was left. Hitting "ctrl + alt + f2" would give me a working terminal that I could interact with, showing the basic CLI of Linux working. I did not play around much with the commands, but I do know the basic shutdown now command was working.

Troubleshooting Steps Tried

I was thinking that it may be due to the driver being X11 and I am running Wayland. I searched online and results seemed to indicate that this would not cause an issue
(I will add more steps here when people recommend them)

Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

Hello good and clever people of Tildes, I need some advice.

With electricity the price it is, and my wife having a sizable workshop in the garden, I'm looking for ways to bring down the heating cost.

Her workshop is 5m x 4m x 2.2m, and the wood is 44cm thick. It's a chunky beast. She makes gifts and personalised items, so when she has the heatpresses and mug/tumbler press on the go, it gets toasty. If the sun comes out, also toasty. However, over night, it gets super chilled, almost to whatever temp is outside. To combat this I decided to use a Govee Electric Space Heater, 1500W with Thermostat, WiFi & Bluetooth. However, this barely does anything and the electric usage flies up.

What are good options here? The office is about 10 metres from my house. It's too far to extend the home central heating via plumbing, plus too much lagging. I don't want to spend a fortune, so any sensible options I'm willing to entertain. If we're talking a couple of thousand, it's off the menu.

Thanks for any help.

Dropping an edit with a link to the actual cabin: https://www.tigersheds.com/product/the-gamma-44mm-log-cabin/

It's not like a USA style log cabin, that's for sure!

Edit 2: Okay - wall insulation looks like the next thing to tackle before even thinking about heating it. Thanks folks.

Hello all. I feel like our US election upset (or victory depending on viewpoint) has really run wild on Tildes. I appreciate all the solidarity and encouragement from the non-US folks. I know for better or worse it affects many of you as well.

While knowing these are special circumstances, I was thinking maybe folks feel a little left out or overshadowed by our drama.

Back before I had to go on a podcast diet, I really enjoyed the weekly updates from American Prestige because they would discuss important or interesting political/social developments and explain their implications.

So what's something happening where you are? How do you feel about it? What do you wish more people knew about it? It can be big or small. It does not have to be something political, just something important to you.

Hi Tildes!

My Leopold FC900R mechanical keyboard had a sudden thirst for a full cup of joe, which rendered the keyboard mostly unusable, even after drying for days.

This has been my favourite keyboard of all time, it looks and types the same as the day I got it, and I'm actually quite miffed it broke!

So Tildes, could you help me out? What would be a good replacement?

For people that do not know Leopolds lineup specifically, they're pretty much no frills high end mechanical keyboard. The only similar keyboard I've found so far is the Leopold FC900RBTS, but it's quite expensive and the colours it comes in aren't entirely my taste. Although I'm not opposed to putting down that kind of money, I'm wondering if there's no alternative available that matches my requirements at a slightly lower pricepoint.

So here's what I'm looking for:

• Double Shot PBT Keycaps, that's a must have.
• Fullsize keyboard. I still use my numpad!
• Wired connection. The Leopold FC900RBTS has both wired and wireless, that's fine too, but at it's core it must be wired.
• Relatively small sized frame, the frame on the Leopold is quite economically built. It's keys on a board and that makes it rather small even at full size.
• I think the FC900R came with MX Cherry Browns by default. I liked Browns but I'm not married to them.
• Cost can be anywhere between $50 and $150, but I prefer paying more if the quality matches the price.
• Colour scheme shouldn't be too shouty, but doesn't need to be full black/white either. This is what my keyboard looked like. I like that type of distinct but not loud colour scheme.
• Usecase is both typing and gaming, not heavy office work, but a decent amount of Tildes comment writing.

I was debating putting it into ~tech or ~gaming, but I suppose it's too allround for gaming. Although if it needs to move I'd love to hear it.

If someone has a suggestion, please let me know!
Thank you everyone!

I've long enjoyed Foxhole and X4 and was wondering what other games has similar logistical systems. Both give the same satisfying feeling when you look at the big picture of how the games are a complex interplay between the immediate gameplay, and what is being simulated "behind the scenes" to enable it.

The descriptor in the title is a bit of a mouthful, so let's break down what I mean.

Complex
To exclude typical resource game mechanics, where you "just" mine resources which gives you resource points that you can spend directly.

Required & Supporting
In Foxhole the main objective is to push the front and win the war. And players can focus on that and never have to really think about how they get their weapons and ammo. But at the same time the logistics is the entire reason they even can fight.
In X4 you can fly about and do stuff and acquire ships while relying on the AI empires economies. But there has to be some alive economy for the game to not go to a standstill.
In short, logistics systems that are required by the game, but not necessarily by the individual player.
This excludes games where the logistics system is the game, like Factorio, Dyson Sphere Program, Satisfactory, etc.

Real end-2-end
To specify that there should as little cheating as possible. Though obviously there is always some cheating in games. Both in X4 and Foxhole, every resource is tracked right from harvest, to refinement, to the end product. And all steps require real moving of goods by AI (X4) or players (Foxhole) between factories, other intermediaries, and end users.

So what other similar games are there? I was thinking of EVE Online, but I think only the player orgs in null-sec have real economies in that game, and you could still play it if they all suddenly stopped.

I am planning on switching to Linux Mint as my first Linux daily driver. I know someone who's used Cinnamon (the default) and it works fine, but I was wondering if the other options officially provided (Xfce and MATE) are any better? I have a little bit of (pretty trivial) GNOME experience on Ubuntu, but I don't really understand the pros and cons of different DEs. I've used KDE on the Steam Deck, and I hear that's a popular one, but can I get that on Mint?

Hey, I'm trying to pull back a bit from the present news cycle, so I'm looking for some alternatives. My brain often is looking for some stimulation that isn't something huge and meaty, so I figured short stories and novellas could be helpful in particular. If you have something long that's great, feel free to toss that in as well.

I like short stories that depict interesting and different worlds, though they don't need to be particularly detailed. Stories with positive (or at least not miserable) endings would probably be better for my mood. For some examples, I liked the I, Robot stories, particularly the first one with Grace and Robbie, They're Made out of Meat, Flatland, The Year Without Sunshine. I'm realizing that is kind of Sci fi heavy, but that might just be because there are more Sci fi short stories I've bumped into, a lot from links elsewhere on the internet.

For some examples of novels and series that I've liked, Cradle by Will Wight, Anne McCaffrey's Pern novels, Scholomance by Naomi Novik, Ender's Game. Recently, I liked Tomorrow and Tommorow and Tomorrow, and Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin, but I don't know if I could handle that level of sad right now. For historical fiction,the only examplez I can think of right now are A Woman of Independent Means, and a Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but I used to read a lot of it when I was younger.

Books I didn't like, but loved aspects of are Babel (I absolutely loved the setting, the book itself felt like it was beating you up with a cudgel), The School for Good mothers (I enjoyed the exploration of what Good motherhood is, and how mothers are judged by society, I disliked how disjointed the actual plot was).

I tend not to like stories where most or all characters are hard to have empathy for -- I hated A Catcher in the Rye, and loathed the Arthur Miller plays I had to read in school. I can get impatient with stories that keep the world vague for a very long time, like Never Let Me Go.

So, any recommendations?

What have you been doing lately for your own fitness? Try out any new programs or exercises? Have any questions for others about your training? Want to vent about poor behavior in the gym? Started a new diet or have a new recipe you want to share? Anything else health and wellness related?

I created an Omnivore account recently and I started to love it. I thought to self-host it but I didn't have enough time and thought I'd host it later.

I (along with everyone else presumably) got this email today:

We’re excited to share that Omnivore is joining forces with ElevenLabs, the leading AI audio research and technology company. Our team is joining ElevenLabs to help drive the future of accessible reading and listening with their new ElevenReader app.

Next, all Omnivore users will be able to export their information from the service through November 15 2024, after which all information will be deleted.

Though it is quite frustrating, I will not go further in my opinion of this move.

I would just like to let the community know that I'm in the market for an alternative for this... or maybe some help how to self-host it. I don't even know if it will be easy to self-host or if it will be worth it, presumably without updates...

I read thinking in systems a primer by Donella Meadows and really found it interesting. I have been struggling to find a follow up book about systems aimed at a reader with intermediate but non specialist Knowledge of systems thinking. They are all either to basic, too advanced, or so dry it’s impossible to concentrate. Has anyone found a good follow on book for this book?
I appreciate this might be a bit of a niche topic!

Lately I have seen a few posts here and there from accounts that have been silent for a while, where I can't help but feel that these new posts are made by different people or that the initial posts they made were intended to "pad" the account. In other words, they feel a bit like spam and because of that I would like to "flag" them somehow.

The obvious question people will have is likely "Why not just comment about it under the post?"

I have done that various times, and it has the opposite effect of what I'd like:

1. Commenting boosts the post for people who sort based on comments or activity.
2. From what I have observed, when a post has one comment, it is more likely to receive more votes as well. If it has more than one comment, it will receive more votes. This, to me, bizarre voting behavior is something worthy of a meta discussion in itself. But from what I gather, people seem to think that it indicates discussion. Making them think that there must be something worthwhile about the post. This obviously doesn't apply when it's just the OP sharing a quote and me raising a concern.
3. Sometimes I am not entirely sure and would like to have someone with more insights behind the screens take a look at it. If I commented my suspicions while being wrong, that would suck for everyone involved.

Basically for the first two points I am not sure what a good solution would be. I am not advocating for a downvote ability, though something would be nice.
For the third point, I guess I am saying that I am missing the ability to report a post. With comments, I can use the malice label and write out a report, for posts there is no such thing.

And Sao Paulo completes the triple-header!

What a weekend. What a day. What a race! Rain, amiright? Gotta be the most expensive weekend all year, in terms of destruction.

Congrats to Ocon, Gasly, and all of Alpine! P2 & P3, respectively. No one would've predicted that.

As an RB fan, it's great to see Max back at P1 and extending his championship lead over Norris! The gap has increased to 62pts. Amazing drive, starting at P17 and finishing P1. Plus he kept banging out fastest lap after fastest lap at the front, even with the rain and wet track. Yeah he got lucky with the safety car and red flag, but even before that, he was on form.

On the other side of the garage...Checo, WTH. Can't even pass your junior team's rookie driver? And then letting Hamilton through, as well? I'll just leave it at that.

Props to all the mechanics and engineers for having to fix and rebuild all those cars that got destroyed in Qualifying this morning. Especially Williams. I think Albon's crash was the most disappointing for me. He was provisionally P2 with 3min left of Q3, and I was stoked that he might actually keep it. But then he spun out into the wall. I actually yelled out "NOOOOOOO!" when I saw it happen 😭

Lastly, remember that there are potential penalties for Norris and a few others on the aborted start weirdness at the beginning.

3 weeks until the next race; enjoy the break. REMEMBER: Vegas is a SATURDAY NIGHT race in the US. Adjust accordingly to your local time.

Next race:

Las Vegas Grand Prix
Las Vegas Strip Circuit
Saturday, November 24

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

I was looking into getting a whole bunch of mods for Fallout and Skyrim and it seems like Nexus is the only game in town. I am not really in the mood to go back and forth 600 times between client and webpage to click on every time I wish to try a collection. I wouldn't mind it if they just severely throttled my downloads, they could just run in the background. But if I have to click the mouse thousands of times every once in a while, I'd rather not mod any game, to be honest.

And although I understand that this is a service and "there is no free lunch", the price they are charging in Brazil is too much for me to be okay with paying. A month of Nexus costs R$51.82, which is 12 bucks more expensive than a month of WoW. I really don't wanna be a "choosing beggar" here, as I know that it is not Nexus's fault that my currency is worth shit. But if there's a cheaper alternative I'll have no problem whatsoever paying for it.

Hi and hello all and fellow southpaws,

With the increasing option to pick from genders between characters (unless heavily tied into story and designed that way) it feels like the next option would be to have left-handedness become an option.
As a lefty I always felt a little "left" out (pardon the pun) in games as soon as I saw a gun or weapon being held in the "wrong" hand.

I know CS2 makes the option available if you dig a little, which is a great start.

So my question is, do you know of any other games that deserve a call out for already having this? Games that might need this (character fantasy) or just a shout out in support of the idea, feel free to discuss below.

Cheers!

Inspired by a recent conversation I had with a fellow museum lover: what is your favorite museum or favorite museums? Why? Curious to learn about some really interesting and unique places that other users might have been to.

finally getting to be that time where I need a USB-C slot on my tower that I built back in 2017 so I started looking into expansion cards.

One thing I can't tell is how to tell if a particular expansion card supports the usb-c ports with DP-Alt mode for a 4k display if the need arises.

for exmple, had my eye on this one and I can't tell much if it does have that kind of support

What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!

Hi all. I cook as often as I can and thought it might be fun to chat about any recipes you’ve tried or would like to try! I’m vegan so anything I post in this thread will be too. Maybe even share snacks or restaurants that are you’ve tried that you’ve liked!

To start is a simple sauce/stir fry recipe I make when I’m pretty tired after a long day:

Spicy salty sweet sauce:

1-2 tbsp gochugaru
1 tbsp white or black rice vinegar
1 tbsp mirin
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp agave or maple syrup
1 tsp corn starch

I usually put all of the ingredients together except for the corn starch and then set aside as I do the rest of the prep.

The rest of the recipe is a bit more variable as I have certain ingredients but looks like this:

1 cup cooked white rice OR hand pulled noodles

Noodle recipe:
250g all purpose flour
125 ml water
1/4-1/2 tsp salt
Canola oil

I add the flour, water, and salt to a bowl, mixing with my fingers. It starts to form pretty quickly into a mass. I knead the mass of dough into a ball until uniform. With the large, smooth dough ball I cut it into 8 pieces with a knife, roll them into a sort of prolate spheroid shape, and coat with canola oil. Put the oiled dough shapes into a bowl and cover with a damp towel. Let them rest for about an hour or so.

Heat a pot of water. Flatten the dough pieces into rectangles with a rolling pin. Use the rolling pin (if it’s a thin one, otherwise I use large chopsticks), to press the dough lengthways to create a sort of seam. Hold each end of the dough and slowly pull to stretch. Slap on counter as you pull a few times. Stretch it as long or short as you’d like. On the seam you made with the rolling pin, split the noodle apart so that the noodle is now a large loop. Put into the boiling water and wait roughly a minute /or until it’s floating. Can cook a few noodles at a time, though I usually do one or two and roll/pull while they boil.

With the noodles or rice done or going and the sauce almost ready, start to chop vegetables, maybe a cup or so of 2-3 types. I like Napa cabbage, squash, green onions, bell pepper, and carrots but really get whatever you’d like or have on hand at the time. Sauté the vegetables in a tbsp or so of oil (I use canola or olive), starting with onions/garlic and then adding others as you see fit. Once the vegetables are done to your liking, add the noodles or rice, then the sauce (adding in the corn starch to the sauce at this point) and stir.

Often I’ll actually fry a half block or block of tofu I’ve cubed before adding vegetables into the oil. I usually do this as the noodles (or if I’m doing a pot of rice, as it begins to cook) are about done resting, maybe with 15-20 mins to go, since frying tofu can take awhile.

I like to serve in bowls, topping with a dash of sesame oil, black sesame seeds, and fresh green onion.

I’ll post more recipes in the thread as I make them but this is probably the most frequent thing I make in a given week. Feel free to share your own!

Okay, so this is getting really long, I'll put the ask up front: I have a strategy, I think it is reasonable. Now is a point where I can easily change things, and it won't be so easily later. So I'm looking to see if anyone has trod this road before and can recommend any of:

1. a different build system that will be easier to manage for this use case
2. a different strategy for using cmake that will be easier to manage
3. any gotchas I should be aware of, even if you don't have better solutions.

Background

I have a project I'm working on where the ultimate deliverable will be a hardware device with 3-4 different microcontrollers coordinating with each other and interacting with a PC-ish platform. This is a clean rewrite of a C++ codebase. Due to the microcontroller (and some of the PC APIs) being C++, the language of choice for most of it is likely to remain C/C++.

I'm succeeded in setting up a build system for embedded code. The old code was arduino, so it relies a lot on those libraries, but I've managed to set up enough custom cmake to get off of the ardunio tools altogether, even if I am borrowing their libraries and some of the "smarts" built into the system about setting build flags, etc. So far, I have a dockerized toolchain (cmake + make + gcc-arm-none-eabi) that can successfully build ARM binaries for the target platform.

The thing that I'm up against now is that I'd like to have a robust off-target unit testing infrastructure. My ideal case is that everything in the embedded system will be broken down into libraries that have clear interfaces, then to use unit tests with mocks to get high coverage of test cases. I'll still need some HIL tests, but because those are harder to set up and run, I want to use those for integration and validation.

In terms of OSes available, we're mostly working on Windows systems using WSL for linux. I'd like things to be as linux-based as possible to support CI on github, etc.

Goals and Cmake limitations

I started out using cmake because I hate it least of the tools I've used, and I am at least pretty far up the learning curve with it. But a limitation I'm hitting is that you can't do a mixed compile with two different toolchains in one build. The reasons why cmake has this limitation seem reasonable to me, even if it is annoying. You can easily change the toolchain that your code is built with, but that seems to be largely targeted at cross-compiling the same binaries for different systems. What I want to do is:

• build my code libraries with embedded settings for linking to the embedded binaries and build those embedded binaries (the end product)
• build my code libraries with linux-ish tools and link them against unit tests to have a nice CI test process
• (eventually) also be able to build windows binaries for the PC components -- when I get to that point, I'd like to get away from the MSVC compilers, but will use them if I have to

Current strategy

My current plan is to configure a library build like this (pseudocode):

add_library(mylib sources)
if (BUILD_TYPE STREQUAL BUILD_TYPE_EMBEDDED)
<embedded config>
elseif (BUILD_TYPE STREQUAL BUILD_TYPE_LINUX)
<linux config, if any>
endif()

#unit tests are built for each library
if (BUILD_TYPE STREQUAL BUILD_TYPE_LINUX)
add_executable(mylib_test sources test_sources)
target_link_libraries(mylib gtest etc.)
endif()

For the rollup binaries, I make the whole target conditional

if (BUILD_TYPE STREQUAL BUILD_TYPE_EMBEDDED)
add_executable(myembedap sources)
target_link_libraries(mylib)
endif()

Then the build script (outside cmake) is something like

cd build/embedded
cmake <path to src> <set embedded toolchain> -DBUILD_TYPE=embedded
make
cd ../../build/linux
cmake <path to src> -DBUILD_TYPE=linux
make

Things I like about this strategy:

• It's relatively simple to do all the builds or just one of the builds (that control would go in the shell script)
• I have one source tree for the whole build
• It lets configuration be near code
• It lets tests be near code.
• I think it's extensible to cover the PC component builds in the future

Things that worry me:

• It feels like a hack
• Support for off-target tests feels like it should be solved problem and I'm worried I'm missing something

Thanks for reading. If you made it this far, you have my gratitude. Here's a video with funny out of office messages that I enjoyed.

Hiya,

coming off as cheapskate since if I love Webflow so much why not just pay for it? Well a few reasons, but mostly because I'd rather like to be not tied to any single service that can just do away with me with a snap of the fingers.

I've been playing around locally with WordPress and the block editor actually gets me to the finish line. It's pretty easy to design what I want to design -- just everything's lacking that final little detail, I can't easily overlap text with images etc.

So am I just incompetent and the WordPress' block editor is actually capable of these things? Most of the plugins (like Elementor) you need to pay for before you can actually do anything custom, which is kinda no-go for me. I'm also not opposed of trying something else, just that it needs to be free (as I want to be certain I know how to use it before I commit).

(Sorry for the rushed post, I'll make corrections it if need be.)

Find yourself watching tons of great videos on [insert chosen video sharing platform], but also find yourself reluctant to flood the Tildes front page with them? Then this thread is for you.

It could be one quirky video that you feel deserves some eyeballs on it, or perhaps you've got a curated list of videos that you'd love to talk us through...

Share some of the best video content you've watched this past week/fortnight with us!

It's time to vote. This thread is for voting on the next set of books for book club. Voting will close end of day Sunday.

If you would like to read with us, please upvote as many as five titles. We will select at least four, probably more if there are books with solid support. I look forward to reading and discussing with you all.

There are a few people who voted before the thread was complete so books with authors earlier in the alphabet got a slight statistical advantage. I will take lessons for next time to avoid this.

Recently my family was watching "It's The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown" from 1966 and I recalled how the plot of the show came from comics that were written over time in the years before the cartoon game out. And one thing we talked about was whether Linus was correct that The Great Pumpkin actually exists, or was everyone else right and it was in his imagination.

It seems a reasonable question, because one thing about Linus is that he's usually the wisest character on the show. Like the rest of them, he has flaws but he tends to see things more clearly than the rest.
Well, I was looking for old Peanuts strips and I found one that seems to answer the question in this article:

https://screenrant.com/funniest-peanuts-comics-about-great-pumpkin-linus-disappointment/

It is under item 4, "Great Pumpkin, You're Going To Drive Me Crazy!" November 1 1961.
Here is a direct link to the comic in question, (not sure if it will work long term).

In the comic, Charlie Brown says: "Hey wake up, Halloween is over... You missed The Great Pumpkin. It just came over the radio... He appeared in a very sincere pumpkin patched owned by someone named Freeman in New Jersey!"

When I was a kid we had a book that had a lot of the older Peanuts comics in it, and I'm pretty sure that I had seen this one and just forgotten about it.

So I think one of the following is true:

• The Great Pumpkin really exists in the Peanut's world
• Charlie Brown is lying
• Charlie Brown is teasing
• The radio was lying, like when NORAD reports where Santa's sleigh is on Christmas eve
• Charlie Brown misunderstood the radio

This question may have been answered in a later strip a day or two later, but I don't currently have access to the strips in the order they appeared.

This question is mostly about whether Charles Schulz decided to have magic in his "universe" or not.
What do you think?

Hi folks--

To those more knowledgeable than I am:

What would be the best local solution to extract numerical data from a batch of PDF file reports? The values I want are interspersed among word processor formatted tables and irrelevant text. The text and table formatting are (nearly) identical across reports. The data I want vary across reports. The PDFs are not of images...I can select and copy text without OCR. I have thousands to process, and the data themselves are confidential (I have clearance) and cannot be shared. I can use Windows or Linux but no MacOS.

I am technically inclined, so I bashed my head against regular expressions just enough to use notepad++ to find and delete most of the irrelevant stuff and make a CSV, but it's a hacky, imprecise method and not nearly automated enough for batches. For reference, I don't code for a living or even as a hobby, but I use R and bash, am familiar with IDEs, and can follow pseudocode well enough to edit and use scripts.

Any thoughts? Thanks in advance!

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like jeff bezos, anticheat and 2024 us presidential election. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was observant.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!

Hello,

I am struggling with a relatively useless personal issue, I am finding it very hard to play the aforementioned game mentioned in the post. My close friend has this heralded as his favorite game ever (tied with Majoras Mask) and possible one of the best of all time, and since the remake came out he very graciously lent me his copy. I have just gotten past the first major boss (Hooktail I think his name is) and just playing this game feels like a chore.

The combat is very slow, the dialogue is so overly childish, the story is your typical Nintendo fan-fare story. Even the music, which Nintendo does a great job most of the time, I find just average. I find the Rogueport theme music to be overly obnoxious for some reason, and too grating to my ears for a central city/hub which you're visiting a lot.

I really want to know what I am missing out on that makes this game so beloved by people other than pure nostalgia because I just can't see it. I know it's completely fine to not like games, but I feel a game as acclaimed as this should usually be liked by most people, and I think I usually fall into the subset of that lol.

Ironically enough, this is the same friend who introduced me to FromSoftware and I have loved all of their games.

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

In search of an app where I can pay for pro features once and get a fully featured application. Is it even possible these days?

Ok, now begin rant.

I don't understand - these services are aggregators of other people's content and let's be honest, only have to build a competent media player one time.

Why the subscription? While I fully understand that Adobe kicked off this new evil timeline of permanent rentals, I don't fully understand how this applies for something as simple as a media player.

Solution

I added 20.43.161.105 duckduckgo.com to my hosts file and everything is working fine now.
I also changed DNS servers away from my ISPs, thanks to all the recommendations in this thread.

cat /etc/resolve.conf
nameserver 1.1.1.1
nameserver 1.0.0.1

That seems to be working

> nslookup duckduckgo.com
Server:		1.1.1.1
Address:	1.1.1.1#53

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:	duckduckgo.com
Address: 202.39.62.156
Name:	duckduckgo.com
Address: 2001:b000:1a0:3505:202:39:62:15d

except (note that non-autoratative IP address which belongs to my ISP) ...

> ping -4 duckduckgo.com 
PING duckduckgo.com (202.39.62.156) 56(84) bytes of data.

My ISPs address again. More...

traceroute to duckduckgo.com (202.39.62.156), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
 1  * * *
 2  * * *
 3  * * *
...
30 * * * *

Why do ping and traceroute not use the new DNS server's I've configured (after re-booting too_)
The only thing to work is to add

20.43.161.105 duckduckgo.com

to my hosts file and now everything seems to be working as expected, though I have doubts now that changing the DNS configuration has done any good.

I know ISPs cache things like youtube to reduce costs so I'm wondering if 202.39.62.156 handled caching of duckduckgo, and they pointed their nameservers there and that box is broken.

Thanks for everyone's input and patience (lol are you still reading???)

Original Question

I've used Duck Duck Go as my main search engine for many, many years.
I have several search engines installed in Firefox including 2 for duck duck go. One for the /lite version and one for the full version.

[See update at bottom]

In recent days neither of these work. I would type my query into the search engine, press enter as I have done for years.

All I see is a blank page.

The latest development is that when I try and enter ANY search to either of those engines I get a GOOGLE 404 not found page.

    
    traceroute duckduckgo.com                                                                                                             ─╯
    traceroute to duckduckgo.com (216.239.38.120), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
     1  * * *
     2  * * *
     3  The usual internal routing of my ISP
     4  ""          ""            ""
     5  ""          ""            ""
     6  ""          ""            ""
     7  ""          ""            ""
     8  * * *
     9  any-in-2678.1e100.net (216.239.38.120)  4.089 ms  4.077 ms  4.181 ms
    
    ping duckduckgo.com                                                                                                                   ─╯
    PING duckduckgo.com (2001:4860:4802:32::78) 56 data bytes
    64 bytes from any-in-2001-4860-4802-32--78.1e100.net (2001:4860:4802:32::78): icmp_seq=1 ttl=117 time=10.1 ms
    64 bytes from any-in-2001-4860-4802-32--78.1e100.net (2001:4860:4802:32::78): icmp_seq=2 ttl=117 time=8.52 ms
    64 bytes from any-in-2001-4860-4802-32--78.1e100.net (2001:4860:4802:32::78): icmp_seq=3 ttl=117 time=6.87 ms
    64 bytes from any-in-2001-4860-4802-32--78.1e100.net (2001:4860:4802:32::78): icmp_seq=4 ttl=117 time=8.83 ms
    
    --- duckduckgo.com ping statistics ---
    4 packets transmitted, 4 received, 0% packet loss, time 3005ms
    rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 6.873/8.584/10.118/1.155 ms

cat /etc/resolv.conf
> MY ISPs name servers
> MY ISPs name servers

Sure enough I cannot find any pages on the site 2001-4860-4802-32--78.1e100.net which is obviously belongs to google.

This is very very strange.

Could someone verify if they can use DDG or whether they see the same as me?
Does anyone have any idea what's happening?

UPDATE
I can connect to and use DuckDuckGo using a browser VPN. This appears to be a mess made by my ISP.
I'd still like suggestion to overcome the problem though.

What have you been doing lately for your own fitness? Try out any new programs or exercises? Have any questions for others about your training? Want to vent about poor behavior in the gym? Started a new diet or have a new recipe you want to share? Anything else health and wellness related?

Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

So I have been reflecting on the statements of many members of this book reading group that they want to include books from diverse perspectives. Talking about next year and looking at our current voting results, I see three options and I would like us to vote on which the group prefers.

First, we could accept a very long list from this voting thread and cut off choices just after Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. That would delay new nominations for over a year.

Second, we could elevate Heaven and Earth Grocery Store and possibly Demon Copperhead to the top of the list in a sort of affirmative action.

Third, we could agree that our next nomination thread (for a smaller list of books) would exclusively be taken from groups that are disadvantaged in some way. An incomplete list of such disadvantage would include being from a poor or formerly colonized country, being an immigrant or refugee, being a political/ethnic minority such as basque, romani or catalan or kurdish, being indigenous, being poor or ethnic minority in a dominant country, being a sexual/gender minority, being disabled etc.

My general question ... where do you folks go when searching for replacement parts for aging technology, particularly pertaining to game consoles? I've come across iFixit, and of course there's Amazon and eBay as well, but I've been having some difficulty finding a particular part.

My specific issue is, I have an old Dualshock 4 (model CUH-ZDT2U, with PCB/motherboard model JDM-055) that is on the outs. It started experiencing some stick drift, so I took it apart to clean the contacts in the joystick housing to the best of my ability. In doing so, one of my kids managed to get a hold of the controllers' guts and break off the vibration motor wires from the board.

So, after taking the board and chassis to a local Makerspace, I got the wires soldered back onto the board. So far so good! However, the stick drift is still an issue and the vibration connection isn't that great. So now, I'm hoping to find some replacement parts - namely, a replacement board with the chassis and motors included.

One of the main reasons why I'm trying to refit this old controller, rather than replace it outright ... is because my wife bought the controller (and the PS4 it came with) as an anniversary present years ago. I'm the sentimental type and I'm trying to keep as much of this old controller going as I can, Ship-of-Theseus style. In addition, these controllers don't come cheap - $70 seems to be the basement these days for a new, in-box controller.

I've taken a swing at purchasing replacement parts off eBay - however, while the controller models matched, the board models did not. iFixit has the exact parts I need, but they are out of stock and their stock is inconsistent. I found another site - Fasttech.ca - that purports to have the same parts, but looking around online I've found a fair bit of discussion surrounding this site and the fact that it may be less-than-reputable.

Any advice on where else I might be able to look for parts?

so this might be a weird question but -- occasionally, particularly in the evenings, I get a strong craving for parmesan cheese. I live in Germany, so I don't mean the green tube kind either. I'll just take little slices off a wedge of real-ass parmesan that we bought to shred over pasta and such.

Thing is, parmigiano reggiano is pretty expensive, and the similar replacement cheeses like pecorino aren't that much cheaper. But I don't know of any other snack that can deliver the combo of saltiness and umami like just munching on slices of italian hard cheese.

So, does anybody else on Tildes understand this? Or have any recommendations for other foods to scratch this itch? Keeping in mind I'm in Germany, so I'm limited to stuff I can buy here.

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.