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.

Server host: tildes.nore.gg (Running Java 1.21.1)
Dynmap: https://tildes.nore.gg
Playtime Tracker: https://tildes.nore.gg/playtimes.html
Tildes website extension (shows online status & location): Firefox (Desktop and Android) - Chrome
Verification site: https://verify.tildes.nore.gg
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TildesMC

The server operates on a soft whitelist. Anyone can log in and walk around, but you need a Tildes account to gain build access.

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)

Timasomo 2024 is now officially complete!

Over the next few days, participants will be posting their creations and efforts in this topic to showcase their work to the community.

Comments and feedback are both welcome and encouraged.

Let these creators know what an awesome job they've done!

Creators: In posting your showcase:

• Give your project a title, and use the # markdown to make it stand out in the showcase thread!
• Link to your project in whatever way works best for it.
• If you like, give a "creator statement" that contextualizes what your project is.
• Add anything else you consider relevant! The showcase is yours!
• If you need examples, take a look at last year’s showcase.

Community:

• Treat this thread like a walk through an art gallery or a museum where you get to see different works on display.
• Simple appreciations for the creators are not noise—they are valuable community support!
• Make sure any feedback you give is constructive and meant to help.

A place to collect articles about what happened in all the other contests.

Edit: please post what the election results were (with a link to the article) at top level and then we can discuss them underneath it.

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 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!

Add awesome game deals to this topic as they come up over the course of the week!

Alternately, ask about a given game deal if you want the community’s opinions: e.g. “What games from this bundle are most worth my attention?”

Rules:

• No grey market sales
• No affiliate links

If posting a sale, it is strongly encouraged that you share why you think the available game/games are worthwhile.

All previous Save Point topics

If you don’t want to see threads in this series, add save point to your personal tag filters.

This was my first time trying working with a laser cutter! I wanted to make a house warming gift, and thought that this could be a nice way to get familiar with the laser cutter. The house warming gift was the mistborn wheel. But after I made that I kinda of caught the itch and wanted to make something for myself as well, which ended up being the surgebinding chart (second design).

https://www.designfind.com/designs/21814
https://www.designfind.com/designs/21815

Cosmere: The cosmere is a fictional shared universe where many of Brandon Sanderson's books take place.
I made this a separate post so that it could be searchable when people look for other Cosmere stuff on Tildes.

So I've been playing a lot of Helldivers 2 recently, and was wondering if there would be much interest in the community for a Tildes LFG / Discord situation to find pick up games.

Anyone else have an interest in the game still?

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?

This is a first attempt at a nomination thread for books targeting this group's stated desire to read books representing minority, or diverse or disadvantaged perspectives and experiences.

I'm drawing the boundaries of the category as broadly as I can and feel free to include a book (within the length limit of 600 pages) that you think fits within these parameters. Also, diverse or minority or disadvantaged can apply to either or both of author or main character.

Here is my attempt to find examples of what we might choose. This is not meant to be a set of hard boundaries, just a descriptive exploration.

Books that qualify include but are not limited to: being from a poor or formerly colonized country, being an immigrant or refugee, being a political/ethnic minority such as basque, tibetan, romani or catalan or kurdish, being indigenous, being poor or ethnic minority in a dominant country, being a sexual/gender minority, being disabled etc.

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?

This is the eighth of an ongoing series of book discussions here on Tildes. We are discussing Kindred by Octavia Butler. Our next book will be The City We Became by Jemisen the first week of December.

I don't have a particular format in mind for this discussion, but I will post some prompts and questions as comments to get things started. You're not obligated to respond to them or vote on them though. So feel free to make your own top-level comment for whatever you wish to discuss, questions you have of others, or even just to post a review of the book you have written yourself.

For latecomers, don't worry if you didn't read the book in time for this Discussion topic. You can always join in once you finish it. Tildes Activity sort, and "Collapse old comments" feature should keep the topic going for as long as people are still replying.
And for anyone uninterested in this topic please use the Ignore Topic feature on this so it doesn't keep popping up in your Activity sort, since it's likely to keep doing that while I set this discussion up, and once people start joining in.

Hi Folks

I've been working on an autoconversion Bash script to pick up videos and convert them to AV1. Yes, I know converting a source to another source means degradation and yada yada yada, but it's something I can live with as most of my sources are of very high quality to begin with, and I'm going for space-saving. Plus, my eyes aren't what they once were.

The conversion into AV1 I'm mostly happy with. I'm currently going through some old 90s shows which are of lesser quality, so they would need a little help to look better with AV1 by adding some natural film grain, else AV1 makes them look a little bit too clean.

I can easily pop into the script and enable film grain in the variables, or add in a simple option, but that's boring and tedious. Why do that when we can automate the world :)

Where I have got to is using the signalstats filter. The issue I have is I don't know how to analyse it's output enough to work out whether I should or shouldn't enable film grain or not. I know it's subjective either way.

Does anyone have experience with this? The output per frame looks like:

frame:1438 pts:59977 pts_time:59.977
lavfi.signalstats.YMIN=0
lavfi.signalstats.YLOW=0
lavfi.signalstats.YAVG=60.6913
lavfi.signalstats.YHIGH=149
lavfi.signalstats.YMAX=239
lavfi.signalstats.UMIN=91
lavfi.signalstats.ULOW=108
lavfi.signalstats.UAVG=121.955
lavfi.signalstats.UHIGH=131
lavfi.signalstats.UMAX=148
lavfi.signalstats.VMIN=124
lavfi.signalstats.VLOW=128
lavfi.signalstats.VAVG=134.535
lavfi.signalstats.VHIGH=146
lavfi.signalstats.VMAX=154
lavfi.signalstats.SATMIN=0
lavfi.signalstats.SATLOW=0
lavfi.signalstats.SATAVG=9.74682
lavfi.signalstats.SATHIGH=27
lavfi.signalstats.SATMAX=43
lavfi.signalstats.HUEMED=147
lavfi.signalstats.HUEAVG=162.949
lavfi.signalstats.YDIF=0.737433
lavfi.signalstats.UDIF=0.642897
lavfi.signalstats.VDIF=0.162755
lavfi.signalstats.YBITDEPTH=8
lavfi.signalstats.UBITDEPTH=8
lavfi.signalstats.VBITDEPTH=8

I'm happy to analyse a random 60-second segment and then grab an average from a couple of these outputs, but I'm not sure if this is a good method or not. I'm asked a couple of the biggest LLMs, they have come back with older ways that no longer exist in ffmpeg 7.1.

I'm trying not to use too many other pieces of software in this script. The dependencies are fairly simple with ffmpeg, awk, grep, etc., the kind of thing you get on nearly every distro of Linux. Any thoughts and/or ideas?

The blaze has officially ignited!

The November 2024 Backlog Burner is officially live. Use this topic to post about the games that you play.

Quicklink: Backlog Bingo

Etiquette:

• It is fine to make multiple top-level posts throughout the week.

• It is also fine to respond to your own posts.

• If you are playing Backlog Bingo, you can share your table either by markdown or through screenshots.

Gameplay guidelines:

• Goals for this event (if any) are entirely individual and self-determined.

• Playing Bingo is optional and not required.

• You do NOT need to finish games unless you want to. The point is to try out games and have fun, not force ourselves to play things we're not interested in.

Backlog Burner FAQ

Backlog Bingo FAQ

Important: All data for your Backlog Bingo card is stored on your device, not the server. Clearing your browser data will irrecoverably delete your card.

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...

November 2024's Humble Choice is now available with the following eight Steam games.

Does anyone have experience with any of the games and, if so, would you recommend them? Is there anything in here that you're particularly excited to play?