This is a follow up to this discussion from the other day where I was getting ready to DM my first session of 5e. tl;dr from that is that I was chosen to be the DM by my group and we're playing through the Essentials Kit campaign, albeit with certain elements tweaked to give it more flavor.

Our first game was last night and I think I crushed it. Typical of our group we got a later start than intended, so we only made it through most of a single quest. But man it was so much fun. I was expecting the group to go routes I hadn't expected, but I really didn't account for them splitting the group...whoops.

Basically the first quest was to retrieve an elderly woman from a windmill. When they arrive, the windmill is under attack by a manticore. In my head the solutions were A) fight it there, B) distract it and save the woman, or C) go hunt with it for food.

The group ultimately chose all 3. One character started telling the Manticore riddles while another snuck around behind the windmill to try to get the woman out of the house. But conveniently the window was too small. It culminated in the Manticore going hunting with a Harengon alone, the rest of the group realizing what a bad idea that was and then shadowing them. And then ultimately the group jumped the Manticore and we had our first encounter. Thankfully I had nerfed the Manticore's health about 40%, so it was a pretty easy fight.

The weakest part was definitely the combat. I was never any good at that as a player, so me running it was a little rocky. But nobody died, everyone got to participate, and they defeated the Manticore at about the right speed to keep it interesting. The best was just the roleplaying. I got to play as 3 distinct characters (the starting zone guide character, the Manticore, and the old lady) and had a blast. The old lady's voice slowly slipped into a Terry Jones inspired cockney woman's voice, which is just so much fun to do.

Long story short, everything went really, really well. I know what did and didn't work, so I'll be adjusting accordingly for next session. Although very little didn't work. I was really pleased. And since we didn't even entirely finish the first quest (the turn-in part at least), I still have a quest/dungeon written up that I can use for next week.

I recently got a Loona, one of those "smart" robot pets. My kid isn't great with real pets yet so we're trying to ease into things, sort of like exposure therapy. But we're having major problems with it. This post is part first impressions and part asking if anyone else has experienced this and maybe has figured out solutions.

Now, my kid loves it, a lot. So it's not a complete flop, thankfully. But wow is it ever the opposite of smart. Kind of like how Google, Alexa, etc have "command phrases" to let them know you're wanting to talk to them, Loona has "hello Loona". But it only triggers listening mode like 20% of the time. Doesn't seem to matter if you talk slowly and enunciate or if you talk normal, it's just really bad at listening.

Even once you have it listening to you, it only recognizes your commands maybe half the time. The booklet it came with seems to say it sends audio to Amazon for voice to command translation, so I'm assuming it's bad at listening to commands because:

1. The microphone is mediocre and isn't picking up all the words correctly.
2. Amazon's public voice to command service isn't great for general use.
3. A little of both.

On the one hand, I get if you're looking to leverage existing technology and not reinvent the wheel. On the other hand, if it can't even detect "hello loona" locally, then everything it hears would go to Amazon. That terrifies me, given their privacy track record. It's also just plain frustrating to try getting it to play a game or go to sleep when it's constantly ignoring you.

Beyond that, it almost feels like the camera is for gimmicks rather than a functional component. It's constantly running into things like walls, chair legs, human legs... It's always running into you when you try to interact with it and it frequently moves violently; fast and without regard for its surroundings. I assume it makes no attempt to map out even just its immediate surroundings because of how it always runs into the same stuff over and over again.

And one feature I was looking forward to is that the robot is supposed to be capable of getting itself back to its charging dock, and yet not once has it ever attempted to do so. Not when it's low battery and not when we tell it to. But it also, for no great reason, assumes that it should just wake up when it finishes charging, so if you start charging it in the evening and forget to manually turn it off, the thing starts yelling and ramming into stuff in the middle of the night; it's insanity.

Anyway, I would not recommend it from personal experience. But if you have one or know someone that does, and you aren't having these issues, please share your wisdom with me.

I appreciate Goodreads for its pretty extensive catalogue of books, the ability to see reviews from other readers, and the social aspect of following what my friends are reading. However, I find both the website and the app very slow and not very well designed. Plus, I liked to minimize my interactions with Amazon. Has anyone used or built any alternatives? While the features I listed above are nice, the only ones I would really want are:

• The ability to quickly look up and add a book to my "want to read", and to keep track of books I have read
• The ability to leave notes or reviews on books (not necessarily visible to others).

I've started to keep a reading log in Notion which satisfies the second point above, but there's no easy way to search through a data base of books and add a book to one of my lists. It would be nice to be able to do so on the fly as I browse books at the store. So Tildeños, what solutions have you all come up with to track your reading?

So I have an old MacBook Pro (mid-2014) Core i5 which I've just installed Ubuntu 22.04.2 on. Most things are working fine but the screen randomly flickers and then goes black and then after varying lengths of time will pop back on again. I've been googling around and found lots of instances of similar graphics glitches but can't quite find a solution.

Any suggestions?

I've been exploring the world of having the TV on in the background. In the world of FAST streaming, (Free Ad Supported Television) I'm a fan of Midnight Pulp, a live feed of weird, macabre, and strange programming that would fit well in a late night block. Is there a recommendation you have for something to put on when you have to have something on, but not want to pay attention?

I'm big into self-hosting and recently getting back into writing as an additional hobby, cuz one can never have too many, right? Anyway, I am looking for a writing organization tool like Manuskript, Dabble, or Scrivener that is both open source and self-hosted.

Essentially, I would just like something that I can organize my thoughts and occasionally write in, but be able to access it from all my devices - desktops, laptops, phones, tablets, etc. It seems like most of the solutions I've looked at are limited to a single device or cloud functionality is locked behind a paywall. Of course, I could just use a self-hosted wiki site for cloud editing/organization, but I'd like something more oriented toward writing if anybody has any ideas. Thanks!

A post for this exists.

I checked, I searched for it first thing and skimmed through the comments. So this should be the end of it. I know you shouldn't make a duplicate post, lest make any kind of post in a different group.

(if you don't know what I'm talking about, click the link at the top, open the article in incognito mode, read.)

As young folk say, idc. I feel this is beyond the scope of the original post as industry talk deserves serious, dedicated discourse. ~talk seems to be the place for this, anything here barely gets the same engagement like ~talk posts; they garner lots and lots... I mean, LOTS of comments. Plus, the WGA writer's strike is still goin on — they been doin this shit for 2 months with tedious media coverage, and have made their presence known. If they can do that, I think I can take a page from their book and post here.

This is not a retread on the Vulture article, not necessarily about your opinions on the work culture Phil Lord creates, etc. If you feel like this post is a duplicate: Don't vote, don't comment! Ignore this post! Revive the original post — you can do it as long as it's on-topic and thoughtful.

This post is about the ripple effects of what that article says, and how it may reflect industry-wide treatment of animators, and even adjacent subcultures and sectors. Take VFX, for instance: Lots of ppl seem to criticise Marvel Studios for their overuse of CGI in their productions, blissfully unaware that Marvel Studios is a bad client to work with.

In other words; this post is meant to discuss Phil Lords in the industry that cause over 100 animators to quit (which I think is too much to ignore). This post is a launching pad for industry awareness, and should hopefully give you the idea to protest in your own way. Don't believe skipping movies will work? It doooooeeeeeeessss~~

So.... what do we REALLY think about the Spider-Verse article on Vulture? What does this truly reveal about the broader treatment of animation in Hollywood? Does Sony raise good points? What are some other instances where a producer or executive caused such upset during the production of an animated movie? What are other reasons or work culture tidbits outside people or moviegoers don't know about? What's it like being an animator working in Hollywood?? What are some labour unions or orgs to look into? What are some novel solutions or fixes that should be pushed by everyone as much as possible?

I was gonna post this on ~talk, but decided last minute not to. If you have read this far (and think this is not a duplicate post), I implore you to vote a/o comment! If this gets to at least like... 40 or 50 comments, that would be so amazing. If not, oh well. But I think it would be a disservice since no matter how small or insignificant this post is, it will help. It may inspire someone here to do something out there, and I think that's more than enough reason.

Hello, I’ve been working in technology for nearly 10 years and I just can’t be arsed anymore.

The companies I’ve worked for have generally been B2B, providing technology solutions for other technology platforms, but there’s no “product” or “thing” at the end, just some more shitty software.

I try to provide the best service I can, but I end up burning out each week. Just utterly fed up and lacking any motivation to make improvements as I have too much other stuff to “deliver”.

My question is more around what drives any of you ?
Do you get up in the morning wanting to make a difference ?
Do you work in an area that directly does good in the world ?
How do you stay motivated and fulfilled in your careers?

What makes you want to get up each day ?

I have followed numerous discussions on here lately regarding extracting oneself from being Google-reliant, and they've all deeply resonated with me. For years now I've been slowly migrating numerous Google-bound things over to my own self-hosted alternatives. I've moved my storage, contacts, documents, and some (but sadly not all) of my calendars to home solutions, fairly easily too.

But the biggest hurdle I've been facing this whole time, the one I've been putting off the longest, is the act of figuring out how to get almost twenty years of mail archive and history on my primary account away from Google and into a space where I can access it separately. I have been steadily changing the main email on my more active external accounts to a self-hosted one, and now only seeing a shrinking handful of lesser-used services still attached to the old gmail. But that history is too precious to me, and I still find multiple occasions where I need/want to reference some communications from long ago.

I've tried searching the web for options, but so far all combinations of my queries are either really elementary "here's how to set up a new email" crap, or else aimed at moving from one Gmail account to another Gmail account. I've been thinking that the simplest approach might be just to set it up as a POP3 account in my mail client (eM Client, for the record), download it all, and then when I finally pull the plug just drag it into the local client archive, and then remove the account from the app. But I figure there have to be others who have done this, right?

The history of the web is littered with with many a dead image/video hosting service. Echos of their existence plague older forums in the form of broken links and images. It seems like they all follow the same path, starting up as the new "simple" service that just hosts images, no fuss. But then as interest grows, so do costs, and the service owners have to scramble to monetize. Generally this is done by stuffing the place full of ads until everyone leaves. Alternatively the owners are stubborn and stick to their guns, until they inevitably have to shut down due to drowning in costs. When they do shut down, millions of assets are lost and the graveyard of broken images across the web grows some more.

https://gfycat.com/ is the latest notable victim of this.

With all the recent social media turmoil, there as been lots of exploration of alternative sites, and all of them have to overcome the problem of hosting media in one way or another.

Tildes obviously does this by avoiding it entirely which, while a very effective solution, is just handballing the problem elsewhere. Users will still want to post images and videos but they will just have to find alternative hosts. Over time those hosts will die and Tildes posts will be filled with dead links.

Mastodon has similar problems,the biggest cost of hosting a mastodon instance is the storage and bandwidth required to facilitate media posts. And there's a real danger of an instance incurring high costs if a particular post becomes popular and is hotlinked on a big centralised social media site.

It seems like a really tricky problem to solve, something peer-to-peer could sort of solve the costs created by traffic peaks but has problems when there is many small files viewed by few individuals each.

Are there any other solutions out there? Web3, IPFS? Or is it just not that much of a problem, do we accept that media on the web is ephemeral and will be lost after a while?

Back in the day I remember setting up squirrelmail + qmail to host my own email as well as for others. And then I got that coveted gmail invite and never really looked back.

I've started to get into the mindset of erasing my digital trail, at least for my personal activities, and email seems to be the main one that I need to figure out.

The idea of setting up my own email solution came up again because I wonder how transparent / private services like protonmail and mailbox.org really are.

Any suggestions or insight would be appreciated. Squirrelmail seems to be now defunct, and I am pretty sure the world has changed enough that residential ISPs don't allow running of servers at home anymore. I guess I could setup something on AWS if I had to.

Recently NordVPN rolled out an update which forced users to use an encrypted username and password combination when connecting through OpenVPN. I haven't seen any posts on this here, and it took me way longer than I want to admit troubleshooting this issue because I knew my original credentials were correct.

If you use a gluetun container for routing any of other containers traffic, you might have recently noticed a 500 Internal Service Error in your Health Status and when you check your logs you will find a AUTH_FAILED message.

Solution below:

1. Go to NordVPN website and log in (using your normal credentials)
2. Under accounts, services, click NordVPN
3. Click "Set up NordVPN Manually" at the bottom of the page
4. You will receive an email verification code, using whatever email you have set up for your NordVPN services. Type this code into the popup window.
5. Copy your new encrypted credentials for your Open VPN client settings.

This is my first post, please add tags as required.

Hey Reddit enthusiasts! Revanced has recently extended its support to some of the most popular Reddit apps out there. The list of supported apps now includes Boost, Infinity, rif is fun, Relay, and Sync.

For those who are new to Revanced, this means you can patch these existing apps with your own oauth-client-id, allowing you to continue enjoying them seamlessly.

Quick tutorial:

1. Go to https://www.reddit.com/prefs/apps in your web browser.
2. Create a new app by giving it a name of your choice.
3. Tick the "Installed App" option and fill in the redirect URI field. The specific URI depends on the app you're using. For example, for rif, the URI would be redditisfun://auth. You can find the required redirect URI in the app's corresponding section on GitHub.
4. Copy the client ID string that appears for the app you just created.
5. Create a text document named "reddit_client_id_revanced.txt" and place it in the root directory of your phone's storage (e.g., /storage/emulated/0/<file here>). Paste the client ID into this document.
6. Install the latest version of ReVanced Manager on your device.
7. Open the Patcher tab in ReVanced Manager and select your app.
8. In the Patches section, enable the "Change OAuth Client ID" patch.
9. Apply the patch and install the modified app (Note: If you already have the app installed, you may need to delete it first and then click Install once ReVanced finishes creating the new APK.)

Following these steps will help you navigate through the process of obtaining a private client ID and applying the necessary patches to enjoy Reddit using ReVanced.

Guides with screenshots:

1. https://gist.github.com/decipher3114/4423a2671dc3ce4401025b737d5c89f4

2. https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1wHvqQwCYdJrQg4BKlGIVDLksPN0KpOnJWniT6PbZSrI (Thanks to @kobew50 on Discord)

If you encounter any difficulties during the process,head over to ReVanced Discord server to seek assistance.

Reddit applications that have available patches or modified versions.

➡️ Platform: Android 🤖

➡️ Platform: iOS 🍎

*Shout-out to WefWef - a Lemmy client not only inspired by Apollo, but which is aiming for feature parity. (GitHub)

Some years ago, I bought the Philips OneBlade around the time it was announced. My beard grows very fast and covers a large portion of my face, so daily shaving with a razor blade is often a chore and can leave some pretty nasty rashes on my face sometimes.

The Philips OneBlade was perfect for my situation as it was a quick and painless solution to shaving. I even changed my style to something like a permanent stubble using the guards included in the package. However, after some time, I decided that I preferred my beard longer and ended up abandoning my electric razor.

Recently, though, I've decided to go back to the old stubble look and have been searching for a decent electric razor. I was pretty disappointed to see that the best product for me would still be the Philips OneBlade. It just seems that there is no other competitor in this type of electric razor (or maybe I just haven't looked enough), which I think is a bit strange considering it has been more than 5 years since the OneBlade was released. Even the OneBlade models from Philips still seem to be the same ones made back in 2016. Is the market for electric razors really so stagnant? Or is that Philips hold such a heavy monopoly on this kind of razor? I'm thinking of maybe buying the pro version this time, but even that seems to be only a fancy clipper attached to the same old product that I had.

I would like to hear your thoughts on this and know if you have any recommendations for electric razors that would be just as small and practical.

I recently digitized some old home movies from my grandparents and looking through the film I realize I recognize almost no one. This got me thinking, I should go through this with my mother to help me identify family members as she's probably the last person who knows who anyone is.

Obviously I can just make a document with notes ex: 2:53 screen right, great uncle john"
But I'm hoping there's a more elegant solution in which I can keep info with the file and not some auxiliary document that dosent live in the same place.

I could just dump all that info into Metadata but that's maybe the lowest quality solution.
The xray function of Amazon prime video is the example of the best solution in a perfect world. (if you don't know, when you pause or bring up the context menu on prime video, there's a bar that identifies everyone one scene with a matching headshot)

I actually looked into it and there's an API that amazon uses for this called "RecognizeCelebrities" and uses images to train the program to recognize faces and populate it's menu. I'm not sure if it's open source but even if it was, it's over my level to use it practically I think.

The last option I can think of is using a video markup platform like frame.io but that's not really a long term solution.

Any ideas?

I have to preface this question with a disclaimer that I am an eager learner of Linux and servers in general, but I'm still a beginner and often run into roadblocks.

Current setup:

• Raspberry Pi 3 with Adguard Home acting as primary DNS
• unRAID server with Adguard Home acting as secondary DNS
• About a dozen other containers running on same server
• DHCP is handled by my router

Goal:

• provide local DNS names for the containers running in unRAID so I don't have to enter IP:Port (e.g, calibre.local) which also has the side benefit saving the various username/password combos into Bitwarden with an actual domain attached to it instead of 14 occurrences of 192.168.x.x

Additional info:

I had PiHole running on the Pi before as the primary and only DNS previously. And I seem to recall you could put IP:Port as a custom DNS and have it resolve. AGH does have a feature for DNS Rewrites but it does not allow for port numbers, IPs only. I switched to AGH because it seems to be more effective at blocking ads, which is likely more a function of the provided DNS blocklists out of the box as opposed to what I was doing in Pihole. I would prefer to stick with AGH for adblocking/DNS if possible.

I looked into just modifying host files on the main computers I touch these apps from, but again, can't include port. What is a good solution for this? Preferably something approachable for a newb like me.

For a long time now, I have been using KeePassXC for desktops and KeePassDX for Android. I keep everything synchronized neatly with Syncthing, which can be configured to operate over your WiFi or the internet through their gateways. This allows me to share a single KeePass file with another individual, provided I tell them the password.

I have a co-worker who is loving 1Password and while it looks great, something irks me about paying monthly for a password manager. I looked into Bitwarden for a "local cloud" and have seen very mixed results as well as not being sure if I could trust my own security configurations to do so.

I am primarily wondering what everyone else is using in search of something a bit more convenient (I'm not opposed to using the cloud) that has an app like KeePass that I can use for desktop apps, and not just in the browser (though I don't use that function often, truthfully).

Edit: Passkey support was mentioned in this comment and made me realize how important such support will be in the coming years. For those of you with password management solutions supporting it, how has it been?

This is mainly so I can find this again and not have to rediscover this for the third time after I forget. I can't find this exact solution anywhere else so I figured I should put it somewhere.

I have a terrible Insignia tv that locks the overscan option so you can't even turn it off, and linux mint for whatever reason doesn't recognize it as a TV so I can't use their automatic TV adjustments. This is just for x11 afaik.

So in the end, I used the underscan to defeat the overscan and it works great:

xrandr to get the output name the TV is using, then

xrandr --output <name-of-tv-output> --set underscan on --set "underscan hborder" <0-128> --set "underscan vborder" <0-128>

to enable underscan and tweak the border values which squash the edges of the screen, undoing the effects of the overscan.

for me the optimal values are 128h 40v but you can just experiment by typing the command into the console before you make it permanent.

The recent PKM thread had me thinking about what folks are using as journaling app/portal. I do use Obsidian for my second brain right now and genuinely love it. But I find the mobile app on Android to be a bit clunky, if I'm honest. Seems slow to open even with very few plugins. For jounaling I've used DayOne for years. I started back when it was iOS/MacOS only, but then switched phone to Android and haven't been back. But now they have an app and web app for that. What I don't like is the somewhat goofy format it saves in and it's on their servers. They used to allow you to at least leverage your own Dropbox, but no longer.

For the past several months I've tried several FOSS options. Main criteria is that I could host it myself, supports offline entries stored in an open file format (preferably MarkDown), and had either multi platform app or a decent web app. That lead me to try these:

Memos
Pros:

• Great persistent web app
• Slick UI that is light and snappy
• markdown support
  Cons:
• Stuffs the .md inside a database file so can be a bit cumbersome to export data
• No offline support. There is a 3rd party app that hopes to implement it

Flatnotes
Pros:

• Incredibly simple
• Another easily deployed app
• Flat Markdown files
  Cons:
• Web app on mobile is almost unusable as in it doesn't scale well to smaller screens
• Very early development, but very likely to stay as minimalistic as it is now.
• No offline and very unlikely to ever have it

Joplin
Pros:

• Multi platform apps that perform well
• End-to-end encryption supported
• Could replace both DayOne and my To-do solution (Google Keep)
• Offline support
  Cons:
• More database stuff instead of flat markdown files

One solution I've been testing lately is using IAWriter to write to a 'Journal' folder within my Obsidian vault on Google drive Obsidian Vault > Journal > 2023.... for example. This works surprisingly well. Of course IAWriter is a bit spendy at $29 for Android and then more $ for other platforms as they're sold separately.

So I'm curious what other people are using for just simple daily journaling, random thoughts, etc. If there's an approach I've missed I'd love to hear it. Joplin is so dang close but not having the structure of plaintext files is a no go for me as I don't want to be trapped by any one product should something happen to the development down the road. Doesn't have to be free, but I want control of the entries either on my own server or cloud storage.

I'm currently using Navidrome to self-host my music collection, while using DSub to listen on-the-go.

This works very well for most genres, except for the bulk of my music which is classical music. This presents its own host of problems pertaining to cataloguing and using metadata, since there are often multiple recordings of the same musical composition, recorded by multiple conductors with different orchestras and/or soloists. There may also be different instrumental arrangements of the same musical piece. Merely sorting by "Artist" is therefore quite unsatisfactory in this scenario.

Some streaming services have come up with quite satisfying solutions in my experience (notably Apple Music Classical and Idagio), but I am not sure how to go about listening to my own self-hosted classical music.

Is anybody here on Tildes familiar with this organizational problem? I would be very eager to hear how you have tackled this. Is there any self-hosted software more suitable to cataloguing musical collections with extensive metadata?

Every person in my household takes a daily regimen of prescription medication and/or supplements. We keep ending up in situations where we run out of something because we don’t have a good way to keep track of our remaining supply of each thing. We need a better system for managing this!

We each use a 28-day (4 week) pill dispenser box which helps somewhat. I refill the dispensers when they are empty. The problem is, some of the medications run out in the last week of the dispenser. At the time I fill it, it’s way too early to call the pharmacy for a refill. But by the time the supply runs out I’ve forgotten about it and have to scramble to get more. I hope I’m explaining that clearly. It’s complicated because every medication runs out on a different schedule.

If you’ve got a solution to this problem please share it!

Consider

• A game system with a random success rate of 1% (a) (like a loot drop in an mmo)
• A game system with a random success rate of 1%, pity=100 (b) (pity in this context means the probability of success is changed on your 100th successive failure to 100%)

How long would it take a player to earn an their success given 1 attempt/minute?

The answer for (a) is "infinity" which the community rarely accepts. It is possible (though unlikely) for someone to fail forever, they can. The answer for (b) at most 100 attempts (100 minutes).

Developers can describe (a) as the average player will succeed after a little over an hour (~69 attempts). However the 99th precentile takes about 7.5 hours... and the unlucky 1%? Longer. 1 hour and 7.5 hours aren't in the same ballpark.

Anyone have a solution to cut through the mathplexity? Decisions in their own game design or what they've seen others do? I simply have pities when the odds are worse than 1 in 5 or relegate (a) style probabilities to combat systems (non-reward).

This is a place to post your ideas about what to do about Tildes groups and tags. I'm going to write about some problems (as I see them) and save my ideas about solutions for the comments.

The taxonomy problem

We have tags and groups and they are somewhat arbitrary. A tag could be a group someday. A group can be downgraded to a tag if it's not used much.

Topics can have multiple tags, but they can be in only one group (and its ancestor groups).

It's hard to pick the right group. An example: a post about animals could go in ~enviro (for wildlife), ~hobbies (for pets), or ~science (for a scientific study). So where do you put news article about a scientific study of the effects of house cats on wildlife?

Adding ~animals seems like it would be a good thing because now you have an obvious place to find all the posts about animals. Animal lovers rejoice! But from a taxonomy point of view, it makes things worse, because now you have another place where you could logically put an article and another place to go looking for it. More groups means more edges and more edge cases. It's enough to make you wish for crossposts.

The competition problem

Tags are better for taxonomy, so why not just have tags? Because classifying topics isn't the only thing we want to do. As Deimos wrote about, eventually we'd like to have somewhat more independent communities, closer to subreddits but hopefully without their downsides. It would be nice if subreddits that wanted to migrate to Tildes could actually do it. We also want to have a good mix of topics on the front page, while allowing some groups to have a lot more posts than others.

I'll start with an analogy: if a school has only one sport that matters, the people who are good at that sport win socially, and other people don't have as much of a chance. But if you have multiple sports and clubs that people care about, there are more ways to win at something. I don't believe pretending everyone is a winner works all that well, but more ways to win promotes diversity and creates useful social ambiguity.

The front page of Tildes is the most visible and has limited space. That creates an all-against-all competition between topics. We also have groups with their own leaderboards, but they are lesser competitions and it's unclear if they matter yet. (I'm using them more, though.) Meanwhile, each topic has an independent leaderboard for its comments that doesn't conflict with any other game. (Maybe that's why I like megathreads?)

I haven't been thinking of Tildes in terms of leaderboards, but maybe it can explain why old-timers are often reluctant to post topics? We aren't really trying to win, but we have ideas about fair play. When there's only one game anyone cares about, we don't want to drown out other worthy topics by entering too many contestants. We're also a bit reluctant to enter anything that's too specialized into the competition, because it doesn't "deserve" the attention. It's not a worthy contestant and it's just gonna lose.

Also, sometimes this isn't a game you want to win. Entering a controversial topic into a competition can get you unwanted attention, and that's often no prize at all. When a game isn't one you wanted to enter, getting attention is more like losing than winning.

For the front page, I expect this problem will get worse with more people. Entering the competition brings more attention than before.

Note: thinking of a topic listing as a leaderboard for a game is only an analogy and I don't mean to promote competitiveness. They weren't designed to be leaderboards and I think we'd like to see design changes that reduce competitiveness. There are known downsides to competition that we don't want, like "cheating" to win with "unworthy" strategies and the rules-lawyering and jealousy that come with that.

Ideas?

Some rules for this "game": Please post one proposal per comment. If you have multiple independent ideas, you can post them separately, but post them together if they're interrelated.

Context: Last year I struggled for a long, long time to make my new Xbox Elite Series 2 gamepad work properly with Steam. After more than a day of frustration and following various trails of other discussions on the topic, I finally figured out the exact series of actions needed to solve the issue. I posted these steps on Reddit, and they ended up getting me dozens of comments and messages, even as recently as yesterday people still let me know that I saved them from the same frustration. With reddit in its current state of uncertainty, I'd hate for this guide to be lost, so I'm hoping new readers and controller fanatics will find it useful here.

The Problem: You have a Xbox Elite Series 2 Controller, which you are trying to use in Steam on Windows. When using the default (no profile lights) profile mode, the paddles are detected and can be mapped in Steam Controller config. However, they still register no input in-game when pressed. Here is how to fix your problem:

The Solution:

Step 1: You must first revert the firmware of the controller to version 4.8.1908.0. On a PC with your controller plugged in, open the Xbox Accessories app (from the Windows Store), then hit Windows + R to open the Run dialog. Run this command:

xboxaccessories:\firmwareupdate?legacyDowngrade=true

This should give you option to revert. Do it.

Step 2: In Steam Big Picture, go to Gear Icon -> Controller Settings and Enable Xbox Extended Feature Support if it isn't already checked. After enabling it you will have to Reboot. If it's already enabled, there is no need to reboot.

Step 3: Back to the desktop, make sure the Xbox Accessories app is CLOSED. If it is open, you must close it, then disconnect the controller entirely, then power it off, and then finally reconnect it to the computer.

Step 4: Press the central profile button on the controller a few times until it cycles through the profiles. You need to cycle it until the profile light turns off, indicating the controller is in its default layout.

Step 5: Open Steam's controller configuration for your game of choice, and you should now be able to re-map the paddles therein.

Every time I have done the above process, the paddles on the default profile (with no lights on) are now mappable in Steam and usable in-game. I have completed this successfully now with five total controllers, and all worked with Steam flawlessly afterward.

Notes & Clarifications:

• You do not have to uninstall the Xbox Accessories app. However, if ever you use it to modify the controller at all, you must repeat step 3. If you try to use the steam-remapped paddles in the game with the app open, they won't work. You have to turn off the app, disconnect and power cycle the controller, and then reconnect, and very specifically do not re-open the accessories app. I'm assuming this is because the Accessories app inserts some kind of override layer that only goes away after removing the controller and closing the app.
• This process will almost certainly make the Bluetooth connection wonky, if it even works at all. Instead, you'll want to use either a direct cable connection and/or the official wireless adapter. In fact, all of the above steps worked for me with the wireless adapter connection just as well as with the wired connection. As a bonus, you can seamlessly transition between wired and wireless mode this way by simply plugging or unplugging the cable.
• At least as of May 2023, I've received now multiple reports saying that newer purchases of the Elite 2 controller are being shipped with the controller now pre-flashed with a default firmware that is newer than the one that was available in the above post. As a result, this means that rolling back the firmware might not work, as it can't be rolled back to version 4.8.1908.0 anymore. However, I have since purchased two more new controllers of my own since then, and neither had this issue, and in fact both worked with Steam immediately out of the box (after telling Xbox app "no!" to firmware upgrades, that is).

I hope I have posted this correctly (it's my first post here!), and that others continue to find it useful.

I'm looking for mountable remote storage that I can use for my backup solution at home. I'm trying to get set up with backuppc and need to be able to mount a large remote filesystem to store my archives. I've tried renting a 1TB storage box from Hetzner, but my account was rejected (I assume because of a recent legal name change). Can anybody recommend a similar provider of remote storage that I can rent and mount onto my server?

Now that the site has gotten a little busier, I’ve noticed a few shifts in how I've engaged with the site and jotted down notes on things that I've noticed might be nice to have. We already have a "what don't you like" thread I know, but this is more like "what didn't I notice when the place was a lot quieter" sort of thing.




Edit bumps for megathreads

I recently created a megathread for the Apple VisionPro reviews. But I realized that if I continuously edit in new reviews as they come in, the thread won’t bump. I’d need to actually post each time a new review comes in AND edit it into the self-post. It might be nice if I could choose to bump a self-post if I’m making a substantive edit to the content. Though I can see the opportunities for abuse here so I wonder if there’s a more elegant solution for it besides just occasionally posting when there are updates.

Following/Subscribing to Topics

Yes topics get bumped as conversation happens in them, but with the level of activity we have right now I’m having trouble keeping up with conversations I’m actually invested in following. Bookmarks are good, but there’s two issues. One is that they’re hidden in a folder off to the side. So it’s easy to forget to check them. Two is that they’re currently serving dual purposes, they can either be for saving specific topics because I think they’re good enough that I might want to reference them again or they can be because I want to keep up with the conversation in them.
I’d be interested in separating the functions a little bit. I’d like to be able to bookmark topics as a “save” function but also “subscribe” to topics to get alerted up top when there are new posts the same way I am alerted to stuff in my inbox. Alternatively, just having an “unread” count next to the bookmarked topics link and sorting the list of bookmarks by acitivity might do it.



A Drafts section

This post right now I mostly composed in a note-taking app because it’s a collection of random thoughts I had while using the site the past couple of weeks but didn’t want to post until I had time to marinate on them. Being able to save drafts directly in Tildes would have been a nice feature. It would also be good for replies since it gives you a chance to be like “Hmmm, do I really want to engage with this conversation right now?”



“Shortlisted” groups

The list of groups is a bit long, especially when you’re scrolling it on mobile. People might not (and probably don’t) actually care about all of them. It might be nice if we could “star” a group to have it show up higher on the list or have all non-starred groups in a collapsed list.

Choosing groups from the new post view instead of posting from the groups view

Since groups are currently being treated more like “super-tags” than separated communities, I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to designate the group in a dropdown menu above the tag bar when we’re posting instead of needing to go into a group to create a new post. In some cases, I might think a self-post belongs in one group but by the time I’m done writing I realize this ~humanities post is really more of a ~life post. This will, of course, depend on the outcome of the “treating groups more as separate entities” discussion.



Subscribed topic tags

Filtered topic tags is a nice feature because it’s one interaction mode that serves dual uses. You can both remove a selected class of content from your main feed but then you can also navigate into it to see ONLY that content. This basically lets you use it alternatively as a “favorites” option instead of an anti-favorites option. (I guess this is less of a feature suggestion and more of an observation for a non-obvious use of the function.) We could, maybe, separate out the list of filtered topics by why you’re filtering. Either “I don’t want to see this stuff” or “I want to be able to specially focus on this stuff.”

Built-in invite request form

Currently to get an invite you have to ask on Reddit or something. Maybe we should have a page where people can request invites within Tildes so we aren’t reliant on having to pick-up flotsam from other social media platforms. The downside, of course, is that you can’t vet people. So this invite path would probably be the lowest priority and only handed out during quiet periods where noxious posters can be handled quickly.



“Only New” filter for comments


I mentioned this issue with the Arc browser that makes it so the “collapse all old replies” function breaks if I open it in a background tab. Maybe it might be nice to also have this as a button I can trigger next to the Collapse replies and Expand all buttons. Or, if it doesn’t over-complicate the UI, maybe even a way to “collapse all before [datetime]” with the last session time pre-filled in. Or perhaps more like a clock that you can wind backwards in 30 minute or 1 hour increments.



Rethinking time-limit on Exemplary labels


I think it’s crucial that these remain a rare commodity, but with the current volume of good posts the 8 hour limit is feeling mighty constraining. Although previously the time limit didn’t feel like a constraint at all because there legitimately wasn’t much to label. Not sure if this should actually change or not, maybe the time limit can stretch or compress based on how active the site has been over the past X hours.



Add a “Funny” modifier to the “Joke” label

The effect on sorting should be the exact same and it should be invisible to everyone, but I just think it would be fun and would also encourage people to label jokes as such (trick folks into narcing basically). Maybe when there is a reputation system in place it can be used to adjust how big of a negative weight your joke posts get. Funnier people get dinged less.

Rethinking the necroposting warning

With more people here there are more active conversations and topics seem to remain active a lot longer. In topics like the one for questions from new users it’s so active it feels kind of silly to see the “this topic is over X old” warning. We do want to encourage maintaining conversations as long as they’re going so maybe we should suppress this warning on active topics (like ones that have had more than 5 posts in the past 3 days).

Improved search


I know search is hard, but it is difficult to find old stuff. I’ve been trying to dig up examples of old posts or previous conversations on things when answering questions and I’m often trying to wrack my brain for specific phrases from conversations a year or more ago. It just doesn’t work for this. Discord search works pretty well and gives you modifiers for who posted, where, around when. I get the potential for abuse here, but maybe enable this kind of deep search for my own post history and nobody else’s?



Mark direct messages as unread

Exactly what is says on the tin. Sometimes people ask you something and you need to come back to it later.



Tag cloud

Knowing what to tag things as is intimidating for newbies and old heads alike. There need to be mechanisms to make this more approachable. I think perhaps if, underneath the tag bar we just displayed a “word cloud” of the common tags sized according to frequency it might help get people started. The word cloud would have to be per group and maybe refreshed per day based on a rolling-sample of the last 100 posts.

Put a vote button on the bottom of the post for self-posts.

Seriously, do you realize how much scrolling I have to do to go back up and upvote kfwyre when he posts something like this? It's especially a hassle on mobile.

What the recent Reddit protest cemented in my mind is how ineffective protest tends to be the larger and more entrenched an established order is. There's no real incentive to change because ultimately everyone knows that the protestors have little recourse.

If you want to enact change, just trying to get people enraged and trying to get them to express that rage is not a great tactic. What you need as an alternative for people to go to instead, because that's the only real threat that matters to the establishment, the threat of being replaced.

So to that end, I'd like to start a conversation about what it is that people need, and how we can arrange structures to get those things without needing to rely on external actors who don't have your interests at heart.

For example, community mesh networks are a way of expanding internet into more of a public amenity so everyone can have access to it.

Virtual power plants can allow communities to produce their own power reliably and reduce their reliance on major power providers.

These are the kinds of things I am interested in. I feel that the most effective way to push back against profiteering corporations is to simply reduce our need for them in the first place.

What are some good community oriented solutions to societal needs that you feel deserve more attention and interest?

We have a backend that kind of does REST APIs but cannot handle simple Bearer tokens for authorization and cannot produce the full set of HTTP error codes (the platform just doesn't allow, for example HTTP 501 to be returned programmatically). There is no Swagger for the API.

The thought was to use Microsoft API Management Services as a proxy of sorts. It would handle the Bearer token upfront, and then just proxy / wildcard the requests/responses to the backend. The hard part is that it needs to parse the return response, and if there is something like "{ errorCode: 501 }" property in the JSON, it needs to return HTTP 501 instead of the regular payload.

Does anyone have any experience in setting this up? It seems like the basic policy processing won't cut it, and so function apps and logic apps seem to be the ticket. We want to keep this facade layer as thin as possible. Microsoft APIM is the only platform we're allowed to consider at this time.

As somebody who loves live music and audience recordings thereof more than almost anything, I've always been quite a fan of listening to ROIOs—recordings of independent origin. I spend time every day finding new recordings, as well as making, mastering, and distributing my own.

Of course, the community of people that do this is very large indeed! And yet, I rarely see people discussing how they listen thereto in this digital era. It's hard to avoid being advertised one of the uncountable software solutions for listening to one's favourite albums, but no software seems to specifically cater to fans of live music to my knowledge, with the only options being either to bodge some metadata for every single live recording one has and treat each like an album, which drowns out actual albums (do I really want hundreds of live recordings of Godspeed You! Black Emperor or black midi amid their respective small number of released work?), takes a lot of work, and feels a bit silly, or one can navigate through a file manager and open a directory of a live performance in, say, VLC Media Player, which is functional if awkward and unglamorous.

I've always wondered how others approach this issue: how do you?

I am really struggling without r/selfhosted. I truly believe it is, by far, the best community for self-hosters that I have come across. What I am missing most of all is, whenever I search for questions to self-hosting problems - especially for smaller projects - the answers are nearly always found within posts on that sub.

At least with things like programming, there is stackoverflow and a bunch of other small communities.

I'm going to end up going to Discord to find my solutions, which is the next big community. But it means having to go on there and ask the question (that has probably been asked hundreds of times before), rather than just searching the issue.

I have lost my r/finch community, and am feeling curious to see if there are any folks here who also find apps can be helpful for their mental health.

I struggle with anxiety and am processing a lot of grief, and may or may not have ADHD (I am in the process of getting tested, but it takes a while). My experiences with therapy are a bit mixed, so I am currently going down the route of trying to DIY my wellness a little. Starting simple with things like, sleep more, try to focus on drinking enough, go out in nature, switching off podcasts and phones and reading more. It's actually helped me, bit by bit.

One of my 'tools' is an app called finch, a virtual pet that encourages you to set goals, check in how you are feeling, journal, do mindful breathing and such. I tried many things and this app is the one that stuck and actually works.

Just wanted to ask, do any others here use wellness apps? And have they worked for you? Which do you recommend?

Just to be clear, I mean apps that work as a stand alone solution, rather than apps like 'better help' which ultimately just connect you to a therapist. Although Better Help has its uses too!

I joined Tildes a couple of days ago, and I'm absolutely loving the interface and community.

In the last few days of using Tildes, I noticed a particular problem that was mildly annoying; if you have the "Collapse old comments when I return to a topic" setting on, and you click on a link that is supposed to lead to a comment in a topic you have already visited, it won't jump to that comment.

Searching around, I found a post about it from a day ago, in which long-time users have mentioned that it's been a known problem for a while now. In those comments, someone mentioned permalinks as a solution, but it appears that's still in the works.

For now, I've made a quick userscript that will address this issue (and adds some slight related functionality). It hasn't been thoroughly tested yet, so if any issues occur, please let me know. This userscript is designed to be used with Tampermonkey (a privacy-friendly alternate that should work is ViolentMonkey), which is available in all popular desktop browsers. Installation instructions for Tampermonkey are available on their site (it's installed like any other extension).

To install the script, you can head to this GitHub Gist which contains the code (click "Raw" to open the TamperMonkey install prompt), or you can copy and paste the code from the following dropdown block into a "New script" on the TamperMonkey dashboard. The dropdown is not guaranteed to contain the latest version.

// ==UserScript==
// @name         Tildes Comment Link Fix
// @namespace    https://gist.github.com/blankdvth/6da89fff580e8cf6e50f88847ddb5729
// @version      1.2.0
// @description  Fixes comment links (anchors) not working as a result of Tildes' comment collapsing feature.
// @author       blank_dvth
// @match        https://tildes.net/*
// @icon         https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?sz=64&domain=tildes.net
// @grant        none
// ==/UserScript==

/* 
    USER SETTINGS
    This script is not big enough to warrant a visual settings menu, so adjust settings here.
    true = enable, false = disable
*/
const alwaysRun_S = false; // If enabled, will always run the script, even if the comment was not collapsed (site works fine in this case). This is useful if you want to make use of the other settings.
const smoothScroll_S = false; // If enabled, will smoothly (animated) scroll to the comment. If disabled, will jump to the comment.
const uncollapseIndividual_S = true; // If enabled will uncollapse parent comments into one line instead of fully uncollapsing them.
const uncollapseChildren_S = true; // If enabled, will uncollapse all children of the comment. If disabled, will leave them collapsed.
const collapseIrrelevant_S = true; // The script uncollapses all parents to ensure the comment is visible. This will collapse irrelevant (not direct parent) comments again.
// END OF USER SETTINGS

/**
 * Uncollapses the comment if it is collapsed.
 * @param {HTMLElement} element Article element of the actual comment
 * @param {boolean} individual If true, will "uncollapse" into one line instead of fully uncollapsing
 * @returns {boolean} True if the comment was collapsed, false if it was not
 */
function uncollapse(element, individual = false) {
    if (element.nodeName !== "ARTICLE") return false;
    var removed = false;
    if (
        !individual &&
        element.classList.contains("is-comment-collapsed-individual")
    ) {
        element.classList.remove("is-comment-collapsed-individual");
        removed = true;
    }
    if (element.classList.contains("is-comment-collapsed")) {
        if (individual)
            element.classList.add("is-comment-collapsed-individual");
        element.classList.remove("is-comment-collapsed");
        removed = true;
    }
    return removed;
}

/**
 * Uncollapses all direct parents of the comment.
 * @param {HTMLElement} element Article element of the actual comment
 * @param {boolean} collapseIrrelevant If true, will collapse irrelevant comments again
 * @param {boolean} individual If true, will "uncollapse" into one line instead of fully uncollapsing
 * @returns {boolean} True if any parent was collapsed, false if none were
 */
function uncollapseParents(element, collapseIrrelevant, individual) {
    const relevant = []; // List of relevant elements (direct parents)
    var wasCollapsed = false; // Whether any parent was collapsed
    while (
        element.parentElement &&
        element.parentElement.nodeName !== "SECTION"
    ) {
        element = element.parentElement;
        relevant.push(element); // Add parent to relevant list
        if (uncollapse(element, individual)) wasCollapsed = true;
        // Collapse all irrelevant sibling comments (if feature enabled)
        if (collapseIrrelevant && element.nodeName === "ARTICLE") {
            element
                .querySelectorAll(
                    `article#${element.id} > ol.comment-tree > li.comment-tree-item > article:not(.is-comment-collapsed)`
                )
                .forEach((child) => {
                    if (!relevant.includes(child))
                        child.classList.add("is-comment-collapsed");
                });
        }
    }
    return wasCollapsed;
}

/**
 * Uncollapses all direct children of the comment.
 * @param {HTMLElement} element Article element of the actual comment
 */
function uncollapseChildren(element) {
    element
        .querySelectorAll("article.is-comment-collapsed article.is-comment-collapsed-individual")
        .forEach(uncollapse);
}

(function () {
    if (!location.hash.startsWith("#comment-")) return; // Not a comment hash
    const comment = document.getElementById(location.hash.substring(1)); // Get comment element
    if (!comment) return; // Comment does not exist
    // Uncollapse the comment itself, and it's parents, then perform other actions if needed/enabled
    if (
        uncollapse(comment) |
            uncollapseParents(
                comment,
                collapseIrrelevant_S,
                uncollapseIndividual_S
            ) ||
        alwaysRun_S
    ) {
        // Uncollapse all children (if feature enabled)
        if (uncollapseChildren_S) uncollapseChildren(comment);
        // Scroll to the comment
        if (smoothScroll_S) comment.scrollIntoView({ behavior: "smooth" });
        else comment.scrollIntoView();
    }
})();

I have an Aerogarden Harvest. It's a pretty neat little device I picked up a few years ago on sale, and I use it as a starter for my outdoor garden. My outdoor garden inevitably fails due to forgetfulness, rabbits, or bugs. This year, after my lettuce was ravaged for the third time, I decided I'd like to scale up my indoor growing solution. My wife is on board, albeit hesitantly as she knows I'm a utilitarian and give little concern to form once function is established. We have a relatively small space, and no out-of-sight-storage-rooms to utilize for the project.

In short: I'm looking for advice on small scale, low startup cost hydro/aqua/aeroponic DIY projects for leafy greens/herbs that can be made to be "cute" or at least finished-looking, rather than a heap of PVC and 5 gallon buckets.

My best guess currently is one of the single-tower vertical PVC pipe systems with a nice hardwood box built around the 5 gallon bucket sump (lipstick on a pig) or a stacked/tiered NFT system with a nice wooden frame and channels made from some "nicer-looking" gutter.

Has anyone here actually accomplished an indoor grow that they were allowed to keep in their kitchen?

Edit: There's been a lot of great input here. I'm still researching, and if anyone else is going down this road, this channel has been very informative: https://www.youtube.com/@KeepOnGrowin

Having finished out the Amazon Prime series "The Expanse" I'm now working my way through the novels and I keep coming up against a problem with with railguns. Specifically, the way that railguns are used in The Expanse doesn't mesh well with the way they're portrayed.

First, some background. Ships in The Expanse are generally unarmored. There are a bunch of reasons for this but the short version is "most things that can hit you in space will kill you anyway" and armor adds mass which makes every manuver more expensive in terms of reaction mass. So no one has armor. This is important because it means that ships in the Expanse can get ripped up by something as mundane as a stray bullet from a Point Defense Cannon (PDC). PDCs are... well, they're guns. Regular guns which are flinging around much less mass and at much lower velocities than railguns.

Thus, ships in the Expanse are equipped to handle impacts but nothing much bigger than a sand-grain moving at a few km/s.

When we're introduced to rail-guns in the series we're given to understand that they use magnetic acceleration to chuck a 5kg chunk of tungsten and/or uranium at a target at an "appreciable percentage of C." That's much faster than a bullet or any micrometeors ships are likely to encounter. Even 1% of C is ~3,000 km/s.

5 kg of Tungsten is less than you think. Some back of the envelope math suggests that's about cube about 2.6 inches on a side... which is not big. That works out to an incredible energy density which would make a lot of sense if railguns were routinely being fired at planets or asteroids but, since they seem to mainly target ships, the vast, vast majority of the energy that goes into flinging that slug at its target is going to carry through to the other side of the ship.

All total we're talking about 488.5 million Newtons of force for 1% of the speed of light. Helpfully, this scales roughly lineraly so long as we don't get too close to C and induce relativistic mass issues, so 10% of C is 4.8 billion Newtons and so on. So, that railgun slug is carrying a lot of energy. At 1% of C it represents 22.5 trillion joules of kinetic energy. Written out long-ways so we can appreciate all those zeros it's 22,500,000,000,000 J. At 10%, we're talking 2.25 quadrillion joules. To give some sense of scale, that means that, at 1% of C, three rail-gun slugs are delivering about as much energy as the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945. At 10% of C one round carries about 537 kilotons, or about the yield of a modern, city-busting hydrogen bomb.

Those are absolutely titanic amounts of energy but, realistically, they'll never deliver that much power to a target. After all, a railgun round can only push on its target as hard as the target can push back on it. If the round just punches through the entire ship like it's made of paper, most of the energy stays in the railgun slug as it exits the other side of the ship and you get a neat hole rather than a gigantic flash as trillions of joules of kinetic energy turn into heat.

And obviously, if we're trying to kill things, we want the latter. The solution to this problem is fairly obvious: you need fragmentation. While it's great to have a tungsten cube all tightly packed together as you accelerate it, if you're shooting at a ship, you want a fairly diffuse impact, especially if we're talking about a 10% of C railgun slug. There aren't a lot of things out there in the solar system which can take 500 kilotons of hate and come out the other side in one piece. Moreover, at the distances at which a rail-gun fight happens, that spread would help ensure that you hit your target. Like a shotgun loaded with birdshot, a fragmenting railgun round would provide a cone of impact rather than a line, making dodges less effective.

And, as I mentioned earlier, you don't need a ton of mass to make this work. If a PDC round can go straight through a military craft then we can safely assume that a chunk of tungsten with the same kinetic energy will do the same thing. PDCs look rather a lot like the close in weapons systems in use on many naval ships today so we'll use those as a guide. The 20mm cannon on a Phallanx CWIS tosses out rounds at about 1,035 m/s. Those rounds weigh about 100 g (0.1 kg) which gives them a kinetic energy at the muzzle of 53,422 J.

So, if we could predictably shatter our 1% C railgun round into 421,136 pieces, each would have about the same kinetic energy as a PDC round and be able to hole the ship. At 10% C we could go even smaller and do the same thing with upwards of 40 million shards. 1% is plenty though. Each hull-penetrating piece of our original 5 kg bullet needs only weigh about 1/100th of a gram, which works out to being about 1/100th of the size of a grain of sand.

Put another way, if the fragmentation of a rail round could be precisely controlled, a target ship would experience hundreds of thousands of individual hull breaches with the mean distance between them determined only by the geometry of the ship and the angle of the attack. The result of this would be either the delivery of a titanic amount of energy to the ship itself as the armor attempts to absorb the impact or, if no armor is present (as seems to be the case in the Expanse) the rapid conversion of the interior of the ship to a thin soup.

This, however, seems never to happen in the series and what leaves me scratching my head. As a book and TV series, The Expanse does an otherwise bang-up job with hard science fiction. Most things in universe make sense. This, however, does not. We have take as a given that the materials science technology exists to allow the mounting and firing of a railgun on a ship -- there are a lot of challenges there -- but the straight-line-of-fire use of them is a rare problem with the world-building.

Any fans have any suggestions to help me square this circle?

I've been playing ARPGs since Diablo 1 and have over a thousand hours in PoE, was wondering what everyone thought of D4?

I think the slower gameplay is a fun change of pace and that the legendary affix system is an elegant solution to always making drops interesting.

Surprisingly, as much as I didn't really care for D3, it's game feel was excellent. D4 has taken an odd step back in that regard. In D3 when you bashed an enemy to death with a barbarian they flew across the stage, or melted into a pile of goo if from poison. D4 everything feels kinda bland visually during combat.

Excited to see what end game is like, still only level 35 so we'll see how this so scales later on.

Thoughts?

I'm personally a little busy for 3d printing at the moment - but I love to see and be inspired by what others are doing. I know this is text based, but I'm also interested in what issues you are running into. I find it useful to see examples of what common problems and solutions others are running into.

I've got an "old" Prusa MK3S that is still going strong for me. When I get the time again I've got a few projects lined up: a brain, a mask, and a fluid desk sculpture that I'm excited to get printing.

What have you been printing lately?

I currently have a Lenovo N42 Chromebook far past it's EoL, for which Google is no longer supporting it. I have put Chrome OS Flex on it by reflashing the bios, and it's pretty solid, but I have no internal audio. Bluetooth audio and HDMI works fine, but no headphones, and no speakers.

I found this solution for trying to hack in an Alsa configuration from an Ubuntu Live Disk (https://www.reddit.com/r/chromeos/comments/swzxsy/comment/irk5kqk/) and I was able to follow the instructions and enable development mode, but when I try to run the alsaconfig script, I get this.

crosh> shell
chronos@localhost / $ sudo alsarestore
No state is present for card chtrt5650
/usr/sbin/alsactl: sysfs_init:48: sysfs path '/sys' is invalid

Found hardware: "chtrt5650" "" "" "" ""
Hardware is initialized using a generic method
No state is present for card chtrt5650

It may have something to do with those instructions being for a different build computer, but I am outside my sphere of knowledge, and anything else I could troubleshoot would be appreciated. Internal audio isn't mission critical for me, but it would be appreciated.

Hello Folks,

I haven't posted on Tildes for a while and today I have a very strong feeling to post something.

But what exactly should I post about? In some sense, a writer's block is the exact anti-thesis of a child. Coming up with some creative content is sometimes painfully difficult for a functioning adult like me, while my 10 year old nephew can blabber hundreds of different things in a five minute span!

Now obviously, I can also come up with hundreds of different things but we all know it's not so easy to put down those things on the keyboard. I'm not an expert in writing craft but I have a strong feeling that most of us just hold ourselves back out of fear of what the world says. And honestly, the so called "world" here is acting very toxic and isn't helping by discouraging content creators who aren't always top notch. And sometimes, the content itself can be good or bad just as beauty is defined by the eye of the beholder. What is cringe for you may be good content or even humor for someone else. If only most of us start focusing on the "full half" of the cup instead of the "empty half", think just how beautiful this world will be!

Years of facing such toxic behavior on platforms like reddit and twitter has caused me to over-analyze and over-scrutinize everything before saying it. Any idea or concept has to pass through a lot of "mind filters" in order for them to get the "clean chit" for "yeah, this can be published". Perhaps, this particular post I'm writing is an exception or anomaly in that sense!

As a programmer, freelancer, writer, someone interested in things like humanities and social sciences, and an ordinary Indian dude, you guys tell me what kind of content should I write so that the writer in me thrives and also the content is at least bearable by the audience?

The problem I'm trying to solve here is difficult but I may not be the only one going through this phase. Is there a solution to this? Any proven and practical solution which you've had success with yourself?

A part of me thinks that I should try podcasting or youtubing first, and then I'll gain the confidence necessary to actually write mind-blowing content. But I have a problem with impromptu speaking and talking, is that a very common problem? Is there an easy fix available for that? I intuitively know from what I've observed in this world that most people have enough confidence to say or speak a lot of things (even the harshest of things!) right in front of others' face but when it comes to writing, they can't write so much. I'm a kind of antithesis of that, isn't it?

How exactly does one build confidence with public speaking? They say keep practicing and you'll get there. Here is a feeble attempt, not exactly a podcast but something near enough - a presentation for an app idea I've got. I want to create more of these but again, what content? I've got no ideas, especially interesting or appealing ones. And judging by the number of likes that youtube video got, I already have half a mind of just giving up on this!

If you've reached until this point, thank you for sticking with me till the end. And apologies if I picked up on your brain beyond its limits!

For the past week, I have been researching headphones/earbuds, buying them, and then cancelling the order immediately because I realized I was making a compromise on what I am wanting. Not a crazy amount of cancelled purchases, just maybe...three.

Anyways, I am in the market for the holy grail of headphones or earbuds that fits my needs but I am thinking I might have to buy multiple for the different scenarios that I am looking for. Which are:

• Preferably earbuds so I can take one out if I need to have an ear free for something.
• Great mic quality - I want to be able to use these for work call and when I go outside to walk. Really need something that handles wind and background noise pretty well that doesn't leave the other person on the phone annoyed talking to me. I don't want to walk around with a boom mic in front of face though.
• No preference on wired or wireless. If wired, I would like direct USB-C so I don't have to think about dongles or anything. I also read that mic quality degrades with Bluetooth? Not sure how accurate that is but the consensus I have read was that wired earbuds have better mics than Bluetooth. Wireless would be amazing if I knew that everything else worked well. I would take a short battery life to have top notch everything else.
• Decent sound quality for music. I already have a pair of aftershokz that I use for working out so I'm not stranger to compromised sound quality. But when I go out on walks I want to listen to language podcasts so I can hear clearly.
• Active noise cancelling - longshot but this would just be nice to have since I have gotten a taste for these with my Sony headphones.

I would be interested to hear your product recommendations or solutions to my wants. I have a feeling that the perfect product doesn't exist but at the bare minimum I would take something that sounds decent and has a good mic that handles outdoor sounds well. ANC and wireless are optional but would be very amazing to have.

I would be using these with a Samsung S22.

I finally decided to accepted that my interest in working and playing with computers and servers is worth to spend some money on. So I ditched my old box in the corner and with it all my fights with my ISP, their NAT, dynamic DNS and all that and got myself a VPS and 1 TB storage solution for less than I would have paid a static IP with my ISP.
Best decicion ever :-)

So I'm getting into Docker a bit, just because it's just so easy to get Nextcloud running. I used native Caddy as a reverse proxy, because if I got this "machine" there I will use it for other things as well, so make it right from the beginning. And I used native b.c I did not yet understand bridge/host mode and installing caddy native seems easier.
Then I fought for one day with CIFS and the nextcloud gui to get the semantics right to get my storage solution accepted as external storage.
Then I set up Jellyfin with Docker because why not. As well through caddy.
Then I fucked something up and was like, fuck it, lets start again this time for real :-P
I wiped my VPS clean (chose ubuntu again) set up and hardend ssh + sudo installed Docker, and then I found out about docker rootless and in the docker docs it's mentioned that it is/might be more secure, so I set up docker rootless and installed all the rest again.
And then I was like, hmm, do these Docker Images/Containers update themself? Like snap did?
It seems not, so I looked for a solution and found watchtower. And now I wasted another day trying to get watchtower to run, and I just can not.

I tried so many variations of the run command now most recently I tried:

docker run \
--name watchtower \
-v ${DOCKER_SOCKET_PATH}:/var/run/docker.sock \
containrrr/watchtower

time="2023-01-20T01:17:41Z" level=error msg="Cannot connect to the Docker daemon at unix:///var/run/docker.sock. Is the docker daemon running?"
time="2023-01-20T01:17:41Z" level=info msg="Waiting for the notification goroutine to finish" notify=no

/run/user/1000/docker.sock exists, I own it, i tried connecting to it through docker -e and containrrr/watchtower --host "unix:///run/user/1000/docker.sock"
I dont now what to try more and I'm at my end with my ddg-fu as well.

And now while proofreading this, I read everything again and decided to try something again and it just worked...

docker run \
--name watchtower \
-v /run/user/1000/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
containrrr/watchtower

seems like the environment variable was not set. But I'm shure I tried that before and it did not work... ghost in a machine :-)

So thats where I'm at. I have to say it was a lot of fun and doing and learning all that tingled my brain in a funny way :-)

But now I have some questions for my much more experienced Tildes-friends:

• Do I even need watchtower? because I'm not actually interested to connect to my server regularly to do the updates/maintenance.
• Was switching to docker rootless even a good idea? it seemed so reading the docker installation docs, but just now I read the Archwiki and there it seems it has some heavy security implications, so I made the security situation acutally worse by thinking making it better.
• How do I get this watchtower thing to fucking work? (only if I actually need it)

I very much appreciate all further/other advise, tricks, recomendations, questions and discussion as well :-)

Hi everyone!

I've been using Vox for about a year now to listen to music and while there are some good qualities to it, I'm honestly fed up with the lack of volume normalisation and having to constantly adjust my volume manually (There's heaps years old of threads on their forums requesting or complaining about this). So here I am looking for a replacement and was wondering if anyone has a setup that I could copy. Here are the requirements that I have:

• I can stream my own music library of high quality music (FLAC format).
• It provides volume normalisation.
• I can set my whole library to shuffle.
• Native macOS client.

I've been doing some looking around and so far the most likely solution will be for me to set up a Gonic server at home and use Strawberry Music Player on my laptop. A close second contender was Youtube music but they don't provide a native client and I currently use a combination of keyboard shortcuts and applescripts to manage playback (I found media keys insufficient but that's a topic for another post).

I am currently paying a subscription fee for Vox so I don't mind if I have to pay for the new player, I'd prefer a service like that for ease of use rather than rolling out my own.

Update
For posterity I'm posting what I ended up doing. I tried Roon and while it looked and felt amazing, the ability for streaming out of home is very limited, it's intended to stream within a local network. It appears you can only do remote streaming to a mobile device and requires a custom port to be forwarded, I wanted to put this behind a reverse proxy but was not able to do that (Seems it's not supported).
I did not try Plexamp, after all the work I did to get Gonic set up properly it felt like I was doing too much work myself to pay for a solution. Ideally I wanted something that would "just work" even if it wasn't free but no solution did that. If I had access to a free trial I would have probably tested it as well.
I already had Gonic working within my home network going into this but setup of it is still trivial. The bulk of the work came in setting a dynamic DNS set up, and a reverse proxy (NPM) inside my network to provide HTTPS support with Letsencrypt certificates for Gonic (It's only HTTP). I spend too much time trying to have a secure setup (Crowdsec + Cloudflare) but after ditching that, I'm still happy with it and looking at logs it does not appear there's any significant risk to my network (I'm also using a geoip block to outright block requests from some countries).
As far as clients go, I settled with Strawberry. Tried the following:

• Sonixd: It had limited hotkey functionality and doesn't seem to be actively developed anymore.
• Submariner: Did not work.
• Clementine: Current version crashes on launch, rc version complaints about wrong credentials when connecting to the server.

(apologies if this isn't the correct place to ask, I'm just a bit out of ideas)
(content warning for abusive parents)

I have a friend who's abusive parents track her location using the stalkerware app life360.

she currently runs graphene os (android 13) on a pixel 7 pro.

in my past android experience there are plenty apps that can spoof your location via developer settings. however they all crash on android 13 (or at least on graphene..)

see below (none of these work, and they also crash on my android 13 phone, but they have worked for me in the past on like android 9):
https://github.com/mcastillof/FakeTraveler
https://github.com/wesaphzt/privatelocation
https://github.com/warren-bank/Android-Mock-Location
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lexa.fakegps&gl=US

if there are no functioning apps that will do this. do you know any other solutions? on other android roms or with root with magisk / xposed? obviously this is less secure than graphene os but the current problem is her parents more than anything else.

we r also considering a secondary phone just for the stalkerware which can be opportunistically left in innocent places. or just killing the life360 app on occasion when needed. or just letting the phone die when it needs to. But not sure how obvious this might be to the abusers. any insight is appreciated.

(suggestions like "leave her parents" are good but far easier said than done and while it will eventually happen its not feasible at the moment. That being said if you can provide detail suggestions are welcome)

Thanks :)

Today's problem description: https://adventofcode.com/2022/day/25

Please post your solutions in your own top-level comment. Here's a template you can copy-paste into your comment to format it nicely, with the code collapsed by default inside an expandable section with syntax highlighting (you can replace python with any of the "short names" listed in this page of supported languages):

<details>
<summary>Part 1</summary>

```python
Your code here.
```

</details>

Today's problem description: https://adventofcode.com/2022/day/24

Please post your solutions in your own top-level comment. Here's a template you can copy-paste into your comment to format it nicely, with the code collapsed by default inside an expandable section with syntax highlighting (you can replace python with any of the "short names" listed in this page of supported languages):

<details>
<summary>Part 1</summary>

```python
Your code here.
```

</details>

Today's problem description: https://adventofcode.com/2022/day/23

Please post your solutions in your own top-level comment. Here's a template you can copy-paste into your comment to format it nicely, with the code collapsed by default inside an expandable section with syntax highlighting (you can replace python with any of the "short names" listed in this page of supported languages):

<details>
<summary>Part 1</summary>

```python
Your code here.
```

</details>

Today's problem description: https://adventofcode.com/2022/day/22

Please post your solutions in your own top-level comment. Here's a template you can copy-paste into your comment to format it nicely, with the code collapsed by default inside an expandable section with syntax highlighting (you can replace python with any of the "short names" listed in this page of supported languages):

<details>
<summary>Part 1</summary>

```python
Your code here.
```

</details>