Turns out I'm still stuck without a good mailreader for Windows. Good Windows mailreaders have always been hard to find. For a while I used Windows Mail, which wasn't great, but at least not terrible either. Unfortunately, MS pulled the plug and tried forcing me to Outlook, which I refuse. Besides, I want less MS in my life.
KMail is great but unfortunately doesn't exist for Windows as far as I can tell. I've tried using Mailspring but it seems incapable of getting my messages.
I've had Thunderbird installed since forever but never liked its confusing and inconsistent interface, but lacking any alternatives, I've tried using it. Turns out it's simply missing messages. Some GMail messages simply aren't there. I can see them on mobile or on the web interface, but Thunderbird simply doesn't have them and can't seem to get them, without realizing it's failing at this. (Mailspring at least gave error messages. Constantly.)
So does a halfway-decent IMAP-supporting mailreader for Windows exist?
It relies on Emacs' ability to render HTML, for yucky HTML email, which isn't terrible, but it may not be as pretty as as a browser-based mailer, or one with a true browser plugin.
Some people also use GNUS for email, but I don't like it for that purpose.
I've played with Claws and it seemed impressive and it is still actively developed. There's also still active work on Sylpheed too, and Vivaldi has its own MUA now as well.
Also, just ditch Windows completely! That's a lot less MS in your life!
I'd avoid Linux too and go for a BSD, maybe FreeBSD for a desktop or laptop, but that's just me. On the other hand my desktop is macOS, with a fullscreen X11 workspace dedicated to my "real" computers mostly running NetBSD. I even run NetBSD VMs in macOS.
All things considered macOS is about a billion orders of magnitude better than Windows for the desktop and laptop. Apple Mail is not the world's worst MUA by far (though Mail on iOS is horrid).
I'm not going to replace the OS on this laptop any time soon. Probably not until Win 10 becomes completely unusable. It's mostly used by my kids these days; it's just that it's all I've got with me on vacation right now.
I'm not a big fan of the direction Apple has been taking either, though. The primary reason to use Mac OS is simply because Apple Silicon is far better than old Intel-style cpus. They should make those available for everything.
The problems I had with Apple's changes are long over -- they've still not improved everything even back to the feature levels they were at during their best days, and like everyone they're adding so-called "A.I." to things, but in general they continue to maintain and even improve on core strengths like usability, reliability and manageability, and perhaps most important of all, security.
I think most of their "decline" was due to rewrites of applications as they moved away from Objective-C, mostly towards Swift if I understand correctly, but they communicated their intent poorly and they pushed new versions of apps out before they were anywhere near feature-equivalent.
In their core OS they still seem to favour complexity over simplicity and elegance, and they have a very strong lean towards "not invented here" mentality and away from some standards. But they keep it working smoothly. I haven't had a bad update in a couple of decades now.
Yeah, but it's trivial to work around Gatekeeper if absolutely necessary and 99.9% of users will never need to install anything third party that will need the workaround anyway. It doesn't affect open-source developers in the slightest as stuff you compile locally works by default -- I've only ever turned it off temporarily once, and that might have been a decade ago.
Also, it is really not actually a "walled garden" it's a critical security feature that ordinary users REALLY need. You simply can't have this level of security without some key controls that are not on by default and strongly recommended. It doesn't even go far enough in many respects. It does make the job of scammers far harder, and it offers significant protections against 0-day exploits, but it isn't total protection. Calling it a "walled garden" is effectively propaganda, but I'm not sure who it benefits. Apple haters, certainly, but what do they gain, other than spreading hate? Microsoft? The same claim applies equally, but in different ways, to Microsoft's stuff where there are not the same security benefits because it's far too trivial to work around.
Any Apple users not sophisticated and knowledgeable enough to protect themselves from scams should probably even enable full "Lockdown Mode". That's a more complete form of protection, and any scammer asking a target to turn it off is effectively showing their hand.
Wow, getting around Apple's walled garden sounds like a pain to someone who is used to using operating systems where installing and maintaining third party software is purposefully made easy.
I remember back when people claimed installing software on OSX was dead easy. Just drag and drop! Well, by the time I needed to actually do it, it was not so easy. All I needed, at the time, was a web browser supported by Cox Communication's web viewer, and Disney+ at the time. I chose Chrome, and the initial install seemed easy enough ... just drag and drop.
But the resulting web browser wouldn't remember settings or saved passwords ... like it was running fresh every time.
Okay, maybe Google was doing something shady to make their web browser work badly with MacOS but I dunno. Anyway, I didn't feel like climbing the learning curve on MacOS.
Ultimately, I just ended up waiting and eventually Disney+ started working again on Linux (it was never technically incapable, their web player simply stopped working with Linux all of a sudden at some point when some genius decided they really needed to screw over Linux users for some reason).
The bottom line is that MacOS goes out of its way to make it more difficult to install and maintain software outside of its walled garden, and on iOS even more so.
I'll never use MacOS ever again. It's just too much of a pain, and I don't see any benefits of it over what I am already familiar with working with. No benefits whatsoever. None at all.
Some day, I might use BSD for something, maybe, but at least there I'd have a lot lower learning curve and, depending on what I choose, installing and maintaining software will be easy and I won't have to work around the OS to do it.
All those big tech companies do shady stuff. Appleis probably the least bad of them. They do seem to care about our privacy in a way that Google, Microsoft, Facebook etc don't.
And I will use Apple in the future, because it's pretty standard in corporate environments, and when given the choice between Windows and Mac, it's definitely Mac.
But I'll never be a fan. They frequently make bad decisions in the face of protests, and it takes a couple of years before they back down again. But at least they back down eventually.
Maybe they've backed down on the installation warnings again, but I do remember the protests against them from a couple of years ago. They have often made moves to close down their platform more compared to the open early days of OSX that won them so much developer enthusiasm.
The benefit of Apple is you don't have to think about updates, security, or for the most part administration. You get a very full-featured desktop/laptop/mobile with ease-of-use that is unparalleled.
Also, Apple's integration between devices is unparalleled, secure and private, and free unless you really do want to use bulk amounts of their cloud storage.
Most of the protests against Apple actually come from "haters" -- a small fringe of very vocal people who can't seem to find any middle ground and who'll go to extreme lengths to push their private agendas.
You're getting a lot harder to take seriously now. A lot of criticism against Apple is very legitimate. Especially against iOS and Apple's App Store policies.
If you're saying that criticism against OSX is exaggerated, that's a point of view I can absolutely see. But their app store and its 30% tax on everything that touches it, absolutely deserves criticism.
I already get updates, security, and administration with, say, Debian. As for "ease-of-use" ... uh no. MacOS is not easy, especially not compared to Linux.
It may seem easy to use for someone who has already climbed the learning curve of using it, but it's honestly bewildering except for using pre-installed software to do simple things.
Naturally, Debian also has a learning curve. But overall I think it's no contest. I wish I could say the same thing about Ubuntu, because it's so popular for newbies, but ... Ubuntu has gone off in weird tangents for no good reason. Oh well. The worst thing about Ubuntu was the decision to encourage multiple disparate software package management systems.
I like how Debian encourages users to stick with the "Debian way", and if it's not available in the Debian apt repositories ... okay, you can install and maintain yourself but you know what you're getting into.
Oh well, at least with my own Ubuntu machines I can stick to the "Debian way" rather than going off into those unfortunate tangents.
The question about ease of use can't really be answered by you or I, but rather by our parents and grandparents. Mine were infinitely better off with macOS, and wouldn't have stood a chance with any Linux, and were already sunk beyond saving with un-updated Windows. My Mom could install software herself on macOS, and didn't have to install the updates because that's automatic. Even installing a printer is possible for a grandparent using macOS, though that's about the limit.
The Dutch government shared a gorgeous animation of the development of the Dutch coast around the IJsselmeer (previously Zuiderzee, previously Aelmere) area over the past 6000 years. Far more detailed than anything else I'd seen.
It's crazy how much changed. Land turns to water, water turns to land, and back again.
My neighbor, a Trump supporter and Travel Agent, just said to my wife, "In our office, we can't seem to figure out why tourism to the US has really dropped?" My wife was like, "Yeah, that's a tough one." 🤷♀️
This is the shit that we're dealing with here in the US. Trump supporters are fucking clueless.
"Two men, an American and a Russian were arguing. One said, in my country I can go to the white house walk to the president's office and pound the desk and say "Mr president! I don't like how you're running things in this country!" The Russian said "I can do that too!"
"Really?"
"Yes! I can go to the Kremlin, walk into the general secretary's office and pound the desk and say, Mr. secretary, I don't like how Reagan is running his country!"
Citizen stops by the same Moscow newsstand every day, glancing at the newspapers, never buying. Eventually the news agent says, what are you looking for?”
Ooh, I heard another one the other day: Man goes to newsstand every day, asks to see the front page, then says “nevermind” and gives the paper back without buying it. Newsman finally asks him what he’s looking for? Man: An obituary Newsman: Those are in the back of the paper Man: Not the one I’m looking for
A Dutch macro-economist explains the sense and nonsense behind Trump's big tariff plan. Apparently there is actually a decent plan behind it, although there might be a few gaping holes in that plan.
Summary: the US has imposed several economic world orders on the world over the last century. In 1944 the Bretton Woods system, and then the neo-loberal order by Reagan and Thatcher. It won't surprise anyone that Reagan's system is killing the US, so changing the system makes sense. Trump intends to do that. Whether his approach will reach the results he wants, is the big question. It could really blow up in America's face.
Funny details I wouldn't have expected from a hard Republican MAGA government:
Trump's Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, has close ties of George Soros, was instrumental in Soros' attack on the British pound in 1992, he continued to work for Soros until 200, and in 2015 Soros invested in Bessent's headge fund. I wonder if all the irrationally Soros-hating MAGA people are aware of this.
Another thing: he's the second openly gay cabinet member (after Pete Butigieg), and the highest ranking openly gay member of the US government ever.
None of that is going to make me a fan of this guy, but it's definitely interesting, and I doubt the culture warriors are aware of it.
Uh, no. There is no plan. He put tariffs on two islands populated only by penguins and a US military base.
Unless Trump is a secret genius who knows something about penguins we don't, there is no plan. Only stupidity (apparently from asking LLM AI what tariff rates to impose, and conducting no checks whatsoever other than erasing the line with Russia in it).
I think there really is a plan. It's just that Trump doesn't understand it, and he's randomly slapping tariffs around. And I think that will ruin the plan. But those two guys behind him are pretty smart, and their plan might not be terrible. Except for the fact that they've got Trump to execute it. That's going to be the weakest point of any plan.
There's no way. If there actually was someone with a brain - not LLM AI - that had a plan, they could simply have given Trump the tariff numbers needed for the plan. They did not.
Or the influence of the smart people just isn't that big. I mean, these two guys are probably by far the smartest people in Trump's cabinet. That's not a high bar of course, and we certainly shouldn't assume they're geniuses, but they have both academic and corporate creds. And the goal of ending the neo-liberal order is probably a good one.
The problem is: they've got Trump, and Trump thinks he's smarter than anyone. And I think the tariff chaos is a stupid idea, but if the tariff chaos is indeed part of the plan, it might not matter that much what the new tariffs are, as long as there are lots of tariffs, and other countries are willing to negotiate with the US to end the tariffs.
But I think that's the gaping hole in the plan: through all the tariffs, the US is squandering trust, abdicating their central position in the world economy, and the rest of the world doesn't really need the US that much. They can still trade tariff-free with each other while ignoring the US. The plan only works if everybody absolutely needs access to the US. The plan would probably work if they did, even with the random tariffs. And there was a time when everybody needed access to the US. But I think that time has gone. Europe is just as big a market, China is getting there, and lots of other countries are attractive markets too. Maybe the US was still a more attractive market before these tariffs, but I don't think that lead is big enough that it can bear this chaos.
Sure, but there may still be a plan. Trump isn't one for planning, but many people around him do have plans, and probably manipulate him to various degrees to execute those plans.
I'm also not arguing that it's a great plan. I do think the goal of ending the neo-liberal order is a good one; it has vastly increased inequality in western countries, and created a powerful oligarchy. Although the people behind this plan are of course exactly the people who benefitted from that.
Are you just arguing in order to argue? Of course these people have influence on Trump. That doesn't mean Trump does exactly what they want. But that also doesn't mean he doesn't do anything they want.
Of course we can never know what they're thinking, or what they're discussing behind closed doors. That doesn't mean we can't think about it, or draw conclusions from the things we do know.
No problem. You do make good points. It's certainly no 5D chess, despite the massive scope, and I don't think the plan is well thought through. It's just that they're not simply doing random stuff; they do have goals. Even Trump. And different people in the government may have different goals; I don't believe everybody wants to end the neoliberal order, for example, but these two guys do, and certainly seem to think they have a plan. Regardless of whether it's a good one or whether Trump isable or willing to execute it.
Although as I understand it, I think Trump does, and I think it doesn't matter that much to the plan what the tariffs are exactly, as long as they hurt other countries. But I also think the plan is stupid and they overestimate the US' control over the world economy, despite the privileged position they clearly still have.
@KimSJ There are a few obscure passages in the Old Testament that condemn cross-dressing and there’s one reference in the New Testament that condemns being “effeminate” (but this reading is super speculative because the Greek word many English translators render as “effeminate” is a word that means “weak moral character” and so maybe they missed something in translation or they allow their bias to show). So, nothing really.
@FrChazzz Thank you. Very interesting. Translating ‘weak moral character’ as ‘effeminate’ speaks volumes about biases! It is depressing how many ‘Christians’ accept one single version as ‘the’ bible, ignoring the realities of translation.
@KimSJ Yeah, it was something I once read from Bishop Gene Robinson (first openly gay person to be a bishop in the Anglican Communion), where he noted that the Greek word "malakos" can be defined as "morally weak." I tried to locate the article to no avail...
There's apparently a tradition of this word also being applied to fashionable, dandy types in ancient Greek society, which might be where the "effeminate" translation comes from.
Also worth pointing out: there's about 3-5 verses condemning homosexuality, which always get disproportionate attention from people trying to justify their homophobia.
Apart from the fact that that's still nothing compared to the number of times the Bible tells us to love people, to care for the poor, and even to welcome foreigners; there's also the issue that they might not even be talking about homosexuality the way we see it today. I believe one of those verses is actually about temple prostitution, one is about pederasty, and Ezekhiel tells us that Sodom wasn't about homosexuality, but about extreme inhospitality.
Also, 0 condemnations of abortion. 1 verse describing how and when to perform abortion, and one describing it as a property crime at worst (pay a fine to the parents).
- Terwijl we zelf met een extreemrechts kabinet zitten wat dikke vrienden wil blijven met deze fascistische staat;
- Terwijl we in Nederland en vele andere Europese landen doen alsof wij helemaal anders zijn;
- Terwijl we allemaal weten dat Wilders precies hetzelfde van plan is;
- Terwijl extreemrechts enorm is gegroeid dankzij de collaboratie door VVD en NSC, en het gedogen door alle andere partijen en media ("laten we ze behandelen als een normale partij") ;
- Terwijl de collaboratie en normalisering van fascisme in mainstream media alleen maar in een stroomversnelling is gekomen, zelfs al zien we allemaal aankomen dat Schreeuwwitje II net zo heftig zal willen zijn als Trump II;
Blijft één ding waar:
Alleen doordat mensen bij voorbaat gehoorzamen, krijgen dictators macht.
Gehoorzaam niet. Weiger collaboratie, ook in Nederland.
I've got an old Android tablet that I'm using just for reading. Well, was using. It doesn't seem to work anymore.
I've got a bunch of PDFs on it that I can read wherever I am. I haven't used it much lately, but a couple of years ago I put a ton of Shadowrun PDFs on it to prepare for a Shadowrun campaign, for example. I just bought a bunch of Delta Green PDFs that I'd like to read from it, but I cannot for the life of my get those PDFs onto the tablet.
I'd like to download them from Drivethrurpg.com, but Chrome refuses to load that site. It still loads other sites.
I do get a lot of certificate errors, though. How do I update my certificates? No idea, but let's try a system update. Doesn't work. It claims a network error. Could it be certificates? How do you update those if you can't do a system update?
Make more space by deleting a bunch of files and trying again. Storage isn't big, but I've got 500MB available now (the file is 25MB). Retry everything above.
Try downloading a new browser, like Opera or something. Play Store crashes when I try that.
Try installing F-droid, so I can install a more open browser from there. Fails to do anything. Nothing happens.
Back to just transferring the PDF. Bluetooth? Tablet and PC can't find each other, no matter how much I set them to discoverable and have them search each other.
USB? Neither tablet nor PC recognize the USB connection. It is charging, though.
Email? The email arrives. Can't download from GMail at all, and from my other mailbox (xs4all), I only get an empty file.
Is there anything I haven't tried? Why is it so stubbornly refusing to download this file? I'm at a complete loss. Maybe it's time for a new one. This one is over 10 years old now. But still, the tablet itself seems to work fine. I can read the existing PDFs. Only the home button doesn't work (and hasn't for at least 8 years). 3 years ago it could download stuff jut fine.
Both great ideas, except I can't seem to install anything anymore; play store keeps crashing, and trying to install f-droid from the website doesn't seem to do anything. Maybe I can send the apk over bluetooth?
Also, it doesn't seem to recognize the usb connection, so I doubt that will work.
@Martijn Vos ADB (Android Debugger) then. Physical cable is most reliable.
"How to Transfer Files to Android with ADB or Fastboot"
What You Need
Before you can transfer files to Android with ADB or Fastboot, you need to have some prerequisites:
A Windows, Mac, or Linux computer with ADB and Fastboot installed. You can download the latest version of the SDK Platform Tools package here.
An Android device with USB debugging enabled. To enable USB debugging, go to Settings > About phone > Tap on Build number seven times > Go back to Settings > System > Developer options > Enable USB debugging.
A USB cable to connect your Android device to your computer.
Often simply plugging in the cable to a booted device, or invoking the debugger (on device) at boot (try holding down various combinations of hard buttons, e.g., volume, power, and/or home button if present) should invoke file-transfer mode.
The device presents as USB storage with a filesystem, you can hunt down what you want to copy from the Android device, or transfer files to it. Generally you're going to want the system Download directory on the Android device in order to access files copied to it from system utilities or other apps.
Professor and authoritarianism scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat joins WIRED to answer the internet's burning questions about dictators and fascism. Why do people suppo...
It is terribly ironic that the USA has these extremely knowledgeable people about autoritarianism and fascism, like Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Jason Stanley, Robert Paxton, and Timothy Snyder. Experts known the world over. And yet it is the USA that is now sliding into fascism post-haste.
It is a pity that these experts probably didn't even get any serious attention from the "Democratic" party. That party sleepwalked right into the 2024 elections and apparently still believes there will be next elections that are free and meaningful.
I am loving that things are finally moving to make European countries less dependent on US software (especially cloud providers), but I am disappointed that there isn't more of a focus on open source software.
There are several government programs within EU counties to fund the development of open source software. We need WAY more of that, coordinated at the EU level.
The best way to avoid being beholden to big tech is to fund viable open source alternatives.
A collaborative note taking, wiki and documentation platform that scales. Built with Django and React. Opensource alternative to Notion or Outline. - suitenumerique/docs
Up-to-date, community-driven list of Awesome European Tech projects! all focusing on privacy, sustainability, and innovation. The goal is to support European startups and projects (Compliance to GD...
Le ministère de l’Éducation nationale et de la jeunesse vient d’attribuer le marché public qui vise à équiper ses services centraux et les établissements supérieurs en solutions Microsoft, des postes client aux datacenters.
Absolutely! There are interesting funding opportunities that, frankly, get underexposed.
Are you familiar with @nlnet ? Their core business is to support organisations and people who contribute to an open internet, by funding projects and making available a slew of services. I have collaborated with them in a couple of projects, which has been an excellent experience.
yes to all you said + Please not only fund but also use the result and make that success visible to the public. Make them/us aware. Otherwise the money is wasted. Fund a tool or project and use it. Make the people that they want to benefit from the possibilities.
Examples (maybe they are bad but the idea should become clear.) Fund Matrix and Element and use it for communication with a doctor, announcement of traffic jam or emergency notifications bla bla. Create good use cases.
I work for a Europe-based company that provides support and development for OSS. The marketing people say the news coming out of the US has been great for the company. So it is happening, just perhaps not as much or as fast as we'd like.
As someone who was jettisoned from the EU by the Welsh and English village-idiot collective, could the UK (or Great Britain - Northern Ireland has an easier route) be included in that please? 😀.
I am part of a group of experienced IT people that have experience in building cloud platforms (a la aws / azure etc).
We'd LOVE ❤️ to build a NON-profit, European created & operated public cloud and only charge for costs... (since we don't like the idea of yet another big tech firm squeezing money from people)
Problem is that we have no clue where to even get started with support from government or Europe.... which we'd need because I doubt we'd get VC funding. 😋
there are projects but they need to be promoted. for example promote them here. there is the reddit group named Buy from Eu that heavely promotes EU products and is growing with 3000 people daily
I think there's probably a case for some software not being open source. It does let your adversaries have a look at code running on all your important stuff. The more is automated and such in your infrastructure the more impact a zero-day could have.
Your government should own the code though, or be able to look at and audit it. That's a must. It's nuts to buy something from some company that might have a shutoff in it.
Wait until they learn where Windows, MacOS, iOS or Android are made.... I really want to see them funding a new OS and completely ignore the linux world. Sounds like them 🥲
What assurance do you have that those governments won't pick really inefficient, cumbersome-to-maintain, bogged-down-with-complexity OpenSource projects, which get mired in problems down the road - BUT have the virtue of having more bells and whistles (conveniences, simplifications) that the end users will like?
Do those governments have incentive to pick the mature, lean-and-mean #OpenSource choices, which have less bells and whistles, -OR- the bloated, cumbersome, Johhny-come-lately Open Source choices, *with more end-user convenience*, and are likely to run way over budget in the longer term? I predict they'll choose the second kind of choice, in a short-sighted, desperate attempt to bring the most convenience to the end users. And it'll bog down in a few years - being really hard to maintain and support; the project being a failure. They'll return back to closed source in a few years - *and thereby get all the end-user convenience they were wanting all along*, realizing they have to pay for it.
I think the problem for them has been the same as for everyone: there has not been a really strong motive to move away from the very mature and quite convenient US-based services.
It takes more than a license change, it also requires a different way of thinking about software. Far too much F/OSS copies monolithic ideas that come from proprietary software that is designed to keep people on a single company’s products. LibreOffice/ OpenOffice have the excuse that they started as proprietary programs and were open sourced but they have the same sorts of problems: the codebase is enormous and baroque so the number of people who can fix bugs is small. To really benefit from F/OSS, you have to focus on building small systems that can compose, not on enormous monoliths. That way, each piece can be understood and supported by a single person and getting a second source is easy.
Unfortunately, that opens up new problems. There was some news article recently about third party companies (lacking in-depth nowledge about the software) claimed support contracts with goverment institutions and grabbed tax money, while the actual developers of open source software were largely left out.
Now that we’re increasingly concerned about the dominance of ‘big tech’, Open Source is often mentioned as an alternative, especially since our governments are carrying out a Total Migration to Microsoft.
There are quite a few European based Linux distros but what about a Linux distro made for the EU public sector.==========Support The Channel==========► Patre...
Reboost ♻️ plz: In light of increased uncertainty on the reliability on the US, European democracies should strengthen their strategic autonomy: this also includes autonomy from #Microsoft #Windows in the public and private sector.
eu-os.gitlab.io proposes to develop together a Community-led Proof-of-Concept for a free/libre replacement of Windows. Follow us on Mastodon and join the Matrix chat at matrix.to/#/#eu-os:kde.org to receive updates and help.
Free Software is indispensable for public authorities to overcome dependencies and achieve technological sovereignty. Therefore, the need of the hour is "P...
Ondanks het geweld tegen de Palestijnse burgerbevolking in Gaza staat Nederland op het punt een defensieverdrag met Israël te tekenen. Dat is onaanvaardbaar. Ik heb net de petitie getekend om dit te stoppen, ik hoop dat jullie dit ook doen! campagnes.degoedezaak.org/camp…
Ondanks het Israëlische geweld tegen de Palestijnse burgerbevolking in Gaza staat Nederland op het punt een verdrag over militaire samenwerking met Israël te tekenen. Dat is onaanvaardbaar.
I think Perl was the first to make its regexes more powerful than that, but according to en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regula… it's not the only one anymore, which makes sense. Who doesn't want more power?
@rdfhrn When I started exploring the WWW because it was fresh and new and looked more interesting than the BBS that were still around back then, Perl/CGI was how you'd do serious programming (DHTML/Javascript existed but were more of a toy you used to make something blink or appear before AJAX became a thing). I still love regex from that time and have to be careful to not overuse it when collaborating with others.
@rdfhrn @mcv "more powerful" is doing a confusing lift here because outside the computational complexity community it may be unclear that this is an uncomfortable property, whereas "regular" is quite a relief to see as it ensures a lack of the edge cases of doom for which perl "regex" (I fall in the mathematical camp, that it can only be a regular expression if it is both an expression and regular) were widely known.
The shadowrunners got what they were looking for, and are now trying to get out of an office tower after the alarms have gone off. Instead of going out the front door, where most of the security is (but also a protest turning into a riot that could cover their escape), they instead decided to take the stairs from the 10th floor all the way back up to the 55th floor to access the roof where where the stealthy ultralight Nightwings they used for insertion, are still waiting for them.
Security teams tried to intercept them, with little success, until a couple of security teams band together and wait for them on the top floor, joined by 4 spirits from the corporate security mages. Generous use of grenades and monowire whips clear the way to the roof, where their Nightwings are indeed waiting for them. But as they prepare to take to the sky again, they spot a dragon in the distance, approaching the building.
At this point, I could discern roughly 3 options: leave by Nightwing and hope to outrun the dragon; get back inside and find a different exit, because any amount of security is preferable to a dragon; or hack the building's air defense turret and actually try to defeat it (no idea what the odds are, but it's not a Great Dragon, so it's not impossible).
They opt for the first choice: fly, dive down, and hope to land as quickly as possible in a street before the dragon catches up, and hide. The decker rolls very well and dives down to street level in a smooth maneuver. The first street samurai carrying the mage as passenger doesn't roll so well, but the mage has an air spirit that helps them descend more quickly.
The other street samurai is not so lucky. Terrible roll, lags behind. The dragon, looking to toy with its prey, doesn't kill him outright but casts Confusion, crippling his questionable control over the Nightwing even further. The mage's air spirit tries to help him descend, but the dragon quickly banishes the spirit. The mage tells the street sam to just jump out. The dragon turns to roast the ultralight and its occupant, who in desperation jumps out. The dragon crumples the plane and then dives after the falling street samurai.
The mage tries to catch the street sam with the Levitation spell, but wants to time it so the dragon flies past the falling runner. I make this an opposed roll. The mage uses Edge to push the limit, the dragon uses Edge to reroll his failures. The mage wins, and snatches the falling street samurai away in levitation just as the dragon was about to catch her. The dragon has to steer hard to avoid crashing into the street below, and that's where we're ending today's session.
The last couple of years I've been wondering what happened to all the protest songs. In my parents' time, there were Dylan and Donovan and all the other '60s protest songs, in my time we went from punk to Public Enemy to RatM. But I haven't seen a lot of protest songs these past two decades. What happened?
I don't know, but some recent event seems to have woken people up and brought them back:
3D printing is fun, but there's some snags. Had a couple of misprints yesterday because of new filament getting entangled. Turns out I'm not the only one with that problem, and the community has designed several fixes for the problem.
People with a new printer always end up first printing a couple of accessories for their printer. Would the printer have been better if this wasn't necessary? Of course. But the fact that you can customise your own printer is really cool.
It reminds me of the ideals behind free/open source software: you can customise it, fix issues in software. It rarely works out that way in practice, because often the software is too complicated to fix it quickly like that, but it's really cool that with 3D printers, you can fix issues in hardware.
It also struck me that there's only a couple of products that people are likely to customise. Can enthusiasts have customised cars since forever of course, and houses always get customised. PC customisation is popular. But what else? Does anyone ever customise their fridge or washing machine? Why not?
There's a category of stuff modified with name/initials, like engraved jeweley, some clothing, etc. I don't feel like that fits your intent, though.
I might add musical instruments. I know several people who've modified guitars, for example (not so many brass instruments).
The tabletop gaming scene is heavily customized. Miniature painting, terrain, game accessories, and the like. Custom miniatures have embraced resin printing for the high resolution. I could argue this is in the category of hobby, which by its nature is often about creating things.
That's definitely true. But people don't modify the high temperature printing nozzle of their 3D printers either, and other household equipment has plenty of parts that aren't in contact with high voltage, heavy rotating parts or scalding hot water. (Although washing machines aren't all that hot anymore these days.)
I've been trying to find a model for a broken clip of an but otherwise excellent Bose speaker so I can print a replacement, but I can't find anything. This is exactly the kind of thing for which home printing would be perfect, but I can't find dimensions for what I need to print.
SMS is the most basic and ancient of mobile phone technologies. SMS apps were always freely included. It just sends text messages, and that's it. Can't be simpler, right? Somehow today, all SMS apps seem to be thoroughly enshittified.
The SMS app that came standard on my Fairphone 5 worked fine for a while, until it suddenly wanted to connect with my Google account. Why does SMS need my Google account? And it refused to show me my messages without it. So I delete it and install Chomp SMS. Can't get more basic than that, right? But today, Chomp suddenly asked for my permission to share cookies with a couple of hundred of their "partners". And there was no option to refuse. So I google for ad-free open source SMS apps, and find Pulse. I want to install it, and despite the web listing it as ad-free, Google app store says it contains ads.
As an european who would be dead today had I had the misfortune to be born in the barbaric system on the other side of the Atlantic, this hits home. Pretty clever framing of a modern tragedy, this 2h read will make you wonder about the cost in blood of each and every social progress. I have the americans to thank for my life, ironically, and Ambroise Croisat. ... <erased>
When I heard about Brian Thomspon's murder, my first thought was "The Ministry of the Future", which discussed using violence to change immovable government policy. I didn't realize that @pluralistic had already predicted this 5 years earlier. Prescient.
"Radicalized" is a dark, dark story, and I say that as a regular consumer of #dystopias. Such a convincing rhythm to the narrative, and such a diagnostic of contemporary ills. I'm glad I took the time for it; thanks for sharing!
About 10 years ago, I worked at one of the ITER sub projects (Interlock), and we had this internal joke: "Fusion is the future of energy. And it will always be"
INSTALLER NOTES: Congratulations! The installation of your fusion reactor (class G2 V) was successful. The optimal distance from the reactor for lifetypes in your category ("Nucleic Acid and Amino Acid Polymers") is 120 million to 180 million kilometers. Please do not try to establish a life-colony on planets outside this range. CAUTION: Reactor slowly increases radiant output over time as fusion products accumulate. After approximately 8 billion years, it will no longer be class V, and all remaining warranties will be void.
To be clear, while fusion research is marketed as being for clean energy generation (always 20y away) it's actual purpose is nuclear weapons simulation, to check the results of physics modeling in high-performance computing clusters, since the test ban treaty forbids actually lighting bombs off to test them. Physicists do learn a lot which might have some civilian applications, but that's not why the checks clear.
Robin Hood: The Legend of Sherwood is a real-time tactics (RTT) game where Robin Hood and his band of Merry Men stick it to the Sherriff of Nottingham and foil Prince John’s nasty plans.
But wait – what the hell is an RTT? Glad you asked! Think of it as the stealthier cousin of the more battle-hungry RTS. While RTS games are all about overwhelming your enemies with an army, the RTT is all about scouting, evading, and hitting only when it counts. Well-known examples include Commandos, Myth, and Desperados.
In a practical sense, it means Robin Hood isn’t much of a killer – he’s more into knocking folks out, throwing coins to distract them, and generally being a lovably, sneaky rogue. Sure, you can kill people, but the game doesn’t love that, and neither do potential recruits for your Merry Men. (Apparently word travels fast in Medieval England.)
The gameplay is mission-based and hardcore. No open world frolicking here. Instead, you’re thrown into tightly designed levels where guards are everywhere, and civilians can snitch on you faster than a Twitter fight. The A.I. is relentless – blink, and they’ll spot you, sound the alarm, and bring their friends.
One time, I had to knock out a chatty woman just to avoid a full-scale riot. Do I feel bad? Kind of, but either she falls asleep or I lose my life. At least I can take comfort in knowing she’s made of pixels.
The art style here is fantastic. As much as people argue about rhe merits of 2D vs. 3D, what about isometric? Because I bloody love the details of the environments. And while the pixels become more noticeable when you zoom in, from a distance, it’s lush and vivid. I mean, the resolution here is 1024x768 – life was good on Windows 98 PCs.
Sound is excellent. We got medieval music to accompany us on our adventures. The voice acting is suitably over-the-top – as all games of this era were – but at least it’s charming and not annoying. As for the sound effects, vivid and sharp – perfect for hearing guards freak out when they realize you outsmarted them again.
Spellbound Entertainment developed Robin Hood. And though they no longer exist, what a legacy they have. Well-known games they’ve made are Airline Tycoon, Helldorado, and Giana Sisters DS.
Do I recommend Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive? Absolutely. But more than that, I recommend the whole stealth RTT genre. It’s a beautiful style I’d love to see more in modern gaming. Go ahead, put on your tights and ready your arrows – it’s time to sneak around medieval England.
Lead the men in green pants through the Sherwood Forrest and fight the evil Sheriff of Nottingham. Robin Hood is a teambased realtime-strategy game from the developers of Desperados.
oh, I *loved* commandos! RTT is a fantastic and fantastically underrated genre. Isometric too, but maybe that's nostalgia. 😍 Would it be too far a stretch to say that Thief and Hitman fit into the genre as well, albeit 3D?
A reminder to employees that all the projects you are working on must be completed by the end of the year, despite that date being entirely arbitrary and in many cases impractical.
When it comes to enjoying the festive season or sacrificing your time and health for the good of Q4, Mr. Lofwyr expects you to make the right call.
@funbaker #AssangeIsNotGuilty Exactly. But having an important Jedi show up to save her, that would definitely attract a lot of attention. To her, and to the fact that Bail Organa knows how to contact Jedi.
My idiot son thought it was a good idea to mess around with a kettle bell minutes before he was supposed to leave for school and dropped it on his toe.
I finally managed to acquire @Greg Stolze 's Reign. (It's surprisingly hard to get in Europe, and shipping from the US costs a whopping €75. But a German webshop had it.)
I may talk about questionable book organization later, but first I want to talk about how frigging awesome character creation is. Of course there's boring point buy, but there's also Random, and true to its One Roll Engine, random takes only one roll. And that one roll got me:
A lowly beggar who first became a street entertainer, then joined the army as a foot soldier, but soon was promoted to leader of his squad. There, on some mission, presumably against a magical cult, he had a profound mystic experience that awoke some magical abilities in him, and also bestowed some unlikely education on him, making him a student of the occult. But the trip also left him with some unexpected windfall in the form of a really nice sword.
That's quite a lot from a single roll, isn't it? Not every roll produces results that are easy to work with, though. I'm still struggling to figure out how a noble byblow (I gather that means "bastard") became both a squad leader and a master sage.
My son gave it a try, and he had a champion in the army, press ganged into the navy, where due to some mistaken identity shenanigans he was recognized as the long lost son of a prominent noble. (We originally thought he was both a front line fighter and a gladiator, but that turns out to be impossible; he's a champion instead.)
It's a weird an glorious system. Most stats end up rather average, though. I think the tables can be improved upon, so you don't get multiple royal cobblers in the same group, and the rules recommend you customize these tables for your own campaign, so that's awesome and I will.
Reign is one of those systems that I was hoping might turn out to be the perfect RPG. Because that's what I'm looking for, and I'm sure it must exist, but none of the previous contenders weren't quite it. The previous contender was Burning Wheel, which I'd heard a lot of good stuff about, and the way Beliefs work is really great, and a big part of what I'm looking for. Only the rest of the system was extremely fiddly with excessive amounts of detail in some places (the enormous skill list) but fantastic bits in other places (lifepaths), but also some gaping holes (anything in between Fight and Bloody Versus).
Reign is next on my radar, and some stuff I read about it makes it sound it might be almost perfect. The dice system is unique and really interesting, but ultimately I fear it might be a bit gimmicky. You roll a dice pool of d10s, and all dice that come up with the same number form a set. You can roll multiple sets, and for each action you declared (which could be more than one), you pick one of your sets. The number of dice in the set is its width, the number on the dice is the height. Getting two different dimensions out of a single roll is a really cool idea. The problem is that the system tends to use these two dimensions for more than two things, which can have weird results.
For example, hits to your legs are easier to parry than hits to your head. I think that's the big one to me. Another one is that quick attacks that go first, also do more damage. I have less issue with that, but with 4 effects mapped to the two dimensions of the roll, I do wonder if two rolls wouldn't have made more sense.
Something I really love about it is that, unlike Burning Wheel, this system is intentionally a toolbox, meant to be tinkered with. Lots of optional rules and suggestions how to adapt it. These seem to be 5 chapters on combat; not sure if they're all the same system or alternatives, but clearly you can start easy and add detail as required.
One optional rule you can add, is Martial Paths and Esoteric Disciplines. They basically give you 5 levels of special bonuses for a skill. This could be a simple way to add some more crunch for players who want it, and there seems to be one for every skill, although I haven't verified that. Honestly, I think you kinda owe it to have at least one for every skill, unless there's a really good reason not to.
My biggest problem with them is that they have some really esoteric names. Some people will love that, but I don't. It would honestly be a lot easier if their name included the name of the skill they worked with. Instead, we get Blades For The Empress which doesn't involve blades, but the sorcery skill.
Also, some of the bonuses seem very small compared to just raising the skill. As far as I can tell, raising the skill always costs just 1 point, so spending a point on a bonus that gives you +1d only in specific circumstances, is not a good deal. That's only worth it once you've maxed out your skill, which I suspect can happen pretty quickly with a linear cost of only 1 XP.
I always wanted to play Wild Talents (an earlier game based on the ORE) but couldn’t get a group together. I’m curious to hear what you end up thinking of Reign.
If I end up using it (and the prospects for that are pretty good), I'll definitely post about it. My plan is to use it for the reinvented Kingmaker-style campaign that I'm discussing in another post.
Nice to see MathJax used, but on mobile, those two formulae get squished together. Separating them might help.
But to be honest, the treatment of exact chances of certain combinations of sets is less interesting to me than issues like blows to the head being harder to parry, and therefore easier to make, than blows to the hands and feet.
My brief stint practicing HEMA taught me the exact opposite: hands and feet are vulnerable (or at least the sword hand and the forward placed foot), whereas head and torso tend to be surrounded by shield and sword to parry them, not to mention having eyes well positioned to see the blow coming.
Making a result of 10 hit the head sounds logical at first, because rolling 10 sounds harder than rolling 1, but that's only true when you need to roll higher. For exact matches, 1 or 10 makes no difference, except that the 10 is harder to parry. So my guess would be that Reign combat tends to see more head hits than leg hits, especially between skilled opponents who know how to parry.
Yes. This is a big reason why many ORE games don’t use hit locations or, at least, don’t tie hit locations to height. We played a few sessions with a tweak that, if an attack succeeded after defenses and such, the hit location was determined by the attacker’s highest waste die (unless some ability allowed a called shot, etc.).
Yeah, that sounds like something I've been considering. Maybe let the attacker even choose which waste die determines the hit location, because it's something you often do have some control over. Maybe you don't want to hit them in the head, for example.
Enough politics. Time to talk about something else! And for today's topic, I'd like to brainstorm a bit about a new RPG campaign. My old Shadowrun campaign is coming to a close, and I'd like to do something a bit more character-driven, with a bit more player agency, a bit more actual roleplaying, and a bit more freedom and a bit more personal stakes, because Shadowrun is pretty mission-based.
Years ago we made a false start with the Pathfinder Kingmaker campaign, and while I loved the concept (wilderness exploration followed by kingdom building and politics), I did not like the execution much. I'm not a fan of Pathfinder-style build-centric systems or the mechanics-first style of play they encourage, and while Paizo's adventure paths are certainly an easy way to get a big campaign, they're kinda linear and never quite seem to fulfill their promise. So let's reinvent that thing.
And instead of a long form post, I'm going to cut this up into bits.
Suggestion: if you make this a series of posts, invent a unique hashtag for the series so it can be found in entirety. This is not necessary if you make it a series of comments on a post.
I could put this new campaign into an existing game world, but ages ago I had some vague idea about building my own game world that I want to revisit, so let's discuss that first.
The idea of that setting was a highly feudal European-style setting that wasn't just pseudo-Europe with the numbers barely filed off. Well, it's sort of pseudo-Europe, but with the numbers hopefully more thoroughly filed off than usual, and yet somehow feeling more historical. With an HRE-style empire with a weak distant emperor and fiefdoms fighting each other, rather than the anachronistic nations you often see in fantasy settings.
So my idea was a continent where elves, dwarves and orcs used to live in relative balance, until humans showed up, fleeing the collapse of their empire on the other side of the sea. The arrival of humans upset the balance: they started displacing elves from the plains, grew food they traded with dwarves for weapons, and humans and dwarves thrived, pushing elves and orcs to the fringes. Elves and orcs are rarely seen: elves hid in the darkest forests, and orcs are mostly far away, on the other side of the mountains where the dwarves live.
An idea I had for a campaign 20 years ago was that elves and orcs would find each other, migrate to cold inhospitable islands, interbreed for a few centuries, and then return as a kind of super vikings. That campaign never went anywhere, I'm not doing that this time.
Setting is still very flexible; I haven't committed to anything yet and could easily move the whole thing to another setting. But some themes of this setting work for me, as I'll go into below.
Recently I was fortunate to have a super interesting discussion ad-hoc adventure design workshop with S.John Ross, who has some very interesting ideas about adventure design, called High-Trust Trad. Trad meaning non-D&D, non-storygames, which is my sweet spot too (though I'm less purist); high-trust is a bit harder to explain, and I won't be able to do it justice here, but it focuses on the characters and how they approach the problems they encounter, the choices they make, how they interest with the various NPCs, etc. It should be roleplay-heavy, driven by in-game motivation, not by predetermined plot, mechanics or meta-game considerations.
A good HTT adventure is non-presumptive, which means it has no expectations about how the PCs will approach the various aspects of the problem. The adventure is made up of a cluster of problems, and for each problem, it should be trivial to come up with 6 different ways to approach it, and 6 more with a bit of thought. A limited list of options is not good enough.
From how I understand it, an HTT adventure is like a complex machine that's already in motion and will cause suffering unless the PCs can stop it. Which may involve discovering what the problem is in the first place.
S. John Ross's Toast of the Town is a great (and free) one-shot adventure that's a great example of HTT design.
He has a bunch of tools to help him flesh out the problems in his adventures. And he tried to explain them to me, and while I doubt I fully grasp them, I figured I'm going to try to apply them to my campaign ideas. Let's see how far I get.
My basic idea is this: A town, a former trade hub, now at the edge of a swampy wilderness. Trade routes have dwindled and died over the years, crime is rising. The town is ruled by a baron looking to strengthen his position against an ambitious marquess who is looking to expand his power and territory. This offers room for political stuff, but won't be the primary focus of the campaign.
The baron would love to revitalize the trade in his city, want would like to reopen the old trade routes. But the last caravan, already some time ago, hasn't been heard from. There's reports of bandits, monsters, and weirder things. So he hires some adventures to explore the place and see what they can do to make it safe again. This is the exploration/hexcrawl part that we're going to start out with.
Of course there are bandits and monsters, but they're only a symptom. What's really going on is that elves that were driven from these lands, are trying to reassert themselves, by disrupting trade between humans and dwarves, by creating problems, and hopefully, by driving humans away. And to do that, they've tapped into some really old magic they discovered here, stemming from a far more ancient civilization that disappeared (vanished, collapsed, destroyed) when the elves were young. Or possible even before there were elves.
And this ancient magic helps them cause chaos and disrupt human and dwarven society, but it's more dangerous than they realize (or maybe they don't care anymore), and it may grow far larger than they can handle. Think ancient undead coming back to life, corrupting and enslaving everybody. Unless the PCs can figure out what's going on, and stop it.
Some of the problems in this scenario, and a stab at the half dozen ways they can be approached:
Bandits: kill them, bring them to justice, protect their victims to make banditry unprofitable, bribe them, recruit them, convince them to make trouble somewhere else. Obviously this needs a lot more development: who are they? Where do they come from? What do they really want?
Monsters: this one is a lot harder to find other solutions for than to just kill them, or at least protect their victims. I need to think more about what to do with this. The problem with monsters is that they're ultimately kinda boring. More obstacles than problems. But maybe I can come up with some more interesting ones.
Other weirdness: needs to get a lot more specific. So how about: an old outpost that used to protect the trade route has been literally swallowed by the land. In itself more a clue than a problem, but the lack of control and security is a problem. Will the PCs set up new outposts? Dig out the old ones? Come to some arrangement with bandits or other locals to provide security? I need a lot more to get to 6 here.
Elves: it will be a while before they get into contact with the elves, or even before they discover their involvement. A big thing is: what are the elves doing exactly? How do they cause these problems? Which problems are them, and which are intended effects from the ancient magic they can't control?
And how may the PCs handle the elves? War? Sympathize with them? Things might be getting a bit bigger than what a single group of adventurers can handle, but that may be where politics and/or kingdom building comes in.
I'm currently digging through my lengthy conversation with him looking for the right approach and the right tools to go about this, but it was a very long and wordy conversation where we touch on every topic related to RPGs, occasionally getting back on track again. So it's not easy to find.
He can be critical about stuff that doesn't appeal to him, but I did just come across this:
There are a couple of ways I like to do problems but there's no WRONG way. Whatever gets you to one is good. I sometimes start LTT style, with a goal. I often start with a victim (but I run a lot of heroic games). There's no wrong starting place.
So wherever I start is fine, just refine until we get there. Let's give this a try.
One hint for how start that he gave was:
pick a problem or a victim or a goal or something like that. Something they'd care about.
Not having started the campaign, it's hard to tell what they care about, but I think part of the campaign, especially the start, is getting to know people, so they'll care about them. People do live in the wilderness. There will be some isolated farms, maybe even a small village, eking out a living under harsh circumstances. These are likely early victims of monsters and banditry.
And maybe I'm going to give them some hints for helpful character backgrounds. Like someone's relative disappeared disappeared, and the PC wants to find out what happened. Maybe even save them.
Every problem boils down to harm, impending harm, or a hybrid.
Identify a victim and a problem. Victims are often fruitful. Because that taps right into what the PCs care about helping, preserving, augmenting, etc.
By his design method, victims don't have to be people. Anything can be a victim. So I guess the trade routes that died are also a victim. But it's also important that it's something the PCs care about, and they're a lot more likely to care about people than about a trade route. Until they start building their own little fiefdom, I suppose; then they might care a lot about that trade route.
So a list of potential victims for them to care about:
A relative who disappeared (with the last trade caravan or otherwise). If they're with the caravan, that makes the relative a better stand-in for the dead trade route.
Farmers and other people living in the area suffering from bandit or monster attacks. (I need to figure out some ways for the PCs to get to know these people, help them, build a relationship.)
The town itself of course; it's caught between the expansionist marquess on one side, and rising banditry and monsters on the other.
In the longer run, the victims may include:
The elves, who have after all been pushed out of their original lands, albeit a long time ago by now. But they're still resentful about it.
Everybody in this part of the world, once that ancient magic breaks loose. I guess this is a fight to save the world after all, but it's going to take time to figure that out. (Is it? Why am I saying that? That sounds very presumptive. Can the PCs discover this early on? Am I going to actively keep this info from them? That doesn't sound very HTT.)
S. John Ross identifies 5 basic forms or root shapes that problems can have: Harmful, Imperiled, Misplaced, Failing, or Incompatible.
I feel a bit like everybody here is Imperiled. That may be a bit one-sided. The bandits pose a threat, the monsters pose a threat, the elves are a threat, and the ancient magic is a threat.
The only one with obvious other elements are the elves: they are themselves also victims of past events, and might be open to other solutions than simply violence. They might be Incompatible or Misplaced as well.
Also, the town is perhaps more Failing than Imperiled.
Then again, maybe the monsters are also Misplaced. What's driving them? I mean, the elves are, but how? Stopping the monsters doesn't have to involve killing them all; it could involve getting the elves to stop whatever they are doing.
So that's something I need to figure out: what are the elves doing? That's the thing that connects everything else: driving the monsters, destroying old outposts creating a power vacuum for the bandits to move into, and of course it's unleashing the ancient magic threat. And the elves might not be aware of that last one. Or maybe not all of them. Some elves might be so consumed by revenge that they're fine with it, but others might not. So there's different factions within the elves, and figuring that out might be the real heart of this campaign.
He also talks about Rounding, Balancing and Complexifying.
Complexifying means ensuring there are at least 12 viable approaches to every problem. Rounding and Balancing means ensuring that none of those 12 stand out as the obvious or optimal one, so the PCs are free to pick any one of them, or even a 13th that I didn't think of.
The goal here is rich tactical complexity. If there's one obviously optimal approach, they're going to pick that one. If there's two, they just have to decide between those two. But if there's a dozen, and none of them stand out, they have the freedom to create their own solution instead of just following whatever I thought of.
And that, I think, might be the core goal of HTT: giving the characters (not the players!) the freedom to create. To create their own solutions, their own plans. Which could be anything.
Let me know if any of this rambling makes sense. I'm talking more about S. John Ross's ideas about HTT adventure design than about my own campaign here. Is it interesting that I share that process and my thoughts about it? Or should I just focus on the campaign itself and keep the rest private?
@sjuvonen actually. We at work had some "problems" with the drivers for the thinkpad usb-c dockingstations. We had to search a little bit and the driver is only available as deb package. So installing and updating on a fedora is system is a little bit annoying.
With my nvidia card I don't have any problems. But I'm not a gamer so maybe I just don't see the problems.
@dashdsrdash unless you have an Nvidia card or a network adapter that the kernel doesn't support, which apparently is most of them available in countries like Brazil, according to a Brazilian friend o.o
drivers: constant anxiety about when a cyclist will run a red light directly infront of you or swerving in and out of traffic erradically. There is no if, only when.
@samofhearts the fuck are you taking about? cyclists often run red lights to wait a few feet further along, or if they're turning into a bike lane or whatever, sure, but I've never seen a cyclist just randomly move out into the path of oncoming traffic, that's just not a thing that happens, because evolution very does not select for those cyclists, and even if it did happen it would barely scratch your paintwork. meanwhile, three motorists have cut right across my lane and actually endangered my life, so how about you shut the hell up blaming the most vulnerable road users for your own dangerousness with exactly the same energy as a man reading some sexual assault statistics and responding "sure, but women always take ages in the bathroom, am i rite fellas?"
I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about or upset about with women. I'm sorry if you're a misogynist. <- Twitter is that way.
Obviously we live in different places and have different experiences. We can learn from each other rather than hate, but whatever floats your boat man.
Where I live in a city, like actual city not a suburbs near a city. The cyclist never stop or even slow down for red lights, they just go straight through them with the pedestrian walk sign and then continue on the road. They need to follow the rules of the road, but they don't. They follow their own rules and they make it very dangerous for pedestrians and any cars that are turning with a green arrow.
Finally, I like how you assume I'm a dangerous driver based on literally nothing. I'm a pedestrian you donut. These cyclist going 20 on the pedestrian walk because they don't want to stop at a red light are going to do a lot more than scratch my or my child's "paint."
My concern is they have a complete disregard for any law or rule of the road. If they want to be on the road or bike lanes. Sweet, follow the same laws and rules cars have to follow so that everything is predictable.
@samofhearts Why does that concern you? If cyclists are actually endangering anyone then *that* should be your concern. If they're just ignoring rules that patently don't matter then why do you care?
“Cyclists are ***holes, they’ll see a bike lane and ride in the road because they can.” That’s an actual comment we got on this channel, and it’s one of the ...
Researchers have found that almost all road users break the law, but the reasons for the infractions differ between modes, with cyclists doing it to save their necks.
I'm not a gamer and I don't have any Nvidia hardware, but another concern we've had is the migration to Wayland. I just did a one year stint using Fedora 40 with the KDE Plasma desktop, and it was really a breath of fresh air with Plasma 6.
At the moment, I'm back to Linux Mint because it's simply easier to get things done when you don't have to screw around. They do a wonderful job taking Canonical's already amazing job and focusing it for traditional desktop users.
Finding drivers for Windows is much more of a problem nowadays. Even for many rather rare and outdated pieces of hardware, drivers are quite often part of the regular vanilla Linux kernel, while it is near impossible to find any Windows 10 or 11 drivers for a 15 year old printer or scanner which otherwise still works perfectly.
@clayton i was just discussing today (with someone worrying about Windows drivers) how if i can plug something in, i plug it in. (I convinced them to go get a 30 foot ethernet cable instead of trying to mess with a wireless driver of some kind.) So, i do not worry about drivers much (except when biking, and even then, about ⅓ the time…) Had to walk down every aisle in Microcenter to find plug-in keyboard and mouse, and i am very happy. USB works.™ And audio jacks. Never bluetooth!
Isaac Kuo
Als Antwort auf Martijn Vos • • •Greg A. Woods
Als Antwort auf Martijn Vos • • •If you use GNU Emacs, you can use Wanderlust.
emacswiki.org/emacs/WanderLust
It relies on Emacs' ability to render HTML, for yucky HTML email, which isn't terrible, but it may not be as pretty as as a browser-based mailer, or one with a true browser plugin.
Some people also use GNUS for email, but I don't like it for that purpose.
Have you looked at any others here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparis…
I've played with Claws and it seemed impressive and it is still actively developed. There's also still active work on Sylpheed too, and Vivaldi has its own MUA now as well.
Wikimedia list article
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Isaac Kuo mag das.
Greg A. Woods
Als Antwort auf Martijn Vos • • •Also, just ditch Windows completely! That's a lot less MS in your life!
I'd avoid Linux too and go for a BSD, maybe FreeBSD for a desktop or laptop, but that's just me. On the other hand my desktop is macOS, with a fullscreen X11 workspace dedicated to my "real" computers mostly running NetBSD. I even run NetBSD VMs in macOS.
All things considered macOS is about a billion orders of magnitude better than Windows for the desktop and laptop. Apple Mail is not the world's worst MUA by far (though Mail on iOS is horrid).
Isaac Kuo mag das.
Martijn Vos
Als Antwort auf Greg A. Woods • •@Greg A. Woods
I'm not going to replace the OS on this laptop any time soon. Probably not until Win 10 becomes completely unusable. It's mostly used by my kids these days; it's just that it's all I've got with me on vacation right now.
I'm not a big fan of the direction Apple has been taking either, though. The primary reason to use Mac OS is simply because Apple Silicon is far better than old Intel-style cpus. They should make those available for everything.
Isaac Kuo mag das.
Greg A. Woods
Als Antwort auf Martijn Vos • • •The problems I had with Apple's changes are long over -- they've still not improved everything even back to the feature levels they were at during their best days, and like everyone they're adding so-called "A.I." to things, but in general they continue to maintain and even improve on core strengths like usability, reliability and manageability, and perhaps most important of all, security.
I think most of their "decline" was due to rewrites of applications as they moved away from Objective-C, mostly towards Swift if I understand correctly, but they communicated their intent poorly and they pushed new versions of apps out before they were anywhere near feature-equivalent.
In their core OS they still seem to favour complexity over simplicity and elegance, and they have a very strong lean towards "not invented here" mentality and away from some standards. But they keep it working smoothly. I haven't had a bad update in a couple of decades now.
Martijn Vos
Als Antwort auf Greg A. Woods • •@Greg A. Woods
They also like their walled garden. Last time I used one, I think you had to enable something to be able to install non-app store software.
Greg A. Woods
Als Antwort auf Martijn Vos • • •Yeah, but it's trivial to work around Gatekeeper if absolutely necessary and 99.9% of users will never need to install anything third party that will need the workaround anyway. It doesn't affect open-source developers in the slightest as stuff you compile locally works by default -- I've only ever turned it off temporarily once, and that might have been a decade ago.
Also, it is really not actually a "walled garden" it's a critical security feature that ordinary users REALLY need. You simply can't have this level of security without some key controls that are not on by default and strongly recommended. It doesn't even go far enough in many respects. It does make the job of scammers far harder, and it offers significant protections against 0-day exploits, but it isn't total protection. Calling it a "walled garden" is effectively propaganda, but I'm not sure who it benefits. Apple haters, certainly, but what do they gain, other than spreading hate? Microsoft? The same claim applies equally, but in different ways, to Microsoft's stuff where there are not the same security benefits because it's far too trivial to work around.
Any Apple users not sophisticated and knowledgeable enough to protect themselves from scams should probably even enable full "Lockdown Mode". That's a more complete form of protection, and any scammer asking a target to turn it off is effectively showing their hand.
Martijn Vos
Als Antwort auf Greg A. Woods • •@Greg A. Woods
It makes legitimate, perfectly reliable software sound illegitimate to novice users. Calling that "propaganda" is really a bit much.
Greg A. Woods
Als Antwort auf Martijn Vos • • •Isaac Kuo
Als Antwort auf Martijn Vos • • •Wow, getting around Apple's walled garden sounds like a pain to someone who is used to using operating systems where installing and maintaining third party software is purposefully made easy.
I remember back when people claimed installing software on OSX was dead easy. Just drag and drop! Well, by the time I needed to actually do it, it was not so easy. All I needed, at the time, was a web browser supported by Cox Communication's web viewer, and Disney+ at the time. I chose Chrome, and the initial install seemed easy enough ... just drag and drop.
But the resulting web browser wouldn't remember settings or saved passwords ... like it was running fresh every time.
Okay, maybe Google was doing something shady to make their web browser work badly with MacOS but I dunno. Anyway, I didn't feel like climbing the learning curve on MacOS.
Ultimately, I just ended up waiting and eventually Disney+ started working again on Linux (it was never technically incapable, their web player simply stopped working with Linux all of a sudden at some point when some genius decided they really needed to screw over Linux users for some reason).
The bottom line is that MacOS goes out of its way to make it more difficult to install and maintain software outside of its walled garden, and on iOS even more so.
I'll never use MacOS ever again. It's just too much of a pain, and I don't see any benefits of it over what I am already familiar with working with. No benefits whatsoever. None at all.
Some day, I might use BSD for something, maybe, but at least there I'd have a lot lower learning curve and, depending on what I choose, installing and maintaining software will be easy and I won't have to work around the OS to do it.
Martijn Vos
Als Antwort auf Isaac Kuo • •All those big tech companies do shady stuff. Appleis probably the least bad of them. They do seem to care about our privacy in a way that Google, Microsoft, Facebook etc don't.
And I will use Apple in the future, because it's pretty standard in corporate environments, and when given the choice between Windows and Mac, it's definitely Mac.
But I'll never be a fan. They frequently make bad decisions in the face of protests, and it takes a couple of years before they back down again. But at least they back down eventually.
Maybe they've backed down on the installation warnings again, but I do remember the protests against them from a couple of years ago. They have often made moves to close down their platform more compared to the open early days of OSX that won them so much developer enthusiasm.
Greg A. Woods
Als Antwort auf Martijn Vos • • •Greg A. Woods
Als Antwort auf Martijn Vos • • •Greg A. Woods
Als Antwort auf Martijn Vos • • •Greg A. Woods
Als Antwort auf Martijn Vos • • •Martijn Vos
Als Antwort auf Greg A. Woods • •@Greg A. Woods
You're getting a lot harder to take seriously now. A lot of criticism against Apple is very legitimate. Especially against iOS and Apple's App Store policies.
If you're saying that criticism against OSX is exaggerated, that's a point of view I can absolutely see. But their app store and its 30% tax on everything that touches it, absolutely deserves criticism.
Isaac Kuo mag das.
Greg A. Woods
Als Antwort auf Martijn Vos • • •Yeah, well the App Store is a necessary evil -- there are too many apps anyway.
I am indeed talking mainly about macOS, nee OSX.
Isaac Kuo
Als Antwort auf Martijn Vos • • •I already get updates, security, and administration with, say, Debian. As for "ease-of-use" ... uh no. MacOS is not easy, especially not compared to Linux.
It may seem easy to use for someone who has already climbed the learning curve of using it, but it's honestly bewildering except for using pre-installed software to do simple things.
Naturally, Debian also has a learning curve. But overall I think it's no contest. I wish I could say the same thing about Ubuntu, because it's so popular for newbies, but ... Ubuntu has gone off in weird tangents for no good reason. Oh well. The worst thing about Ubuntu was the decision to encourage multiple disparate software package management systems.
I like how Debian encourages users to stick with the "Debian way", and if it's not available in the Debian apt repositories ... okay, you can install and maintain yourself but you know what you're getting into.
Oh well, at least with my own Ubuntu machines I can stick to the "Debian way" rather than going off into those unfortunate tangents.
Greg A. Woods
Als Antwort auf Martijn Vos • • •