Wow that’s actually genius thank you

Still a very cool project! Fun to play around with

The TF2 community has been going strong! There’s even been a revitalization of classic custom game modes like TFWare, Balloon race, Dodgeball, Smash Bros, Randomizer, Class Wars, etc: https://teamwork.tf/community/quickplay

This is super cool!

Does it support things like max/min to simulate advantage/disadvantage?

It would be really cool to mathematically compare different kinds of rolls, like the cascading dice damage post from a couple weeks ago (even if its not built into the notation, just writing out the logic by hand)

I use Duplicati for my backups, and have backup retention set up like this:

Save one backup each day for the past week, then save one each week for the past month, then save one each month for the past year.

That way I have granual backups for anything recent, and the further back in the past you go the less frequent the backups are to save space

I still think material design 1 (which came out in 2014) is good, which focused on clarity with limited space. The problem started with material design 2 in 2018, which pushed for increased whitespace and homogeny in design. (And Microsoft’s Metro… shudder)

Material design 1 balanced clean and readable while maintaining depth (trying to emulate 3d space by “stacking cards of content” with shadows). But since most of MD1 was guidelines instead of, like, actual components developers could use, it was a double edged sword of forcing people to be a little creative in making their own UIs but cumbersome because you had to make it all yourself

Material design 2 tried to “fix” this by making everything simpler and shipping a ton of premade components that developers could just slap together and call it a day. Good for speeding up development, unfortunate because everything now looks the same. It’s also because of this that material design started to “break containment” and appear all over desktop applications/websites. It’s never good when a mobile design language is applied to the larger desktop space

That’s why I really don’t mind seeing material design 1 on either mobile or desktop, because it was designed to use space efficiently and interestingly. Material design 2 on the other hand favors whitespace and speed to the detriment of us all

If you haven’t heard of the game Blood on the Clocktower, you should definitely check it out! It’s a bit more involved than the other games on your list, but it’s become my holy Grail of social deduction games

Also a big recommend for Manifold Garden for special thinking in a fractal space

Oh no those look really good

Thank you

I also really appreciate these, a bunch of cool projects I haven’t heard of before this week

Thank you, I didn’t know this existed!

The parents are getting a divorce, meaning the kid will celebrate Christmas twice, once with each parent

Oh definitely

There’s plugins for tons of things from customization (like custom boot and suspend animations) to tools (like mangohud for performance/energy monitoring) to quality of life (like kde connect or syncthing or teamspeak right in the sidebar)

And it’s super easy to install and update, just go to their website in desktop mode and download and run the executable to install it, and then you can just install plugins and update without needing to leave game mode

There is a decky plugin that lets you turn on kde connect in game mode, though you have to pair in desktop mode first

https://www.newsweek.com/googles-ai-chatbot-tells-student-seeking-help-homework-please-die-1986471

Make sure to read the actual message, it’s a lot worse than the headline makes it sound lol (It’s also nice that you can look at the link of the full conversation to see how normal it was until the last message)

My favorite non-standard holiday song is If it has to be Christmas

With such lines as

If it has to be Christmas for you to be nice

You’re an asshole

If you think the season is the reason

You’re a piece of shit

And calling people spineless if they can only make a change for the better if it’s New Year’s and hints that so much of the holiday just appearances

It’s part of an album that was made for a game, so most of the other songs directly reference the game, but this one and a couple others are standalone

Recently I had two major problems with Windows updates that needed manual intervention in a very user unfriendly way.

Earlier this year one of the security updates for 22H2 broke my computer’s recovery partition and prevented the update to install and constantly fail. It took like a week for Microsoft to acknowledge the issue, at which point they said they would post a fix shortly. Then a whole month later they said they wouldn’t/couldn’t fix it automatically and anyone affected would have to manually delete the partition, shrink your main disk partition, and recreate the recovery partition. On top of that, there was no notification of the issue or how to fix it, one would have to notice the update keeps failing, look up the error, and dig up the instructions from their blog. And then go through the ugly process of editing partitions which I can’t imagine most users doing.

Either that or just live with no recovery until the next time you reinstall the os.

https://superuser.com/questions/1837245/kb5034441-and-changing-the-recovery-partition-starting-offset-in-order-to-be-abl

The second issue this year was halfway through a windows update (when it just reboots a couple times) my computer just simply stopped booting. I could power cycle and everything and after the bios it would just black screen forever. The only way I got around it was to hop into the bios and change the boot order. Another thing I wouldn’t expect normal users should have to do to just boot the computer

And I personally have seen all the ads in Windows explorer, the start menu, the lock screen, etc. and the massive pushing of Copilot being added to the toolbar even after removing it manually. And readding OneDrive. I’m in the US though so that’s probably why (it’s nice to know the only reason Microsoft does all this because they’re not legally pressured not to. Gives me so much trust in them to do the right thing with my computer and data)

I’ve since moved to Linux (which I’ve used on my work machine for many years) and have had near zero issues. It’s very nice not worrying how my computer is going to make itself worse without my consent next

edit: I definitely wouldn’t consider myself a fanatic that tries to convert everyone to Linux. For a lot of people Windows is the best choice, but in my case in particular it really has made things easier

https://youtu.be/V-fRuoMIfpw

The pinebook’s privacy switches (for WiFi/BT, camera, and microphone) operate at the firmware level, the operating system has no control over them

https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/Pinebook_Pro#Privacy_Switches

The keyboard operates on firmware independent of the operating system. It detects if one of the F10, F11 or F12 keys is pressed in combination with the Pine key for 3 seconds. Doing so disables power to the appropriate peripheral, thereby disabling it. This has the same effect as cutting off the power to each peripheral with a physical switch. This implementation is very secure, since the firmware that determines whether a peripheral gets power is not part of the Pinebook Pro’s operating system. So the power state value for each peripheral cannot be overridden or accessed from the operating system. The power state setting for each peripheral is stored across reboots inside the keyboard’s firmware flash memory.

A couple of favorites that are different from what others already said:

• I strongly dislike autorotate on my phone so I always keep it off, however it makes perfect sense in apps like YouTube/Twitch. So I have one task that turns it on when opening one of those apps, and off again when closing them
• When I’ve got Bluetooth headphones, I can choose to have incoming texts read out to me. Very nice when walking/running outside and not needing to pull my phone out
• Similarly, I’ve got a task that will (optionally) read out the name of the song that’s playing to Bluetooth