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Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Agree with you completely, but the explanation is probably in order.

    CoMaps is a fairly recent fork of Organic Maps. There were questions being raised about Organic's governance - dodgy partnerships, misuse of funds, not being truly open-source due to keeping core libraries private - and so CoMaps was created to 'do it properly'. The app functionality is basically exactly the same, so moving over is completely painless.

    https://news.itsfoss.com/organic-maps-fork-comaps/

  • Pair up a 5090 with a 640x480 monitor and open up your copy of Quake 1. Easy 3400 fps.

  • I've missed my face when drinking and spilled an entire pint of beer down me, and my shirt wasn't as wet as that.

  • That is a thing of beauty. Bring the gravy boat to the table so that you can top it up to the brim, heaven.

  • Yeah, but that one doesn't have the right gear on. Section 4 of the laws of the game say:

    3(a) For ease of identification, players’ clothing must have the numbers 1 to 13 with additional numbers for the substitutes.

    4(b) A player’s normal gear shall consist of a numbered jersey of distinctive colour and/or pattern, a pair of shorts, socks of a distinctive colour and/or pattern and studded boots or shoes.

    4(f) Studs on boots or shoes shall not have sharp edges or pose a risk of injury to other players.

    If there's one thing I know about cats, it's that their booties have sharp edges that pose a risk of injury. That cat is going to get a red card as soon as it enters the playing field. Only language some players understand.

  • Oh sweet baby Jesus. That is some astonishing code for validating the title and body of a PR.

     bash
        
          - name: Create PR message file
            run: |
              mkdir -p /tmp
              cat > /tmp/pr-message.txt << 'EOF'
              ${{ github.event.pull_request.title }}
              
              ${{ github.event.pull_request.body }}
              EOF
    
    
      

    Put a single-line EOF in your pull request body, follow it up with a completely arbitrary set of Bash commands, whatever you damn well like, put all the environment variables with the repository secrets into a webhook request and send them off somewhere, make sure you terminate it with another cat > /dev/null << 'EOF' to match the other EOF. Now you can compromise the entire project by raising a pull request.

  • I'd some plans to write my own e-pub reader, since all the existing ones are shite in their own way, but since e-pub files are secretly xhtml and css in disguise, it's actually a hell of a job, much bigger than I'd anticipated.

    I don't think making network requests for files nor parsing any of those formats is so difficult, and while the actual layout rules interact in a complicated way they're not insurmountable. However, doing it securely and in a way that runs at an acceptable speed is much harder. Tokenizing JS and interpreting it isn't so bad, but that's not going to run a modern website with tens of thousands of lines of scripts. Displaying video with hardware acceleration? Best bust out some code.

    Moving to another protocol will either need the cooperation of everyone everywhere all at once, or since that'll never happen, alternatively convincing all the major browser manufacturers to support both for a while so that other companies can enter the market, which will also never happen. Going to be a tough sell.

  • The app that you've always wanted, or at least, close enough so that you can tweak it and maybe submit a PR! Except of course that it's written in .NET and uses WinForms for its UI. Bastards.

    In some ways, I'm a bit envious of Windows for having a standardised UI toolkit, even if it's terrible. Linux has a selection that are each flawed in their own way. I think the last time I enjoyed writing UI code was on the Amiga 1200, and that wasn't yesterday.

  • 4K for me as a developer means that I can have a couple of source files and a browser with the API documentation open at the same time. I reckon I could use legitimately use an 8K screen - get a terminal window or two open as well, keep an eye on builds and deployments while I'm working on a ticket.

    Now yes - gaming and watching video at 8K. That's phenomenally niche, and very much a case of diminishing returns. But some of us have to work for a living as well, alas, and would like them pixels.

  • Speaking as a developer; I've a 4K screen which is amazing for having loads of source files open at the same time, and also works for old or undemanding games. Glorious Eggroll's version of Proton has all the FSR patches in it, so you can 'upscale anything'. Almost any modern game, I'm going to be running at lower resolution, usually either 1440p or the slightly odd 2954 x 1662. Generally, highest-quality graphics and upscaling looks better than medium-quality native to me, for games where I have to compromise.

    I would be interested in an 8K display for coding, as long as the price is reasonable. I'm not spending five grand, that would be crazy. But I'd still be upscaling for playing games, as basically no GPU could drive that many pixels.

  • Open to abuse, unfortunately. If even the most trivial of cases takes a week to resolve, then you could shut any company down by filling fifty suits.

    The real solution would be for the judge to actually do their job and to penalise companies for doing that kind of bullshit.

  • Exactly this. I needed a day return on short notice the last time I had to take a flight for a funeral, so that would be business price for tickets rather than leisure price. About 10x price difference, but there was no alternative if I was going to be there.

  • Building Vim from source is pretty damn easy. cd vim && make && sudo make install. Just need to be careful not to run it by accident, or you'll be restarting Linux From Scratch from scratch.

  • Was expecting it to be "vodka without beer is just waste of money", in that case.

    Looking it up, most sources seem to have it the other way around - "beer without vodka", as in there's no point wasting money on drinking unless you're going to do some hard drinking?

  • I am intrigued. Most of the cultures I'd expect to have that proverb have neither definite nor indefinite articles in their language.

  • To be fair, their installation page is excellent, but it does require close reading. Where I'd messed up was the "install essential packages" section, where it just says to "consider installing" stuff which is essential really - firmware, network stack, a text editor. If you're able to access the internet and adjust configuration files, then you can install everything else you need.

    Their suggested disk partitioning has a gigabyte for efi, which is twice what I'd recommend, and includes a swap partition, which I would not create. A swap file is just as good, and more flexible. Otherwise yeah, if you can install Arch, you can probably do all the Linux maintenance you'll ever need to do, and it's not that difficult - practise in a VM if you want - and will make you much more skilled and confident.

    https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Installation_guide

  • I actually find that starting a 'raw disk partition' virtual machine for Windows is one of the best ways to run it. Stops it from fucking up your BIOS and EFI when it does an update. You can restart into it when you want the 'native GPU' for games.

    Of course, the even better way to stop Windows from fucking up your hardware is to not allow it anywhere near your hardware in the first place...

  • Ah yes, the 'Arch Linux' experience. To be fair, your machine boots really really fast when you don't read the install guide carefully enough and fail to put a network stack on. Valuable learning opportunity.

  • If a few minutes of reading TvTropes is anything to go by, the Tolkien never officially decided on an origin for his orcs. All of the possibilities he considered clashed with his legendarium somehow. And he had some of them that actively resisted Sauron, which makes them 'not strictly evil' I suppose.

    You can't be evil if you don't have free will. A tool has no evil except from what comes from the hand that wields it. So to me, orcs make more sense as a constructed organic machine, little better than automatons, and with no moral sense of their own. A dog would have more capacity for evil. But the interesting question would ask who would have the capacity to create such machines, who believes that violence is an acceptable method of achieving their goals. You say that conscience is optional for antagonists? I'd say that a complete lack of empathy is the defining quality of evil, what drives them to seek power without any care for others.

    Plus, having orcs lets you roll up a whole pile of mooks for your players to fight whenever you like, and if they happen to be trying to advance your BBEG's goal while completely indifferent to whether they cause pain and suffering along the way, all the better. Can't give the masterplan away if they were completely indifferent to why they were asked to do something and never asked questions about it, but it gives your players some goals to work towards and some puzzles to chew on.

    And yeah, Strahd's entire backstory and motivation being 'he is a dick' is difficult to make interesting. A well-intentioned extremist that thought they needed power that they then could not control and which led them to darkness has the potential for some characterisation. Strahd wanted the booty but could not get the booty and is angry about it. Plus that module is just two hundred hours of one TPK after another.

  • The Android dev kit includes a copy of QEMU that's set up to emulate ARM with a selection of popular screen sizes and revisions of the OS, so that you can test your app on a variety of 'potential phones' before you upload it to the marketplace. Snapdragons are amazingly performant CPUs for how gently they sip at the battery, but they're not that strong in the big scheme of things - any random x86 processor should be able to emulate them while using fifty times the power. A Steam deck ought to be able to do it; the request will then be 'we'd like to play Android games better', which to me is a much more reasonable ask.