pre

Not me!

I spent most of the weekend in VR No-Mans-Sky exploring a made-up galaxy, and when someone tried to speak to me near the meetup-for-missions place I ran away.

Oh. :(

Thanks. Will try and have a look next time I'm forced to boot into windows.

Used to be that Windows users would complain that Linux made them edit arcane config files, I guess now it's Linux users that complain about Windows needing you to edit arcane registry settings.

Really what I want is for the task-bar to not send everything to a search-engine anyway.

I don't want web-results in a task-bar-search at all. I'm trying to launch a program, not tell Microsoft-search the names of every program I launch.

Presumably they make more money with the user-hostile version and the user isn't paying so...

I press it as soon as I see a popup about cookies or login or sales or basically anything at all.

I press it when there's a paywall.

I press it when the site doesn't do dark-mode.

I press it when adverts become annoying.

There also exists an auto-reader-mode plugin that you can tell to always open that site in reader-mode in future.

Reader mode is great. Hope it doesn't become popular so website start trying to stop it working.

Well. A Russian company, DDos-Guard, did host Parler in the end didn't they?

And sure enough, the FBI is investigating.

Signal is a charity rather than a company, but dunno if that makes any actual difference.

If they have telescopes then the trails from star-link satellites would probably give it away.

The ants in the article were in driveways though.

Fermi's paradox says nothing about how likely aliens are to visit earth. It notes that we can't see any sign of them when we look into the sky.

Perhaps the humans don't care about the ants, but the ants damn well can see signs of human activity.

Latency probably matters more than bandwidth in a case like this.

Gotta pay for the direct-fibre for the ping as much as the volume.

Congestion is gonna mean you always need slack. There must be unused bandwidth or the occasional packet-loss just cascades.

We are using Jamulus, and I won't try and pretend that it's great, but it's just about workable.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/llcon/

My band haven't really been able to get into a room together since about March, mostly it's not even been legal but even during the time when it was legal we figured it was probably inadvisable.

So we've been trying to do it online.

And then decided it might be worth trying to perform online, with each of us in different rooms around the city.

I'm taking a video-feed from four different people, and audio feeds from six different audio-sources, mixing them and then pushing that out as a member of a video-chat with dozens of other people.

So I was kinda glad of my half gig symmetric.

I think I'd have needed the full gig if we were a twelve-piece band, say.

Eh?

When I'm elsewhere it can continue to not have the passwords to anyone else's wifi.

I don't own one of them, but I would surely be able to instruct my router to put it in jail like I can every other device.

LAN-only.

Indeed.

"All your work is instantly synced to the cloud"

Ugh. Nope nope nope.

But now maybe sounds like I could turn that off and just rsync the files to my Debian tower.

That is more win.

You borrow some money, buy a house, do it up, sell it for more, pay off the debt with some left over for your trouble.

That's using debt as a tool to make more money than you could have made if you didn't have access to credit to buy the house.

Or you borrow some money, build a car-factory, sell some cars, pay off the debt, and then have an income stream you couldn't have had without having access to credit to pay to build the car-factory.

Was just thinking about how I'm nearly going to be getting the payoff from not playing any No Man's Sky until there's a VR version.

And here's another proceduraly generated universe that pips it to the post.

Have you used the VR system? Looks like some of that UI in the video wouldn't work without a mouse/keyboard. How much of the system is VRable?

Looks like it's just rocks and light too, right? No pretend life?

Yep.

Hadn't noticed Internal had disappeared, but indeed it has. Suppose there's not really any need for it with Eevee existing now.

The new renderer, Eevee, is brilliant and fast and is only one of the many great improvements to what was already one of my favourite bits of software.

Some of the best open-source desktop software that there is.

Usually if there's some news story that people are talking about and I dunno what the story is about I'll do a Google News search on it to find out.

Often can't do a normal google search coz then it mostly shows reference and history rather than latest news story.

Has it though? Does nobody else use a file-browser any more? I'm mostly command-line but even I use a file-browser fairly often.

Cool, good to know. Cheers.

Yep, also using an external charger to keep mine going.

My batteries are swelling. I suspect it's no longer safe really.

:-?

Oh, man, I forgot it had that FM-Transmitter. That was so cool.

So many of us miss that phone.

I am finding Flesky much better than any of the swyping keyboards.

I installed it mostly so I could customize the backdrop, but I stayed because those few added gestures make prose input so much more efficient.

Still entirely awful and terrible for writing code though.

Delete the stupid Gif-Keyboard plugin, add in the "OMW" one for common-phrases-shortcuts (then build lots of templates), add the copy/paste bar, and the numbers row.

I like the fireworks-noises plugin too, audible feedback is helpful[1], but wish it sounded more like Ziggy off of Quantum Leap.

They appear to have ignored my suggestions on their forums to make it sound that way, and can't see a way to make my own plugin.

[1] - A feature of my S7 that nobody I've ever noticed talk about online is the ability to control the volume so easily just by putting your thumb over the speaker as you hold the phone. The fireworks noises are basically muted that way if you're trying to type in public ;)

I continued ranting FWIW: https://dalliance.net/vPre2/phone-keyboards

Yep.

I miss that keyboard.

I don't think I could have used it to write code, though I never tried very hard coz it was so frustrating. Practice would have helped.

But I could and did use it to write and edit long-form prose.

It's way better than a touch-screen for shelling in and fixing server issues when you're stuck at a party away from keyboard.

Actual code writing tends to mean using lots of symbols though, and while the N900 keyboard was better than a touch screen, both make you want to rip open your skull and put the wires in directly in frustration.

I miss that keyboard.

When I had that keyboard, the best email-interface was still Mutt over a terminal. You could use Vim! Type without looking! It was ace.

That phone had the best microphone out of any I've ever owned by a clear mile too. Certainly the only one that could stand up to being used in the band practice-room without just distorting to hell coz of the volume.

I still use it for that, for video-recording band-practise, cos nothing else ever came close. The USB port broke and now can only transfer files with WI-FI and have to use an external battery charger, and all my batteries are swelling slightly and really ought to be retired.

But I don't have anything else that will actually work for it.

is there even a proper way to measure how good a language is?

Nope.

I mean.

They're all Turning Complete (except for the ones that deliberately aren't), and they're often good at expressing different types of problems.

So depends what you're trying to do.

Trouble is, it so often turns out you didn't really know what you were trying to do till you were nearly done doing it and then you're stuck with what you picked.

PHP is pretty good for building website prototypes, and can now handle the scale as they grow too really.

But "Good" depends on what you're trying to do, and what tools you already are running anyway.

Is there a way to measure how good a spanner is compared to a hammer?

I've refused to sign employment contracts which push all "IP" into the employers ownership saying things like "You don't get to own my graphic-novel or my band's songs or whatever just coz you pay me to write some web-app"

I've never had them refuse to amend that clause in the face of that. Maybe it's different outside the UK.

If they did refuse to amend, I'd continue the job hunt basically. I probably don't wanna work for a company that inflexible anyway.

Also, contracting works well for owning your own IP. Contractor clients appreciate you have other clients too and don't usually even try to demand exclusive ownership of the product of your mind.