efaardvark

Not a recent pic, but once while hiking I caught a wandering rainbow... (zoomed version..)

It does look interesting. Pretty sure I won't be playing it tho. For one thing it isn't available natively for linux. For another, Epic is one of the places promoting it, and given their track record they'll likely try to do one of their exclusive deals that makes it unavailable anywhere else. Epic doesn't have a linux client anyway. I'll just pretend it doesn't exist until/unless I see it somewhere like GoG. (And yes, Steam is also advertising it, but I know of at least one person who pre-ordered a game - mech warrior 5 - through Steam and are STILL waiting on a date for their game, even though it has been advertised through Epic for more than a year now, because Epic pulled a last-minute exclusivity deal. Can't get their money back from Valve either because Valve says they will release it on Steam, eventually. If Epic is involved in distribution then I'm not going anywhere near it. Just one of many reasons I don't pre-order games, and think exclusivity deals on content are extremely anti-consumer.)

Experimenting with kdenlive (first time I've used it) on some footage from my KSP play. This clip is from the blooper reel. Everything was going fine until... a very Kerbal moment. Revert! Revert!

More KSP!! Just kind of grinding for cash, but I managed to upgrade most of the buildings in the KSC (Kerbal Space Center) including the tracking station. This means I have maneuver nodes! I always just upgraded the tracking station before I did anything else so I never really realized it, but after trying to get to the Mün without them a couple days ago.. manuever nodes are underrated! Being able to plan exactly where you're going BEFORE lighting the engine .. what a concept! I also did a tiny bit of minecraft. I loaded a snapshot of 1.15 to play with the bees and behives, but I only played for about 10-20 minutes. Found a hive, got stung by the bees. Honey seems like it will be a good food. Couldn't figure out what to do with honeycomb though. Getting it makes bees angry and they'll come after you and sting you, so it must be useful for something, but I couldn't figure out what. The bees died too, just like they do in real life when they sting someone. Kinda sad, actually. There should be some way to get honey/comb without getting stung.

Success! Always nice to see the parachute deploy properly at the end of the mission...

I did it! Well, I landed successfully on the Mun. Currently roving around gathering science. Found one of the special new surface items from the Breaking Ground DLC. First time I found one since I bought it. Unfortunately I don't have the science instruments to get anything from it. Oh well. Now if I can just avoid crashing the rover long enough to find another biome, then take off and make it back to Kerbin. Onward!

No, you don't need an nvidea card that costs more than your computer to do raytracing in minecraft. It is possible even on AMD's "old" RX580 (though the alpha software still has bugs), and their new RX5700 seems to work fine. That said, and while I have to admit that it does make MC look awesome, I'm not going to buy even a $400 GPU just to play MC! Not a big fan of bleeding-edge driver/software bugs either. Maybe in a couple years when the next-gen cards come out, all the bugs have been worked out, and the GPU prices on the now-current get knocked down to a couple hundred $$ because they're now "old"... (Sorry for the delay in in responding.. haven't had much free time lately so didn't see your post.) I'm not sure there's any sure-fire way to make it interesting. MC is a sandbox game so it helps to be able to come up with your own goals and side-arcs. While there is something of a goal in things like the ender dragon and the end cities I find that I get more enjoyment out of implementing the wild ideas I get along the way. I also find that it is more fun as a social thing. You do have to watch out for people who are just into griefing though. If I can find some good people to play it with then I tend to get more enjoyment out of it however. (I actually wish that the devs would work more on this aspect. If they had an in-game voice chat it would help a lot IMHO, especially if they spent as much time on rendering ambient sounds as on - for instance - ray-traced graphics. Imagine caves that sound like caves, monsters in caves, with a bunch of fellow players getting creeped out listening to monsters in caves, in VR... ) I also play on "hard" a lot, sometimes even permadeath, just to make things more interesting. I get that's not an option for people who don't like survival mode.. just my prefs. Some of the new content helps too. I too got jaded and stopped playing for a number of years. I think it was just after horses were introduced, which would have put it sometime around 2013. I didn't start up again until relatively recently with the aquatic update. (So ~2017.) If you haven't played it recently there's a lot of new stuff to discover at least, and the pace of introduction of new stuff seems to have picked up in recent years. Some of the new stuff does make it more challenging, as well as provide more opportunity for creativity. The whole village/raiders dynamic makes finding and protecting a village/villagers a nice side-arc/distraction for instance, if you're into that sort of thing. And of course, newer hardware makes the game better too. The first system I ran minecraft on could barely run it at single-digit frame rates even at a render distance of 4 or 5. Amazing at the time, but MC at that level doesn't have much holding power. Now I can run at 50fps even at a render distance above 30. Combine that with the new biome/content and it makes just wandering around and looking at the scenery a lot more enjoyable. Things like ray-tracing are continuing and enhancing that aspect. (Again, if you're into that sort of thing.) Better hardware also makes the game more responsive and therefore easier to control and less frustrating to people that aren't e-sports gods. I still get a bit of lag occasionally, but nothing like the situation where the screen freezes for a minute and when it unfreezes you're dead sort of issues I had in hardware eras past. Also, it sounds like this doesn't apply in your case but I could never get into the handheld ("Bedrock") version. If you haven't tried the full desktop version then give that a shot before giving up. (The java version works great on linux btw.) hth...

Today and tomorrow I'm burning off some comp time from work so I'm finally getting back to my KSP "career" game. Only I think I'm pushing a bit too hard. I just started this game so I don't have ANY tracking station upgrades. No upgrades m/eans no patched conics, maneuver nodes, or encounter indicators. In fact, no planning aids at all, basically just orbit ellipses and flying by the seat of one's pants. Nevertheless I took 4 contracts, 2 of which require going to the Mun. One is "just" an orbit & return. That would be hard enough without the course-plotting aids, but I've done that much before. The other one requires landing. Landing isn't too hard - assuming I can make orbit in the first place - but since the other contract requires returning the spacecraft that means I have to take off again, orbit, transfer back to Kerbin (Earth), and land. That means I can't just land a simple probe to transmit a temperature reading and then leave it. I need extra fuel for the trip home at least. I need to "soft" land in spite of the extra weight/mass. And I need to bring the extra mass of stuff like a heat shield and parachute that are useless for landing on an airless moon like the Mun, but critical for getting back safely on the ground at home. Ordinarily I'd want to break the spacecraft up into sections designed for the different mission phases, or maybe even do two missions, but I think I can do it in one monolithic one. If so then that means all the cost of what would have been the second mission becomes profit! Unfortunately I'm early in the tech tree and don't have things like docking ports and fuel transfers available. I don't even have landing gear! Or at least not the heavy-duty stuff that would stand up to the relatively massive lander I'll have to put down. I do have some rover wheels with good enough suspension to work. That complicates things even more, but there was a contract to test that part and the money was good so why not? In for a penny, in for a pound. Right? It does give me the opportunity to drive around and collect more science points as well. I feel like the game has given me a lot of rope to hang myself with here. That said it actually all seems to be working according to plan. I built a rover/lander with enough power and an antenna to drive around a bit and transmit bunches of science back to Kerbin. Assuming I can land it on the Mun of course. I managed to launch it successfully, and even get a Munar encounter before I had to stop for the night. (Getting too old for all-nighters. ) It even looks like I somehow still have enough delta-v to orbit. land, take off, and come home. I put a hefty heat shield on the part that comes back so I don't have to be too accurate with the return trajectory. (As long as it hits the atmosphere and not the planet I should be ok.) I should get gobs of money for facility upgrades and enough science points to unlock quite a chunk of the tech tree, especially if I can land close enough to the border of two biomes so that the rover can explore both before having to come back. That's a lot of unhatched chicken-counting but we'll see. So far, so good. Hopefully I can finish this mission and retire all these contracts tomorrow before I have to go back to work. (Ugh.)

Kipling was my first thought as well.

All of them. I don't like it when a book or an anime or a game ends, especially if it is a good one. Sometimes I'll leave the last chapter or the last episode for a week or more before I finish it. More of a personality quirk than a difficulty issue tho..

I'm thinking that with the KSP2 announcement I need to somehow find time to get back to my recently-started 1.7 career game so I can finish it before the new version drops. 2020 will be here before we know it, and there will be distractions like Christ mass-shopping between here and there if I don't get going on it soon.

Reading the KSP2 announcement.... OMG!! Nice shoutout to Shaun Esau there at the end of the trailer btw. Gives me at least a little hope that this will keep the KSP fanbase/roots in mind and not just be a monetization of the franchise by Take Two.

Happy birthday @Wedgy

I often use it too. Well, on the latest Ubuntu it is called "LibreOffice", but whatever... same code base. I'm actually not a big fan of such huge, complicated apps, but it is certainly comparable to MSFT's Office suite if you're doing typical word-processing, spreadsheet, and presentation stuff. I also use tons of other "open" software. Far more I'm sure than anyone (including me) would be interested in enough to see a full list, but things like ffmpeg, imagemagick, ghostview, gimp, gcc (and the rest of the binutils), and mysql/mariadb come to mind offhand. Most of this kind of stuff comes with any recent Linux distribution as a standard install option, but it is generally available separately for windows and macs as well.

Not everything on Linux is open-source. AMD has an open driver for their gfx cards (which is one reason I have an AMD GFX card), but Nvidia is still shipping their driver as a proprietary binary blob even as we speak. I've run close-source display drivers from X.org on both redhat and SuSE in the past. I've also used proprietary drivers for things like RAID cards on both Linux and BSD. The "philosophically pure" crowd would obviously want to run FOSS at all levels, and there are certainly benefits to that, but it is also certainly possible to run closed-source stuff on an open-source platform like Linux. Also, BSD unix is open, and far predates Linux. Bell Labs created BSD IN 1977(?) for mainframe hardware. Linux never ran on anything before the Intel 386 came along in '85, and really wasn't anything but Torvald's student computer science project until the 486 CPU's better memory model came along in the late 80s and made it more useful/practical as a general-purpose operating system. That's why I started with BSD, because my old Amiga 3000 used Motorola 68030 processor. The '030 had 32-bit memory addressing and a "proper" MMU that enabled things like a protected supervisor mode for the OS back when the rest of the PC world was still dealing with 16-bit memory accesses through segments and offsets and user programs that could directly access (and thus corrupt) OS memory.

I've been running FOSS almost exclusively since forever. Back in my college days I bought my first computer, a Commodore Amiga 1000, which I eventually upgraded to a 3000. But then the chicken-lips company self-destructed and folded, leaving me with some very capable but orphaned hardware. I took a look at MSFT's W3.1 and Apple's System 7 - the latest and greatest commercial OSs at the time - and decided there had to be something better. Both seemed like a big step backwards from the Amiga's native OS (and hardware). Then I looked into BSD unix, and eventually found a CD containing source code for OpenBSD. It took me 2 weeks to figure out how to bootstrap the system back then, and then 3 days to compile a working kernel for my hardware, but I did it. Wonderful learning experience, and I've been a fan of FOSS ever since. Some time around the 486->Pentium transition a CD of Yggdrasil Linux found it's way into my possession and I built my first "PC" system to run it. Since then I've been running Linux as my main OS on most of my personal systems. (The exceptions being a couple Mac laptops, once Apple saw the light and switched to Darwin "underneath" their MacOS X.) Over the years I've also tried RedHat, SuSE, Ubuntu, and Manjaro at one time or another. I seem to recall I also had a couple iterations of NetBSD in there somewhere. I've actually never even owned a Windows system. Currently I'm running Ubuntu on a (AMD) 2700X CPU in a system w/32GB RAM and an "old" Radeon RX 480 GPU. Recently I got them to install some new Linux systems at work too, replacing some old Sun systems.

Same here.. 120+ degrees in my car in the parking lot after work today.

Gotta be at work early so I really shouldn't be getting interested in anything that's liable to delay my rest but I'm checking out a gameplay 'tubie on the No Man's Sky "Beyond" update as I eat dinner and get ready for bed.

Welcome!

Not just games and anime and manga either. First the Walmart era, then the unholy alliance of Amazon and China have pretty much killed all local shops. I have the same problem with electronics (resistors & capacitors type electronics, not cellphones and computers) and other things. I have to drive 20 miles for a decent "local" electronics store even here in the Los Angeles county metro area. There used to be a "rat shack" (Radio Shack) on almost every corner. I haven't seen a decently-stocked old-school hobby shop - models, paints, balsa wood, brass stock, etc. - around here for years either. I would love to go there someday. Not just for the otaku culture either. There's also a thriving electronics/hacker scene there as well that I could get into. I might never come back.

Yay