captain_aggravated

captain_aggravated , vor 12 Tagen

To expand on this, the rainbow of colors which start at a straw then turn yellow, red, brown and then that vivid blue, are caused by refraction. The oxide layer on the surface is transparent or translucent, and the thickness of the layer determines what wavelength of light it scatters. The hotter it gets, the thicker the oxide layer forms, so you can fairly reliably tell the temperature the metal has been heated to by eye, and you might use different amounts of heating to achieve hard-but-brittle or soft-but-tough.

I've even seen it done by Chris of Youtube channel Clickspring for decorative purposes. It's how he made the steel hardware of his brass clock blue.

Exactly how you temper something the size of a sword using a forge is a bit outside my understanding; I've done it with relatively small bits of drill rod to make lathe tools with a gas torch, but that's about it.

captain_aggravated , vor 12 Tagen

Yeah I referenced Clickspring, when oxidizing a part for decorative purposes he would put the part in a brass tray full of brass shavings apparently to function as a thermal mass so that the color comes out evenly.

captain_aggravated , vor 18 Tagen

Could you imagine the litter box that thing needs?

captain_aggravated , vor 22 Tagen

And it is intentionally horrible. It is how the developers want it.

Lack of a user friendly art suite is a major barrier to Linux adoption.

captain_aggravated , vor einem Monat

beat me to it.

captain_aggravated , vor einem Monat

"My kids never call me anymore. Fukkin' liberals.'

captain_aggravated , vor einem Monat

I refer to that "the devs like it shitty" thing you get out of moderately old FOSS software "GIMP syndrome" because GIMP has it the loudest. A legitimately capable piece of software that you're an idiot for using because good UX is considered a bug by the developers. Best to just let it die in obscurity and create something new from scratch than attempt to fork it.

captain_aggravated , vor einem Monat

I don't think Inkscape has GIMP syndrome; it's my understanding that Inkscape is just missing some features that make it a non-starter rather than a deliberately shit UI.

FreeCAD has GIMP syndrome which hopefully will soon be remedied.

captain_aggravated , vor einem Monat

Both of those statements are categorically false.

captain_aggravated , vor einem Monat

Fun thing I discovered: A lot of DVDs check which region the player is from and play a different warning at the beginning. VHS is analog and linear so that FBI warning is just baked into the video but DVDs can shuffle video on the fly. Fun fact: That's how they got the theatrical edition and the extended edition on one side of one DVD, if you play the standard edition it just skips the added scenes on the fly.

captain_aggravated , vor einem Monat

Way back when I still lived at home, my family had a little game, someone would put in a movie and the first one to guess which movie it was "won." I could often do it from the previews. DVDs spoiled this with their menus. Well, most of them did. Some of them do just start playing the film (or start at the previews).

I recently ripped my whole DVD collection to my NAS because, well, optical drives are going extinct. And I noticed some patterns. DVDs of contemporary movies from early in the format's history were often special events. They had specially designed one-off packaging, lots of extra features, extravagant menus, etc. As you went later in the format's run, packaging became standardized, and especially older pre-DVD movies that were being re-issued on DVD would often just auto-play the movie when inserted. They often had menus that had no animation or music so you could chapter select or toggle the subtitles on but you'd have to stop the movie to see them. Also, TV shows on disc suffered way more from disc rot than movies, I'm guessing the discs themselves were cheaper/worse.

captain_aggravated , vor einem Monat

Okay, who downvoted this? The MPAA?

captain_aggravated , vor einem Monat

Minor suggestion: Do it in winter. Transcoding video like that is a CPU intensive workload, if you're going to pump that much heat out of your PC case you might as well want it.

captain_aggravated , vor einem Monat

A lot of things made it a Winter project for me: wanting to assist my furnace rather than fight my air conditioner in the Carolina heat was one thing, also my work slows down a lot in winter, not as many projects to do, so I had plenty of time to mess with it over winter. Plus, in summer I keep my house at 74, in winter I keep it at 70, It's amazing how much that makes a difference in CPU temperatures.

captain_aggravated , vor einem Monat

sigh would you look at all that stuff...

captain_aggravated , vor einem Monat

You have to click? I turn on my networked printer and every Linux machine on my network sets it up whether I wanted them to or not.

captain_aggravated , vor einem Monat

An Epson XP-830. Full disclosure: When it was brand new it was a severe pain in the ass because it wasn't supported by CUPS yet, I had to go out to Epson's website and download a driver in .rpm fromat and install it with alien. Bought it a couple months before I abandoned Windows for Linux and had to make it work. After about a year CUPS suddenly knew what to do with it and it's Just Worked(tm) ever since.

captain_aggravated , vor einem Monat

Does that refresh take place across the entire eye simultaneously or is each rod and/or cone doing its own thing?

captain_aggravated , vor 2 Monaten

Windows constantly says "this could harm your computer." Just about any time you install software it does.

Remember when Linus Sebastian blew up Pop!_OS? As a Windows user, "This is likely to break your computer, do not do this unless you absolutely know what you're doing. To proceed, type "Yes, do as I say."" is something to walk right past.

captain_aggravated , vor 2 Monaten

I've done big forensic write-ups of it in the past and mapped it to the FAA's accident chain model. It just so happened that he was using a distro with a weird forked DE (Pop!_OS) and just so happened that the version of the Steam package in the apt cache from when the install image was made was bugged in such a way that it would uninstall Xorg, and it just so happened that Pop!_OS didn't run an apt update when launching their GUI app manager.

When Linus saw "failed to install Steam" he turned the petulant child up to 11 and started bitching about how you always have to use the terminal in Linux, and instead of googling the error message to find out "do an update and try again" he found a page that told him how to sudo apt install steam. Most instructions like that tell you do to an apt update before an apt install, so I don't know if he either aggressively skimmed, deliberately ignored the update command because he's used to how painful Windows updates are, or if he found a source that didn't include it.

APT spat out a lot of stdout about all the packages it was going to remove, with a highlighted plaintext warning at the end which he failed to read or failed to heed.

Linus' bad attitude was a major contributing factor to the incident.

captain_aggravated , vor 2 Monaten

I think it played a part.

captain_aggravated , vor 2 Monaten

There has to be a level of "competently trained user" in there we can strive for. I think we were getting there about the time I was in high school circa 2003, where every last one of us could format an MLA essay in MS Word and do an autosum in Excel.

Something that put me off of Microsoft products for a decade before I switched to Linux was their constant rearranging of the UI, requiring users to re-learn how to do basic tasks that worked just fine.

captain_aggravated , vor 2 Monaten

One other fairly important detail in that 99% off the shelf parts 1% copyrighted BIOS: IBM contracted with Microsoft for the operating system, PC-DOS. And for some reason this deal was non-exclusive, so if someone else built compatible hardware, you could just buy a copy from Microsoft without the IBM branding on it and it'll run. Which is exactly what Eagle, and then Compaq, did.

captain_aggravated , vor 2 Monaten

When it comes to line breaks on Lemmy, one is none, two is one.

captain_aggravated , vor 2 Monaten

Yeah I'm pretty sure PC standing for Personal Computer was at one point a trademark of IBM. The IBM 5150 PC launched into a world full of different and incompatible microcomputers, even those that shared processors weren't software compatible with each other. Hell, one of the things that sank Commodore was nearly none of their own machines were compatible with each other; most code written for a VIC20 wouldn't run on a C64, etc.

It was IBM designing a machine from off the shelf components, buying an OS from Microsoft, and relying only on the copyright on the BIOS to keep the machine proprietary that led to their ubiquity even 40 years later. Compaq wrote a non-infringing BIOS and was able to put to market a machine compatible with the PC's software library. And now, for the first time in microcomputer history, you had a de facto industry standard. Build an 8086 machine with ISA slots, write or license a BIOS that MS-DOS can talk to, and now you too can run that growing software library.

This was not a decision anyone made. The 8086 was quite literally slapped together because the engineers didn't think it was going to be much of a big deal, IBM didn't set out to create a standard that would stand for decades after they gave up all involvement with it. The modern x86 PC was metastasized as much as it was designed.

captain_aggravated , vor 2 Monaten

So I just learned this mere seconds ago messing around in the terminal because of this thread. You know toilet the big text program in the terminal that does kind of ascii art text? A major difference between it and figletis it can do colors, and there are two color presets guaranteed to be available. Try toilet "hello there" --gay

captain_aggravated , vor 2 Monaten

To turn on your new space heater, open a terminal and type dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/null

captain_aggravated , vor 2 Monaten

Universe was the Sci-Fi SyFy channel seeing Battlestar Galactica's success and demanding a "grimmer, darker Stargate show." It sucks pink eye.

captain_aggravated , vor 2 Monaten

So here's the thing about Stargate canon:

There was the movie. Roland Emmerich planned to make a couple of sequels turning it into a trilogy, but that never happened. Bill McCay wrote a short series of novels based on the premise of those sequels through the late 90's.

The TV series Stargate SG-1 treats the movie as like 96.7% canon. There are some very minor things directly retconned, for example in the movie the nameless planet they go to is said to be in the "Kaliem galaxy" where in the show the same place is named Abydos and is located in the Milky Way galaxy, but beyond a few details like that it is treated as established fact.

TV show picks up from where the movie left off, then takes a 27° right turn and heads off in its own direction compared to where the books went. It kind of feels like the writers were given nothing but the theatrical cut of the movie to study with no other context or creators' notes or anything, and then told to make a TV show out of it. And then they did a very good job with this assignment.

You know how some shows have a first season problem? Like, Babylon 5's first season is a little rough and it really gets good in Season 2, or how you should introduce someone to Star Trek TNG at Season 3? SG-1 has some early installment weirdness in the first six episodes or so but they're watchable, and then by mid-season 1 it finds its groove.

captain_aggravated , vor 2 Monaten

I don't think SG-1 started off as rough as, say, Star Trek TNG did. They were making overall good television even in the first episode of SG-1.

The first two seasons especially had the Torchwood problem of trying to be very emphatically a show for adults, which is why there's that infamous full frontal scene in the pilot episode. I think they realized that there's money in syndication on basic cable so they produced most of the rest of the show to kind of a PG rating which stabilized the tone.

captain_aggravated , vor 3 Monaten

There need to be open source "smart" devices. Like, I've read and edited the source code running on my 3D printer. I was able to do that in my own home because it's got an Arduino Mega for a motherboard.

captain_aggravated , vor 3 Monaten

To me that just reads as "development has ended."

Which it kinda has for Factorio, because their current development branch is unreleased, the whole 2.0 expansion pack thing.

captain_aggravated , vor 5 Monaten

I was struggling to get an OS installed on my cousin's dell at one point. This machine came with that Intel Optane...shit with a spinning rust hard drive, I was replacing it with a straight-up NVMe SSD. Windows would get well into the install process, and then bomb out with an error that was something like 0x123a039f34798cd76eb1 UNDEFINED ERROR. This of course was in the Windows installer, which isn't a functioning desktop environment, so I had to type that manually into my laptop to google it, and got very few results.

I tried Linux Mint, and it apparently had the same problem. It said something like "BIOS Storage config error. Unable to mount file system. It may be that such and such setting is incorrect in the BIOS. See this page for further details." The last sentence was a hyperlink to a wiki that discussed the problem, which opened in Firefox because this installer runs in a live environment, AND IT HAD A QR CODE LINK IN THE ERROR MESSAGE to the same page so you could easily copy the link to an external device. Y'all that was a white glove concierge deep tissue massage of an error message.

captain_aggravated , vor 7 Monaten

:q! or :exit or :quit or ZZ...there's lots of ways to quit Vim.

captain_aggravated , vor 7 Monaten

I think you might call me an FDR New Deal socialist. I'm in favor of things like social security and government public works projects.

It has been my experience as a lifelong American that "capitalism" is just feudalism, or a desperate attempt to return to feudalism. "Capitalists" aka the ruling class have all the "capital" aka enough resources to actually accomplish anything. When any normal citizen wants to start a business, they have to beg a capitalist for a loan of some type, possibly selling "stock" aka a loan that never pays to term, allowing the capitalists to leech off of your profits basically forever. Wages get lower, costs get higher, all to funnel as much wealth to a small upper class. The myth of the meritocracy, where he with the best ideas, the best inventions, the most innovation, the product most in demand is he one that succeeds...doesn't hold up in a world of patent trolling or felony contempt of business model we're currently in. Doesn't stop them from parroting it to keep the little people quiet though.

Meanwhile I'm not aware of a "communist" nation that ever actually was. I am unaware of a nation that has ever actually operated per "to each according to his ability, from each according to his need" workers owning the means of production etc. They've all turned out as dictatorships with command economies. I mean, show me a country where the workers' unions are actually the ones in power. No, you've got the likes of North Korea, Russia and China building empty skyscrapers, building entire cities that sit empty, demolishing brand new apartment complexes because the floors aren't safe to walk on. The government told us to build it, so we built it. I get punished if I don't, and I don't get rewarded for doing a good job. The man that wrote Tetris didn't earn a single kopek.

Neither seem to actually work long-term.

captain_aggravated , vor 9 Monaten

In the time I have been a Linux gamer, it has gone from "here is a list of games that work in Linux" to "here is a list of games that do not work in Linux." Which some dictionaries define as "progress."

captain_aggravated , vor 9 Monaten

I started out in 2014, and pretty much what I did was look to see if there was a Steam logo on the Steam store page to indicate Linux compatibility. With Proton in the last few years, I just don't really worry about it. I will say my tastes have just about always lined up with the kinds of games, the kinds of studios, that are likely to publish for Linux, the nerd shit like Kerbal Space Program and Factorio. I don't play Call of Fifa, Modern Fortnite or whatever.