I think if Starfield had come out 10 years ago it would have wowed people and been a classic. But now it just seems dated when you have other games doing RPG better (Cyberpunk 2077, Witcher 3, Baldurs Gate 3) and open world space better (No Mans Sky).

Starfield doesnt do RPG as good as those games, nor does it do open world space as well as No Mans Sky. I’ve heard it described as being as wide as an ocean but as deep as a puddle, and that doesnt seem far off to me.

I really hope Bethesda have paid attention and dont make the same kind of mistakes with Elder Scrolls VI. Big and empty is not the way to go.

Yeah the poster talking about “coding” is talking a bit of nonsense. “Coding” here is slang for “code blue” which is an American medical euphemism for cardiac arrest or medical emergency. Code blue is partially used to not cause alarm with patients (for example if tanoyed or if people overheard staff) and medical staff are familiar with it because its common in the US system. “Coding” is just a slang that medical staff say to each other and is a quasi medical term; its not an official term and would not be written in peoples notes for example.

And it is not an universal term. In the UK we call a cardiac arrest a cardiac arrest and put out an “arrest call”. It is unambiguous and doesnt fall into a trap of creating other “codes” that become confusing. Similarly we have Trauma Calls for trauma teams and so on.

Some US hospitals apparently use a range of codes like code purple, code white, code gray etc. To my knowledge its not even standardised in the US or often between nearby hospitals (although code blue wouldn’t have other meanings). I wouldn’t be surprised if some US hospitals also don’t use code blue at all anymore because it is unnecessarily ambiguous.

Surely this is an pointless exercise? A leader who lost their own seat beibg parachuted into another seat will just be attacked constantly. “Couldn’t even win their own seat” will be the constant riposte, and his own authority in his own party will be severely undermined.

And if its anything like UK politics, voters dont like being taken for granted and asked to vote for candidates who don’t even live in the constituency. I doubt even his own party’s voters will be delighted as this.

Edit: Also this made me laugh:

“An unstoppable movement has grown under [Poilievre’s] leadership, and I know we need Pierre fighting in the House of Commons to hold the Liberal minority government to account,” he said.

Seemed pretty stoppable to me.

I’m not sure this true - PDF is an open standard. The issue isn’t generally with layout and reproducibility - a good PDF maker and a good reader will give you an accurate representation of how it looks on all devices once the PDF is created.

Certainly there isn’t a dedicated FOSS tool for make PDFs; Libre Office and Inkscape do a decent job but not perfect which may be what you’re referring to. And they’re not dedicated PDF makers plus the real problem is building fillable forms and signature tools.

But there is a proprietary alternative called Master PDF that is a dedicated and supports all the PDF standard features I believe; one perpetual license is $80 compared to Adobe subscription based charging. I’m not aware of other options myself but they may exist. But it’s a viable alternative to the “adobe tax”.

Also of course if you have Office 365 from Microsoft, you can use Word to export docs to PDF reliably (in my experience). Obviously as far as you can get from FOSS, but it is an option on Linux via web browser if you have it from work for example; at least you don’t have to pay Adobe but it’s scraping the bottom of the barrel for this threat I know!

Firefox can do basic annotating, adding text and adding pictures but it can’t make a new PDF from scratch.

You may be confusing Adobe Acrobat Reader with Adobe Acrobat? Full Acrobat is the proprietary tool to make a PDF file from scratch including some of the more complex functions.

PDF is an open standard and has been for a while, so there are now plenty of alternatives for most of the functions. LibreOffice Draw and Inkscape can do a lot of PDF creation functions but not all. There are also “print to PDF” options to create basic PDF documents too.

However some of the more niche functions are not widely supported or well supported; and there isn’t really any opensource dedicated PDF maker that I’m aware of. Layout tools are abundant but I think it’s things like building forms and document signing that is less easily replicated. There is Master PDF - a fully functional PDF maker which is proprietary and available for Linux; it $80 for a perpetual license. I’m not aware of any other alternatives myself.

“Anyone” is a bit of a stretch. I think this is an example of how fragmented media and experience has become.

Selling millions of copies in impressive but there are billions of people in the world. And there is also new stuff being released all the time in the worlds of music, tv, film, books and gaming. All of this is jockeying for media attention and peoples attention.

These things were important to you as they were part of your formative years or had some emotional resonance., so it makes sense you are aware of them, but your lived experiences aren’t the same as others.

For example, I’m a gamer, I’ve heard to Trine but never played it.12,000 reviews on Steam is pretty impressive. But its a 16 year old game and when it comes to older games there are huge titles like Skyrim or GTAV that dominate attention still from that eraor earlier.

The Road to Perdition is a decent film but have a look at a list of Oscar winners - how many have you actually seen? The Oscars isn’t representative of films that were widely popular but rather films that were popular or important to people on Hollywood itself, or to the movie makers. It won one Oscar for cinematography.

And it grossed $180m - not bad but if you look a box office mojo the top 3 films in 2002 were Lord of the Rings 2 towers, Harry Potter and Spiderman. Road to Perdition was the 25th biggest film of the year, and bigger films includes Gangs of New York, Catch me if you can and Minority report. It was a decent film in a year of bigger films commerically.

As for Everclear, sorry to say I’ve never heard of them. Looking them up on wikipedia, they didn’t seem to troubled the charts outside the US and Canada, and for some reason New Zealand. And they did well in the Alt Music charts but they never broke the top 10 in the popular charts. So they are a bit niche even if they were popular in their own right and did well.

All of us have different things we love or were formative for us, and even the “mainstream” that gets the attention is still really only a fraction of what’s going on.

And I’d add the nature of taste and preference is so different that the stuff that gets big and crosses over into a mega hit is either generic/inoffensive commerical slop backed up with massive marketing or rarely so extraordinarily good that it spreads through word of mouth. There are so many gems out their like Trine or Everclear but most people will never come across them. Keep spreading the word about the things you love so others can enjoy them too.

The guy is ranting about a criminal investigation into why his polling numbers are so low. He’s quite literally a demented old man. I think he really isn’t rational enough to see that that he is harming the man he wants to win.

Second for The Rest is History. Its on all major podcast platforms and on YouTube. It has two hosts who take it in turns to talk about a topic while the other asks questions. Its full of gentle banter, and light humour but deleves in depth into topics. Some topics are covered in a single episode, others in depth in multi part series.

Its got a huge backlog of episodes, clearly labeled by topic and covers the full breadth of history. The two hosts are British but it covers global history, and it doesnt have biases. It does a “warts and all” approach to any topic.

Strongly recommend it.

The removal of the black gradient at the bottom is a plus.

Putting the controls in their own grey capsules so they still standout is a plus.

The moving of the volume button to the right is a negative.

I dont like change just for changes sake, but in fairness some of this is a good idea and a welcome design shift. I just hopebthey move the volume button back as having on the left with the main controls is pretty widespread and common design.

As per your other thread, incase others are interested. I dont own one but on searching options seem to be limited. It can be jail broken and Kodi installed.

That may be a jumping off point for doing more but I can’t see that anyone has successfully installed linux on it for example.

https://github.com/NSSpiral/Blackb0x

So I dont own one but was interested in what could be done.

As far as I can see the 3rd gen model is less versatile than the 1st and 2nd, because its so locked down and has very limited storage. Its more like an iPhone than a PC.

However apparently it can be jailbroken and Kodi installed onto it: https://github.com/NSSpiral/Blackb0x

Jail breaking means “unlocking” the restrictions apple put on the is on the device so you can do more with it.

But this project is last updated in 2021 and from the looks of it online, fundamentally there isn’t much more that can be done. Jail breaking it would be a first step to do anything with it if you want to experiment.

Kodi would certainly give it a new lease of life but that still keeps it as a media consumption device. Kodi is an open source media tool that has a good TV friendly interface, and a huge range of plugins for streaming video and audio (legally but also illegally; kodi itself is perfectly legit and legal but there are plenty of plugins that essentially allow media piracy). You could then sell it on eBay if its working? Someone might want it even if only for cheap?

Other than that, recycle it? If your local refuse centre doesnt recycle it some companies might?

Travel Agents. I remember growing up they were all over the place and people had to go to them to book flights and hotels or buy package holidays.

They’re all but gone now. I’m vaguely aware there may still be some specialist ones left catering to elderly boomers?

Its an entire business and career path thats completely gone, replaced by websites and at a push generic call centres (some people still book over the phone I guess?)

This 100%. Tesla remains massively overvalued, and it’s on the basis that in the future the company will dominate with self drive cars. It’s vaporware on a scale never before seen.

Tesla has fundamentally flawed self-drive technology because someone stripped out essential tech to save money. Lidar is essential to self driving cars but some genius decided they knew better than their own engineers and the self drive industry as a whole and instead made their vehicles and tech camera only. That genius? Elon fucking Musk.

The guy’s an idiot. The company is an overpriced joke.

Mine is about the same. Totally forgot it included by Steam Deck and my Index. Makes me feel a little better!

But then when i look at the number of unplayed and unfinished games in my library I feel bad again.

And then I feel worse remembering I also have a large GOG library which isn’t in that Steam spend and also lots of unplayed games…

And the company remains massively overvalued despite the recent falls in value. It has a long way to fall yet.

It honestly seems very unpredictable. Anecdotally the worst behaviour seems to have been at the most republican states but not exclusively.

For example the Australian who had a work visa and lived in the US for years flew in to Texas where it was arbitrarily nullified. There are plenty of stories of people crossing southern and northern borders and being detained by ICE. Thats included British, German, Australian and French cirizens that ive seen in the UK press coverage anyway.

As a US citizen you shouldnt have an issue but I’d probably travel through a major hub like JFK in New York to be safer. I wouldn’t re-enter through Republican states like Florida, Texas, nor probably Washington DCs airports. Obviously travel on your US passport.

You should he OK as a US citizen but it does look like there is a breakdown in the rule of law in the US. People imagine that means riots and the police not able to keep control, but in this case its the government and government agencies doing whatever they want and the legal system unable to stop them.

I’m a UK citizen and am not intending to travel to the US - I often cone for a major conference but having seen what happened to the French scientist who had his phone searched and then was denied entry for criticising Trump I won’t be risking it. I’m sure a lot of other UK and Europeans feel the same way.

Sadly the only 100% safe option for you is to not leave the country. Its madness as youre a US citizen but at this point things are still going through the courts and its not clear where this will stop.

Also they dont “owe” the US anything. Trump has a cretinous understanding of economics.

This is just Mafia like extortion. It doesnt really matter now if/when these tariffs are undone - Trump has totally destroyed the US reputation as a reliable ally and trade partmer.

No deal with the US is worth the paper its written on, as everything is dependent on the whims of one person.

Presidential systems are sources of weakness and instabilty it seems. They’re no better than monarchs, and the whole system can easily be twisted into dictatorship. Look at Russia and now the US.

Windows intuitively making you jump through 7 steps to not have an online account. The reality sadly is most Windows users will just be pushed by Microsoft to use a Microsoft account to access their own PC.

Only 1% of Windows users who are IT people and enthusiasts will find out how to avoid being forced into internet based accounts.

You can’t directly convert the app to make it natively android; android is too different for that. The app is built to use the whole android OS, not just the kernel (which is forked from linux). That means the android app is designed to run on mobile processors (usually ARM), and will be making calls to the android OS for everything.

You can’t repackage it directly as a linux app. However there are emulators and translation layers that cannbebused to run android apps within linux.

Waydroid for example allows android apps to run using android containers in linux. Anbox is also a container approach to running android apps. Both these approaches essentially translate for the android apps, and reduce the overhead asnthey dont have to emulate everything and can directly pass instruction to the linux host system. You can also use full virtualization to emulate an android device and run a whole virtual device. This would have a bit more overhead though.

I’m not aware of tools that can be used to compile android apps from source in to linux apps. It could be done in theory but would be complex due to the degree of translation of android APIs needed. Again compiling into some kind of container approach (I. E. Compile to include anbox or waydroid) might be doable but would bloat the app. I dont think there is the demand for that kink of approach when building in containers into Linux (and Windows) allows direct reuse of the android apks.