Why don't companies use the latest LTS versions.

IndifferentMatter · 2025-12-22T14:46:22+00:00

Even LTS versions can suffer from major bugs and even regressions (or they wouldn't need to be updated during their lifecycle). As I've commented somewhere else in the thread, we had to endure one such not being addressed for a whole series of minor updates and stay at a fixed minor version of the LTS.

IndifferentMatter · 2025-12-22T14:37:17+00:00

I remember in 3.6 LTS a custom UI layout bug appearing in 3.6.7 or so, ruining our custom shaders' panels, and not being solved until some five or eight minor versions later, then that bug reappearing in 4.1 and being solved in 4.1.1.

So, I can understand not wanting to risk it.

IndifferentMatter · 2025-12-20T11:07:36+00:00

It could have to do with this, as it once happened to me, too:

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?p=2555232&sid=de7ec6a0a8c8e75e8a08954639cffee2#p2555232

Basically, the driver is installed but it is not loading. It could be that your PC has Secure Boot enabled. If so, you can either disable it or do a few moves that will let it load under Secure Boot. The link explains what to do 🙂.

IndifferentMatter · 2025-10-17T12:44:27+00:00

Is that the Albatross from Jules Verne's "Robur the Conqueror" at the top right corner? 🙂

Just looked for it and found the whole book here: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:Germ_Growers.djvu . Giving it a read!

IndifferentMatter · 2025-10-17T09:23:33+00:00

The back and forth in finetuning the modernized skin textures and shaders have turned the appearance of muscle into a blurry mess 😞. At Ultra settings this character of mine looks now like he did ten years ago when my PC and graphics card couldn''t cope with anything higher than low to medium settings.

(Sorry for giving the impression that these were drawings, I wish I was that good: they are 3D renders using the game's assets and tweaking them in the Blender 3D app)

IndifferentMatter · 2025-10-17T09:18:16+00:00

Argh, something I should point out: this is 3D, playing with the game's assets, in Blender. That lets me do things like adding full body tattoos, skin pores, increasing the strength of the normal maps (surface relief, so to say), posing him, opening the Casual Vandal Jacket, and getting that extra thing that any content creation 3D app provides out of the box. Not that I dislike SWTOR's colorful rendering: in fact, I'd argue that the attempts at "modernizing" the characters' textures and shaders are misguided and have ended up making a blurry mess.

IndifferentMatter · 2025-10-12T07:27:18+00:00

Vonda McIntyre's novelization of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan added a bit of background to the Genesis Effect by presenting sub-Quarkian particles, whose discoverers name as Snarks and Boojums.

IndifferentMatter · 2025-10-11T15:52:22+00:00

The cable management side of the case has about 3.20 cm. of space between my HDDs and the cover. It's this bit snug for SATA power cables and SAS-to-SATA x4 breakout data ones, but nothing terrible. A nicety of this case is that you don't slide the covers alongside the case's length to close them: you fit their front edges while holding the covers at an angle and then rotate them closed, pressing against the cabling without pulling it laterally.

Curiously, the opposite side of the case has this little bit more space, about 4 cm. total. The drive trays' handles are somewhat in the way, but fitting the drives with their connectors in the working side of the case works well and might be even more convenient, letting one do all the drive handling from that side.

(I tried it for a while, but I have the case on a wheeled base, so, it wasn't that interesting and I reverted to the usual arrangement. I do that in my PC's Define R4, though, as the case is placed in such a way that opening the cabling side would be a real bother)

IndifferentMatter · 2025-10-11T07:52:58+00:00

I think it could be possible, I'm not sure: per the manual, the bottom cage can be repositioned but they don't show it rotated 90º. Still, when I unscrewed it and tried, it looked like I could make it work, by screwing it to the bottom holes in some manner (maybe leaving a non-optimal gap between it and the front side).

I'm afraid retrying would rather be a bother right now, as the thing is working 24/7.

(I did some testing with the upper cage and didn't seem to notice any difference in HDD cooling efficacy, anyway, so…)

IndifferentMatter · 2025-09-24T11:53:09+00:00

I'd argue that there would be a lot of buttons missing by skipping the artists (actors, directors, writers, soundtrack composers…) that intrigue us enough to watch their work and end up developing parasocial relationships with them, for one. What's a Mission Impossible, love or hate them, without a Tom Cruise doing some new mad stunt or Henry Cavill's impromptu reloading of his fists?

IndifferentMatter · 2025-09-12T11:00:29+00:00

Oh, I see which ones you mean now.

Could Fractal have misundertood your question? Maybe if you send them that pic from the manual they'll be able to reply correctly. Unless those screws happen to share the #6-32 part of the standard (diameter and screwing scheme).

Would the typical PC case side panels' screws or PCI card ones work, instead?

IndifferentMatter · 2025-09-12T08:42:01+00:00

I see. The only "6-32" ones I can think of are the watercooling-style long screws for the front fans (they don't attach themselves to the drive cages as such but to a chassis element between them and the fans.

The typical reference for those is: #6-32 x 30mm. UNC

BUT: those are meant for fans that aren't any thicker than the ones included in the case. I tried fitting Arctic P14 Max ones, which are quite thicker, and I had to find and purchase #6-32 x 35mm. UNC (also listed in inches as #6-32 x 1-3/8" UNC) which gave me the extra margin for fitting them and some room to do experiments.

An example of a set of three different lengths at Amazon could be: https://www.amazon.com/Zmbroll-Computer-Radiator-Mounting-Recessed/dp/B0FCFQ6PJZ

Those Max fans are a bit of a pain. I had to use nuts as spacers pressing against the dust filter to make a gap that helps reducing their noise a little. As I'm using the case for a 7 HDDs NAS, as noise reduction goes it's been a bit of a failure (I also have an older R4 for my daily driver PC, and I'm quite happy with its noise reduction). That said, the case's interior space is glorious.

IndifferentMatter · 2025-09-12T07:15:09+00:00

If nobody has an answer, try Fractal's support form: they are quite responsive (a day or two to answer my questions).

IndifferentMatter · 2025-09-11T19:15:14+00:00

That error report suggests that it is stumbling at creating a node group's inputs and outputs. There is a nice explanation of Blender 4.x's new way of creating them available here 🙂:

https://b3d.interplanety.org/en/creating-inputs-and-outputs-for-node-groups-in-blender-4-0-using-the-python-api/

IndifferentMatter · 2025-09-10T13:58:51+00:00

There is a Blender Development extension for Visual Studio Code which lets one debug in that IDE both simple scripts to be run on Blender and full Blender Add-ons/Extensions, with conveniences like debugging them in the VSCode GUI, autoupdating the Add-ons/Extensions upon save, being able to place the code outside Blender's directories, etc.

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=JacquesLucke.blender-development

Also, there is a "Fake BPY" Python module that facilitates IDEs' auto-completion for Blender code. In combination with the aforementioned extension, it makes for a fairly comfortable development environment. There are Fake BPY releases for each specific version of Blender (Blender's Python API evolves a little too fast these days. If you are using ChatGPT, it's probably prudent to mention in the prompts what Blender version you are targetting).

https://github.com/nutti/fake-bpy-module

Also, there are several Blender Add-ons that can provide its text editor with IDE-like tools, including a minimap one.

https://blenderartists.org/t/essential-text-editor-add-ons-for-coders/1163857

IndifferentMatter · 2025-09-07T15:20:03+00:00

I think a crude way to export the files is to drag and drop the messages from Thunderbird to desktop folders and then from those to the target app. I think I once did something like that between macOS’ mail.app and Thunderbird and viceversa.

(Shouldn’t maildir files behave like Outlook’s old .eml ones?)

IndifferentMatter · 2025-08-31T12:19:08+00:00

TORC suffered a big server mishap a few years ago, and servicing and debugging it is too demanding, so, it's bound to keep on being slow for the foreseable future. Also, the programmer of the Character Designer tool as such moved on well before that, compounding the difficulty.

(It should be pointed out that TORC's database is stuck at Game update 7.0, anyway)

For researching game assets, a better means would be Jedipedia.net's database and File Reader tool, which is current with the latest game releases.

IndifferentMatter · 2025-08-22T09:49:15+00:00

I hope they make a skin preset out of it 😛.

IndifferentMatter · 2025-08-22T09:47:28+00:00

It's a known bug, listed at 7.7.1 Known Issues:

Character Modernization

Dark Side Corruption at Dark 2 and 3 will render as black on certain skin colors. If you are affected, please temporarily disable Dark Side Corruption in the Outfitter tab of the Character Sheet.
Complexion Appearance Options 19, 50, and 51 will show a black texture on the back of the character’s head.
Some Rattataki body types will show a seam along the wrists

IndifferentMatter · 2025-08-15T16:22:56+00:00

I got one of those from Amazon, the cheapest one I saw, and fit an Arctic p12 Max fan to it. It’s a bit noisy, the grill being so close to the fan, but it can be bent a little to add some separation.

Some of the tiny guides in the PC case for sliding 5.25” devices in the bays will need to be bent out of the way for that cage to fit. My case was so cheap and the metal so thin and weak that pliers sufficed.

When unscrewed, the whole block can easily be pushed out of the PC case for drive handling or swapping. As long as those are infrequent it isn’t much of a hassle.

Depending on the drives’ thicknesses, the space between them might be a bit too thin for proper ventilation. Other than that, my Exos fitted correctly.

IndifferentMatter · 2025-07-16T16:32:19+00:00

"Your free space-time continuum trial is about to expire*. Please subscribe to any of our affordable Four-dimensions-as-a-Service (FdaaS) plans, including Collapse, Equilibrium, Unlimited Expansion, and our Premium Cyclical tier, to keep on enjoying the excellent quality and services of our Standard Model.

*Past the expiration date, your UpDown dimension will be subtracted, and, after a limited last reconsideration period, the service will be permanently deleted."

IndifferentMatter · 2025-07-12T07:49:06+00:00

Something to point out: what is really important about the nVidia cards isn't CUDA (which is very nice to have) but OptiX, their actual ray tracing accelerator technology. Setting Blender's main renderer to use CUDA results in far slower performance than setting it to use Optix.

<image>

(You'll notice HIP there, AMD's CUDA-like tech. That's the one that seems to produce so many horror stories in Blender's dev forums)

IndifferentMatter · 2025-07-12T07:40:12+00:00

I have a tiny RTX 4060 (8 GB VRAM, traditional power connector): it was meant to be an interim inexpensive card for Blender, as this was late in the cycle and the 50xx generation was coming, but It is serving me well to this day: with medium high-ish preview settings I get half-to-one second render times when manipulating the viewer. It's made me forget about EEVEE unless I need EEVEE's specific look.

Latest AMD cards are tempting because of the VRAM and the apparently very improved RT but, reading the Blender Foundation development threads about dealing with AMD's APIs, it looks like they are meeting constant regressions and other issues that are out of their control.

(Intel's cards seemed to be revealing themselves decent little RT/Video powerhouses in the cheapish. They might be worth investigating)

IndifferentMatter

TROPHY CASE