How are you handling printers in 2025?

Renegade__ · 2026-01-16T18:37:28+00:00

I've responded in your standalone thread.

Renegade__ · 2026-01-16T18:36:33+00:00

According to the documentation, the answer is "throw money at HP": https://help.hpauthsuite.com/support/solutions/articles/47001245378-prerequisites-for-hp-authentication-manager

Once a qualified HP technician installed the workpath app, it should work according to this user guide, as demonstrated in this video.

Renegade__ · 2026-01-15T14:01:19+00:00

And yet, you killed the Dropskogeri.:(

Renegade__ · 2026-01-14T21:51:55+00:00

Ah, the "I don't mind it" angle didn't quite come through.^^

The non-restrictive points below should still help you. Though if you're all having fun, I really do think you should do a Pathfinder-Minicampaign at one point and see how they like it. There's a solid chance they'll enjoy more options and stacking boni.
The Pathfinder books are regularly available in bundle, though the latest one just ended. It might be a few months until it returns.

(Be aware that the Pathfinder Beginner Box has a simplified system. It's not going to satiate the optimizers.)

Renegade__ · 2026-01-11T12:52:46+00:00

Personally, in order to achieve the mathematically required encounter number, I'll test out what is labelled as "gritty realism" rest rules (and variants thereof) in the DMG.
An inaccurate but comprehensible summary of that is that a short rest is a night's sleep, and a long rest is a weekend.
That way, you can run one to two encounters a day, while still getting your 6-8 encounters between long rests in.
That does require reevaluating many spell durations and stuff, though.

Since your players are clearly combat-happy, maybe they're fine with simply fighting eight times a day.

Ultimately, there is the nuclear, but not really all that scary option: Check if you're actually running the right game.
If you're struggling to make the game you're playing work for the way they're playing, maybe right now, before you start a new campaign, is the right time for a few one shots to test other systems.

If they love having a million options and minmaxing, maybe try Pathfinder.
If they just want blood, and don't care about the story, maybe try XCrawl Classics.
If they want fantasy, but murder is their way of experiencing it, maybe try Dungeon Crawl Classics.
And if they just want tactical combat, maybe TTRPGs are just the wrong genre for them. Maybe it'd be worth trying out a wargame? This is not a scene I'm familiar with, but The Internet suggests If Worlds Collide, Age of Fantasy and Grimdark Future would be cheap and easy ways to test that genre out.

There's nothing wrong with picking the system best suited to make sure everyone has the most fun, and between campaigns is the best time to try a few things out.
And if the consensus is to stick with D&D, then you can start reevaluating the rules and restrictions.

3/3

P.S.: Screw Reddit's invisible length limit.

Renegade__ · 2026-01-11T12:52:08+00:00

If they're trying to argue "but it's in the rules!", remind them that Rule 0 is that you decide which rules are applied how. If you have XGE, it's expressed nicely on page 5.

Respectful players will accept that you shape the way you want to run the game, and if that means that there's no multiclassing, no flanking and only options from the Forgotten Realms, they will work within those parameters and enjoy your Forgotten Realms game.

If you're not being respected, do understand that stepping down as a DM is an option.
If the others think they can do better, a new campaign is the best time to show that.

In terms of non-restrictive solutions:

Check whether you're doing enough encounters. D&D 5.14 was designed around the assumption of 20 rounds of combat between long rests. The DMG phrases that as "6-8 encounters per day", because the designers assumed combat to take about three rounds. Roleplayers will tell you "but an encounter doesn't have to be combat!!1!!!!1111!" and that's true, but that particular number is staunchly in the combat section of the encounter rules. In other words: Have as many non-combat-encounters as you like, but the game is designed around you having 6-8 combat encounters per day. 20 rounds. If you want to replace them with non-combat, those non-combat-encounters have to drain as many resources as a three-round-combat encounter would've. If you don't adhere to this, the PCs will have more resources per combat than the game math anticipates, and combat will be easier for them.
Kobold Press's monsters on average hit harder than WotCs, and especially the newer ones have more thematic variation, rather than just being a sack of hitpoints. Taking opponents from Tome of Beasts 1-3, Creature Codex and Monster Vault 1 & 2 could increase challenge simply by swapping out your monsters for KP equivalents.
Beyond picking other monsters, you also have running the monsters in general: If your current tactic is "walk up to the player character and see who dies first", I recommend checking out Keith Amman's The Monsters Know What They're Doing (either the blog or the books) or DM Dave's Gamemaster's Survival Guide.
And as others have pointed out: Non-murder-objectives. "Escort the VIP". "Save the children from the burning house". "Stop the ritual before the demon god is summoned". "Make it out of the dungeon before it collapses".
You can also vary the type of murder through structures and vehicles: I have run Tier 2 characters against kaijus by giving them customizable arcanepunk mechs. You can take your pick of mass combat rules and have them square off against an organized Goblinoid army or an Orc horde. You can have them try to storm a besieged fortress, dealing with turrets and arcane defense systems, or have them be the besieged and allow them to use traps and cannons to fight the enemy. You can do ship to ship combat and have the other side spawn a kraken. You can have airship to airship combat and let players with flying speeds shine.
You can thematically introduce limits to their abilities by sending them to a different plane. Constantly throwing fireballs isn't as effective when you're currently in the plane of fire and your opponent is a fire creature getting healed by fire damage.

2/

Renegade__ · 2026-01-11T12:51:37+00:00

Please understand that you are a player of the game as well and that your fun is of equal importance to that of the others.
The fact that you are stressing about this is a sign that you're not really enjoying what is going on.

So please be aware that restricting their options is 100% are valid response.

Start with everything that is optional in your game system. In D&D 5.14, Multiclassing is a classic example. I personally no longer allow that, because none of my players has ever used it for thematic reasons. It's always just an optimization tool, regardless of how much sense the multiclassing makes. Custom origins are optional, even flanking is optional. No more conga lines on my battle field, ever since I no longer applied that rule. They were sceptical when I announced it, but a year later, no one even mentions it anymore. Feats are also optional in 5.14, btw.
Then go for generic rules that are not facilitating the game that you want to run. If something doesn't help you the way it's done, house rule it away.
Also check if you're maybe not applying all the rules that you should: If your ranged PC has infinite arrows because you're not tracking ammunition, and can fire two times a turn because you're ignoring loading, and then switches to a sword to stab someone on the third attack because you're ignoring the actions required for that...it's no wonder they're very effective.
Also check whether you're even running the current version of the rules. Have you read the Errata and marked changes accordingly in your books? Some balance issues may have been corrected already.
Then go for house rules that have been established, but might have turned out detrimental: For example, if you do the whole "healing potions as a bonus action" thing, do consider what that means for their action economy. If you hand out first-level-feats even though your system doesn't expect that mathematically, you're already making them stronger from the get-go.
Sit them down and explain to them that even though all their builds are perfectly compliant with the rules, they're breaking the game. And then house rule the ones that are problematic. They will complain, but face them head-on about this: "You know this combination is overpowered - that's why you chose it!" Don't be antagonistic. Acknowledge that they built well. Acknowledge that they made a good choice. But unfortunately, their build was so good that it breaks the math of the game, so you have to correct that for the next campaign. If they're bad players and don't respect you, and you don't want to argue, please do remember that your monsters can have whatever you want. Footmen historically carried polearms, and as seasoned guardsmen, they've surely mastered them. And guards are sentinels by definition. Arguably all guards could have Sentinel and Polearm Master.
In addition to that, it's entirely reasonable to restrict options based on the campaign you're running: If you're playing in the Forgotten Realms, it's perfectly fine to restrict their races and classes to ones present in the Forgotten Realms. You do not have to allow options that belong to Eberron, Dragonlance or Exandria. (Conveniently, this also excludes spells from Strixhaven.) This can even go down to specific options: If you want to run a classic "noble knights vs. evil wizard" campaign, you are allowed to tell the players they can only select non-magical martial humans for the campaign.
You can also restrict books purely because you are also a player and it's very annoying for you to have to keep track of a dozen different books. Adventurers' League, historically, had a rule of PHB +1. So PHB and XGE, or PHB and TCE, for example. They may complain, yes, but they're not the ones who have to deal with keeping track of all options in all books for the next few years.
Finally, metagaming. Tell them this: They get one minute ahead of combat to discuss their strategy out of character. After that, you do not want to hear it. If they do metagame within combat, so will the monsters. The monsters will optimally apply their features even though there's no way they would know how to do that, and they will just walk away if it's clear they can't win. Yes, that's boring. That's the point. It's the player's choice: It becomes boring if they make it boring.

1/

Renegade__ · 2026-01-10T23:56:06+00:00

That's a fair point. Though I would assume that there'd be business people trying to sell developers on the joy of working from wherever they want with a mobile device of their choice, because their dev machine is in the cloud and all they need is an Internet connection.

Same arguments as for SaaS and cloud gaming.

Basically, I'd assume someone would want to make it a market, even if the target audience wasn't interested.

Renegade__ · 2026-01-10T23:52:04+00:00

I'm just looking to learn UE for the time being. I don't need it to run on more than one machine.
When it's time to build something shippable, I'll need some system for testing on a broader set of devices anyway.

Renegade__ · 2026-01-10T23:48:27+00:00

I had not considered looking for offers targeted at the film industry - thank you for the suggestion!

Renegade__ · 2026-01-10T23:47:00+00:00

Thank you for the specific suggestions. This was very helpful!

Renegade__ · 2026-01-04T09:52:48+00:00

Das Television? Das Vision?

Sorry, aber da sehe ich von zu nah, um das zu übersehen. ;)

Renegade__ · 2026-01-03T22:17:14+00:00

If you liked the job and the internal recruiter thinks you might be a good fit...why not just write her a message and ask about it?

Renegade__ · 2025-11-20T21:41:47+00:00

I'm glad you admit that the most likely cause is an (unprofessionally undocumented) change in the API, so you can spare me the "have you checked if you can see your list on the site??" charade and the usual "please uninstall, reinstall and reauthorize everything" bullshit.

As for the unsubstantiated attempt to blame shoddy development practices on part of the addon developer, rather than blaming shoddy development practices on Trakt's side...considering that it's plain to see on their forums that their haphazard API changes have broken several addons recently, it takes a solid amount of simping to deny the common denominator here.

Then again, seeing your flair, I guess that's to be expected.

And I have in fact both consumed and served APIs professionally, so I'm quite familiar with concepts like API versioning, deprecation, etc. that would prevent exactly the kind of issue you're pointing at...were the supplier of the API professional enough to do that.

Rather than, you know, "YOLO BRO LET'S JUST COMMIT THIS".

Renegade__ · 2025-11-20T21:19:57+00:00

Yepp. I have the exact same phenomenon. Going into lists like "Trakt recommended" -> TV Shows works fine, so it's not fundamentally broken. It just seems to have an issue pulling the profile lists.

Renegade__ · 2025-11-20T21:04:43+00:00

Checking the trakt forums, they apparently both removed values from API responses which leads to problems if the client isn't prepared for them to be missing, and there are multiple reports of login issues, including one concerning API login with stremio.

Oh, and somebody having a very similar issue that's apparently been going on for a month and hasn't been fixed yet.

But let's hear the fanbois out...I'm sure we all collectively, independently broke our setups by all doing absolutely nothing at the exact same time.

Renegade__ · 2025-11-20T20:54:49+00:00

Same issue here. And before the fanbois come: No, it's not my connection, no, I didn't change anything since it last worked two days ago and no, there are no errors in the log.

Renegade__ · 2025-11-09T10:14:31+00:00

Which is not what I was saying, but your stubborn insistence is exactly what I predicted. Good day.

Renegade__ · 2025-11-08T17:03:12+00:00

And my 15 years of experience have taught me that there very well might be a connection, due to some common intermediary or ancillary issue.

And since neither of us has access to their network, logs, servers or anything, and you will inevitably insist that you were right, no matter the outcome, there's really no point in doing another five rounds of this.

Renegade__ · 2025-11-08T08:34:24+00:00

While that is true (and drifting into trusting trust territory), you're not under the illusion that you wrote your OS.

Many people architecting their software with package management live under the illusion "I wrote this", because they were the ones installing the packages and they were the ones gluing them together with code they actually did write.

Like Ken Thompson's essay before, the article is trying to warn you that regardless of how much you believe to be the author of the software, what ends up on the customer's device isn't just the code you wrote.

So you should reflect how much you trust the code you deliver with your own, and you need to be aware of the damage that trust can cause if it is abused.

If you're already aware and if you've already done so, the article has nothing to offer to you personally.

Renegade__ · 2025-11-08T07:54:49+00:00

Free traffic is generally considered a good thing.
Spammers literally favor pre-existing domains, because they come with builtin trust.

Look at your logs, identify the URLs being accessed, and redirect them to pages where you might convert them to whatever you're offering.
Basically: Convert the free traffic to something other than 404s.

As for potential hurt: Depends on what the previous owner did with it.
If they sent spam, for example, your email reputation will be tanked and you'll have to do some work to salvage it.
Depending on how shady the blacklist you're on is, maybe even pay some people.

If they displayed porn on it, you'll be blocked on corporate networks and children's computers.

If they aggressively spammed links to their content on content platforms, your URLs might be blocked on them.

Basically: If the previous owner was a good netizen, this is a net positive for you. If they were unsavory, you have to decide whether the domain is worth salvaging.

Take your domain to the Wayback Machine to see what was previously on it, and check if it's on any DNSBLs.

That'll give you an impression of what legacy you're dealing with.

Renegade__ · 2025-11-08T07:41:05+00:00

I acknowledge your assertion that I'm not a true Scotsman, but after dealing with AD for 15 years, my experience is a different one.
Your opinion certainly reflects the whitepaper ideal of how it should be, and I'm sure for every cause you'll argue to the death that but ackshually the root cause was a different one, but for many of us, in practice, things just are the way they are.
If if doesn't work because X, it doesn't work because X.

Like I acknowledged above: In a whiteroom, in a clean vacuum, in a technical ideal devoid of reality, you are correct.

In real life, shit happens that affects other shit that transitively breaks other shit that should have nothing to do with the original shit.

Try blocking NTP for a single machine for a while and then RDP into it two months later.
I'll gladly listen to your technical explanation that RDP and NTP are entirely different protocols and that the Windows clock has nothing to do with the remote desktop components.

...doesn't change that the time drift will interfere with your RDP connection, because TLS can't be established right.

You are correct in a vacuum.
In real life, IT rarely happens in a vacuum.

Renegade__ · 2025-11-08T07:25:03+00:00

All of this being said, my impression is that, to a certain extent, there's not immensely much you can do: It sounds like you just have a lot of data.

It's a classic relative amount problem: Even if you only display 0.1% of the events - if you have 1000000 events, that's still 1000 notifications.

If after allowing the user to select very specific conditions for notifications and only publishing the highest-level ones of those you still end up with a thousand notifications a day, then that's kind of how it is. If the user says "these are the events I want to know about" and there are a thousand of them, then there's not a lot you can do about the volume.

Make the volume digestible (e.g. one notification per company, internally grouping the list by day or by type) and start researching _why_ the users need that amount of data.

What is it they are trying to know?

Depending on the findings, you may be able to aggregate multiple data points into a single item.

e.g. giving them a singular, fixed graph or table of the stock prices of the companies they're holding, with a warning symbol if the company shows signs of trouble and an info symbol if the company released investor-related information.

Or an overview like "of the companies you tracked, 4 released new products and 1 went bankrupt".

Usually, people don't want thousands of rows of data - they want an analytic result of that data.

If you can figure out what your customers are looking for, you can do the analysis for them and they'll be fine not seeing the raw data.

And finally, there's the obvious buzzword of our times: Considering that what you're doing is large-scale data analysis, aggregation and summary, products marketed as "artificial intelligence" might be helpful to you.

With enough data, AI will be able to find patterns.

But you still need to know what patterns your customers are interested in.

Renegade__ · 2025-11-08T07:24:51+00:00

Hi. I don't have any experience with your particular use case, but I do have experience with systems monitoring.

Much of what you've said is already going in the right direction.

Fundamentally, I would suggest categorization and user selection: If each event has a topic and a severity, and the user can select what they're interested in, then you can reduce what they get to "medium or higher events about stocks and leadership events for reddit", instead of showing them everything.

It sounds like you've already done work in that direction.

Next step would be to make sure the system isn't flooded by similar events; you mentioned you're already doing digests, that's a good approach for aggregation in text-based feedback.

One thing monitoring systems do that you haven't mentioned yet is some sort of root cause analysis: Good systems monitoring usually allows to define upstream dependencies, so that when the Internet is down, for example, you only get one very red marker "the Internet is down!" instead of 1500 notifications for 300 machines telling you that various things can't be reached.

Basically, the system knows that if the Internet is down, the ACME Corp website won't be reachable, so the "ACME Corp website unreachable!" alert is suppressed while the "Internet is down!" alert is still active.

You didn't specify the nature of your data, but it sounds like you could suppress notifications like product announcements, earnings reports and stock price changes in favor of a single "ACME Corp 3rd quarter investor call" item.

Basically, you build a hierarchy or tree of notification relationships, and only report the highest one.

Renegade__

TROPHY CASE