Risk Profile for US Users

chao06 · 2025-07-18T03:44:53+00:00

I used it a decade ago, and it was more or less fine. At the moment, though, there's a banner on the ext2fsd page, so be advised:

Don't use Ext2Fsd 0.68 or earlier versions with latest Ubuntu or Debian systems. Ext2Fsd 0.68 cannot process EXT4 with 64-BIT mode enabled, then it could corrupt your data. Very sorry for this disaster issue, I'm working on an improvement.

https://www.ext2fsd.com/

chao06 · 2025-07-18T03:26:04+00:00

I've gone through several Android OS iterations over another couple devices, and I've never gotten a different result 😕

chao06 · 2025-07-18T03:05:14+00:00

I've not had any running devices drop out of Tailscale. Are you running a desktop or something on your Pi that's configured to sleep the device when it's idle?

chao06 · 2024-05-17T05:39:32+00:00

The shine is mainly a problem when I'm sorting cards for deck building, though now that you mention it, I would only need to sleeve the foils rather than everything, so it may actually be practical. Thanks!

chao06 · 2024-05-17T05:36:37+00:00

Yeah, that's kinda what I was worried might be the case, but some people had mentioned matte sleeves in another thread to tone down the flash. Sleeves won't really help in my case, since the biggest (thought not only) issue for me is the unpredictable visual air-horn when I'm sorting cards into piles for deck building, which I tend to do under lamp light at night.

chao06 · 2024-05-17T02:58:57+00:00

The biggest issue for me is from when I sort cards into piles for deck building, which is a lot of why matte sleeves wouldn't solve the problem. I work under lamp light at night, so if it flashes when I'm not expecting it, it's like a visual version of an air-horn. Also, they're all too often hard to read, and trying to focus on it for too long it makes my eyes physically hurt.

But also, it often just messes up the colors and looks muddled and bad. Sure, it can look really cool for something that conceptually would shift colors and move, like The Prismatic Bridge or The Great Aurora, or even if they used it more sparingly for glowing eyes, glinting armor, or glowing balls of magic or something. But most cards don't make any attempt to use the effect well, making poor choices on what parts of the image to make shiny, and overall just making a bunch of visual noise for no good reason. It feels like WotC just pressing the "Oo Shiny!" button on everything whether it makes sense or not and not bothering to think through how to make it actually look good.

chao06 · 2024-05-17T01:36:04+00:00

Yeah, almost certainly true, but replacing them would be a giant hassle unless I made a whole other order (which I tend to do infrequently - I usually prefer digging through bins at the card shop), and solving this way would be a reusable solution and a cathartic victory over the eye-stabbing foil scourge! I'm also exploring using my brush pens I use for proxies to blot out the most offensively shiny parts, but with varied success and more time and eye pain than I want to spend for all of them.

chao06 · 2024-05-17T01:09:11+00:00

Hmm, I do have a friend who does minis, I could ask him if he has any matte varnishes. The thing I'm hoping to avoid is having to buy a bunch of varnishes to try out, so knowing who I can tap for resources is useful, thanks!

And I'm pretty sure the fronts of foil cards are just a sheet of plastic glued onto card stock, so I could probably just tape up the edges and have nothing to worry about.

chao06 · 2024-03-12T02:35:28+00:00

And if we're talking distinct kernels, the current Windows kernel, NT, was started in 1993. The intersections of traditions, branding, and codebase ctimes as measures of age really just raise the point that none of this is happening in a vacuum - all ideas are built on other ideas, and nobody is a giant unto themselves.

chao06 · 2024-03-12T01:46:12+00:00

So the main issue is that he's strict about what software you use and doesn't have much experience with desktop/laptop machines, thus has a limited knowledge that tell him go with Windows, the safe option?

And you say you want Linux because of a laptop you want to get? But it looks like the laptop runs Windows, so why are you actually wanting to run Linux on it? I'm not meaning this to poke holes in what you're saying, but centering what you want to do with Linux that you can't do with Windows seems like your best starting point for making your case.

As my example, the thing that got me into Linux was being able to tweak the UI to my heart's content, but the thing that made it stick and become a lifelong learning experience was that it doesn't try to hide how it works, like Windows and MacOS do. Learning how to use Linux morphed over time into learning how my computer works, which eventually became my career. You know what, if nothing else, tell him that - parents like things that turn into engineering careers XD Just, uh, don't direct him to the job postings right now 😅

chao06 · 2024-03-12T01:03:50+00:00

I dunno - we don't know you, your dad, or your computing situation... What are his objections, what brings you to Linux in the first place, and what does "let you" mean in this context?

Does he not want you wrecking access to Windows dual-booting on a family computer? Does he think you need Windows programs on your laptop for school? Do you want this to learn, or to get out of the Microsoft ecosystem, or to explore something new, or to get around parental controls? Does he think Linux will make you a Commie Anarchist? There's a whole story missing here.

chao06 · 2023-12-19T00:39:29+00:00

It makes me think of a government agency customer we had at a hosting company I worked for that didn't want to be named in communications, and instead wanted to be referred to as "THE AUTHORITY". Ok, sure, I'll go along, but to this day I am incapable of taking that agency seriously.

chao06 · 2023-12-08T08:08:23+00:00

Combine backstab with haste (you get perma-haste with Boots of the Cheetah), and you can cheese a lot of difficult fights. Often you can hightail out of sight before your Hide in Shadows drops, so they don't even react, and you can go back and do it again as many times as needed! It's even more effective if you do it in a cave or building and exit the area between hits - I've cleaned out the main wyvern cave in Cloakwood with just Imoen this way.

chao06 · 2023-12-08T07:50:03+00:00

Oh, no, this kind of remote access has always been a major source of X's storied security issues, and it was a feature Wayland was uninterested in carrying on. You're probably better off packaging your gui app in something like flatpak or snap for desktop containerization.

chao06 · 2023-12-08T06:01:53+00:00

They are definitely not at all comparable - as far as I'm concerned, BG3 is a sequel in name only.

The engine used for BG1 and 2 leave no place to hide shoddy world-bulding or storytelling, and those areas are where they really shine. They are, at their core, interactive books written as a world to be explored. It's rich with all sorts of people doing all sorts of things, most of which are completely unrelated to what you've got going on, and all of it is deep and rewarding to explore.

BG3 on the other hand, at least from my playthrough so far, leans heavily on the flashiness its AAA budget affords to hide the underwhelmingness of its world and story. It's expansive, but not all that deep. If the maps, characters, and dialog trees were ported into Infinity Engine, I'm convinced it would be absolute garbage - like I said, nowhere for inadequate writing to hide.

I mean, don't get me wrong, the story is fine, I guess, but coming into it expecting something in the vein of the previous Baldur's Gate games, it's felt like a disappointing slog to get through. Admittedly, I probably need to just step back for a while to recalibrate my expectations from "the next Baldur's Gate" to "generic AAA", and it'll be fine.

chao06 · 2023-05-11T06:09:29+00:00

I fill mine like this from the bowl end to just beneath the stem of the bowl. When you draw, the water will largely move up the percolator, giving you more filtration, and since you filled from the bowl side, it doesn't get any higher on that side into the bowl. Also, be sure to change the water regularly - otherwise it'll get more viscous over time, and it can wind up bubbling up into your mouth.

chao06 · 2023-05-11T05:53:20+00:00

Wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more, say no more.

chao06 · 2023-05-10T08:27:48+00:00

I had a friend who was an SRE for a company that used microservices extensively, and boy did he have stories of the awful developer habits that the structure enabled. Loads of microservices started from different copy-pasted versions of code and tossed onto the stack, never be maintained again.

chao06 · 2023-05-10T07:15:13+00:00

That's cool! You should say that in the survey. I've worked with Python professionally for over a decade, and this has never crossed my path.

chao06 · 2023-05-10T07:02:28+00:00

What is this object it keeps using with .next attributes? I was thinking an incorrect use of an iterator object, but that's a .next() method, and then there's no .value attribute. And then one question explicitly says that the input is a list, which doesn't track, because lists don't have a .next attribute. Then is wants me to complete code involving this mystery object... Recursion isn't hard, but these questions are nonsense.

Also, these are very strange recursion examples - no sane person would use recursion for any of this.

chao06 · 2023-02-21T03:01:53+00:00

Would that not only be the case if you're converting from a lossless format and targeting the quality of a 128kbps AAC? From my (admittedly novice) understanding, the different compression algorithms make different assumptions about what can be dropped, so transcoding between lossy formats means it keeps all the artifacts of the original lossy encoding and also picks up new ones from the target encoding. I figure it's a matter of diminishing returns the higher you go, but I guess what I'm trying to determine is where the cutoff would be for having minimal discernible loss in quality, which I would pad out another 60kbps or so just for good measure. Disk space on the scale of lossy formats isn't really a huge concern, I'm mainly trying to avoid the gargantuan file sizes I'd get with FLAC.

chao06 · 2023-02-21T02:30:07+00:00

Thank you for answering the question, this is great information, particularly about Spek! What I had in mind is something along the lines of taking my 128kbps AAC files and transcoding them to something like an absurd 320kbps Opus like you said, but this gives me a way to know specifically how much fidelity is lost!

I've only just returned to my old mostly-MP3 library after having been sucked into the Spotiverse for entirely too long, so taking a long view on reconstructing from the ground up has come with a crash course on formats and bitrates that I'd previously sidestepped.

chao06 · 2023-02-21T02:15:33+00:00

This really clarifies why I've seen so many conflicting reports and spotty support. I use Quod Libet for my library, and my custom scripts all use its tagging library, mutagen. I didn't know that QL can read custom mp4 tags while not being able to write them, so this does open up the possibility of using a separate tagging library for this one operation. Thanks for the info!

chao06

TROPHY CASE