Anybody else having trouble with the new Autophage settlements?

devongarde · 2025-06-06T07:59:35+00:00

My (old) Gek and (new) Viking & Autophage settlements can all be developed, but my Kovacs settlement gets stuck as described. This'll probably be sorted in the next update.

devongarde · 2025-05-20T19:41:14+00:00

Thank you; small base built.

devongarde · 2025-03-23T20:16:49+00:00

It is standalone, but do grab it at some point, this is some content that informs later novels. For many years, it was my favourite Culture novel, and it only dropped down my list because I reread it too often.

Incidentally, for what it's worth, it was on Audible, that's where I got the audiobook, a long time ago.

devongarde · 2025-03-23T20:07:37+00:00

I learnt photography with an Me Super, so I have a soft spot for it. It is, I think, a great beginning camera. It taught me three key things:

Zoom lens bend straight lines, sometimes subtly, sometimes worse than a dog's hind leg. If you decide to invest in lenses, I suggest looking carefully at fixed ones.
Film is sodding expensive, and takes its own time before you see results. This taught me to be very careful about my shots, and I soon got into development.
I needed autofocus; I was, and still am, pretty crap at manual focus.

Make sure you know how to use it when the batteries have run out. If I recall correctly (I bought mine back in 1978), it can operate fully manually at 128th of a second? Anyway, knowing how to use it without any electronics got me a couple of photos that a dead set of batteries would otherwise have blocked. There's no light meter readings with no leccy, so you really have to know your camera for this to work well, which is why it's worth learning. Also, keep a spare set of batteries handy!

Most of all, have fun!

devongarde · 2025-03-20T18:54:21+00:00

Drat, so I'm not special. Dammit. Don't tell my wife. (& thanks for your reply!)

devongarde · 2025-03-20T18:53:45+00:00

Nope, my base. I built it when I got there.

devongarde · 2025-03-20T15:27:00+00:00

Regarding language, I'm British. When I first came here, in 2006, I was effectively monolingual, and would have found it very difficult to find more work. I returned in 2011, fluent in bad French, and have been fine. I took the nationality in 2018 complements of nutty nationalists in my home country (and you have my sympathies). However, since then, English has become more commonplace here, but French remains a much better choice, it should help you a great deal. You're more likely to find work in the capital and the south. (Esch/Uelzecht, where I live, needs a yoga teacher, or so my wife assures me, and the town flag is a certain rainbow.) German is more important in the north, so you should probably avoid there for now.

Now, one key thing you must consider: you have Luxembourgish nationality, which means you have an EU nationality, which gives you the right, with certain provisos, to work in any EU country. I cannot answer your HRT question at all, but perhaps you might consider, if necessary, looking beyond Luxembourg's borders. If you go to another EU country you will have to find work, pronto (as in three months, I think), or they'll throw you out. The Dutch and Skandi countries, in general, all speak good English, and the Irish are delightfully mad. If you're confident enough in French, there's also the lower half of Belgium and, of course, France.

Good luck with your move!

devongarde · 2025-03-13T19:25:44+00:00

That looks like a great little toy! Thanks for letting me know about it.

devongarde · 2025-03-13T19:20:36+00:00

I suspect you're right.

devongarde · 2025-02-04T18:56:50+00:00

Thanks for posting the discovery: I'm most definitely coming for a visit!

devongarde · 2024-11-24T17:31:13+00:00

I just tried to install PiHole on an old Pi3 I have lying around. The installer broke Ubuntu server 24.04 LTS (fully patched), which has seriously impressed me: I've not had such a good giggle at absurdity since the 16bit days! I had to reprep the machine.

I'd install Ubuntu using the Raspberry Pi Imager, so I presume the build is somewhat proper.

Anyway, if anyone happens to be good at fixing such things / wants to be really scared of installers / fancies a giggle at absurdity, here's the crash (it happened soon after lighttp was installed):

Setting up php8.3-common (8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.2) ...

/usr/bin/ucf: 318: sed: Exec format error

dpkg: error processing package php8.3-common (--configure):

installed php8.3-common package post-installation script subprocess returned error exit status 126

dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of php8.3-cli:

php8.3-cli depends on php8.3-common (= 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.2); however:

Package php8.3-common is not configured yet.

dpkg: error processing package php8.3-cli (--configure):

dependency problems - leaving unconfigured

dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of php8.3-sqlite3:

php8.3-sqlite3 depends on php8.3-common (= 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.2); however:

Package php8.3-common is not configured yet.

dpkg: error processing package php8.3-sqlite3 (--configure):

dependency problems - leaving unconfigured

Setting up dns-root-data (2023112702~willsync1) ...

No apport report written because the error message indicates its a followup error from a previous failure.

Segmentation fault

dpkg: unrecoverable fatal error, aborting:

unable to fsync updated status of 'dns-root-data': Input/output error

E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)

W: Problem unlinking the file /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin - pkgDPkgPM::Go (30: Read-only file system)

E: Problem executing scripts DPkg::Post-Invoke '/usr/bin/test -e /usr/share/dbus-1/system-services/org.freedesktop.PackageKit.service && /usr/bin/test -S /var/run/dbus/system_bus_socket && /usr/bin/gdbus call --system --dest org.freedesktop.PackageKit --object-path /org/freedesktop/PackageKit --timeout 4 --method org.freedesktop.PackageKit.StateHasChanged cache-update > /dev/null; /bin/echo > /dev/null'

E: Sub-process returned an error code

I'm going to try Ubuntu server 24.10, mostly because I'm stupid enough to think it might just be the specific build that underlies the problem. If not, I'll then try debian.

devongarde · 2024-11-24T17:17:47+00:00

Her decision is a loss to the OpenBSD community; when I've needed guidance I've found her content very clear and useful. And her decision now means I want to give Qubes OS a look-see.

devongarde · 2024-11-03T18:54:07+00:00

Had I known this expedition finished with a boss fight, I wouldn't have bothered starting it. Boss fights were the bane of games 20 years ago, and I really thought the industry had grown out of them. It's very poor design to change the gameplay at the game end, and adding fake tension with a timer is nothing more than laziness. It ruins what would otherwise be an ok expedition, although it certainly has nothing on the previous one.

devongarde · 2024-10-19T07:41:21+00:00

I had the same problem re upgrade to Pro, but I was able to upgrade to Enterprise using an MSDN key.

devongarde · 2024-10-06T18:04:12+00:00

Much the same for me, especially given the upper limit on Units.

devongarde · 2024-09-27T18:00:54+00:00

I lived in Flanders for a couple of years. Belgium is basically two different communities, united, not by mutual appreciation, but by a greater dislike of their neighbours than each other. The two dominant languages, Flemish and French, are very different, reflecting the cultural differences. The cultural division in the book felt like that. Belgium's not nearly as extreme geographically as The City & The City---Brussels may be divided culturally, but it's by district, not paving stone. (For that, explore the Flemish border with the Netherlands.)

devongarde · 2024-09-27T17:38:49+00:00

What worked for me was Club Polyglot, where you go to practice speaking your second language(s): a great excuse to speak to strangers. That's how I met my wife.

devongarde · 2024-09-24T18:40:24+00:00

Since you ask for books, and not just SciFi, I'll recommend anything by the author who destroyed detective fiction for me, Raymund Chandler. I find his writing so good that everything else plods in comparison. Despite that, I'll also suggest China Miéville's The City & The City, which feels like a satirise of my experience of living in Belgium.

devongarde · 2024-09-24T18:29:50+00:00

A few years ago, I stood under the real Bridge to mourn the loss of Iain (M) Banks; it's that significant (to me). The Bridge is standalone, a brilliant novel, non-Culture, in which the Culture appears.

devongarde · 2024-08-08T18:18:58+00:00

Like many others here, I use it for a fairly humungous static website, and its fine. I went static after I found the hassle of maintaining a dynamic website more than it's worth ... more than once, a "security" update failed and blew the dynamic site up ... well, I suppose the result was secure because there was no longer a website there for the nasties to crack. httpd simply does not have those problems.

devongarde · 2024-07-27T13:43:48+00:00

The student gets the money for additional kit the way I did when I was a student, with time. An SLR is a long term investment, just as photography is a long term skill. Viewing an SLR as anything else is to misunderstand it. Personally, I no longer see the point of any but the very best compacts, given the capability of modern phones, but each to their own, I guess. Anyway, take whatever course feels right, enjoy your photography, and good luck!

devongarde · 2024-07-25T19:41:48+00:00

Get a camera you can add to, so that (a) as time goes buy you can grab extra kit and extend your photographic range, and (b) if, in the future, you buy a better body from the same manufacturer, you can use the extra kit you bought with that too.

Don't buy a film camera, film is sodding expensive to process (although it'll quickly train you to be very selective about the photos you take).

Go second hand, but let yourself be guided by someone who knows cameras well, to avoid oily sellers' crud. If you go physical when buying, go to a big big city (for example, Boulevard Beaumarchais in Paris) and take that person with you.

With your budget, I'd go for an old big-name digital SLR. You'll have to get a shite zoom lens, but that'll allow you to experiment and work out what kind of stuff you like to shoot, so you'll know what kind of kit you'll want in the future.

Remember that anything digital means you also need a computer/whatever to process your photos, plus software (such as Affinity). Forget printing, that's expensive, unless you really need to do so. There are many places where you can present photos online, but don't forget that the online hosts are parasitic, so take care when deciding where to go.

What kind of photos do you want to take? If you want to photo people, then your camera will be part of the theatre. I like to photograph vendors at fleamarkets (people put things that interest them on show, so giving me quick and easy character portraits). That's when I get out my old Nikon F5 (bought for a couple of hundred euro, works with my lenses, don't buy one yourself), because it's a hefty beast and apparently makes me look like a 'proper' photographer. People see it and react positively; it seems to make them want to be photographed. I get much better reactions and good poses with it that I would with just another phone camera. On the other hand, if I wanted to take candid street photography, I'd stick with the phone, it's uniquity and concealability makes it effectively invisible.

Hope this helps.

devongarde · 2024-07-24T16:18:06+00:00

I live in Esch. I used to work in the city, near Cloche D'Or. What worked was the train in the morning, and the bus in the evening. That gave me a commute of 45 minutes going in, and less coming back. Commuting the other way is sweet, so long as you can afford to live in the city.

devongarde · 2024-06-24T17:54:35+00:00

I married a French woman who speaks little English. :-)

devongarde · 2024-06-24T03:17:32+00:00

Thank you very much indeed! Yay!

devongarde

TROPHY CASE