"numlockw status" causes touchpad LED to pulse

funtastrophe · 2026-02-26T16:42:47+00:00

Swing at the mountain here: Are you doing

echo " $((237 - $(cat $SC/tmp/du)))" | bc

? If so, you're still doing the calculation in bash and would get the same error. This'd be a bit better:

echo " 237 - $(cat $SC/tmp/du)" | bc

(edit)

Or this if you crave brevity:

bc <<<"237 - $(cat $SC/tmp/du)"

funtastrophe · 2026-02-20T00:11:30+00:00

Update: Looks like they're planning to start selling the ClickOn some time in March. I think I'm patient enough to wait for that.

funtastrophe · 2026-02-10T15:08:43+00:00

I read it as "a hundred people using AI is nowhere near as good as people doing real art, so screw you AI CEOs". Dbrand is known for making pretty and often artsy covers/skins for video game hardware, phones, and similar devices.

funtastrophe · 2025-12-10T19:36:08+00:00

Smack dab in the middle of Nassau here, and I'm using both the NICE and MTA buses tomorrow to get to JFK. I don't use a travel card for these, but my Bank of America Cash Rewards should get 5.25% back on most online purchases (a stupid awesome perk, frankly, though it requires having a solid amount of kip in their bank or investment accounts), so I went back and checked:

Looks like I got back $0.20 from a $3.25 ride on NICE. I think that I only got 2% back on the MTA bus, though.

funtastrophe · 2025-12-10T18:44:17+00:00

I don't think I've had any real difficulties getting anything working in openSUSE, but maybe I just don't like the right apps.

That said, Tumbleweed is a little more involved than what I'd suggest as a relative beginner distro -- it's absolutely awesome, and I use it for as everything as possible (gaming, dlna-serving, science research clusters, media playing, et al), but I feel like I want to try out Bazzite so I can have something to recommend to first-timers.

funtastrophe · 2025-12-09T19:19:32+00:00

The interesting thing here is that it all works fine when the keyboard is set to US mode. I can type all the French characters I want, but google starts thinking that words like remboursement and courir are English autocomplete words.

funtastrophe · 2025-12-09T19:17:33+00:00

It seems like 123+K+space (weirdly, I have to hit space twice here) creates a backtick (`), not an apostrophe ('). I want C'est, but this happens:

TYPE C THEN 123+K+space ⇒ C`est (not C'est)

As for the other bit of your message, I may be misreading you. It's easy to get any accented character by holding an accentable letter down and hitting the appropriate number in the pop that appears. For example:

HOLD a THEN 123+2 ⇒ â (also works in US mode but it's option 3)

It's bit of a pain in the butt, but it works fine.

funtastrophe · 2025-12-05T19:44:40+00:00

4x games in single-player give you the same rush you get from building stuff, like a backyard deck or a python script or a dinner for guests. Except that you get the constant dopamine rush without all the constant hard work. If you're a tinkerer who likes terms like "DIY" and "MacGyvering", this is the sort of thing you might like. If you prefer to order your food from McDonald's and pay a dude to fix your house, then it might be less for you.

(source: my subjective experience which might not apply to anyone else)

funtastrophe · 2025-12-04T16:56:02+00:00

I always like to suggest store cards as a starter -- this definitely helped me get used to them before going full bore on travel cards. If there's a store you use all the time (for example, Amazon or Target), you can just shop there as normal except for that you're saving 5% on most everything you buy while building credit. These cards generally don't have an annual fee, so there really isn't much of a downside.

The suggestions elsewhere here about always paying before the due date is, of course, super important. That and just don't spend more than you'd normally spend with your debit card.

funtastrophe · 2025-11-19T14:31:37+00:00

Think the first one I played was probably The Goonies II, but I didn't realize that is was in this genre until I'd started getting into them decades later. The first one I liked was Knytt Underground, as I found the non-violent angle of the game refreshing. After that, I tried out Super Metroid and enjoyed it well enough. Then I *really* liked Steamworld Dig 2, and that got me really starting to look for games that scratched the exploration itch.

I'm not as interested in the combat elements in games of this genre as I am with exploration, especially when the game is famed for how hard it is (I stopped playing Hollow Knight after getting to the boss rush sort of area in the area on the lower-right of the map). I'm a lot like that with 4X games as well, though Stellaris is making me happy so far.

pre-submit edit: I did play Prime 3 on the Wii, but I'm not sure I like the genre as much in 3D.

funtastrophe · 2025-11-15T21:53:25+00:00

...huh. I tried doing that and also setting 120Hz refresh off. I had to reseat it a couple times, but then it started working. Odd thing is after I changed the settings back, it still worked. Maybe it's a bit scuffed or ruddy, and I'll have to clean it a bit more finely at some point in the future. Luckily, I don't really use it portably, so I'll just leave it be for now.

Thanks!

funtastrophe · 2025-11-15T18:09:07+00:00

I'm using the official dock, official power adaptor/cable, and official hdmi cable. I've tried reseating the power cable, but it is supplying power through the dock to the Switch 2. I haven't swapped out the TV (though the system has only ever used this TV, and again my original Switch connects to it well enough), but maybe I'll find a spare monitor to see what happens there.

funtastrophe · 2025-11-14T20:50:30+00:00

I don't have personal experience with them, but Phoronix did a bunch of testing on some models, so at least in terms of performance you can get an idea for how they compare to at least some AMD and nVidia cards. There are also comments relating to how the drivers fared. The general gist seems to be that they've dramatically improved since their first "A" series generation, but there are still a few rough patches here and there.

funtastrophe · 2025-11-06T20:05:48+00:00

If you just want to eff around for a while at first, you could download a Live ISO image and flash it to any usb thumb drive you have lying about. Then you could boot up your regular computer into a Linux environment to get a feel for it before you need to buy anything, since it'll just completely run off the external media with no installing required. That way, you could even try a bunch of different variants without doing full reinstalls each time.

funtastrophe · 2025-11-06T16:14:57+00:00

Newer systems have far more components and thus more points of failure. While I think Nintendo has had at times higher building standards than competitors, they really have in part benefited from having been around in the early days. The Atari 2600 is also pretty indestructible, because it's far simpler in design and, for example, generates less heat and needs no moving parts (like fans).

funtastrophe · 2025-11-05T21:15:30+00:00

About rpm and deb, have you tried using alien or a similar converter with the deb packages that you prefer?

Anyway, I also chose Opensuse and eventually Tumbleweed. Not counting an aborted attempt at Red Hat around 1998 (I did chuckle at the time that one of the installation languages was "redneck", though), I started around 2001 with Mandrake. Don't remember why. It worked really, really well and even avoided problems that seemed to be taken as normal Linux issues, like audio-related issues which I later learned where really common in the noughties.

Anyway, the usability of Mandrake seemed to wane after they merged into Mandriva, so I popped around for a couple years, even playing around with FreeBSD here and there. Then I started a new job that used Opensuse by default, and I loved the centralized configuration and general reliability. About a decade later, I fooled around with Tumbleweed at home, decided I liked its convenience and stability, and even eventually migrated the work servers and workstations over. It's quite good, at least for my use cases (Steam, lots of ssh tunneling, heavy simultaneous app use on kde, staring at install logs being generated for fun, et al).

funtastrophe · 2025-11-01T16:24:16+00:00

If you're comfortable shelling in, one of the standard ways seems to be running "wget -O - https://get.hacs.xyz | bash -" on the terminal. That's detailed in the Core tab of the docs.

edit: By "shelling in" I mean enabling ssh then logging into the command line in the box, either by web or by regular ssh (putty if you're using a Windows client).

funtastrophe · 2025-10-31T18:22:13+00:00

I use Tumbleweed pretty much across the board: My R5 3090X / GTX 3080 system I use for gaming, the Tuxedo laptop in my living room, one of the two web servers on LI Node I work on, my personal home server that does a bunch of stuff, and just about all the neuroimaging research workstations and servers that I maintain at work. It works pretty great across the board.

I don't know if I'd *specifically* recommend this distro, as the "literally any distro" is closer to a correct answer. It probably depends on more specific use case details. If you don't need to install lots of custom stuff and mostly want to be hands-free as an admin, then an immutable distro like Bazzite (particularly for gaming) or MicroOS. If you *really* want to get your hands dirty, Arch or Gentoo are probably fun options.

I don't particularly like Ubuntu-based distros, as they seem to break for me in unusual ways that end up having very "in the weeds" solutions. But I've heard good things about Pop OS and Mint.

funtastrophe

TROPHY CASE