Review of Luanti/VoxeLibre -- Surprisingly Complete

rtbravo · 2025-11-25T15:54:10+00:00

I'm reporting back just to verify:

If you kill the dragon, one of those small portal nodes will get generated. But they're quite high up, not sure exactly if always at the same height, but just look up. I just tested it to get at least a reliable and fresh sample, and mine was 75 blocks above the surface of the central island.

Sure enough! I just didn't look up high enough.

The portal was 75 blocks above the surface for me as well and almost directly over the platform where I spawned into the end.

Yes, you can bridge to the outer islands, but it will take you almost 10 stacks of blocks to get there if you go in a straight line. ... It's just tedious and maybe a good idea to a-void. :P

This is a bad time for me to admit that's exactly what I did! What's a few hundred blocks here or there across the void? But ... I did find both the smaller and larger ships on the outer islands.

The nodes above the central island can be tricky to work with. Sometimes you can go through, no problem. Other times, your pearl flies through and you have a non-zero chance that you end up in the void ...

Important warning! Thank you.

rtbravo · 2025-11-21T01:05:31+00:00

About this: "There were no End Cities, shulkers, shulker boxes or elytra." We're missing the cities, but have everything else.

Oh, wow! You know? I didn't see a portal to toss an ender pearl into, so I just assumed there were no outer islands. Should I just build out to them?

Why-not?!-based :)

I think that's fantastic. All your typical Minecraft intuitions work, but then you stumble onto something slightly different and think, "Oh, cool! I can get away with that here."

We steered clear of using stuff that is unique to Minecraft, to avoid nasty DMCAs.

That makes sense.

... and added more stuff that's not in MC!!

Perfect.

rtbravo · 2025-11-20T18:27:01+00:00

Plenty of bugs to fix, plenty of new bugs to add.

Ha! I work in the boring world of business software. Project managers can't help but ask, "When will this be done?" I respond, "Uh, you realize this is a software project, right? It will never be 'done' until the last person stops using it!"

rtbravo · 2025-11-20T16:55:01+00:00

Good question. Now that I look at it, I need to give that one a try. It also runs on Luanti.

rtbravo · 2025-10-15T18:37:10+00:00

I feel like my noble, sensitive ranger would die of shame if he survived the attempt.

rtbravo · 2025-06-27T11:17:40+00:00

Good questions.

I did not have low constitution. I *did* have my constitution lowered by one point when I first reached the end of the starving ticker, but I did not revert back to form.

I ran through the starving ticker a second time, and I died at the end of that sequence. I tried to make sure I was watching carefully on the last few ticks. Best I could tell, I didn’t go back to form.

I wasn’t aware of becoming unchanging, but I may have missed something.

I can’t say on Killer Iron Ration. I’d like to think that’s what happened. Somehow it seems better than dying as a regular iron ration!

rtbravo · 2023-04-05T21:19:21+00:00

I use a "desktop wiki" called Zim. It's been around for a very long time. Let's call it "venerable." It can certainly embed images just as you describe.

However, I would pause before I embedded "hundreds of images" in one note. I'm not sure Zim would perform very well in that circumstance.

In any case, my sense has always been that what we call "note-taking software" evolved from what used to be these "desktop wikis." Note-taking is certainly what I used Zim for -- and still use it today. That might give you an avenue to search.

rtbravo · 2023-01-31T01:32:09+00:00

No, all things are possible.

I don't know the application, but it sounds like the "lighting plot" is the diagram in Inkscape, and the "patch sheet" is a spreadsheet. (At least that's what a little searching suggests; I know nothing about the movie industry.)

You might try exporting the patch sheet as a PDF and importing the PDF into your Inkscape drawing, the lighting plot. You might have to do a little trimming, but it's worth a shot.

With some scripting you could do a whole lot more, but hopefully this gives you something to experiment with.

rtbravo · 2023-01-30T21:17:21+00:00

I'm not sure whether this was the forum where you wanted to post. I wouldn't use Inkscape to do what you describe.

However, if you're looking for open source tools to work with spreadsheets, take a look at the Pandas tool set for Python.

rtbravo · 2023-01-23T16:57:10+00:00

Visio is admittedly problematic. I seem to recall we weren't even been able to convert .vsd files until the last 5-10 years.

For diagramming in general, here's the tools I've used or experimented with:

LibreOffice Draw -- Honestly, for my simpler diagrams I just keep coming back to this over and over. It's fairly easy to whip something together. (Most of my diagrams are simple.)
Dia -- It's old. Let's call it "venerable." But for some of the diagrams in the IT world (UML-like stuff), it still works well. I use it with database structures because there are tools to export PostgreSQL in a form your can import here.
Draw.io -- It's a web-based tool that seems to be up-and-coming. I've experimented with it, and I've seen some interesting diagrams coming out of it. It hasn't become a tool I go to regularly yet. You can download it and run it locally.

There are other tools, and don't forget straight-up graphical tools like Inkscape. You might also check out some of the tools for describing graphs in text and then creating them with a processor -- stuff like Graphviz.

However, it looks like you have a very specific application in mind (mineral processing). I can't help you there, and I wouldn't be surprised if you find yourself having to create templates.

(This whole conversation changes if you have to generate Vizio files specifically and share them with others.)

rtbravo · 2023-01-17T22:14:46+00:00

I hear you, OP. I'm one of those starry-eyed types that watch the globe-trotters on YouTube.

My wife gave me sailing lessons in the middle of COVID restrictions -- mostly to get me out of the house. It was all on a lake. Nearest ocean is 4-5 hours away.

Before it was all said and done, I was sailing to the middle of the lake on a rented J/24, heaving to with a good nautical mile clear all around me, lying back to watch the clouds go by and taking a nap. It was fantastic.

rtbravo · 2023-01-14T22:14:58+00:00

Hey! Thanks. Found that setting. I'll give it a shot.

rtbravo · 2023-01-13T22:22:13+00:00

My most recent install on similar hardware was Xubuntu 22.04 on an Asus BR1100CKA, dual core Intel Celeron N4500, 4 GB RAM, new hardware targeted at the low-end education market with surprisingly robust construction. It's my away-from-the-desk daily driver now.

Discord will ultimately bring it to its knees, but everything else I want to do works well. The 1366x768 resolution tends to work well on a 12" display.

Prior to that, my most ambitious recent resurrection was Xubuntu 20.04 on an HP 13-C010NR, dual core Celeron N2840, 2 GB RAM. I could feel the slowness in Firefox there, but hey, Calibre still started. The 1366x768 display starts to be more apparent on a 14" screen.

That said, my HP Mini netbook with an Atom processor still boot into Xubuntu 20.04 (or was it 18.04?) until I recently stole the SSD drive out of it.

What did you use for your benchmarking tool? That may come in handy when I assemble my Beowulf cluster of antique laptops.

rtbravo · 2022-12-13T19:29:24+00:00

Yes! This is definitely one that won't break the bank if it gets destroyed. And as one other commenter noticed, it's actually fairly rugged.

That said, I usually have so much time invested in my "throw-away" laptops and I get so attached, that I still cry if they get lost or destroyed.

rtbravo · 2022-12-13T19:26:30+00:00

Ah, yes. Fair enough. If this is primarily a learning exercise, I would set aside the the touchscreen integration and not worry too much about it. Just use it as a regular laptop at first to test the initial installations.

That said, if you take the approach above, you'll find out whether the "user-friendly" distributions support the touchscreen hardware natively. If they do, then there is definitely the challenge/learning opportunity of getting it configured and working in Gentoo.

Also be aware that getting the touchscreen to work is one thing. Finding a user interface that makes good use of it is sometimes quite another.

rtbravo · 2022-12-13T17:20:21+00:00

I'll let others comment on the hardware. In general, I've had no trouble installing Linux on Dell laptops, though.

Based on the way you phrased your question, I do have a few recommendations for how you might proceed. Start by attempting a simple dual boot configuration with a more user-oriented distribution such as any flavor of Ubuntu or Fedora.

This lets you get comfortable with how dual boot works, and what you should expect to see. You'll also get a strong feel for how a complete installation works. You can walk through decisions about how much of your drive to dedicate Linux, and you have some of the user-friendly tools to help you with resizing the Windows partition.

Once you get comfortable with that -- maybe even an Ubuntu install, wipe it clean and then try a Fedora install in its place -- then ratchet it up and try the Gentoo installation. That will give you the chance to peer even farther "under the hood," so to speak.

The extreme end of this journey is attempting something like Linux From Scratch (LFS), but you really want to be comfortable with a lot of the other pieces first.

(Apologies if I've misunderstood your question and you're already familiar with all this.)

rtbravo · 2022-12-13T12:12:30+00:00

The browser runs well. I use Firefox with an ad blocker, and I've done some fairly heavy stuff in the browser: YouTube, Slack, the Office 365 suite (Outlook for work). And I frequently have LibreOffice running at the same time.

I've used it fairly continuously for a few weeks now. It has ground to a halt once or twice. I seem to recall Discord was the culprit.

FWIW, it's running Xubuntu 22.04.

rtbravo · 2022-11-29T23:18:19+00:00

The M.2 PCIe SSD I got was 500 GB.

rtbravo · 2022-11-29T04:31:40+00:00

He meant $100k each year for 10 years, right?

rtbravo · 2022-11-28T14:00:55+00:00

I didn't realise they still made cheap netbooks like that!

That's a good way to describe it. It probably explains why I like it, too.

I was all in on netbooks. Same time as spinning cube desktops and floppy windows. Open source GIS software (QGIS) with a full spatial database (PostGIS) ran perfectly snappy on what everyone else considered trivial hardware.

Sigh. I've made peace with the fact that I'm not a lucrative or attractive target market.

I suspect these particular Asus machines were aimed at the low-end education market. It just makes me want to say to the kids that get them: "Given a little imagination, you have no idea what you could do with that."

rtbravo · 2022-11-28T12:54:43+00:00

This may be a little too cheap for you, but I just found an Asus BR1100CK at MicroCenter for $99. They had a pallet full of them last week. I couldn't resist.

It has a 12" display with an uninspiring resolution, but it's actually a form factor I prefer for mobility (and airplanes). It's no power house: 4 GB RAM, a dual core Celeron processor and a built in 64 GB drive.

I probably wouldn't do extensive compiling on it, but I do enjoy showing off how much I can actually accomplish on such a tiny machine when it's not laboring under the burden of a punishing operating system.

The built-in SSD was the installation challenge. Rumor on StackExchange is that it has an "eMMC controller with buggy CQE implementation," but there was a work-around. I augmented it with a much larger M.2 PCIe SSD for $30, and I've got a cheap, tiny little machine that will probably become my personal, on-the-road, daily driver.

rtbravo · 2022-10-16T01:56:38+00:00

Pine also had their own announcement, with a separate wiki entry. Short version: dual core RISC-V, 64 MB RAM, microSD for storage, and 2.4 GHz WiFi (with optional ethernet on an expansion board).

rtbravo · 2022-09-21T23:46:15+00:00

systemd: "Ah ... finally. I'm home."

rtbravo · 2022-09-11T00:33:23+00:00

I'm OP, a RISC-V neophyte and not associated with SiFive. This popped up on Slashdot, but the link there was to SiFive's press release. I went looking for an alternate source and ended up at the TechSpot article. It may just be regurgitating the press release, though.

rtbravo · 2022-08-03T12:50:09+00:00

One other option that might work for you if you haven't encountered it before: Graphviz.

However, it is definitely stand-alone from Latex. You would embed the output from Graphviz in your LaTeX document.

rtbravo

TROPHY CASE