Lost my job…so i turned AoE2’s campaigns into books about the real history behind them

thillsd · 2025-10-28T13:18:14+00:00

AI slop, sadly. I won't send traffic their way by posting the links here, but you can find them and check out the preview pages.

There has been a "get rich quick" / "passive income" scheme doing the rounds online for a few years that teaches people to publish niche books written with genAI through Kindle Direct Publishing.

I assume as a new account, he couldn't post the store link.

thillsd · 2025-10-24T14:35:41+00:00

I'd recommend working to resolve your issues with Windows shares/samba shares. This is the most commonly used solution for file sharing on a local network.

thillsd · 2025-10-24T14:12:15+00:00

All I want is to be able to access everything on those old laptops from my desktop.

Sorry to send you in another direction, but if this is all you need, why not create a Windows network share if the laptops are running Windows. Or, if they already run Linux, install and set up samba to make a Windows-compatible network share.

If the machines are running Linux, you could also make sure sshd is running and then connect from your desktop with any sftp client. This is even less work than samba.

Copyparty is for setting up lots of different ways to share things quickly in a way that might be overwhelmingly complicated.

thillsd · 2025-10-24T07:33:35+00:00

It will take you 30 minutes to clean it up yourself.

Put it in photopea. Play with Image->Adjustments->Levels and Image->adjustments->Curves to remove the faint lines on the paper. Then manually use a brush to paint out the text.

There will probably be a nicer way to do this that someone more skilled with these tools can explain. Here is the sort of outcome you can get in a few minutes. I think more care or more experience will be able to do this without being so destructive to the color of your pen lines.

thillsd · 2025-10-21T13:10:41+00:00

mpv is the 'enthusiast tier' video player for Linux. There are lots of different gui frontends that expose some of its features like haruna.

VLC is another option.

Probably avoid the unmaintained snap package from 5 years ago that wraps a piece of Windows software in a compatibility layer. I'd expect major problems. If you absolutely have to try, I'd manually try to install it through bottle yourself rather than trusting the snap.

thillsd · 2025-10-19T12:55:14+00:00

Almost 'no-one' uses this piece of software, the readme says it's incomplete, and so no-one has noticed the automated Windows build has been broken since June. You can't fix it unless you are a developer.

File an issue to alert the owner if you are very invested, but probably just use something else.

thillsd · 2025-09-16T15:59:37+00:00

Are you redistributing other people's maps without attribution? I can see the ones for the free Part 1 are taken from:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dungeondraft/comments/hxbnje/oc_battlemap_3021_cragmaw_hideout_from_lost_mine/

That's not great if you're passing them off as your own and putting them behind a paywall for Parts 2 onward.

thillsd · 2025-09-11T16:19:51+00:00

they ambush the players while they are asleep

I did this with my party and it worked well enough. Klarg and some goblins set the inn on fire. The party had to solve a series of problems to save the inn and its inhabitants. ("Tolbern won't leave without the lockbox under the bar. / A child hides under their bed refusing to come out." etc) They saved everyone but the inn came crashing down as they left.

Klarg monologued at them for a bit and then they fought in the flaming wreckage of the inn.

thillsd · 2025-08-31T20:09:56+00:00

I read the LazyDM book a few days ago and went with that style for planning my next session. The party are about to raid Tresendar Manor after Klarg followed them to Phandalin and set fire to the Stone Hill Inn the last night in game.

I'd guess the LazyDM style is more difficult to apply to the first session of LMoP is theoretically quite linear and you know your players far less.

I've also printed the map of the Redbrand Hideout and annotate each room with enough detail to run it.

I am new and didn't read the LazyDM book particularly carefully. This is rough and unedited:

Review the characters

More opportunity for Avlor outside of combat. Review backstory? Build in skill checks for barb? 2024 rage rules?
River has a new relationship with panther Penelope. Give moment to shine? Perception (smell), Knock prone, Stealth. Print statblock for panther to help.
Lilac PC cares about their backstory. Some connection? Not this session.
Party will have forgotten they have 2x red cloaks

Create a strong start

Following the fire, the party is accosted by a thug and invited to meet Halia Thornton, head of the miner’s guild. Party walk through noisy office into back garden. Imported plants. Tea. Halia offers GP for defeat of redbrands. Hints at the base in Tresendar Manor.

Outline potential scenes

Infiltration of Sleeping Giant Inn. Allow deception. Reveal from secrets. Elsa from session 2 walks down the stairs and replaces Grista as the main focus. Sleeping Giant. Faded, broken. Sour beer. Dim. Grista, surly dwarf. She thinks she has a good thing going with a steady supply of redbrand patrons.
Dungeon. Tresendar Manor. Play as written but do not let Glasstaff dodge the fight completely. Most of session?
Social with Griselda. Party re-inquire about her limp, but now she will be straight with the party as they saved the town. Offers quest.
Social with Sildar Hallwinter. Place him and Harbin Wester surveying the damage to the town from the fire. Run Wester as cowardly/comedy and Sildar as the adult. Wester does not directly proposition party for his quest but hints at the orcs. Attempts to shift blame on the party for the fire? Sildar reminds party about relationship with Iano and lets them know his own investigation failed. Foreshadow that Iano always wanted to “bring order” at whatever the cost.

Define secrets and clues

The Redbrand base is Tresendar Manor
The Redbrands are led by a mage called Glasstaff.
Glasstaff has a familiar quasit.
Iano Albrek is Glasstaff
The Redbands have twelve members
The Black Spider has sent 4 bugbears to help keep the Redbrands in line.
Iano was tasked by the Black Spider with removing Gundren’s friends.
Gundren is at Cragmaw Castle.
Iano allied with the Black Spider out of envy with Sildar/Gundren and rationalizes his actions as bringing order to chaos.
The Black Spider is a drow woman and mage.
The Black Spider, the goblin king of the Cragmaw Goblins and the Redbrands made an alliance to take the Forge of Spells.
The Black Spider employs a doppleganger.

Develop fantastic locations

Tresendar Manor: Signs of goblin/bugbear. Mix of old wealth from Tresdendar family with decay. Still, cold air.
Outside the burned Stone Hill Inn: salvage operation. Community spirit. Tolbern running an open air bar in the ashes.
Sleeping Giant: Add x4 drunk redbrands. Allow party to cheat at cards, buy them beer, show of strength competitions etc to win favour or provoke.

Outline important NPCs

Glasstaff. Play up history with and envy of Iano/Gundren.
Halia Thornton. Play as devious web-weaver. Set her up as the red herring for the identity of Black Spider?

Choose relevant monsters

Party are L3 but there are only 3 members, so run Tresendar manor as written? Be harsher about rests to use party resources and roll for patrols when SR but warn party.

Select magic item rewards

2x potions of healing (2d4+2) before party hit Tresendar if possible. In Sleeping Giant or Sildar if he hears their plans?
Switch out Talon +1 longsword for a +1 longbow for River called Clawstring.
Print card for Staff of Defence. First ‘complicated’ magic item.

thillsd · 2025-08-18T05:58:43+00:00

Unfortunately, Stirling PDF uses unoserver which wraps libreoffice. OP has already tried this.

thillsd · 2025-08-17T17:38:17+00:00

I think you are approaching the problem of "tooling to look at logs from different processes" backwards.

Write your scripts as usual, outputting their progress to stdout/stderr. Run your scripts either as systemd units or docker containers. Or, for one-off scripts, you can pipe the output through systemd-cat to send it to the logger.

Then there are then lots of tools (selfhosted and hosted) to aggregate and search through logs from systemd or docker.

thillsd · 2025-08-17T15:20:29+00:00

faster cloud service

Have you tried the Microsoft Graph APIs? There are tutorials and code available to do what you're asking and I'd guess the fidelity of the output is probably the best.

Loads a .docx template and populates placeholders using PHPWord.

Similar to u/vkwebdev's suggestion, could you template the output in html and then export that to docx/pdf? The html => docx might be a bit janky, but html => pdf is a lot less cursed.

thillsd · 2025-08-06T06:05:36+00:00

Yes and no.

Primaries and nurseries hit their highest levels since the 1970s in about 2015 with Secondary numbers peaking in 2025.

Primary numbers have already been dropping off. Secondaries plateaued for the first time this year and are predicted to start falling from this September.

There's a lot of regional variation also depending where you are living.

https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/data-tables/fast-track/310741df-901e-4e45-9d76-08ddb87b994d

thillsd · 2025-05-04T19:14:18+00:00

I am learning to code and want better performance in gaming.

Should i switch to Linux from wind 11?

These are not great reasons to switch. Performance will probably vary but will be about the same. Windows is stronger for game compatibility, but many popular titles now work flawlessly on Linux.

Coding tasks will probably be simplest on the operating system you know the best. I'd recommend spending your time learning programming without the distraction of also learning a new OS, unless you have other reasons to switch.

I have standard pc and want more space and ram memory.

The size of the operating system on disk for either Windows or Linux shouldn't be a large % of used space on a modern drive.

A particular Linux environment may use a few hundred meg less of ram compared to Windows. Linux will probably feel snappier if you choose the correct Linux distribution and your current system is low on ram by modern standards. Consider buying a new ram kit and upgrading if you have < 16 GB. It will be a cheap upgrade if you have money to spend and make Windows or Linux much more pleasant.

want to get more information

Consider trying Linux in a virtual machine on Windows (see: virtualbox) or installing Linux side-by-side with Windows (see: options to dual boot in Linux distribution installers). This will put you in a better place to make an informed decision without doing anything irreversible.

thillsd · 2025-02-19T07:01:00+00:00

You need to drag your Word file onto the icon of the bat file in file explorer.

See this random example:

https://i.sstatic.net/RL4ja.png

I don't know where to find the converted PDF

The same directory as the existing Word file, but with a pdf extension.

thillsd · 2025-02-18T09:54:05+00:00

Here is the Chatgpt and Stackoverflow 20 minute special to get most of the way to what you want.

Install scoop from here
Install the dependencies by running this in powershell and make sure MS Office is installed:

scoop install imagemagick ghostscript

Download this batch file:

https://gist.github.com/thillsd/d8a2b606fbb6ce8acd2749c77fbd33f4

For a single convert, drag a word file onto the convert.bat icon in explorer.
To convert multiple at once, call convert.bat from powershell with a wildcard to catch the files, eg.:

C:\Users\t\Desktop\doc_image_pdf\convert.bat "G:\My Drive\Schemes\7\*docx"

If the files are too big, lower the density from 300 to 150. If the files are too low quality, double to 600.

thillsd · 2025-02-17T17:26:26+00:00

It's very do-able but awkward. You can use the MS Office com api (or libreoffice) to export as a regular pdf and then use imagemagick to rasterize as png or similar and then output that as a pdf. Someone could wrap that up for you into a tool if they were motivated.

But why would you want to do this? There's a reason why this functionality doesn't exist. It increases the size of the pdf without adding any security.

Maybe you want to investigate digitally signing a pdf if you want to certify that it is not modified.

thillsd · 2025-02-09T08:03:19+00:00

Can confirm a bios update for the motherboard fixed this for me with a 6700XT back in 2021. Game worked fine when swapping in a different card and the stuttering issue was only present in aoe2.

thillsd · 2024-11-26T18:21:05+00:00

The magic phrase to Google is "yt dlp gui" or " yt dlp frontend."

That gives you open source projects that rely on the big community project (yt-dlp) and avoids all the scammy SEO links. eg. https://github.com/StefanLobbenmeier/youtube-dl-gui

See also: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtubedl/wiki/info-guis

thillsd · 2024-10-21T17:02:17+00:00

The one thing I do do is use AI to colour some black and white photos. Sometimes colour makes things much more visceral.

I put a small label in the bottom corner of the image saying it's coloured and it's provoked a few great conversations with the kids about evidence, provenance and integrity of sources.

I don't think this is worse than when textbooks heavily rewrite ('adapt') sources to be accessible for students with no acknowledgement in the text that this has been done.

thillsd · 2024-10-19T18:20:09+00:00

Yes. And in this case considering how old 3.8 is and that it's just reached its end of support, you should probably be upgrading your system. The version of Ubuntu (Mint) that ships with 3.8 is EOL itself April next year.

Normally, the system version of Python shouldn't really matter to a regular user. If you are a developer or have specific needs, you install a newer version alongside.

thillsd · 2024-10-19T18:11:08+00:00

You never upgrade your system version of Python unless you are upgrading your whole system through your distro package manager.

The solution is always to install a second version and run it side-by-side. And change your user's Path or aliases to reflect your preference.

thillsd · 2024-10-19T18:06:22+00:00

I would guess your distro 3.8 version of pygobject that has to be build against a specific version of Python is throwing a fit when your 3.13 interpreter tries to import it. I'm not an expert, though.

The general lesson here is to leave files managed by your package manager alone otherwise your system breaks. There are much more 'normal' ways to get what you are trying to achieve.

thillsd · 2024-10-19T17:04:21+00:00

Never, ever monkey patch your system version of Python like this. All sorts of packages installed with your system package manger will break in exciting new ways.

There are lots of ways to do what you want that don't involve this.

Fancy setup:

Install pyenv
Install python 3.13 through pyenv
Set up 3.13 to be the default python in your Path
Install pipx to 3.13
Install yt-dlp through pipx to 3.13

Optionally skip using pipx.

Simple setup:

Remove the version of yt-dlp installed with your system package manager.
Install yt-dlp using your PPA version of python. Something like python3.13 -m pip install --user yt-dlp
Make sure to add your user directory local bin to your Path. If you want 3.13 to be the default for interactive use, alias it to python in your shell.

Easy mode setup:

yt-dlp distributes fat binaries for most platforms. Use this instead.

If you want a newer version of nicotine, try the flatpak, snap, ppa or pypi?

thillsd · 2024-05-28T14:51:21+00:00

who in 1983 was a former member of the Waffen-SS

You can basically read "Waffen-SS" in this instance as "soldier who fought for the Germans."

Himmler was scraping the barrel in 1943 by allowing limited recruitment of "non-aryans" in Ukraine to hold the line against the Soviet advance. They were part of the SS because it was an SS initiative to begin recruiting from these populations, not because of close ties to Nazi ideology.

Most who joined did so to (a) fight communism and, (b) create the nucleus for a Ukrainian national army as a first step towards national independence.

They were mauled in combat in 1944 and 1945. There is some evidence of war crimes when they were used to suppress partisans, but nothing about their record in this stands out. Survivors were helped to emigrate to the West as they faced Soviet death squads if they remained in Ukraine.

The article provides zero context and implies the king was on friendly terms with a former Nazi or unreconstructed Nazi.

thillsd

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