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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • Lol I spent a week going back and forth with Revolut support in august. I could sign into the app but it would always ask me for a “selfie” verification and every time support would say its a super dark selfie.

    Eventually I decided to try a stock ROM and it just worked and I realised what was happening so I transferred all of my money out and deleted my account.

    Most local banks here are terrible at making apps, some even require a separate device that looks like a calculator to use online banking, so hopefully they wont follow suit anytime soon


  • Thank you! I’ve been hesitant to install a whole bunch of extensions but vitals and astra monitor look great, I’m going to try them out this week and see which I prefer.

    I’ve been avoiding flathub, it just doesn’t seem like my cup of tea but I may have to reconsider and take a proper look at it because it sounds better than a browser extension ngl

    I was just so surprised that a terminal that supports tabs doesn’t have generic tab switching, at least I know I’m not crazy now for not enjoying Gnome terminal lol

    I promise the giant cursor is a useful feature even though so many people have thought it was a weird bug lol I constantly do it when I’m trying to figure out how to word an email and on the very rare occasion where I can’t find my cursor it has actually been helful!


  • I’m pretty biased since I have been using KDE for a few years and only switched to Gnome this week to properly try it out so maybe I’ll change my mind but I doubt I will.

    IMO KDE has better theming and is more uniform across a wider variety of apps. It has support for community themes out of the box and it feels like the components are modular so you can have a different colour title bar compared to the app window etc

    • Dolphin > Nautilus
    • Kate > Gedit
    • Konsole > Terminal

    These are the 3 main default apps I use on both DEs. Dolphin has way more customisability and looks better but Nautilus has a fantastic multi-file rename with the option for find and replace built in.

    For me, Kate is like the vlc of documents. It will open anything and everything whereas I’ve had a couple of “could not open” errors from gedit this week. I also prefer Kate to Vscode.

    Konsole by default switches tabs with ctrl tab but Terminal doesn’t and thats basically my only issue with it.

    Gnome seems to still require you to install a browser extension to use Shell Extensions.

    KDE widgets are fantastic, I love having system monitors in a hidden panel at the top of my screen so I can really easily check system resource usage. I haven’t found anything similar on Gnome yet.

    KDE Connect is such a brilliant app, it wouldn’t launch for me on Gnome but there is GSConnect for Gnome but its a 3rd party app

    By default on KDE, if you shake your mouse the cursor gets bigger and there doesn’t seem to be a size limit which is so fun to do lol

    Going from Plasma 5 to 6 was a nightmare for me but its probably because I was using EndeavourOS so the updates were sooner and more frequent.

    Overall I think Gnome looks and feels a bit outdated and clunky and KDE looks and feels more modern with better integration across apps but that might just be QT vs GTK

    I do plan on continuing to use Gnome for at least another 2 months to give it a fair try but I will almost always recommended KDE because I prefer the look and feel




  • What do you mean they’re failing to install? That sounds like a wine issue.

    Sometimes games just work better on previous wine versions so it might be worth trying a couple of those.

    I haven’t played the game but it seems to be DX11 so DXVK probably needs to be installed to the prefix

    Towards the end of the FG installer, there is usually an option to download the dependencies so make sure you have those installed with winetricks to the correct prefix. C++ Redist download option here refers to vcrun in winetricks and its probably vcrun2022 since the game is new.

    Is it defaulting to using your integrated graphics instead of the discreet gpu?

    You could also add it as a non steam game in steam since proton will be set up properly to see if it runs better.

    Edit:

    470

    Do you need to update your drivers? 470 came out in April 2021. DXVK only supports 510 and later so d3dcompiler instead of dxvk should be used but a driver update would be better.


  • 2 accounts consistently reporting the same IP, location and user habits etc being linked is more absurd than nobody ever noticing excessive uploaded data from their phones? It is very easy to monitor the amount of uploaded and downloaded data on a device, lots of people would have noticed by now. The amount of storage, bandwidth and processing power that would be required to monitor the audio from hundreds of millions of android users globally 24/7 would make this the dumbest business decision ever when there are so many easier and efficient ways to track users.



  • Just tar and zstd. They’re probably installed by default for most distros anyway.

    I think this is what I used when I first tried out zstd https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-install-and-use-zstd-compression-tool-on-linux

    Tar supports input from zstd so I put everything on one line.

    tar -I 'zstd -v --ultra -22' -cvf YourFile.tar.zst -C /path/to/your/file YourFile
    

    -I takes the input from zstd which is in quotes.

    –ultra it should be redundant but for some reason its needed for higher levels of compression.

    -22 the highest level of compression offered by zstd.

    -c for compress.

    -v for verbose.

    -f for the file name.

    -C excludes the absolute path to the file/directory and just takes YourFile as the file/directory to compress. Its not needed if you’re in the same directory as YourFile.

    I would recommend leaving out

    --ultra -22
    

    and just test how much compression you get with the default level first because 22 is super slow and if it just can’t compress the file you won’t see any difference in file size compared to the default compression level.


  • For 3DS games I use NDSTokyoTrim to remove useless data from the game files to make them smaller.

    DreamCast, PS1 & PS2 games get compressed to chd with chdman.

    GameCube and Wii are compressed to rvz with Dolphin.

    PS3 I remove the PS3_UPDATE folder, 256MiB for each game adds up. I also use Gnarly Repacks for PS3 games since they have better compression than anything I’ve tried so far.

    Switch games, I use nsz.

    Then I use tar with zst on all of them, Nsz and rvz already use zst so theres no change but I just like to keep everything the same accross all of my roms and pc games.

    Everything else, GB, NDS, SNES etc all get archived and compressed with tar and zst. For these I’ll also use the --ultra -22 option since they’re small enough files anyway so they don’t take long to compress/decompress. If anyone knows any specific compression/trimming methods that are better than zst, I’d love to hear about them!

    Copies of all the tar archives are kept on 2 separate drives and a copy of the games are on my PC in whatever the smallest format is that is compatible with their emulator.



  • I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as Manjaro, is in fact, Arch/Manjaro, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, Arch plus Manjaro. Manjaro is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning Arch system made useful by pacman, yay and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.




  • For me the issue here is, why put so much time and energy into basically rebranding an LLM. I’ve seen LLMs running on RPi and android phones. Why not write a blog post showing how to run LLMs locally with existing tools for the best privacy instead and put more focus on their existing services. It just seems like they’re jumping on the AI bandwagon and charging a premium for an already freely available LLM.

    I see some benefits of AI like quality tts when using OSM and stt when transcribing/translating audio but other things like Googles AI answers and Microsofts Copilot leave me scratching my head wondering why consumer would want this



  • I’ve run into issues where a game will work with a specific version of wine but then not work with a newer version but then other games that don’t work with the older version, work with the new one.

    Theres also potentially issues of dependencies for one game breaking another game. Separate prefixes just make it easier to troubleshoot a game not working since you can just install/uninstall whatever dependencies that it might need without worrying about messing up other games.

    Its also just easier to delete the entire prefix when you realise you’ve installed too many useless dlls and you’ve finally found the one thing you do need to make the game work lol

    I also like to archive games I like since companies can just decide to remove their games from existence whenever they want. So I just add the separate prefix that has any extra dlls or tweaks to the archive so that the game should still work in 3 years without having to try and download dependencies that may not be as easy to find in the future

    But if you don’t have issues I don’t think its a big deal and if you do have issues with a game, you can just make a separate one for that anyway.




  • Every few months I like to clear out my password manager of any accounts I don’t need anymore, usually just throwaway emails aliases.

    I’ll usually attempt to log into any services that I know I’ve deleted/requested to delete to make sure they’re not accessible anymore and so far I haven’t been able to log in to any of them so I can only assume my requests are working.

    I suppose if a service had a data breach, after my information was meant to be deleted, and I found my information there then I’d make a complaint to my regulator about not deleting my data. I would have proof of my request and their acknowledgement of the request so it’d be pretty silly of them not to delete it after saying they did

    I rarely use anything but email aliases and fake information anyway and I never let online retailers save my card information. And if my address in on my account I change it to P. Sherman 42 Wallabyway Sydney before I delete/request to delete my account.