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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • In combination with the exercise it sounds like you’re doing anyway, have you tried a bit of Yoga and a bit of listening to meditative sounds before/during bed/sleep/end of day? You may have tried similar things already, but if not, maybe worth a go? It’s not going to pass/waste time as such, but might put you into a better position to stop your mind racing with negativity, especially in that crucial pre-sleep phase.

    Particularly looking at “Yoga for Anxiety” or “Yoga for Mental Health” type things, moreso than general strength and fitness Yoga. You’ll find a bunch online. You might find something like this Yoga Healthcare Alliance 10 Week Course works for you (it’s promoted by the UK’s NHS for some conditions). It’s focusing on basic de-stressing, de-tensing muscles, breathing focus, and may help you feel calm and relaxed - which may give you a good nights sleep - which could potentially do wonders for beginning to recover.

    I’d also suggest combining it with some “sleep headphones” - a fabric headband with some really flat headphone speakers inside it - then listen to a combination of “meditation for anxiety” or “8 hours deep sleep ambient soundscape” type things whilst you lie there.

    Ideally you’d do the Yoga sat on your bed, then drop straight into something like “a nice man tells you you’re great and everything will be fine” followed by some sort of “inner peace meditation that lasts 8 hours or longer”. Obviously, you’ll find your own preferred voices/sounds. I’ve also used white noise style “starship engine sound” or “on a night train” audio.

    If you watch them on your phone with “Newpipe”, you can save them as videos or just as audio files - which you can then set up as playlists in VLC. No point in downloading the same thing every night.

    This whole set of things might not work for you at all, but if you’re up for hours anyway, what do you have to lose?

    Personally, I found this process helped me massively on my way out of a similar patch (combined with exercising more, quitting caffeine for a while, CBT therapy - it was a multiple angle approach).

    Regardless, I wish you luck and pass you my best wishes in your recovery.



  • I’m sure it’s not possible for everyone - but I essentially did this some years back - though more with Premiere than Photoshop - and therefore more Cinelerra/Kdenlive than Gimp/Krita.

    I ran a dual boot system from about 2008 until about 2015. If it could be done in Linux/FOSS, it was. If it couldn’t, it was done in Windows/Adobe software.

    I was self-employed, though I often did subcontracting work for a handful of media/umbrella organisations - so sometimes I had to use Premiere or Sony Vegas to carry on half-done projects I was handed.

    Bear in mind this was when you bought Adobe software and didn’t rent it - and you could also keep running an older version for years.

    Anyway, over time I used the Windows partition less and less, until I got rid of it entirely when I got a new computer.

    I had to work a bit harder one year, and I did miss out on a few projects - but mostly, I could do everything I could do previously, but it took a bit longer for a while until I adjusted to a different workflow.

    After that, you’re just saying “That’s a £2000 job”, “That’s a £200 job”, and meeting a deadline. Nobody really cares if it took 7 minutes longer to do, and I saved a lot of time not using Windows any more.

    Editing (and other design stuff) is a far smaller part of my overall work these days, but I still do a good chunk of projects over the year, and I’ve been 100% Linux for almost 10 years. No regrets.




  • To a degree, yes, but don’t expect magic. Some laptops have a waterproof membrane under the keyboard, so if you’re lucky, and it does, you may be able to just pop the keys off and dry the membrane out, and make sure no liquid creeps round the side into the electronics.

    Otherwise you may have better odds if you open up the case and mop up any/all loose liquid you can get to with a microfibre cloth, as soon as possible, then try and let it air dry for a while.

    A sealed bag with dried rice and your electronic object may absorb a bit of leftover moisture, but only to the extent that it will equal the moisture level in the sealed bag - the dried rice will gain a little extra moisture, the object will lose that bit of extra moisture.

    Try to resist the urge to turn it on to check if it’s working until you’ve got all the moisture out.




  • I can’t personally, but I’ve installed/set up Linux systems for quite a lot of older people, and I think only one of them ever uses the terminal for anything. The rest just… use the computer.

    On the whole, they’re pretty much just using Libreoffice, Firefox and a few other bits these days. If something needs the terminal to fix, we’re already past the point where they’ve phoned me to pop round and fix it.

    These used to be Ubuntu systems, but I switched them all to Mint after having endless Snap permission problems with printers, USB sticks and other peripherals. Once up and running, it’s pretty low maintenance.

    I guess they don’t need to use the terminal, because I’ll go and do it if it’s necessary - but we are looking at once every few years. Not a lot of tech support needed.

    On my own machine, I probably use the terminal every day.


  • The “Fonline” engine fodev.net or fonline.ru was (almost) able to create a fully functional Fallout game, with zoom, higher resolution sprites or isometric 3D models, whilst retaining the look, feel and controls of the originals.

    The main problem (from my perspective) was that it was designed as a “multiplayer-first” engine with real-time pew-pew-pew combat, and getting it to do anything singleplayer and turn-based needed quite a lot of work at the time - and engine updates weren’t often backwards compatible, and the documentation was often only in Russian. A lot of half-finished projects showed great promise, but then broke and fizzled out.

    I think it’s still in development. Last time I looked, they were “refactoring” all the code (including fixing all the single-player stuff). It still holds promise for the future.


  • I got detention off of a teacher for saying “Hitler the Shitler” or “Hitler is a Shitler” or something suchlike during a lesson, even though several other kids had already said it and didn’t get in trouble.

    Technically, the detention was for swearing, though I chose to interpret it as “Miss Teacher loves Hitler and he is her boyfriend”.

    I instigated a petty campaign of cartoons, blackboard messages, textbook graffiti and just general rumours that this poor teacher was genuinely a Hitler-loving-Nazi, and had a Hitler shrine in her house. As I was generally honest, well behaved etc, it was readily believed and spread quickly.

    As she was relatively unpopular as a teacher, many of the other students joined in, goosestepping past her in the corridor, nazi saluting behind her back etc.

    After a few weeks, upon entering the classroom to find a full blackboard chalk cartoon of her and Hitler getting married, she started crying and shouted at us and we all felt awful.

    I apologised to her after the lesson, and she actually apologised for unfairly singling me out for punishment “to set an example” and oddly, we actually got on pretty well after that, and the Hitler jokes faded out naturally.


  • Looking at some of these… I’d never even considered sectioning them by genre - mine’s mostly by physical location - if I want to play that game, where’s it already installed?

    So there’s :
    Desktop, Laptop, Deck Internal, Deck SD1 (and SD2, 3 & 4 for removable SD cards)

    Then like most people, I’ve got a “Complete” and a “Maybe [person’s name]” for ones the missus might enjoy.

    The only sort of grouping is “Wheel Games”, which is basically driving games, but the type you want to play with wheel & pedals, not just a controller. My wheel and pedals aren’t set up permanently, so when they are set up, I pretty much only play all the Euro Truck/Bus Sims, Dirt Rally, F1, Revhead, BeamNG sort of games etc.





  • If you include remasters, I’ve been playing Shenmue I, which I think I originally played on my friend’s Dreamcast in about 2001. Think it was one of the most expensive games ever made when it first came out, so I guess that’d make it pretty AAA?

    There’s a lot that feels a bit dated in it, like slightly clunky controls, annoyingly long sequences for tiny things (i.e. taking your shoes off every time you go in/out the house), emotionally stunted voiceovers etc - but it also holds up as a good mystery, and such a beautifully realised game world that the clunkiness just becomes sort of joyously nostalgic. I think it’s great.

    Also, the creepy little kids that shout “HEY MISTER! DO YOU WANT TO PLAY… soooocccerrrr?” are still hilarious.




  • There’s a gamingonlinux article which might explain a bit.

    Very roughly, a few alterations to the anticheat to make it work on Wine made some of the anticheat’s workings apparent, which in turn allowed people to work out new exploits.

    Wine is an excellent tool for reverse engineering. Additionally, we had to disable many antitamper checks to make Hyperion run on Wine. This has allowed interested parties to learn a lot about the internal workings of Hyperion, relevant to both Win32 and UWP. As the initial shock of Hyperion’s release started wearing off, many people have begun discovering the various angles through which one can learn more about the inner workings of Hyperion.

    As to why all the anticheat stuff matters so much, I’m not quite sure.