• 5 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • Depending where you are moving to, snow may not be the only sort of inclement winter weather you may have to deal with. For instance, ice may build up on trees, power lines, and/or roads.

    If on roads, don’t drive unless you absolutely have to, and if you do, be way more careful than you think you need to be. Look up safety tips for driving in icy conditions before you have to put them into practice.

    If you have any trees that might fall on anything of value, kindof watch their condition. If any are splitting down the middle, hire someone to treat them before the winter season to avoid major problems like this.

    Or it’s possible you’ll live somewhere ice buildup is unlikely to be an issue. Maybe look into the history of the area or talk to someone who has been there a long time to find out what conditions might be an issue.

    Also, the ability to work remotely is kinda nice, I guess. It’s a double-edged sword, though. If you can work remotely, you never get days off due to weather. But if you can’t, you may be pressured to drive into the office when it’s very dangerous.




  • This reminds me of a game of Bang where I was the manipulative player. It’s a hidden role game, except that the sheriff role is not hidden. The deputy, renegades, outlaws, etc were all hidden roles. The sheriff and deputy win if the outlaws all lose (get shot enough times to be out of the game). The outlaws win if the deputy and sheriff both lose. (I don’t remember specifically the rules of the renegades.) Depending how may players you have, you’ll have different numbers of outlaws and renegades, but there’s always one sheriff and one deputy. But everybody knows how many of each there are even if they don’t know who is what role.

    I was an outlaw this game. And I basically just kept telling the sheriff that I was the deputy. One by one, all the other players fell, each at my insistence they’d said something suspicious and had to be an outlaw. (Basically, convincing the sheriff to start shooting a particular player is a death sentence for that player.) When only three players (the sheriff, me (an outlaw), and the deputy) remained I just kept telling the sheriff I was the deputy and trading shots with the real deputy. Eventually, the sheriff sided with me and started shooting the deputy, thinking (at my insistence) he was an outlaw.

    When someone dies, they’re allowed to show their role card, so the jig was up when he died. Then it was just a grueling game of the sheriff and I trading shots until one of us was unlucky enough times to take the hit that our health went to zero. I eventually won, but it took forever.

    After the deputy died, he admitted that he had suspected something had gone wrong in the shuffling/dealing of role cards and somehow we’d ended up with two deputies. I was apparently that convincing.

    That was the day I learned of my talent for manipulation.




  • Neat!

    spoiler
    • Red. It was rubber.
    • Male.
    • Tall, thin. I don’t remember a face, but he was wearing an old-fashioned formal shirt and sport jacket. The cuff of the shirt was unbuttoned and folded back. He also wore a wide-brimmed black hat. (I’m currently watching an episode of Hell on Wheels which probably influenced that.)
    • Large for an apple, small for a canteloupe.
    • Square, dinner-table-hieight. Dark-stained wood. I’m no woodworker, so I wouldn’t know what kind of wood it was, but I’ve got a couple of bookcases of the same wood and staining.

    Aside from that, I can say it took place in an old cabin and in the background, I saw an open doorway to a… foyer? The door to the outside was open. It was very sunny. And I saw green grass outside.

    And, I knew all those things before I got to the questions. I just had to consult/replay the scene in my head to get all the answers.

    Seems fair to say I don’t have aphantasia.


  • FizzyOrange got it right. “Screen grab” is nicely asking a graphical system (X11/xorg-server or a Wayland compositor or whatever) via an api to give you an image of either the whole desktop or some particular rectangular part of it. And you can do it 30 times every second (or more) to get a video. OBS uses such APIs to get video from the screen for saving to a file or streaming to Twitch or whatever. Various tools can be used to get screenshots and save them to files. Etc.

    Heck. On my work machine, because they require us to meticulously log the time we spend on individual tasks, I’ve got a script running that uses ImageMagick’s import command to grab screenshots of my desktop and save them to files once every 5 minutes so I can refer back to them while logging my time.

    And as FizzyOrange said, various Wayland compositors have workarounds for the fact that there isn’t (or rather wasn’t until recently) a way to do screen grab in a standard way that would work across all compositors which properly and comprehensively implement the Wayland protocol. I use Sway on my personal machines and it’s based on something called wlroots which has built-in a nonstandard extension to the Wayland protocol that allows screen grab. But once wlroots adopts the new standard way of doing screen grabbing, the nonstandard extension will be unneeded/obsolete.


  • Oh shit! I hadn’t heard they’d finally added that. That’s awesome.

    Maybe that means FFMPEG and Zoom will start supporting it soon.

    On my personal systems, I use Sway (a Wayland compositor). And I sometimes wish I could do screen grab with FFMPEG, but so far I haven’t wanted that enough to actually switch to X11 or use wl-screenrec.

    On my work machine, I’m on Ubuntu and I have to use Zoom and screen sharing is kindof a non-negotiable thing. (Plus, FFMPEG screen grab is nice to have on my work machine as well.) So I use i3-gaps on xorg-server. Except for those two things, I’d rather use Sway.




  • Assuming you’re in the U.S. (though possibly even if you aren’t)…

    The cool thing about game mechanics (boardgame, video game, school playground game, etc) is that they’re not covered by copyright. And (while this bit might be less true of video game mechanics) they’re rarely covered by patents.

    So, for the most part, clones require no licensing or anything. You can make a knock-off of Carcassonne or Settlers of Catan or whatever legally, so long as you avoid trademark infringement. (Basically as long as you’re careful to make it clear your game isn’t by such-and-such company and you don’t have any affiliation with them.)

    (Also, it’s worthwhile to mention that some games are as much or more so “flavor” as/than mechanics. In such cases, while I don’t know that there has been that much precent in the court, it’s likely the flavor would be considered copyrightable. So maybe if you’re copying the BSG boardgame, don’t include Cylons. Also, IANAL.)

    I once designed/manufactured a 3d-printable clone of Cubed: Next Level Dominoes, which itself was a(n I’m pretty sure unlicensed) clone of The Grid Game.








  • I’ve heard that YouTube has started experimenting with injecting ads into the actual video stream rather than getting JavaScript in the browser to swap between video and ad. Specifically for the purpose of breaking ad blocking. (Particularly to break ad blocking on Open Source apps/clients like NewPipe.) Though I haven’t seen it myself.

    There are a lot of doomsayers saying that YouTube ad blocking is a thing of the past if they do that for all videos/users, but I don’t think that’s the case. Ad blocking will catch up given some time.