• 2 Posts
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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: March 17th, 2024

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  • Came here for this. You can basically use LARP as an excuse to further almost any creative hobby. For PAX Unplugged I made a LARP Escape Room, and that was an excuse for me to learn how to use Arduino controllers and wire hardware in order to make a robot puzzle for the event.


  • It depends on how many versions I am away from the latest, and how much I’ve messed with the distro.

    Usually I stay on an Ubuntu LTS and upgrade from LTS to LTS when that upgrade path is ready. I upgraded from 20.04 to 22.04 this way.

    But this time I wanted Pipewire in 24.04, and didn’t want to wait for a 22.04 to 24.04 upgrade to be ready. I’m using a bluetooth headset and Pulseaudio is pretty terrible at switching headset profiles. Between not wanting to upgrade an upgraded install, and having messed with Pulseaudio quite a bit trying to get it working, I went ahead and clean installed 24.04 and moved some configs over.



  • What if a revolution in the US caused a global economic collapse?

    We tend to think of potential revolutions in the same way as the US Civil War, or the French or Russian revolutions. The problem is that a civil war would be much more like the British Civil War, and most people know very little about the French or Russian revolutions.

    A Revolution or Civil war wouldn’t have 2 times. It’d have a dozen. We can’t agree on what the future of the country should be now, how would we in a Revolution? There would be Revolution, counter-revolution, a civil war where the sides shift every 6 months. And you know how other countries try to influence us now, with Russia interfering with elections and China manipulating companies? That’s with the full strength of the Federal government attempting to stop it. Now they’d get to do it with an extremely vulnerable, fractured country.

    Add on to that that those other revolutions involved world powers, but in a far less connected world wide economy. The fall of the US looks less like the French Revolution, and more like the Bronze Age collapse.

    I think it’s too soon to write off the US as irredeemable without revolution. The last time we had a brush with Fascism taking over the country, we got FDR and The New Deal. If we can avoid this brush with Fascism, we might get another chance at turning things around.






  • If you follow pro wrestling, if you go to small independent shows, there is almost always one guy in the front row, with a WWE belt, taunting wrestlers. Because you see, those wrestlers are nothing, and no matter how cool they are, whether or not they win the match, whether they win that indie promotion’s title, they’ll never be the WWE champion. And, sure, I guess? But not everyone cares about that. And even if the wrestler isn’t going to be WWE champ, they’re far closer than that guy is.


  • Common in the hobby of tabletop RPGs, or especially Larping, is Main Character Syndrome. People think that their character is the most important thing in existence. If things don’t go their way, they complain, claim cheating or bias. If the larp is setup for it they ask for appeals for the decisions and investigations against the person who wronged their character. They spend more time just arguing over what great things should happen (or what bad things should not happen) to their character than they actually do just … playing the game.




  • The best explanation I’ve seen is that music is mixed differently for CD/streaming and vinyl.

    For mass market, the move has been to mix for louder bass and similar things. The idea being that it makes the music more popular. But it also makes it difficult to appreciate anything but the bass.

    On vinyl, you can’t max out bass like that, it won’t work on the format. So they have to give it a normal mix instead, making it sound better. In theory CDs should sound better than vinyl, but because of the music production trends, it doesn’t currently.




  • I don’t know of a good way to route other application’s traffic through the VPN container with them being in docker containers, unless you use some intermediary setup. That’s why I have socks proxies routed through the VPN, so I can selectively put traffic through it. If the app supports a socks proxy you could do it that way. At the least you could use Proxychains to do so if the program does TCP networking.


  • So it’s always going to be used for technical things, but not necessarily development things. I use it for both.

    For my home server setup I have docker setup like this:

    1. A VPN docker container
    2. A transmission (bittorrent client) container, using the VPN’s network
    3. An nginx (web server) container, which provides access to the transmission container
    4. A 3proxy socks proxy container, using the VPN’s network
    5. A tor client container
    6. A 3proxy socks proxy container, using the tor container’s network

    Usually it’s pretty hard to say “these specific programs and only these should run over my VPN”. Docker makes that easy. I can just attach containers to the same network as my VPN container, and their traffic will all go over the VPN. And then with my socks proxies I can selectively put my browser traffic over either the VPN or Tor, using extensions like FoxyProxy. I watch wrestling through my vpn because it’s cheaper overseas and has better streaming options, so I have those specific sites set to route through my VPN socks proxy. And I have all onion links set to go through my Tor proxy.


  • A lot of Google/Android TV devices support “Basic TV” mode. You get the option during device setup, you can switch to it later by resetting the device. I would probably also not connect it to the internet, but that should cover making it a dumb device. I bought a Hisense one, tried it with Android TV for a bit, experienced it slow down and freeze up a bunch, and just switched it to Basic TV and plugged in a chromecast. Has worked fine since then.