data1701d (He/Him)

“Life forms. You precious little lifeforms. You tiny little lifeforms. Where are you?”

- Lt. Cmdr Data, Star Trek: Generations

  • 34 Posts
  • 223 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: March 7th, 2024

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  • Rubbing alcohol and a microfiber cloth.

    Also, I feel like I’ve had good luck with k3b, though mainly for CDs.

    As for drives, as others have said, USB ones tend to be janky; go for an internal. I like my LG WH16NS40 Blu-Ray drive.

    If it’s a desktop, it should be easy to hook up with SATA, though if you have a newer case, you might need to dangle a cable out the side like I do.

    If you have a laptop, though, you’ll probably need a USB adapter, though there might be a hack using an M.2 slot to hook up an SATA PCI-E card.


  • If you don’t like bog standard Debian, you might really like Debian Testing.

    It allows you to get decently new packages; I’d say typical lag is one week to a couple months depending on the popularity and/or complexity of the project.

    I’ve been using it on my desktop for over three years just fine. It’s been quite stable while still getting new software versions in a mostly timely fashion.

    Do note though that Testing means Testing; it’s not really concerned with being a rolling release distro, but with preparing for the next release, so there’s a few quirks:

    • Sometimes, a package you’re using gets removed while its dependencies undergo a transition, forcing you to use the Flatpak.
    • When a new stable release starts to get close (usually 6 months), they’ll start what’s called freezes, where they let in progressively less changes until release, after which things start speeding up again.
    • As a general annoyance of anything rolling release-esque, software behavior may change over time, meaning a previously good config can suddenly break, and you have to fix it.

    Personally, I’ve grown tired of Debian Testing and rolling release in general; while I still using Testing on my desktop, I’ve thrown Debian Stable on most things I’ve owned since then, and if I really need a newer version of software, I’ll just install the Flatpak or use a container.







  • Persistence should be near impossible; you most likely have a bad habit or other factor that makes you vulnerable. As others have said, check your router settings; make sure your router firmware is the latest to patch any vulnerabilities. Check devices on your network to make sure none are compromised.

    My first guess, like others, is you’re doing something horribly wrong with your port forwarding, followed by you’re installing suspect software. Don’t go installing from random Github/Gitlab repositories without at least doing a bit of background research. Also, sometimes even legitimate open source projects get compromised. Ultimately, try to stick to the bare minimum, just stuff from the Debian repos, and see if it still happens.

    If you still have the problem, then my last resort is to ask this (and this is really paranoid, hopefully an unlikely scenario for you): do you use your computer in a safe environment where only people you trust can access it?

    I mostly ask because if not, maybe someone has physical access to your computer and is pulling an evil maid attack, installing the software when you’re not looking. Maybe it’s a jerk coworker. Maybe it’s a creepy landlord. A login password is not enough to defend against this; it may be possible for the attacker to boot off a USB stick and modify system files. The only way to prevent this is to reinstall and use full disk encryption, which I do on my laptop. You can try to use Secure Boot and TPM1 to add further protection, but honestly, your attacker just sounds like some script kiddie and probably won’t perform a complex attack on your boot partiton.

    1: Despite their obnoxious utilization by Microsoft, they can actually be quite useful to a Linux user, making it possible to set up auto-decryption on boot that doesn’t work if the boot partition has been tampered with (in which case you use a backup password).




  • I think I largely agree with your points.

    I’m also really annoyed that the choice tree required a website that no longer works. Additionally, for the overall results of the graphics, I’m rather bugged the game is that hardware intensive and think they could have easily optimized to make this game more accessible to lower-end hardware. I did my entire playthrough on an AMD laptop with iGPU (on Linux through Proton), and it was mostly playable.

    spoiler

    One of the worst parts graphically was the tractor beam at the mining facility; if I looked away from it, I could do around 24 fps, but the moment I looked at it, the game game became a slideshow.

    However, it was still really fun, and I only payed $12.50 for it.

    spoiler

    I wish I didn’t have to hate Bedrosian, but the universal hate is deserved. She suggests genocide with the frequency Worf suggests firing phasers or Shaxs suggests ejecting the warp core. I really wish they would have toned it doen a bit or written her differently.

    Also, I wish we had more time with Urmott; as good an officer he was, he had less chance to impress me than Westbrook, and thus I couldn’t choose him as first officer. Part of this is just an inherent structure issue with Starfleet (as summed up in Eddington’s “you don’t get to be captain wearing a gold uniform” or the story of Harry Kim), but honestly, for being the first officer you meet (besides Ensign cannon fodder), his story underwhelms.

    Though really, if I could really choose, I’d try to make the doctor my first officer, though I’m not sure she would have accepted.

    I did really enjoy the starbase and Resolute environments, and I wish more games would immerse the player in a Starfleet ship that way.

    Also, anyone else think the space British empire aliens all just looked like a realistic rendering of Squidward?








  • What do you use Photoshop for? I ask because if you’re just having fun with it or making simple edits like saturation or color curves, it’s probably easier to find a replacement. GIMP still has a bit of a clunky interface, but has become much more livable since it got some non-destructive editing in 3.0. Personally, I use a combination of Inkscape and GIMP for a lot of stuff.

    However, if you’re using Photoshop in a professional capacity as say, a photographer or a graphic designer, I’m not sure you can effectively abandon Photoshop. As much as I hate Adobe, Photoshop is unfortunately an industry standard, and it’s rather difficult to get running reliably under Linux. There are ways, but I wouldn’t call them reliable. I thus can not in good conscience recommend you switch all your machines to Windows, though perhaps you can run Linux on one device and keep a dedicated Photoshop box if that’s possible for you.

    Everything else should probably be fine. Depending on what you play, you might lose a few games to kernel-level anticheat, but honestly, my thought is “Why should I give a company access to an important part of my operating system just to play a video game?”

    As others have said, you should probably use LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice; the latter isn’t really developed anymore, and the former maintains compatibility with your old files while having vastly better maintenance and feature updates.

    Spotify and Discord both have native apps for Linux, so you should be good. I don’t really use VPN services (I could rant about why, but that’s best left for another time), but there’s probably ways to get them working.