I wish all games would just let you save whenever you want to! Why is using checkpoints and auto saves so common?

At least add a quit and save option if you want to avoid save scumming.

These days I just want to be able to squeeze in some gaming whenever I can even if it's just quick sessions. That's annoyingly hard in games that won't let you save.

I wonder what the reason for this is?

I've been a long time Android user and have been flashing custom roms on older phones when they end of life from their manufacturer to keep them up to date.

I started thinking.. how far should we trust custom roms?

There's a whole other debate how much you should trust the OEM roms as well but right now I'm focusing on custom roms.

Sure, they're open source but I'm not sure exactly how many eyes there are on the source code itself for a given rom. Many of them are "just" tweaks of some bigger more basic rom too, like Lineage OS for instance, then there's usually just one guy managing his particular rom.

Someone could theoretically add some nasties in there without people noticing if the code isn't vetted.

Sure, you could say that that's possible in all open source projects, like Linux Distros and so on, but there we have a ton of people working on the code so there's a much higher chance of bad stuff being found.

I'm not necessarily saying I don't trust Lineage OS or other roms, I was just hit by a train of thought and wanted to see what you guys think.

For my part I'd give more credibility to LOS than roms based on it that are managed by just one or a few persons for instance, but still.

I don't know. Was I suddenly hit by the paranoia stick or are these valid concerns?

Thoughts?

Beehaw has me thinking about bees..

Sim Ant was such a nice little game when it came out (yes, I'm old) and it ought to be fun to have something similar but with bees.

Does anyone know if such a game exists? I looked around a bit and found Bee Simulator on steam but that's more playing a single bee, not managing the entire hive.

Might still be neat though even if it's not quite what I had in mind.

Anyway, just.. wanted more bees. :)

Any of you running D4 in Linux through Lutris?

I'm currently on openSUSE Tumbleweed with Lutris installed as a flatpak from flathub.

The game runs pretty decently though I had to turn down the graphics a bit compared to what I can run in Windows.

After a while tho the game starts chugging and then basically freezes almost completely. I can still hear sounds in the background but the game looks like it slows down to like one frame per minute and I can't tab out or switch over to a terminal with alt ctrl F* either. Basically my entire computer slows to a halt and I end up having to do a hard pwoer off.

Anyone else having this problem?

Do we have any other former SETI@home users here?

I'm still bummed that the project stopped and for that matter that nothing really came of their analyzation phase. Nothing seems to have happened since they moth balled it..

I wasn't the most active user by by far but I had tens of thousands of classic cpu hours and some millions od current score after close to 20 years of on and off participation.

Sure, there are other projects I could join but.. there was something magical about SETI to me.

For those who never heard of the project:

https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/

You could donate spare cpu cycles to help analyze data from the Arecibo radio telescope to look for signs of artificial signals. You had it running in the background and as a screensaver if you wanted to see what you were analyzing.

I'm sure most of you have heard of it or similar distributed computing projects. There are plenty to choose from using BOINC (that S@h used) over at https://boinc.berkeley.edu/

https://foldingathome.org/ is one if the most known similar ones.

I just wanted to vent a bit.

I'm still struck now and then by the fact that they stopped the project and I get bummed out..

For a long time I've been using Windows only on my private computer even though I might've wanted to use Windows.

One big part of that is that I have it set up next to my work computer when I'm working from home so I can do private stuff on it while working. Talking to people on Signal, Matrix, browsing Beehaw and so on. My work computer is pretty locked down and snooped on. I'm allowed do to stuff like that on it but it feels iffy.

Until recently I've used Mouse Without Worders to share the same mouse and keyboard between the two and it's worked like a charm.

I just never got around to checking for a solution that would work cross OS until today.

I've tried Logitech's solution once but couldn't get it to work due to firewalls and other stuff going on on my work computer but.. Barrier!

That just worked! I set up my private computer as the server and my work computer as the client and now I'm switching betwern the two machines without a glitch! :)

It did complain a bout a missing SSL cert at first but this solved that issue:

Copy the path to SSL directory which you can find in your error. "ERROR: ssl certificate doesn't exist: /home/rsvay/snap/barrier-kvm/2/.local/share/barrier/SSL/Barrier.pem " In this case : "/home/rsvay/snap/barrier-kvm/2/.local/share/barrier/SSL/" Then run the following commands:

cd  "path to your SSL"
mkdir -p Fingerprints
openssl req -x509 -nodes -days 365 -subj /CN=barrier -newkey rsa:4096 -keyout Barrier.pem -out Barrier.pem
openssl x509 -fingerprint -sha256 -noout -in Barrier.pem > Fingerprints/Local.txt
sed -e "s/.*=/v2:sha256:/" -i Fingerprints/Local.txt

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/67343804/error-ssl-certificate-doesnt-exist-home-rsvay-snap-barrier-kvm-2-local-shar

I'm currently on Win11 but I'm getting that familiar Linux itch and want to dual boot a while again. I tend to gravitate towards Ubuntu simply because it's so big and well supported by most things.

I've run Arch in the past but I've gotten too old and lazy for that if I'd be completely honest. I have played with manjaro and endeavour though.. and opensuse tumbleweed, rolling is kind of nice.

Not sure what I'd try out first this time so I figured I'd get some inspiration from you guys!

I'm a huge fan of Peter F. Hamilton myself (original username NorthernLightMountain after all) and figured there ought to be more of us around here!

My absolute favorite world of his is the commonwealth universe and really want him to get back to something on that scale again.

I've read both the Salvation and Arkship trilogies after that and even though they're both good I want brick sized epic space opera again!

Might just have to go back an revisit his books again.

I did see that he co-authored a book semi recently that managed to fly under my radar; Light Chaser (written with Gareth L. Powell).

Has anyone read it? No spoilers please :)