I left the pc gaming scene about 20 years ago and only came bacj this year. I found my steam credentials from when they were initially seeking players and revived my account (I closed my email on the account back in 2009, so i couldn't recover).

I've mostly been playing vSkyrim, BG 3, and a few emulated Zelda games. I finally ordered a new gaming laptop because Cyberpunk 2077 is hard to rrad on the Deck, even on a 50" tv on hi-res.

All that is just so you all know where I'm coming from, i am both a newb and a veteran!

From a business standpoint, looking ant it form the non-gaming financial point of view, the move to online-only makes very compelling sense.

It fully implements the licensing model, gives them total control over the property, enables them to generate reports that accurately identify trndsvin user populations, pinpoint steady revenue figures, and they can kill the game as soon as it isn't valuable to them anymore, and they don't have to worry about losing revenue from sharing, passing the copy to an otherwise paying customer for free, or a significant pirtiin of piracy loss.

Itvis the end state of the "we are mearly licensing it to you until such time as we decide ee want it back" model.

It sucks, and if i can know it is online only before buying, i will pass. All of us should. Revenue is king to them, and if they lose even a little, they will try something else.

I second this. I discovered it a few weeks back, and it's impressive and fast.

Find someone in your community who has professional map tech skills. That person can get detailed map data from your municipality and upload it into openstreetmaps, and you will then have the best maps :) if you are so inclined, you can learn yourself from their site.

The reason you can't find addresses is likely because the data is not added to the maps in your region. I have similar problems here, though my state got much detail from batch updates last year.

I found a resource that merges addresses into osmand maps monthly, for north america and beyond. Even better, it does so in a way that normal address layout for north Americans can be used when searching.

Here in north america, we search by typing "255 maple street, some town 01234", while osmand expects something like " USA some town street 123".

You can download merged maps from opensupermaps.com, and find almost any address you seek, then you can navigate. Osmand is pretty good with directions, but sometimes messes up. Magic Earth is better at navigation, and has similar features to Waze. OSMAnd has much greater map detail, where people have uploaded it.

I use ocrmypdf, after being a bit frustrated with gscan2pdf. There is a simple ui available, but I just created a tiny script that does the ocr , deskew, etc. In one operation with wildcard file selection.

I also installed a jbig compressor that really shrinks images. My processed docs are generally 40% to 80% smaller, and it seems to get better tesseract output than gscan does.

A fellow old-schooler, I see! Me too!

This is the way.

We've been able to survive for 200,000 years without any of this s***.

I went the easy route and bought synology, set up a raid 6, and it saved me within 1 year.

Raid 6 spreads data wide enough to survive 2 concurrent drive failures. I had one drive fail enough to degrade the raid, and while I was awaiting a replacement (warrenty replacememt), a second drive started to fail. I bought a replacement for that, inserted it, then got the first replacement and inserted that. No losses, and I now have a drive in stock waiting for the next failure. It's been at least 5 years without failure, so I am due.

Schedule an integrity check once a quarter or month to protect against bit rot. The danger with bit rot is you won't know you have it until drives fail. If integrity is compromised, the shit hits the fan when you are syncing up the new drive, the system cannot recover, and you lose everything. That is when you start over with your verified backup. If that's bad, goodbye data.

Um....

These just came out like 2 months ago. Are you talking about the old nexus 7, which is 11 years old? Or maybe the most recent releases in 2014?

Anybody who bought one of those in 2020 was a moron and deserved to have them die "unexpectedly".

It got clunky precisely because they want you to pay for a subscription. Why pay if it works well without paying? It's the capitalist way. Make it a pain, then offer a "cure" for a price.

Humanity as tools.

I started Reddit almost 2 years ago, and used Infinity. I avoided all social media since MyPage but finally gave in for Reddit. It was Toxic, then it went to hell in a handbasket like Twitter.