kbal

Well I decided to upgrade to Debian testing last night on my desktop here, just for fun. It seems fine.

Xfce4-screensaver wasn't in bullseye so I had an old locally compiled version installed, which may have been the cause of some video problems. Replaced with the debian build.

A broken bash completion script I had removed came back and was annoying until I remembered what I'd done.

Old searx install didn't work, neither did latest searxng install script from git. Too many python errors for me, so I gave up and ran the docker container instead. That was the only frustrating part.

Skyrim runs more smoothly and amdgpu hasn't crashed yet. It had been getting bad lately, locking up during video playback sometimes (maybe once a week) in the past month or two. I think perhaps running the newest kernels with the old mesa was a bad combination.

I ran out of disk space on the EFI partition during install, but it recovered no problem.

Other than that no problems so far.

They're talking about closing the main support office for the Mauna Loa Observatory — which is "recognised as the birthplace of global carbon dioxide monitoring and maintains the world's longest record of measurements of atmospheric CO2."

Changelog once again didn't make it to nexus but it looks fairly substantial.

The carbon dioxide (CO2) spewing from human activities is not only changing Earth’s atmosphere, it’s also rapidly acidifying the planet’s oceans. In 50 years, that acidification could reduce the oceans’ ability to absorb CO2 by 10% as it takes a toll on phytoplankton

... Nevertheless, it’s still too early to conclude that the projected declines in phytoplankton will inevitably reduce CO2 uptake by the world’s oceans, Church and others caution. It’s still possible the declines could be offset by higher plankton growth rates at high latitudes and other global processes involved in carbon cycling. However, Church says, “It certainly doesn’t help.”

Legal researchers Cynthia Khoo and Kate Robertson warn that a Canada-U.S. CLOUD agreement would extend the reach of U.S. law enforcement into Canada’s digital terrain to an unprecedented extent, and that if signed, this agreement would effectively allow U.S. police to demand personal data directly from any provider of an “electronic communication service” or “remote computing service” in Canada, so long as it had some ties to the U.S.

What is going on with loops.video? Once in a while I follow a link to there and it plays the video no problem, on a nice minimalist web page with no distractions... and then I wonder what other videos might exist and there seems to be no way to find out. It just plays that one it started with, looping forever. What am I missing?

As expected, the long-awaited ntsync has made its way into kernel 6.14.

ntsync "driver" to handle Windows locking types enabling Wine to work much better on many workloads (i.e. games). The driver framework was in 6.13, but now it's enabled and fully working properly. Should make many SteamOS users happy. Even comes with tests!

Meanwhile, in Québec... Carney demonstrates that he can parle français, Freeland goes on Tout le monde en parle.

If 2024 was the year of "age verification" let's build on this success and make 2025 the year of height verification. We must develop a consensus about where to draw the line, so that we can finally say "you must be at least this tall to use social media."

If modded Skyrim isn't the best game you ever played, you just need to add more mods. Sometimes they combine in ways that are better than expected. Today's discoveries:

1. Walking around at a somewhat normal pace in the game most of the time thanks to "Controller Walk Run Toggle" (speed configured with Autorun) means travel takes long enough that even the relatively mild effect of cold that's the default in Sunhelm becomes significant. It's not seemingly instant like some versions of survival mode, more like you've actually been outside for enough time that it makes sense you'd be feeling the cold.

My Skyrim time scale is set so there's still enough time to travel pretty far in a day but at one point it was getting dark and I had to think for a moment about how to stay warm that night. Just then the lights at the inn came into view. It felt a lot like it does irl when you're walking in the woods, it's a little longer than expected to get home, and it's getting dark. Peak hiking simulator. Combined with dense forests and combat that's deadly and quick, it feels pretty good.

2. With the dodge mod I'm using, going into sprint mode by holding the button for a moment toggles from walk to run, as it should. Exiting the sprint by doing a dodge roll doesn't toggle it back, so you're left doing the default Skyrim jogging. But then another dodge roll (if you're out of combat and no weapons drawn) does go back to a walk for some reason. So after a little practice to get used to the sequence you can just use that one button to toggle it, leaving the d-pad button free for other uses.

Holiday Skyrim binge initiated.

It's going to be a long time before I level up enough to start Dac0da. Best of the newly added mods to make a difference in the early game so far:

Passive Mudcrabs Controller Walk Run Toggle Cast Spells As Lesser Powers

Revel in the joy of our grand tax holiday! There will be no sales tax on thousands of items, to boost your solstice spending power! Video games, so long as you don't buy them the normal way. Some beverages, depending on size and ingredients. Pencil crayons, if they're bought as part of a package that contains blue ones. What spectacular benevolence!