JustEnoughDucks

Still doesn’t seem to work.

Tribalism + fearmongering propaganda + times of financial hardships is more effective than education.

See: afd popularity in germany

All of their changes will be merged to freecad 1.0 apparently outside of a few UI changes that will be add-in options.

I want a new, modern Battle for Middle Earth 2 with better balance, modern graphics, and maybe different modes like quick vs longer form games. Definitely some reform like making it more difficult to build walls, but the walls stand up better to infantry and you really need siege engines.

The game was not balanced competitively (men so OP) but holy damn the battles felt epic and building your own forts and castles to defend was amazing.

Also, I am confused at why nextcloud is at the intersection of networking, music, and multimedia.

Yes it technically has a video viewer and music player, but I would be very surprised if any person in the world right now is genuinely using it to post that content to the fediverse social-network style.

With electronics, that is only the tip of the iceburg before you get into trinocular microscopes which the absolute cheapest are almost 300€ nowadays 😉 then assembled PCB prototypes where every iteration can be 200-500€ depending on size. Or you could get into spending hundreds on hotplates and reflow ovens to do it yourself.

But wouldn’t it be faster and cheaper in the long run to be able to fabricate the simple PCBs yourself? There goes 1000€ on a small CNC 😂 rabbit hole goes deeeeep.

Electronics projects mostly.

Mostly smart home PCBs and interconnect boards and 3D modelled housings. Examples:

• esp32-C3 dumb doorbell (just a doorbell that sends an MQTT message and sleeps the rest of the time). It works fatastic except that my Proximus ISP modem/router completely fucked up and so the network is no longer usable and I had to set it in bridge mode to a router it can’t reach. I want to release it, but haven’t had the time to water - resistance test it or make assembly instructions
• esp32-S3 voice assistant satellite attached to an IR blaster, I2S mic, and PCM5102 to control and send audio to my old Yamaha RX-496RDS to control it via IR and can play audio (local or Spotify) via music assistant. Pretty much an Alexa echo attached to my speaker system. PCB link which I am planning on releasing.
• My unfinished Flight Stick with custom electronics, fully custom 3D printable housing, etc… It is almost done, but needs like 2 more small iterations, but we moved and started doing a full-strip renovation, so my 3D printer is no longer set up because it is too dusty inside, and I don’t want to spend another $100 doing a PCB test iteration to use a better ADC with less components. Eventually as firmware practice, I want to rewrite the firmware in Rust or something. I also just looked at the Repo and the quick logo I drew up has been modified somehow without any commit. I know for a fact it was correct before. Very weird.

I also have tons of new project ideas that I don’t have time for.

My other hobbies

• weightlifting, again completely dropped off due to every free moment renovating

• Running a home server with replacement services for everything I need

• Running (my motivation has been 0 recently…)

• cooking. I try to do a few new recipes per month

• gardening. With the renovation, I just grew a few courgettes, tomatoes, and squash this year

• video games (more of a de-stresser nowadays than a hobby, most recently casual rocket league with friends is fun, hadn’t played since 2018 or so)

What would I want to do?

• Cut down the 2 larger trees and 10 mini trees (originally hedges) that we marked for removal

• deep clean the house

• climb in the crawlspace and drill the pipe brackets I need to

• finally go weightlifting after months of no time or willpower

• play saxophone

• meditate

• go for a long run

• play with my dog and go adventuring for an hour or 2

• cook a new meal I haven’t tried before

• watch a movie with my girlfriend

• take an edible

• play some games with the boys

What would I likely do?

• sleep

• mow the grass and rake leaves

• play rimworld

• watch Castle with my girlfriend

• eat leftovers

It’s interesting the difference in what people think a collapsed civilization will look like.

Some people think we will “return to monke” where wilderness survival skills will be essential and people who have them will be the “main characters.” That would probably be the easier and better future.

The more likely option will be technofeudalism where rich people have small, brutal armies and control localized power grids, farming operations, and politics with tech as mass migrations happen and wildlife becomes all but extinct outside of human cultivation. Survival skills won’t matter when all land and food scarcity is controlled by a rich few with absolute control. The average survivalist will be wiped out with the first natural disaster or by the feudal lords with drones. Return to nature might only come after 50 years when chip supplies and power grids have dried up and fallen apart, but it would just as likely be mad-max as oil could likely still be used.

Who knows. Fascism might take over with how it is going now and solve the climate crisis with mass genocide and forcing green energy for all we know.

The thing about meshtastic is the walking distance range and limitation to text messages.

Though I don’t know if it is possible to integrate a LoRAWAN concentrator with a nice collinear J-pole antenna to mount on the top of your house to move to a double digit range where it could be useful as a neighborhood mesh with multiple channels. (With the added benefit of using lorawan devices like pet trackers and things).

Still Lora smart (but local) home agriculture, water collection, etc… Is a really cool technology for large properties.

Their entire list is odd choices except for the top 10 (even persona 5 is iffy as top 10 of all time)

They favor shooters and then place a game that had lost most of its audience in under a year as the best shooter other than doom 1 of all time.

I love helldivers, but it is a very niche game in comparison to so many others, even those on the list.

Not to mention KOTOR and DA:O as 94 and 95. Also prey is an extremely weird choice…

I still have a 5 year old Jabra Elite Active 65t that is still trucking. I had a few glitches starting a year ago like the right earbud dropping in volume or it being stuck in a hung mode where they had to be completely depleted over a few weeks to reset them, they wouldn’t even charge.

However, they still work fine and are super convenient with hear-through for office work compared to wired IEMs way better for all fitness activities too, just not as good for really listening to music.

Battery life is still 3-4 hours after 5 years not including the case recharge (the case battery has degraded significantly more than the earbuds themselves, probably due to the high quality VARTA cells in the earbuds)

I am going to wear them into the ground, but jabra is doing a stock sellout before their new version of buds come out, so I bought the €140 Jabra Elite 4s for €60 for when these bite the dust, but they seem to be going strong still.

Oh yeah they have been here in DelHaize and Albert Hein (both owned by the dutch company) for a while and are now popping up in Colruyt and spar I think.

On the final episode with my rewatch

Title of the book? I am looking for some fantasy or sci fi to read.

Or I guess that might be doxxing yourself…

Outside of a select couple instances where even mentioning an opposing view without disgust and insults results in furious down voting, reporting, and a ban lol.

A physical keyboard has entered the chat

True, but through pihole, you can see if your phone makes pings to microsoft servers during use.

It doesn’t request location access, it doesn’t request contact or phone access, it doesn’t require you to sign into a microsoft account, it doesn’t constantly send data back home, etc… It only requests file permission and camera permission while you are using the app. A lot of apps harvest your data, and the entire Windows OS is built around harvesting your data and spying on your every click. This app doesn’t seem to do that as far as anyone can discern.

I use mine with Microsoft Lens (I know, but one of their best products that doesn’t spy on you) as a document scanner and then sync it to my document server paperless-ngx.

It can angle correct, color correct, and has good filters for b&w and greyscale that often make it look like a real document scanner if your phone has a decent camera.

Much better than drive or any of the open source options to be honest, sadly…

I love the absurdity of game reviewers 😂

• “This game is the pinnicle of its genre”

• “This is the 1 game I would bring to a desert island”

• “one of the most captivating puzzle games ever”

85%, 88%, 70%, a C to a B. That is just above average.

Meanwhile you get an absolute broken AAA piece of crap that barely functions, incoherant story, generic and boring and those same reviewers say “70-80%”. So there is a <10% difference between absolutely mastering a genre and releasing straight garbage?