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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: November 25th, 2024

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  • Mine used to, but they stopped.

    I asked why, and they said in the worst case some people would steal them. Maybe they just kept them or “lost” them, or they returned the cases without the game. With something like the Nintendo chips the theft would be obvious, but a couple of disk style ones had labels forged too. A stupid crime, given the last borrower would simply be fined.

    On average though, there were a lot of difficulties keeping them in working order. Apparently they were reported non-functional more than DVDs, and despite a contract with a cleaning and restoration company still had a high failure rate requiring frequent replacement. Which is really kinda funny given how 90% of the time the disk is just a DRM token for an online download, shouldn’t be that susceptible to failure from minor damage…

    Anyway between these costs and an analysis that physical game media was on the way out the door(probably mostly the costs), the program was discontinued and you can’t borrow games around here anymore.



  • Well, you see IRC and forums went together because they filled two different needs and we understood that back in the day.

    IRC was for chatting, short, quick real time communication that would be lost to the ether as soon as you signed off, unless you had a bouncer or log bot.

    Forums were for long information, be that long posts or posts that needed to endure for a long time. Sure you’d get some one liner responses to those posts, but forums were not at all instant like IRC. Though the information did stay much longer, and was much more searchable and organized.

    Discord has spoiled us, being quick and chatty while also allowing for longer posts and being searchable. At least within the Discord client. Shoot they even added those “forum” channels to replicate the old forum feel. But real time.



  • I generally go with Debian, makes a good stable base. Then over SSH you can use a helper script like LinuxGSM, or use Docker containers. Or both? I’ve seen containers that use LGSM inside…

    For the web aspect, you can use DockGE or Portainer as a simple interface for the docker containers, but if you want to dig into the game configs from the same panel, you might want a full grown game management program, or a system level panel like Cockpit.

    One cool looking option is to set up a full out hosting panel like AMP, though admittedly it gives me weird issues often enough to think about downgrading to more basic options again. It was meant for a hosting seller environment, and behaves accordingly.


  • And don’t even get me started on “AI”.

    As the family technical person, I can say after years of attempting to teach people to understand and solve their own problems, my support calls are down in the past year! Is it because they got smarter? No! They started using ChatGPT, CoPilot, etc and following it blindly. Do they understand the concepts of what they are changing and doing? No, but as long as the original problem is fixed, who cares if a dozen more are created, as long as they(the problems) keep quiet.

    I am cursed to be in the middle, couldn’t just be given a well paying technical job like my forebears, but nobody thinks they need my technical skills anymore, so I have talents now viewed as outdated and of limited use.






  • Others are posting the well written explanations, so I’ll make the short comparisons.

    GitHub is like Reddit is to Lemmy. It’s the main player in source code hosting, proprietary and centralized to the profits and whims of Microsoft. But for that cost, you can easily bet a project you are looking for has a presence there, and it’s easier for a dev to pop from project to project with one account and identity.

    The others are like Lemmy, meant for hosting your own GitHub-like website with all the bells and whistles on top of the standard Git codeshare. There’s a lot of feature parity, though some softwares have more than others. But it comes at the cost of obscurity, Codeberg is a big player but any instance you find is isolated, and any devs you entice to help you need to register additional accounts personal to that instance. And the hosting costs are on you, it can all vanish with an unpaid domain/server bill unlike the central giant of GitHub.




  • This is why I can’t/don’t have a lot of the “best practices” in my family archive. I’m not encrypting local drives, I’m not using BTRFS, or a ZFS pool. If I did I’d have to ensure my Will provided for the lawyer to hire a tech shop to help recover them. No, exFAT and NTFS, in the clear so those left behind can just plug them in and get to making their own copies. Otherwise the archive would die with me.

    Does that mean someone could steal my drives and go through my family photos? Sure. I hope it brings them much guilt, something a garbled encrypted drive could never do.




  • They didn’t find any nodes, yet. Somebody has to start, by expanding the reach of a current network, or starting one in a more empty area.

    If the tech behind this interests you, and you have some discretionary budget, I say do it anyway. You get a new toy, new knowledge, and now the best part:

    The next guy who gets discouraged by the idea of no connections, has a connection. Now there’s two nodes.