It’s a bit weird, isn’t it?

Technically, the navigational tool is “a compass” and the geometric draw-a-circle tool is “a pair of compasses” (I don’t know why) - but in general use, people just call both of them “a compass”.

We’ve had hundreds of years to rename one of them, but for some reason haven’t bothered.

Here they still exist - they just make you pay if you want a new one. I (and seemingly most people) use them all the time still, but I guess more people reuse them more times now. I’m quite happy to pay 30p for one when the old ones get used up. I think they’re a bit sturdier than they used to be too - so less likely for the handles to snap when you’ve still got a mile to walk home.

I guess it mostly cut down on unwanted ones getting littered etc. Now they’re valuable, all the more reason to hoard them in a cupboard in the kitchen.

Where you are it sounds like they stopped existing - what do you put your food shopping in? Do you still have a thousand left that you previously hoarded?

I think technically it’s both, but it’s mainly focused on the former - the shop and supermarket ones. You now pay 20 or 30p for them - previously when they were free, they would sometimes force a bag on you, even if you didn’t want one (I guess to walk around advertising their shop).

Throwing pretend milkshakes at a pretend Nigel Farridge is disrespectful.

We should be burning effigies of him on bonfires.

I miss lovely, earthy, warm, friendly chocolatey Brownbuntu.

I always felt purplebuntu was a bit vile.

I might be wrong, but wasn’t Movit just for timeline preview, and hadn’t worked properly for quite a few versions and now you just use the NVENC/VAAPI etc export profiles to export with GPU?

I’m sure it’s not possible for everyone - but I essentially did this some years back - though more with Premiere than Photoshop - and therefore more Cinelerra/Kdenlive than Gimp/Krita.

I ran a dual boot system from about 2008 until about 2015. If it could be done in Linux/FOSS, it was. If it couldn’t, it was done in Windows/Adobe software.

I was self-employed, though I often did subcontracting work for a handful of media/umbrella organisations - so sometimes I had to use Premiere or Sony Vegas to carry on half-done projects I was handed.

Bear in mind this was when you bought Adobe software and didn’t rent it - and you could also keep running an older version for years.

Anyway, over time I used the Windows partition less and less, until I got rid of it entirely when I got a new computer.

I had to work a bit harder one year, and I did miss out on a few projects - but mostly, I could do everything I could do previously, but it took a bit longer for a while until I adjusted to a different workflow.

After that, you’re just saying “That’s a £2000 job”, “That’s a £200 job”, and meeting a deadline. Nobody really cares if it took 7 minutes longer to do, and I saved a lot of time not using Windows any more.

Editing (and other design stuff) is a far smaller part of my overall work these days, but I still do a good chunk of projects over the year, and I’ve been 100% Linux for almost 10 years. No regrets.

To a lot of laptop manufacturers, it certainly seems that way as of late - that’s why I’m ever hopeful that a modular laptop, such as the framework, might give us the option of how we want to control a mouse cursor.

Fingers crossed for a touchpad with physical buttons.

To a degree, yes, but don’t expect magic. Some laptops have a waterproof membrane under the keyboard, so if you’re lucky, and it does, you may be able to just pop the keys off and dry the membrane out, and make sure no liquid creeps round the side into the electronics.

Otherwise you may have better odds if you open up the case and mop up any/all loose liquid you can get to with a microfibre cloth, as soon as possible, then try and let it air dry for a while.

A sealed bag with dried rice and your electronic object may absorb a bit of leftover moisture, but only to the extent that it will equal the moisture level in the sealed bag - the dried rice will gain a little extra moisture, the object will lose that bit of extra moisture.

Try to resist the urge to turn it on to check if it’s working until you’ve got all the moisture out.

It’s a good plan for a more professional setup, but in this distinctly unprofessional setup, if I did it remotely, I wouldn’t get my chat and a cup of tea and biscuit :)

I can’t personally, but I’ve installed/set up Linux systems for quite a lot of older people, and I think only one of them ever uses the terminal for anything. The rest just… use the computer.

On the whole, they’re pretty much just using Libreoffice, Firefox and a few other bits these days. If something needs the terminal to fix, we’re already past the point where they’ve phoned me to pop round and fix it.

These used to be Ubuntu systems, but I switched them all to Mint after having endless Snap permission problems with printers, USB sticks and other peripherals. Once up and running, it’s pretty low maintenance.

I guess they don’t need to use the terminal, because I’ll go and do it if it’s necessary - but we are looking at once every few years. Not a lot of tech support needed.

On my own machine, I probably use the terminal every day.

The “Fonline” engine fodev.net or fonline.ru was (almost) able to create a fully functional Fallout game, with zoom, higher resolution sprites or isometric 3D models, whilst retaining the look, feel and controls of the originals.

The main problem (from my perspective) was that it was designed as a “multiplayer-first” engine with real-time pew-pew-pew combat, and getting it to do anything singleplayer and turn-based needed quite a lot of work at the time - and engine updates weren’t often backwards compatible, and the documentation was often only in Russian. A lot of half-finished projects showed great promise, but then broke and fizzled out.

I think it’s still in development. Last time I looked, they were “refactoring” all the code (including fixing all the single-player stuff). It still holds promise for the future.

Yeah, but his job was to drill holes in the walls to install artworks all the time, so I imagine it wouldn’t be a big deal to him (and likewise, wouldn’t be a big deal for him to deinstall and refill the holes, as that was also his job).

That’s awful. Poor bloke. Taking the work back down, filling a couple of holes, painting them and retexturing the wall after - you’d expect them to say “You can take that down and repair it on your lunch break” and just move on.

You can mod almost everything in Dwarf Fortress, down to the shear strength of a single beard hair - but you can’t mod the threading :)

Was one of the records “Largest Dwarf Fortress Fort with a playable frame rate”?

If you include remasters, I’ve been playing Shenmue I, which I think I originally played on my friend’s Dreamcast in about 2001. Think it was one of the most expensive games ever made when it first came out, so I guess that’d make it pretty AAA?

There’s a lot that feels a bit dated in it, like slightly clunky controls, annoyingly long sequences for tiny things (i.e. taking your shoes off every time you go in/out the house), emotionally stunted voiceovers etc - but it also holds up as a good mystery, and such a beautifully realised game world that the clunkiness just becomes sort of joyously nostalgic. I think it’s great.

Also, the creepy little kids that shout “HEY MISTER! DO YOU WANT TO PLAY… soooocccerrrr?” are still hilarious.

You can use the box to collect cats in.

There’s a gamingonlinux article which might explain a bit.

Very roughly, a few alterations to the anticheat to make it work on Wine made some of the anticheat’s workings apparent, which in turn allowed people to work out new exploits.

Wine is an excellent tool for reverse engineering. Additionally, we had to disable many antitamper checks to make Hyperion run on Wine. This has allowed interested parties to learn a lot about the internal workings of Hyperion, relevant to both Win32 and UWP. As the initial shock of Hyperion’s release started wearing off, many people have begun discovering the various angles through which one can learn more about the inner workings of Hyperion.

As to why all the anticheat stuff matters so much, I’m not quite sure.