[-] kbal@fedia.io 7 points 4 hours ago

I've used them both in the past, but prefer Xfce now. So I'm probably not too biased either way on Gnome v. KDE. I'd say they're both extremely well-supported, popular, respectable, and safe choices. They're quite different in style though, so odds are you might find you have a preference for one or the other. Go with whichever you like best.

[-] kbal@fedia.io 26 points 13 hours ago

As a child of the 20th century, so did I.

[-] kbal@fedia.io 5 points 1 day ago

sign in to websites using your personal web address, without having to use your e-mail address.

What is the point of that? For convenience, email addresses are much easier to come by than is web hosting. For being securely anonymous it's also much easier to do through email — but not by so much that requiring a website rules it out, if that's the intention.

[-] kbal@fedia.io 6 points 1 day ago

One way to stop the alt-right Russian propaganda campaigns from undermining trust in our institutions would be to improve those institutions in order to avoid giving those who aim to disrupt our society so much authentic discontent to work with. But that would take competent government and difficult choices, grappling with under-acknowledged problems, and making radical changes to our economy to make it more financially, democratically, and ecologically sustainable. Why bother, when you can instead simply hire anti-Kremlin influencers like me?

  • Genuine disdain for authoritarianism in general and Vladimir Putin in particular
  • My Internet comments are regularly seen by an audience of dozens
  • Reasonable hourly rates

Give me a call and I'm sure we can work something out.

[-] kbal@fedia.io 24 points 1 day ago

Linux sucks, Windows is worse, MacOS is useless. We must conclude that those systems are not a good choice for regular users. I recommend a simple pocket calculator instead. No graphics drivers to worry about, no firmware updates, if it goes wrong you just press the reset button and it's ready to go again in a tenth of a second, no need to do backups, you can get a pretty good one for $20, light weight, really good battery life. Much better in almost every way.

[-] kbal@fedia.io 3 points 1 day ago

If you have time for an answer in audio form the CBC has some ideas.

[-] kbal@fedia.io 7 points 2 days ago

"commit today to voting for a carbon tax election"

The other guy's line deserves a mention as well. I hope the other parties join him in calling for a carbon tax election. Let it be a referendum on whether or not to do anything about climate change. Only Poilievre can lose this next election for the Conservatives, and this just might be one way to do it.

[-] kbal@fedia.io 7 points 2 days ago

Such a dismissive attitude towards politics — that it is only about waging election campaigns, irrelevant to the more substantial matters of government which can proceed once the election is won without the impediments of what are normally thought of as political concerns such as balancing competing interests, weighing public perceptions, and making delicate compromises — is what I object to, yes.

[-] kbal@fedia.io 21 points 2 days ago

"I’m not focused on politics. I’ll let other parties focus on politics."

What kind of bizarro world does Ottawa exist in when the country's top politician does not understand that politics is his job?

[-] kbal@fedia.io 15 points 2 days ago

what if you have to get a hold of them at two in the morning

People sometimes accuse me of being cynical, and yet here I was giving this guy the benefit of the doubt, thinking his objection might be that we don't need such a rule because employees already had the right to not answer the phone by nature and tradition.

[-] kbal@fedia.io 19 points 3 days ago

By Grabthar's Hammer, what a camcorder.

[-] kbal@fedia.io 6 points 3 days ago

Doing it when the Liberals are in really bad shape improves the odds of the NDP winning, up from 0.0 to 0+ε.

8
submitted 2 weeks ago by kbal@fedia.io to c/skyrimmods@lemmy.world

Act 1: It started with some fun little quests to introduce you to the narrative style. The fights were too hard, so I improved my character stats until I could handle them. It's not easy to know when there's no choice but to go along with whatever is suggested, and when you can do something else, but I guess I got it more or less right.

Act 2: A nice meaty dungeon crawl. My efforts to make my character stronger paid off, the difficulty was just right.

Act 3: Holy shit it's too hard suddenly. One does not level up quickly in my version of Skyrim, maybe that's why. At one point there's an option that suggests you can skip the whole thing, but I didn't take it and would guess it probably isn't so easy. I had to resort to stealth archery and I didn't bring a lot of arrows. Some horror game stuff of a kind I don't normally enjoy, but it was well-executed. It was a pretty long slog.

Act 4: Okay we're in Dark Souls now. Except the boss fights are even longer. I had a legendary weapon, shiny superhero armour, lots of magic resistance, a good healing spell, all the equipment a skyrim paladin could want, and yet even some of the non-boss fights took a lot of time and effort. Hit, dodge, run, heal, repeat. Forever. To be fair I do have the difficulty settings turned up pretty high. I wandered around lost for a very long time. Some of the battles were epic. There was only one area I had a really hard time with: There doesn't seem to be any resisting the tentacle attacks so they were pretty much instant death.

The ending was quite good and made it all seem worthwhile.

15
submitted 1 month ago by kbal@fedia.io to c/skyrimmods@lemmy.world

Well here's a linux modding tip: Turn off ESYNC and FSYNC when running DynDOLOD. If it randomly goes wrong in the middle of its hour-long run, that could be the problem.

23
submitted 2 months ago by kbal@fedia.io to c/climate@slrpnk.net

First time since March 2023!

16
submitted 2 months ago by kbal@fedia.io to c/skyrimmods@lemmy.world

Here are some mods I can recommend that directly affect game balance, feel free to suggest more. For the most part I've listed only things that directly affect the basic variables in simple ways, not including survival mode stuff, combat overhauls, perk tree changes, the paraglider, and many other things that obviously do also affect game balance but aren't only about that.

*Skyrim Skill Uncapper for SE and AE - Adjust rate of level up for each skill individually. I like level-ups to be way slower than the base game, like 10 times slower, but with skills where tedious grinding is already the only way to train them left closer to normal but contributing less to character level advancement. Enjoy being level 1 for a meaningful amount of time.

*Armor Rating Overhaul - Makes early-game armour not completely useless. Getting some should be the priority it normally is in such games. The base game armor rating algorithm seems weirdly broken, any of this mod's options is better.

*Yet Another Difficulty Mod - Adjust damage dealt/damage taken, optionally changing it automatically as you advance. In my current game it's set to start with 1.0/2.0 at level 1 and smoothly progress to 0.5/5.0 at level 30 (compared to 0.25/3.0 for default legendary mode) and so far that seems good.

*Extra Encounters Reborn - Encounter more problems when wandering around the world.

*High Level Enemies - Make those you encounter more dangerous. Many of the people and animals who live only to murder passing strangers scale to higher levels than previously possible.

*NPC Regen Nerfed - Taking away their infinite magicka supply makes things a little easier.

*Simple No Health Regen - If you don't go full survival mode, maybe at least have no health regen.

*Smart NPC Potions - They might use two or three healing potions during a fight. Also they might poison you.

*Maxsu Combat Escape - When fights are actually difficult you might want to be able to run away without that stupid ogre continuing to be angry at you forever from the far side of a mountain.

*Simply Better Movement Speeds - My current choice of movement speed mod.

*Encounter Zones Unlocked - Probably helps if you're going to have a playthrough that goes on for a while.

15
submitted 3 months ago by kbal@fedia.io to c/skyrimmods@lemmy.world

Why didn't anyone tell me that Papyrus Tweaks NG is mandatory once you have too many other mods?

Too many being probably about four hundred in my case. Script lag was getting ridiculous and then it started locking up, and now suddenly with that one addition, it's smooth and solid again. With that I guess my personal version of Skyrim is pretty much done, or at least ready for play testing.

192
submitted 3 months ago by kbal@fedia.io to c/technology@beehaw.org

Under the slogan ‘Think of the children’, the European Commission tried to introduce total surveillance of all EU citizens. When the scandal was revealed, it turned out that American tech companies and security services had been involved in the bill, generally known as ‘Chat Control’ – and that the whole thing had been directed by completely different interests. Now comes the next attempt.

29
submitted 4 months ago by kbal@fedia.io to c/linux@lemmy.world

Update available! This version is very old.

Xscreensaver has apparently been checking for updates and is disappointed that it hasn't had one for 14 months because Debian is too stable. Can anyone recommend a linux screensaver which would work with xfce and can be trusted to never do that?

31
submitted 4 months ago by kbal@fedia.io to c/skyrimmods@lemmy.world

Oblivion remade in the Skyrim engine. Thats our goal. With our planned 2025 release date we’re showcasing gameplay systems, a part of the world map, a new city, Ayleid dungeons and much more.

Despite our progress, we can’t do this alone: we hope with your support to finish the final steps in completing Skyblivion. Does that sound like something you can do? Then please visit our website to apply: https://www.skyblivion.com/volunteer/

19
submitted 4 months ago by kbal@fedia.io to c/skyrimmods@lemmy.world

nexusmods.com is blaming their current outage on Fallout:

We are experiencing much more traffic than usual due to the popularity of the Fallout TV series [...] this extra traffic could cause a degraded experience across the website and our applications.

35
submitted 5 months ago by kbal@fedia.io to c/cybersecurity@infosec.pub

The upstream xz repository and the xz tarballs have been backdoored.

10
(fedia.io)
submitted 6 months ago by kbal@fedia.io to c/reddit@lemmy.world

you’re invited to a special program that lets redditors purchase stock

I loaded a page on reddit due to a search result and found out that I'm among the chosen few. Message sent yesterday. They must've gotten fewer takers than expected on the first round of invites if they're now offering shares to people who haven't posted, commented, voted, or done anything else on the site for the past 8 months.

2
Enhancer for YouTube is gone (discourse.mozilla.org)
submitted 8 months ago by kbal@fedia.io to c/firefox@fedia.io

Yet another popular extension has disappeared under mysterious circumstances. It seems that its author might have requested its removal, but if so then even in that case the longstanding Mozilla policy of telling its users absolutely nothing about what happened applies.

It happened a month ago but it took me this long to notice since the feature I like best only recently stopped working. It's the sort of thing that requires periodic updates to keep up with changes to the youtube UI.

Does anyone know of another extension that can automatically resize the youtube player to fill the browser window? Or, for that matter, the invidious one?

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kbal

joined 10 months ago