Nice! I switched my parents over to Firefox and OpenOffice years ago, so switching them over to Linux Mint was just a matter of showing them where the update button was now. (Their laptops are completely functional for their purposes, but couldn’t be “upgraded” from Windows 10 to 11.) Scratch another few off the MS list forever.

Audio codecs like MP3 usually do a Fourier transform to move the sound into the frequency domain, discard any frequencies that you’re unlikely to notice, and encode ‘rate of change’ for the remaining ones. So the encoding problem is usually sound with fast changes in intensity or frequency, which is basically what percussion is.

System is quite percussion heavy, so will sound bad.

Recently moved from Spotify to Qobuz, because fuck Dan Ek, and the fact that they’ve got better bitrates across the board really makes the difference for jazz and jazzy stuff. Neglected, sounds crap on Spotify. Sounds great on Qobuz. But that’s the change from ‘bad’ to ‘quite good’ bitrates; additional bits are very much a case of diminishing returns.

I’d be happy if plasma looked a bit more like WinNT. Completely functional, all the information there at a glance. Nothing hidden away in hamburger menus, no guessing about what you can and can’t click on. Does what it needs to then gets out your way. The best-designed that Windows has ever been.

Yes, very happy with mine. Started it up to see the preinstalled version of Linux and then restarted it to install Arch btw instead, but it’s a great wee machine, exactly what I wanted and will be replacing it with another like it when the time comes.

It is certainly true that TempleOS won’t be identifying with one of the common browser user agents when surfing the internet.

I dunno. Oxygen Not Included looks crisp on a 4K monitor. And it makes my job easier, being able to have an absolute tonne of code on-screen and readable. I reckon I could probably use an 8K monitor for those things.

Yeah, I generally have FSR running on any 3D game made in about the last decade - even if I can run it at 4K at a reasonable framerate, my computer fans start to sound like a hoover and the whole room starts warming up. But upscaling seems a better solution than having separate monitors for work and play.

100% of supercomputers, 80% of mobile devices (as Android), 4 or 5% of desktops depending on whether you count ChromeOS. Desktop share is a few percent higher if you just count gaming PCs, eg. the Steam survey, since it’s more widely used at home than on business machines.

The rate of adoption is accelerating, too - slowly but steadily.

Just need a chutney that was developed in the 90s, and then we can make a delicious chutney+blue ciabatta sandwich that’s all younger than you think.

As a “caps lock is another control” enjoyer, I know that pain. Don’t need to take your fingers off the home keys to type ^[ , whereas the proper escape key is a bit of a stretch.

Well, having not played the Xbox version… ;-) Once you’ve got it running, it remains one of the finest games of all time.

Getting it running is the real sands of time, tho. It has a particular hatred of multi-core CPUs, requires a graphics card that supports both hardware transform & lighting but also truly ancient versions of DirectX, and is obstinately not-widescreen. You’ll be wanting a fan patch; last time I tried one, it was a bit of a crash-fest (it wasn’t, back in the day) and some of the SFX looked plain wrong.

Graphics still held up perfectly - the art style is very strong - and the story remains charming. All I wanted from a remake was the damned thing to start up in a modern screen resolution, and it seems they’ve managed to spend years on it without even managing that.

“If you make noise in real life, then the alien will hear you in game.”. As if A:I needed to be any more terrifying than it is.

Still - it’s a very expensive bit of hardware to implement the microphone feature that eg. the Famicom had, and the ‘tracking’ functionality only benefits a couple of games. Bizarre decision to make it mandatory as part of the console.

Saw them at a festival a couple of years back. They know they’re a bit cheesy and play into it, but they’re a tight band and can still smash out all their hits.

Now, the fact that the festival could hardly afford anyone else because Filth were headlining, that was a problem, but it did mean that a few lesser-known bands got to play a decent set, so it’s all good I suppose.

They’ve a lot of canals, the ladders are custom, they’ll need to be coated to stop them from corroding, and that’ll be the installed price, so that’s a small team driving round, barriering off bits of the canal while the work is done

If anything, seems cheap for a council job. My town would probably spend ten times that on the desk study to decide where they’ll go and to get the paperwork together.

Dark Souls 3 is a great game to play at SL1. You’ve got quite a selection of weapons and armour that you can equip, plus one spell, so it’s a bit of a puzzler to find optimum combinations of stuff to beat all the bosses.

Dark Souls 1 is okay to play at SL1. You’re limited to being a pyromancer and have a good selection of flame spells that you can cast, but you’re limited to weapons with fairly boring movesets, and you’ll be doing a lot of running back to Blightown to get pyromancies and level up your flame.

Dark Souls 2 is goddamned brutal to play at SL1. Your dodging is tied to your agility, which means you’re a sitting duck until you get some stat boosting gear. Start the game by murdering Cale for his hat of +3 dexterity, grab the work hook and the ladle to swap out in your off-hand for their small stat boosts, and get yourself to Tseldora to grind the peasant set for its small adaptability bonus. I hope you’re good at beating end-game bosses with a rapier, no shield, and bad rolls - maximum four in a row due to your low stamina, which makes throne watcher / defender hellish.

Scholar obviously has all of the pain of 2, plus you can’t rush into the DLC areas for their high-powered rings. By the time you get the ring of the embedded for its massive SL1 stat boost, you’ll have most certainly earned it.

Yes, I did play through all four at SL1 in preparation for the release of Elden Ring. DS3 is fun at SL1, but I also do not recommend the others to anyone. Elden Ring is quite good at RL1 - it still allows some quite varied builds, and it forces you to learn the bosses rather than just “DPS race” them like you do normally.

If you’re just wanting to play it, you don’t really need the models, do you? Couple of packets of the cheapest army men you can find in the toy shop will do it you want fancy pieces, but just folding a piece of card in half so that it stands upright and writing on it what it is will suffice.

3D printing would do very nicely for the one-off models that you don’t want to kitbash, of course. Also great for playing DnD with; another game where you’re not obliged to use the ‘genuine books’ to play either.

Proving a thing that’s only known empirically is extremely valuable, too. We’ve an enormous amount of evidence that the Riemann hypothesis is correct - we can produce an infinite amount of points on the line, in fact - but proving it is a different matter.

Interesting, but misguided, I think.

If you’ve selected Python as your programming language, then your problem is likely either to do some text processing, a server-side lambda, or to provide a quick user interface. If you’re using it for eg. Numpy, then you’re really using Python to load and format some data before handing it to a dedicated maths library for evaluation.

If you’ve selected Go as your programming language, then your problem is likely to be either networking related - perhaps to provide a microservice that mediates between network and database - or orchestration of some kind. Kubernetes is the famous one, but a lot of system configuration tools use it to manipulate a variety of other services.

What these uses have in common is that they’re usually disk- or network- limited and spend most of their time waiting, so it doesn’t matter so much if they’re not super efficient. If you are planning to peg the CPU at 100% for hours on end, you wouldn’t choose them - you’d reach for C / C++ / Rust. Although Swift does remarkably well, too.

Seeing how quickly you can solve Fannkuch-Redux using Python is a bit like seeing how quickly you can drive nails into a wall using a screwdriver. Interesting in its way, but you’d be better picking up the correct tool in the first place.

Back when I owned an XPS, one of the driver options was ‘compressed screen updates’, which only updated the part that had changed. As far as I could tell, made no difference to battery life whatsoever - turning down the screen brightness even a notch did much more.

Daily driver laptop for nearly ten years, and the part that finally failed was the CPU fan, which wasn’t easy to obtain replacement parts for, so treated myself to a new laptop entirely. Mind you, the power connection was a PoS, would have been as well keeping that on an annual reorder for how often it failed. Pretty good laptop otherwise.

A controversial take. Every new feature added to Github has made it more unpleasant to use, and a lot of that is down to Copilot, for me. Only way to get rid of it is to wait for Github to go down again, which is the only thing it does reliably at the moment.

Oh, that’s obnoxious. I thought it was another ‘button along the bottom’, but it takes up the space that should be ‘right control’? Bastards. Hopefully you can rebind it to something useful, even if the keycap symbol sucks.

Mind you, I’ve already got caps-lock rebound as ‘control’ and alt-gr rebound as ‘compose’. My laptop has the ‘penguin’ key (it’s a Tuxedo laptop, no Windows key here) used for Sway. (My desktop keyboard is a Model M from before the days of Windows keys, have had to bind ctrl+alt as the ‘Sway Key’.) I’ve already got some ‘useless keys’ that I could rebind to other things - looking at you, print screen - but one you could press with your thumb while chording would always be nice.

Those ZBooks look like fine laptops. If you installed Arch on them, obviously ;-)