I wanna get more into cooking, but a lot of things need milk. So we just got the blueprints for the automatic feeder and automatic milking machine (can't remember the exact names for them and our game being set to German doesn't help with that, haha).

But we can't find them in the build menu?

They...should be in the build menu, right? If so, what category are they in?

-- Frost

It sounds like a lot of people just try to passively memorize vocabulary and read a bunch of stuff and whatnot?

I uh, haven't been doing that. >,,>

I picked up German and after doing a few things of Nicos Weg, I was grabbing words off wiktionary, looking up grammar, and trying to say stuff. Oftentimes varying levels of hilariously wrong (shoutout to the time I said "ausm Artzt" and sounded like I'm a chest burster coming out of the doctor). It's super fun and I think personally way more engaging than just trying to memorize stuff without being able to use it. It also naturally exposes us to a bunch of random helpful semi-advanced grammar concepts, to be able to say things like "we really need to take a shower and we STILL haven't eaten anything".

Started picking up Chinese today and I'm doing the same thing: look up words, look up grammar, bang out sentences. It's definitely slower going than German though!

Yet everywhere I look (at least for Japanese stuff), I see "oh don't do output at first! you need to memorize a bunch of shit and be able to read things and THEN you can start talking". Surely we're not alone in how we learn though?

-- Frost

I'm looking into learning Chinese!

So I set up a pinyin IME. I think it's the fcitx5-chinese-addons one. Worked pretty well... until I realized it was giving us simplified. And I can't find a switch to put it into traditional mode. There's nothing in the menu. The "configure simplified/traditional chinese conversion" button in the settings uh... just doesn't work.

So I tried rime.

Worked beautifully! Until I went to poke its settings and it had none. It did have an "open user dir" button... and... it's FULL OF YAML. Nope. I'm not putting spaces for indentation in our configuration files. Out the window you go.

Then I tried chewing. It uh... it's definitely not pinyin.

This really should not be this hard... how the heck do we type traditional chinese with pinyin (without being forced to use YAML)?

(OS info: we're running Debian stable/testing (stable on laptop, testing on desktop) with KDE, and fcitx5 as the input method system. We've already got mozc for Japanese and that was infinitely less of a hassle.)

(edit for People From The Future: if you have this issue and you're on a Debian-based distro, install fcitx5-module-chttrans)

-- Frost

And they're just... not agreeing to not do that? because they seem to think KDE's native input settings should be nuked and replaced with Only fcitx? Guh.

But you can go to input method settings, configure addons, Wayland, uncheck "allow overriding system XKB settings" (it's the only setting in there for us) and that fixes it.

https://github.com/fcitx/fcitx5/issues/1261

Argh.

-- Frost

We just got ourselves our first grinder! It's a cheapie because we're on a pretty tight budget. Kingrinder P0.

I tried 5 clicks from 0, but it wouldn't grind very well. At 10 it actually grinds (takes like 8-10 minutes though!), but I'm not 100% sure if it's grinding fine enough for Turkish. The coffee does get a little bit of foam on top, though! Just a very thin layer. What even constitutes "fine enough for Turkish"? I know it's supposed to be finer than espresso, but does it matter how much finer?

-- Frost

We've played a little bit of Pokemon, but never really got into it. Probably because of the peer pressure from other furries to like or at least know all the different critters.

In NMS everyone's procedurally generated, so there's none of that! And it turns out the battle system is really fun. I like all the buffs/debuffs/shields/"hit after 3 turns"/etc. moves.

Oh, and it's all holographic, so no one gets hurt.

I do wish you got the opportunity to start swapping moves before getting to max level, though. Can't even start tinkering before maxing out.

-- Frost

We're on Debian testing(+unstable) and running into update issues. apt upgrade doesn't touch anything, and apt full-upgrade wants to upgrade 2 libreoffice packages, not touch the 341 other upgrades, and remove the main libreoffice package.

How cursed of an idea is it to just sudo apt install $(apt-mark showmanual)? That looks like it would upgrade everything, while just removing a couple hopefully-inconsequential system libraries.

-- Frost

systemd recently pulled some shit, adding a field to store people's birthdates because of a new California law. (It's not the field itself that's the problem, it's how easily they're jumping to comply with shitty laws.)

This has our whole friend group rightfully freaking out. I'm pretty glad that it's now normal to be uncomfortable with systemd, it makes me feel a whole lot less weird. I do wish the circumstances were better though.

Anyway, since we switched most of our machines (all our physical ones, not our VMs/LXC containers/VPS though) to OpenRC a little while back, I figured I'd (do it again in a VM and) document the process for anyone who wants to jump ship too. Hence, my blog post!

(Unfortunately if you're on Arch it sounds like you're a bit screwed unless you get your init system from the AUR and write all the scripts yourself. I have no idea about Fedoraland.)

-- Frost

I wrote a blog post that'd be relevant here, and I was about to post it, but then remembered that a lot of subreddits don't like "self-promotion" stuff. There's obviously no money or spam or anything involved, but still. Is it frowned upon to post your own blog posts here, or should I go ahead?

-- Frost

I'm trying to run OneShot on Linux, Debian 14 testing to be precise (wow, it's been years... last played 2022, apparently).

It won't run though. Might be because the included libraries are too old? But if I try renaming them and using system ones, it still breaks?

Error creating window: Couldn't find matching GLX visual

This still happens if we use the Steam Linux Runtime 1.0 (scout).

Anyone got ideas?

(Yes, I could just use Proton, but Oneshot does some fourth-wall-breaking stuff and I'd like that to work.)

-- Frost

The new update may not be all that huge, but it's a blast. (And makes me want to look into Snowrunner.)

I love loading up all the trash, carefully driving it to the dump, and then getting to play garbage disposal basketball. Very chill and fun.

I haven't even started the expedition yet! Just dump trucking on our main save.

-- Frost

And it's apparently fun as heck! Liiittle hard to control though. I keep smashing into hillsides giggling uncontrollably.

I picked it up from https://nmsspot.com/2023/03/21/speed-tip-the-melee-reload-jump-trick/. Apparently you can

• take a projectile gun (e.g. boltcaster) and fire a shot so it's not full
• hit melee, hold it down
• while holding down melee, tap reload really fast
• instead of reloading you'll do the melee elbow animation over and over, going really fast
• optionally take off with jetpack, or just keep giggling until you smack into something

Seriously this is like something straight outta Warframe.

I think the fact that you can't really control your direction very well just adds to its hilarity. And makes it less likely to get patched.

-- Frost