Grayjay on Android has been working damn near flawlessly for me. No clue if the parent company is to be trusted at this point or not- but I cannot argue with the results.

Sure, but we’re talking about a handheld. Yes, performance is improving generation over generation, but in the handheld space power usage and heat dissipation are equally important. If you’ve been keeping up with recent innovations, you’ll see that generally we are making more powerful parts, but they’re getting much more power hungry for every little percent of improvement they bring in raw horsepower. So far it doesn’t look like you could even get Xbox series S performance in a handheld yet. At least not at a reasonably portable size, cost, or battery life. You could get a little better than PS4 pro performance in a handheld at present, based on what I’ve seen. Which is not a full generational leap over what’s out there.

If they released one NOW they’d probably be shooting themselves in the foot. At best they’d get mid-generational performance improvements whereas likely in the next year or two Valve is probably going to drop a true SteamDeck 2 with significant improvements. All speculation at this point, but if you’re a bean counter at Microsoft, speculation is like 90% of your job. Unless they abandon the standard console release cycle and shoot for faster iteration, they’ll want to come out absolutely swinging to compete.

Compatibility is unlikely to be very different. The key is immutability (easy to update, hard to brick your system) and some baked in nice to haves for gaming like some specific drivers/patches and controller support out of the box.

Cheaper than Spotify for the number of users it gives you (at least where I live) and the app itself has functioned significantly better than Spotify’s has in my experience so far while not depriving me of any of the artists and albums I listen to regularly. Early on in its life it was big time selling snake oil, but at this point it’s just a solid alternative to Spotify and YouTube music which have both, frankly, gotten “too big to fail” and have begun enshittification because of it. Man we need more competition…

It’s in the appendices. It tells us the authentic Westron names of all the main Hobbits we follow.

If we wanna be pedantic (and I usually do), Pippin’s Real Name is Razanur.

There’s an old article on the Arch wiki I used to use HERE. For simplicity I’d just always use section 2.2. Hasn’t ever steered me wrong, but I’m also under no illusions that no digital data is sacred. And if it IS sacred, then it’s already backed up under the 3-2-1 approach. Just make sure you know which device is which so you don’t mix up “if” and “of”. There’s probably significantly more user friendly ways of doing it, but I guess I’m old now so I’m stuck in my ways.

Get a same sized drive (or larger) and just dd it? I used to do that all the time, even to Windows installs, if I knew a drive was starting to become unreliable. I’d advise mounting the original/donor drive as read-only to mitigate any potential data losses while transferring. But dd makes a perfect bit for bit copy of any partitions, drives, etc that you feed it. Just don’t get the inputs/outputs backwards! And always remember: dd stands for “disk destroyer” because if you get it wrong, bye-bye data.

To be more clear I was more focused on the not wanting a car that needs software updates part of the argument, less so the means of delivery. Obviously, having an always on connection absolutely sucks and I’d personally be super down with just pushing an update via a USB drive or whatever like you can a BIOS update. But a lot of manufacturers have it set up so that you have to either pay a dealership to plug in the USB for some arbitrary reason, or demand the always on connection to do it. In a utopia of software development where there are no critical bugs, we would all prefer a car that doesn’t need updates. I didn’t mean to imply that I was arguing in favor of remote connection by manufacturers, and it’s absolutely my bad in not wording it properly.

On the flip side: if a car stereo has a known firmware issue causing problems with say Bluetooth connection, I DO want the manufacturer to actually provide an easy means of fixing/updating the borked software. Better that the system was properly tested and feature complete to begin with- but I’m not delusional enough to believe we can truly have nice things.

Remnant 2. Gotta finish Cyberpunk 2077 (again) first though. The damn DLC adding extra achievements has thrown everything off!

For what it’s worth- I’ve used them plenty and it’s always appeared to be legitimate. They don’t “stock” every game out there, but they do have most things and they do usually end up being 3-5% cheaper than steam unless steam is having a sale.

*ahem Subtle Spell has entered the chat. Cast any spell that doesn’t require a line of sight target and that doesn’t require material components or otherwise rely on an “attack” or similar action. Like say Guardian Of Nature. Or, if you want to get REALLY pedantic: Dimension Door.

Just seemed like a more appropriate fit. As I’m sure we’ve all thought about good ol’ JD eating house pets whilst in the shower. When we aren’t thinking about sultry couches, anyways.

I see we’re doing some better numbers over here in showerthoughts!

Showerthoughts maybe?

Alright, where’s my replacement once my current Fitbit dies? What company makes a watch that tracks steps, heart rate, sleep, spO2, notifications, is generally water resistant (light swimming) and has a battery that lasts ~5+ days? Bonus points for open firmware/hardware that doesn’t require me to design my own apps/systems for each of those items. I don’t even use most of what my Versa 3 can do, but I know it won’t last forever and I’d at least like an idea of where to go if/when it breaks down.

Proton experimental and (at least as of yesterday) I had to opt into bleeding edge beta as well or I’d just get black screen at launch.

No stuttering for me on Linux… Runs as good as it ever has but the visuals are even that much better due to the engine upgrades. Not a fan of the new UI, but the old UI was clunky too, so I can’t really say it’s even a step backwards.