I left the pc gaming scene about 20 years ago and only came bacj this year. I found my steam credentials from when they were initially seeking players and revived my account (I closed my email on the account back in 2009, so i couldn’t recover).

I’ve mostly been playing vSkyrim, BG 3, and a few emulated Zelda games. I finally ordered a new gaming laptop because Cyberpunk 2077 is hard to rrad on the Deck, even on a 50" tv on hi-res.

All that is just so you all know where I’m coming from, i am both a newb and a veteran!

From a business standpoint, looking ant it form the non-gaming financial point of view, the move to online-only makes very compelling sense.

It fully implements the licensing model, gives them total control over the property, enables them to generate reports that accurately identify trndsvin user populations, pinpoint steady revenue figures, and they can kill the game as soon as it isn’t valuable to them anymore, and they don’t have to worry about losing revenue from sharing, passing the copy to an otherwise paying customer for free, or a significant pirtiin of piracy loss.

Itvis the end state of the “we are mearly licensing it to you until such time as we decide ee want it back” model.

It sucks, and if i can know it is online only before buying, i will pass. All of us should. Revenue is king to them, and if they lose even a little, they will try something else.

Well said… Two weeks before the equivalent i posted moments ago.

I’ll elaborate for him/her: mesh devices sold by untrusted companies with a profit model will almost surely be collecting your data.

The problem is not “mesh”, it is the companies using a new, cool, buzzword to sell their spyware that is the problem.

They are basically enhanced repeaters that don’t require a seperate network access point.

If you get a device that is primarily marketed as basic hardware, like the Asus router, you are more likely to avoid the collection. Bonus points if you can flash FOSS software to it, also like Asus, so yiu know it is clean. Regardless, use a VPN for external communications.

My home is small enough that mesh is unnecessary, but I’d buy another Asus device for mesh if it were necessary.

Well, i haven’t neen much of a gamer for years (got too adicted to WoW), but just started again this year. I am amazed by Skyrim, and am now modding it up.

I also just got Cyberpunk 2077, and will get into it soon.

I don’t know, but there might be pdf viewers that permit editing layers. Try LibreOffice Draw or gscan2pdf. Maybe The Gimp can do it.

No, you aren’t. You just haven’t been conditioned your whole life to accept 100% surveillance.

Only if it earns a profit.

That is a trust based transaction when parent asks where their child is going as well.

Putting tracking malware and using surveillance all the time is invasion of privacy, teaching the child that surveillance is okay, and completely lacking a trust relationship, which is bad within a family.

Anti-trust lawsuit in 3… 2…

*rolls D-100* … I disbelieve!

I use ocrmypdf, after being a bit frustrated with gscan2pdf. There is a simple ui available, but I just created a tiny script that does the ocr , deskew, etc. In one operation with wildcard file selection.

I also installed a jbig compressor that really shrinks images. My processed docs are generally 40% to 80% smaller, and it seems to get better tesseract output than gscan does.

Any DNS based blocker will filter out anything from URLs at the source, so no data is received. I use AdAway with Magisk. Blocklists are updated regularly.

I saw that as I continued reading other comments.

I generally stick with Firefox, but I do have chromite ony degoogled secondary phone as a backup in case something only works with chromium renderer.

A fellow old-schooler, I see! Me too!

Depends on if someone uploaded the data for the target area, and the lookup is not intuitive for North Americans.

OsmAnd is a favorite of mine. If you live in one of the covered areas (North America for sure) OpenSuperMaps merges a US style address search and most street addresses into the maps.

OsmAnd search goes by town, street, number while these maps work with “25 oak street Chicago Illinois”. Also, the open street maps rely on croud sharing for map details, so many areas have very little detail, while others put Google Maps to shame.

For navigation, I like Magic Earth. It includes similar search ability and has Waze-like features. The only problem is a lack of critical mass of users to get good traffic and hazard warnings. You can be one more user to supply such info.

Perhaps the curator is running a red herring with the intention or blocking liberal media?

I was not saying 25 for a dev job, i was saying that for other kinds of work i might be able to get without getting a new degree.

I understand how it works. The fact remains that companies already laid off people because of AI, and until now, I have never been unemployed more than 2 months.

I’ve also never seen a market in which most job posting garner 200 to 500 applications within 24 hours. It is armageddon out here.