[–] [S] 1 point 1 month ago

(3 months later) Enough for a sock?

I harvested one, and it was easy to twist into a short strand of rope by hand. Strong enough that I cannot rip it apart. But it took a long time and I only managed a thick and uneven yarn. Maybe I should skill up and learn spinning...

Anyway, the plant has tiny aphids or something, and I'm too lazy to fight them. I think it's supposed to dry out on its own soon.

OFVUFZaUQzkYXzu.jpg

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    Oh now you make me want to play planescape torment again. Really good writing. It always felt like the dialogs were about you and the questions you have, and immediately relevant to what happens next in the game.

    I'm maybe a third through disco elysium, but I found the writing went off-rails too often for my taste, sometimes disconnected with your quest or what happens next. It's still very well written, maybe just not my "book". But now I have just derailed this thread from the original topic completely, so who am I to judge.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago*

    From the Luanti/Minetest games, I also like Exile very much.

    It is a bit hard and nerdy (you'll have to read the PDF guide/tutorial as you progress), but I found it oddly calming. I recommend single-player only.

    In contrast to other Luanti/Minecraft-Like games, in Exile it feels very rewarding just to have found shelter from a storm and a cozy fire going, after you were on the edge of collapsing from exhaustion. Though you're almost certainly out of food and it would be dangerous to go out looking before the storm passes, you're not quite dying yet and you have time to make your mud hole a bit more cozy. (It's not a good game if you want to build huge creative castles, but you'll need to build and improve your home a bit.)

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  • [–] 19 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    Battle for Wesnoth. It's a fantasy-themed turn-based strategy.

    Though I haven't played it recently, I have some very good memories. It teaches you gambling and probability (especially on small multiplayer maps), and you develop feeling for the difference between 40% chance to hit and 30%.

    The single-player campaigns are nice too. The one that I have in especially good memory is "Under The Burning Suns", which made a few creative and artistic changes to the game. It shouldn't be the first campaign you play, but it can be the second.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    If you are considering rsync, you should also consider rclone instead, especially if you want to access cloud storage. Both are mainly for syncing in only one direction. They can be set up for two-way sync with conflict handling, but I'd consider that slightly dangerous.

    Syncthing is two-way (or n-way) distributed continuous sync, devices can be offline/online at any time, and with robust conflict handling. I know it only from private use, you install it on each machine where the data lives (as opposed to accessing a cloud). It works great for that. I don't know if it is good in a multi-user or corporate context.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago

    Cory Doctorow's "Walkaway" may fit, depending on what you're after.

    Society hasn't collapsed exactly but they are building something new from scraps of deserted technology far away from civilisation. The setting is near-future, their motto: "The first days of a better nation." It is about a group building their own bed&breakfast for themselves and others to escape from the "default" society. There is a global support network of others attempting the same. They build in old ruins with 3D printers and abandoned fuel cells.

    (Another topic of the book is mind uploading. The book is all on earth, no space travel. The main focus is on politics and society and a cultural rebellion against old money. I think the main characters are a bit weak in the sense that they are too similar and I sometimes confused them and it didn't matter. But it was still fun to read for the political ideas being spelled and acted out, and yes, for the enthusiasm of building something new.)

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago

    I'd start with some basic Linux networking and tools, if you don't have them already.

    I don't know if that's the basics everyone knows these days, but... learn how TCP,UDP,ICMP,TLS relate, what a netmask is, what is ARP and MAC addresses. Fire up Wireshark and look around what is happening on your network. Learn some basic commands like ip -br -a and ss (or the older netstat) so you know how to figure out which program is listening where. Learn how to manually resolve a DNS name (dig or host). How tunnel a TCP connection or a webbrowser through ssh (port forwarding, SOCKS proxy). Learn enough of the HTTP protocol so you can manually enter a valid GET request over a simple TCP connection to port 80 with netcat or nc. Or use httpie or curl for the same purpose. You can't host a lot with that knowledge, but it helps to figure out why things are not working.

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    This is a free-to-read e-Book that deserves to be better known.

    The setting is a near-future dystopia. It is written from the point-of-view of an "artificial", a disembodied PDA (personal digital assistant) who has to earn its CPU time. Did you know that reboots are painful and disorienting? Good thing people wear masks with cameras. It is a criminal offense not to transmit your stream in public.

    The world is on the brink of collapse because of climate change and waves of viruses like mySARS. I know what you're thinking now, but no: this book was published around 2012. Climate change wasn't even a news topic when I first read it. And anyway, this is just the setting. The plot is about surviving in a surveillance city-state, and the inner struggles of an artificial being.

    Later books have more action-packed fights for technology and power inside and outside of the city, while some of the more nerdy elements are dropped (like keeping track of the PID that is running the artificial).

    Pineapple Progress Report (media.piefed.social)
     

    Since it is quiet here, I'll give you an update on my pineapple!

    I posted the blossom two months ago, it has turned into a proper fruit. I expect it to grow twice this size before harvest. On the left you can see the dried-out stem of the first fruit. The new stem branched off sideways. I have squeezed in a stone from below to keep it upright. The fruit will soon need support from above, or risk toppling.

    The leaves are a bit of a hazard, sharp and pointy as the fruit crown. I'm cutting the tips before they reach eye-level.

    Growing next to the pineapple is a young cotton plant (hopeful) and the top of an avocado (dying).

    A potted pineapple plant on a sunny window, with a half-grown fruit
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