I’m no expert but what I’ve heard is that there are lots of mosquitoes that don’t bite which are more important for the food chain, but the ones that do bite make up a super small part so if we only eliminated the biting species there would still be plenty of other non-malaria-carrying mosquitoes for the food chain.

At least that’s the theory.

The screenshot doesn’t show any version change to signal - the version number is the same, so I was just answering why you might see an update like that since I thought that was part of your question.

Those might be flatpak “refreshes”, which show up as “updating to the same version”. As described by a flatpak maintainer, sometimes an app or runtime gets updated without changing the user-facing version number. I assume that’s what you’re seeing here.

Even better is your monthly streaming bill being $10 in electricity and a $5 VPN subscription (if you’re in a country where your ISP sends angry letters and you don’t opt for Usenet instead)

My gaming PC is sticking with 10 for the foreseeable future, it’s my only windows machine and that’s because it’s a beatsaber and fusion360 machine and I don’t want to be bothered with fixing something when I want to get a workout session in or need to urgently design a part.

P.S. if anyone knows how to get fusion working in wine I’m all ears

I’m curious if it could solve the traffic light and crosswalk ones, I would try but I’m out of free image uploads from asking it to explain memes to test its cultural knowledge.

I think it’s because Federal Express the company has services which includes ground and express. Some trucks are marked FedEx ground so this is to mark that it’s the express service truck I guess.

One game I used to play recently started working suddenly in the latest proton major release (I think 9), it wasn’t mentioned in the release notes and it has no community around the game since it was released around windows vista, as well as being pulled from stores for many years (I still have it on steam) so I don’t think anyone intentionally fixed it but probably just a result of some system call being implemented or tweaked to behave closer to correct.

So yeah, it’s very good to test your broken wine apps every 6 months to a year because slowly anything I ever had issues with in wine is starting to work.

Unfortunately volume normalization only works on the overall volume. If spoken dialog happens during sound effects that are supposed to play on a separate speaker (but got mixed into the dialog due to downmixing to stereo), no amount of fiddling with EQ or volume normalization will boost just the dialog without also boosting the background noise (in the case of using even a 30 band EQ, it won’t work if there’s any background music, vocals, or sound effects in the same frequency range as speech).

If you want to boost dialog with only software, the best route to go is to get in before downmixing so you can boost the center channel before it gets irreversibly mixed with unwanted sound effects from other channels. Some players might have that option, but like I said if you’re playing from a set top box or streaming stick, you’re gonna need an additional piece of hardware in the chain to do this. If you have the video file itself, you can use ffmpeg’s audio filter to do a custom downmix using the -af flag. This way, you can use a downmixing algorithm like the Robert Collier night mode dialog downmix mapping which preserves original dialog volume (which actually is an improvement in some cases since some algorithms erroneously lower the dialog volume when downmixing to stereo) while slightly reducing music and other channel volume - you can adjust the weights used to boost center channel volume further as well.

I mean that’s technically true, but:

1. If the problem is bad 5.1 to stereo downmix, then you’d be trying to use software tricks to separate out dialog that has already been merged with the other audio tracks, which won’t do a great job.

2. That software needs to run on some kind of hardware, so if you’re playing your media from a streaming box that doesn’t run custom software (Chromecast for example) then you will need to add an additional piece of hardware in the chain to do this processing, such as a DSP.

3. This essentially amounts to trying to fix it with EQ when you can just not merge the center channel with the other channels in the first place. Having a dedicated center channel speaker lets you use the ultimate software regulation trick - simply turning up the volume on the center channel.

That seems like the only solid solution. I got a budget 5.1 with rear satellites because not only did I want a dedicated center channel for dialog but I wanted to avoid the 5.1 to stereo downmixing issues (such as in Plex) where the center channel gets incorrectly divided with a volume decrease (jellyfin didn’t seem to have the issue), but this way I can just sidestep those issues by being able to directly play 5.1.

This has helped a ton but there are still some movies that don’t cooperate, like dune part 1 during the Paul and his mother breakfast scene at the beginning. Even though I have the truehd 7.1 atmos and DD 5.1 (which direct plays without conversion), the only way to make that scene audible without blowing out the speakers the rest of the movie is to crank up the voice boost EQ which ruins the balance.

I switched from Google photos to immich so I could keep my photos more private (self hosted on my own NAS). I still keep Google photos installed on my phone so I can edit photos (the editor is really nice to use). Every time I open it, it bugs me to resume backing up to Google. This week I found that it had started backing up to Google again although I don’t remember accepting so I had to go and clear out all the uploaded photos again.

I hate this. Even when I decline to back up it usually then nags me with a second screen asking if I want to do a one time backup. Like, no. I don’t want to send any of my photos to Google.

You could end up working for a company that develops free software so that’s one way. My company develops an open source science tool and it’s free for anyone to hack on, run their own copy, and use for commercial purposes, but we sell support which usually seems to involve being paid to develop certain features and fix certain bugs, as well as advise on how to keep their system running smoothly.

I still have some 3gp/3gpp videos recorded on my old slide. What a pain. And I think depending on whether your phone was gsm/CDMA would affect whether it recorded to .3gp or .3g2.

I just discovered how easy ollama and open webui are to set up so I’ve been using llama3 locally too, it was like 20 lines in docker compose, and although I’ve been using gpt3.5 on and off for a long time I’m much more comfortable using models run locally so I’ve been playing with it a lot more. It’s also cool being able to easily switch models at any point during a conversation. I have like 15 models downloaded, mostly 7b and a few 13b models and they all run fast enough on CPU and generate slightly slower than reading speed and only take ~15-30 seconds to start spitting out a response.

Next I want to set up a vscode plugin so I can use my own locally run codegen models from within vscode.

Apparently it’s not very hard to negate the system prompt…

I’ve even experienced this in the 3D printing community, where I design a highly parametric model and put lots of effort into making all of the major dimensions and qualities parameterized and dynamically adjustable, with lots of bounds checking and value clamping, with all the parameters at the top of my scad file with comments explaining what each variable does.

And then someone comes along to remix my model, says I don’t want to install openscad, and just scales the entire output stl to change the dimensions, squashing all the features of the model in the process (instead of having the size gracefully adjust with all the features moving around to account), and leaving anybody starting from their work with a hard to remix mesh with no parameters.

Thank goodness it’s in HDR

Did you make sure to stop network manager too? I think disabling it tells it not to start it automatically but I think if it was already running it may have stayed up and maybe it brought the interface back up.

That’s my only guess, if ip link shows it as down still then idk. NetworkManager also has its own Mac spoofing thing so you might have better success editing the properties of the network connection in NetworkManager and putting a new Mac in the cloned Mac address field. I’ve only used macchanger with netctl.

Damn. I managed to get basic insurance for like $75/mo but it’s one where they require you to install a tracking app on your phone for the first month that gives you a higher rate if you accelerate or brake hard. I just drove like a grandma for a month and uninstalled it after.