@glassbottommeg annoyingly, a lot of these sites do things to start the video playing in a way that gets past the strongest autoplay blocking you can set in firefox's settings.

Malicious web developers must have loved adding GDPR popups, since the button to dismiss them can be used as an explicit user action to trigger a video playing.

@minterpunct @trysdyn it's the "flattening it down" that's the problem. In both the photoshop image case and in the video case, "flatting down" requires re-encoding the entire modified image.

There's no common / well supported video formats that allow you to add a new layer without flattening.

In the old days, this problem would be solved by using youtube annotations, but youtube has removed support for those… a lot of old videos lost corrections when those got disabled.

@mikeloukides @janellecshane @Wolven @FractalEcho this is actually a really tricky challenge for our current generation/classification models.

LLM generate new text which is similar to the data they are generated from, by their very nature.

Generating another model to try to distinguish natural human text from LLM output is going to learn the same things as the LLM about what makes stuff "more like the input", so I don't see any way that it could come up with conclusive results.

@Epsi I live here and just looked at the fancy light up sign we have, pretty sure it's AWATTO

@cassidy @topher hey, there are other methods (e.g. systemd user units) and in some cases - if session "lingering" is enabled - that can allow running background applications even when you're not logged in to the session.

This is how I run syncthing, for example.

@tsoulard @cassidy that's an interesting one - the new "dark mode" switch in settings requires application opt-in.

That's because changing the gtk3 theme out from under applications will make them unusable if they happened to have hardcoded colours in app-specific styles which assumed the default/light theme.

@cassidy @topher @mgedmin note that I use both *smaller* and *larger* font size adjustments.

I use 100% scaling and 1.25 font size on my laptop's 14" 1080p screen, and 200% scaling with 0.875 font size (175% effective) on my desktop's 24" 4k monitors.

@cassidy @brainblasted the problem with the focus indication work (from the thread i saw on discourse a while back) is that it's not a *static* indication. I really want an easy way to tell at a glance when looking at my screen(s) which window has focus.

In older desktops this was easy, due to coloured titlebars / window borders being different on focused windows.

I'm not a fan of GNOME's unfocused "backdrop" styles since they reduces contrast, making it hard to read unfocused windows.

@cassidy @topher @mgedmin for me, this is mostly because the fractional scaling mode as implemented has too many compromises.

When I use font size adjustment instead of fractional scaling:
- X11 apps render at native res, instead of with blurry upscaling
- Wayland apps are rendered at native res instead of with blurry downscaling, and perform better too.

the new wayland fractional scaling extension will help, once enough apps support it.

@minterpunct no, you're not supposed to *hold* your hands together. just let them briefly touch when they come together, before moving them apart again.

@jk be much easier to make this work with cartridge formats.

And "MiniDisc emulator" sounds much cooler anyways.

instead of boring, electrically-interfaced optical drive emulators, we should have gone for the "car cassette adaptor" route and designed a 12cm diameter micromirror device which harvests energy from rotational inertia

@jk ... but good luck making this work with the slot-loading drive in your car :/

@jk due to friction losses, I don't think you could do this with *just* rotational inertia. You would need the emulator device to hold on to something to prevent itself from spinning (at which point, it can be powered quite simply by a generator running off the hub, which is being spun by the optical drive's motor).

Having the "disc" held in a fixed alignment so only part of it needs micromirrors, held over where the drive's head sits, would simplify things too.

@QuietMisdreavus it is kind of interesting that they put the attachment point on the bottom of the phone. I guess it makes sense; that makes it easier to balance if you've got some weight hanging from it when using the phone to make calls or trying to use it one handed on the go.

@QuietMisdreavus Sony was still making android smartphones with loops for attaching stuff up to around 2016, but they don't do it any more :( My Xperia Z5 Compact was the last phone I had which could attach something.

I definitely took advantage of it, had a little plushie attached to my phone for a while.

So, it's time to say "farewell" to some of my collection. Machines that I rarely use, and that I have a solid emulation solution for, need to find new homes. I'm a bit sad about this decision, but I know it's for the best, ultimately.

So... watch this space, I guess. I loathe to sell on fleaBay, so I'll bee seeking alternate forums for these sales. I've bought plenty of machines direct from folks on Twitter over the years so I know that's doable.

Anyway, I guess I just want to close by telling everyone "Don't let anyone tell you how to retro." You don't have to own 40 computers to enjoy Vintage Computing as a hobby. Enjoy these old machines, these old games, these old programs - any way you like. Support museums and retro arcades and spaces if you can, but don't feel like you have to. But do be part of the community, please. This hobby needs fresh faces - especially if they don't look like mine (white, male, and bearded)

[fin]

@glassbottommeg I've seen a few games which did all the work to have the per-system settings saved to a separate file, but then had their steam sync set up incorrectly such that those settings were included in the sync anyways :(

@der_istvan regarding disk space usage, it would be interesting to see at some point support for deduplicating files between multiple different ostree repos; imagine an ostree based linux distro built on top of the freedesktop runtime where flatpak apps on a matching runtime version shared files with the distro.

@der_istvan I also heavily make use of terminals; flatpak doesn't have a good experience here. CLI apps can't usefully be packaged with flatpak, and launching apps in a flatpak from a terminal is difficult, since there's no way to get correctly named commands in the shell aside from manually sticking wrapper scripts in your path or setting up shell aliases.