tal @ tal @kbin.social

Trying a switch to tal@lemmy.today, at least for a while, due to recent kbi

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2 yr. ago

Hmm. I was wondering if the National Trust would object to plantings -- I dunno if you can do that in national forests here in the US -- but it looks like they do plant stuff:

https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/support-us/plant-a-tree

Help plant more trees

For only £5, you can plant a tree that will tackle climate change and support life for years to come. Your support will help to plant and establish 20 million trees by 2030.

1,000,000 saplings have been planted so far thanks to your donations
14 species of tree have been planted including oak, beech and crab apple

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/03/national-trust-to-plant-1200-hectares-of-flower-filled-grassland-in-devon

National Trust to plant 1,200 hectares of flower-filled grassland in Devon

EDIT: Looks like we do it in the US too, and the program even has the same name:

https://plantatree.fs.usda.gov/

Donations to Plant-A-Tree will be used to plant trees on national forests throughout the U.S. and territories. You can select to have your donation go to where it’s needed most or to a specific national forest. Donations to where it’s needed most are received in the national office over the course of the year and are pooled and distributed annually to reforestation projects at various locations in the national forest system.

republic candidate

Republican candidate

the Pixels are actually worth it and very very good phones.

Not the longest-battery-life devices.

Well, whoever does that for closed-source software is going to basically have to do what they have done. Probably some kind of cross-distro fixed binary target, client software to do updates, probably some level of DRM functionality like steamlib integration.

If it's not Steam, it's gonna be something that has a lot of the same characteristics.

Personally, I kind of wish that there was better sandboxing for apps from Steam (think what the mobile crowd has) since I'd rather not trust each one with the ability to muck up my system, but given how many improvements Valve's driven so far, I don't feel like I can complain at them for that. A lot of the software they sell is actually designed for Windows, which isn't sandboxed, and given the fact that not all the infrastructure is in place (like, you'd need Wayland, I dunno how much I'd trust 3d drivers to be hardened, you maybe have to do firejail-style restrictions on filesystem and network access, and I have no idea how hardened WINE is), it'd still take real work.

Their use of per-app WINE prefixes helps keep apps that play nicely from messing each other up, but it isn't gonna keep a malicious mod on Steam Workshop or something from compromising your system.

The Steam store does have a section for non-game software. It's not very heavily-populated, but it's there.

https://store.steampowered.com/search/?category1=994&supportedlang=english&ndl=1

1,439 results match your search.

If I exclude non-Linux-native stuff (which will still generally run via Proton):

https://store.steampowered.com/search/?category1=994&os=linux&supportedlang=english&ndl=1

100 results match your search.

And because it has a standard set of libraries, it's probably the closest thing to a stable, cross-Linux-distro binary target out there, which I suspect most closed-source software would just as soon have.

You run your open-source stuff on the host distro, and run the Steam stuff targeting the Steam libraries.

I mean, that's probably part of it too, but I also feel like they wouldn't have filmed the scene at Canary Wharf.

Honestly, given that Robin Hood's home was Sherwood Forest, Sycamore Gap is about...checks Google Maps...about 172 miles by (modern day) road out of the way, too.

EDIT: Hmm. Apparently, Acer pseudoplatanus also didn't grow in Britain at the time Robin Hood was supposed to be running around, either -- it was introduced from central Europe, probably significantly later:

https://gabrielhemery.com/native-trees-of-britain/

Some trees introduced a long time ago to Britain are now considered ‘naturalised’. There is a specific term for species present since 1500; an ‘archaeophyte’. Such species include beech (native only to south-eastern Britain), horse chestnut, sweet chestnut, sycamore and walnut.

https://www.wildlifetrusts.org/wildlife-explorer/trees-and-shrubs/sycamore

It was introduced into the UK from Europe sometime in the 15th or 16th century, and has become naturalised since, as well as being widely planted.

I think it’s called the Robin Hood Tree because it was in a Robin Hood film.

Yeah, but the movie was presumably filmed there because they were looking for something that didn't have houses or whatnot in view, looked like it did during the time of Richard Lionheart.

Or a contemporary of Stonehenge's builders.

https://aeon.co/essays/who-chopped-down-britains-ancient-forests

Much of England had been cleared as early as 1000 BCE, some two millennia beforehand. The Bronze Age saw intensive farming on a scale that we are only just beginning to appreciate. As Oliver Rackham puts it in The History of the Countryside:

It can no longer be maintained, as used to be supposed even 20 years ago, that Roman Britain was a frontier province, with boundless wild woods surrounding occasional precarious clearings on the best land. On the contrary, even in supposedly backward counties such as Essex, villa abutted on villa for mile after mile, and most of the gaps were filled by small towns and the lands of British farmsteads.

Rackham describes the immense clearance undertaken during the Bronze Age, boldly claiming that ‘to convert millions of acres of wildwood into farmland was unquestionably the greatest achievement of any of our ancestors’. He reminds us how difficult it was to clear the woodland, as most British species are difficult to kill: they will not burn and they grow again after felling. Moreover, in his dry phrase, ‘a log of more than 10 inches in diameter is almost fireproof and is a most uncooperative object’. The one exception was pine, which burns well and, perhaps as a consequence, disappeared almost completely from southern Britain, the presumption being that prehistoric man could easily burn the trees where they stood: the image of pine trees burning like beacons across the countryside is a strong one.

General manager Andrew Poad said the sycamore had been "an important and iconic feature in the landscape for nearly 200 years".

Well, Robin Hood was supposed to have been running around in the 12th century, so I suppose it was a bit ahistorical in the context of the guy anyway.

Maybe have the little lumberjack go up and try his hand at being an arborist and plant some new sycamores along the wall for future generations.

EDIT: If they move quickly on it, I imagine that they could probably use cuttings from the existing tree.

EDIT2: Yup, apparently it works with cuttings:

https://hort.ifas.ufl.edu/database/lppi/sp012.shtml

Acer pseudoplatanus

Primary method of propagation: seed
Alternate propagation method(s): cutting, grafting/budding

https://www.theecoexperts.co.uk/blog/uk-gas-sources

UK natural gas imports by country of origin (in 2021)

Country	Natural gas (metric tons)
Norway	1,440,000
United States	92,000
Denmark	45,000
Belgium	45,000
Russia	12,000
France	8,000

That's not a very high proportion that was coming from Russia even before the invasion.

Maybe demand for Norwegian gas has increased due to other countries that did import a lot from Russia wanting to import from Norway, and that'd have an indirect effect on the UK, depending upon the contractual situation with Norway.

I mean, Bangladesh was not, as far as I know, getting natural gas from Russia at all, but when the European energy crisis happened, they promptly got priced out of the market and had blackouts.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/04/asia/bangladesh-blackouts-power-grid-failure-intl/index.html

Many parts of Bangladesh have experienced frequent power cuts this year despite efforts to ration gas supplies amid high global natural gas prices.

Natural gas accounts for nearly three-quarters of the country’s power generation.

Over a third of the 77 gas-powered units in Bangladesh were facing a gas shortage, government data showed on Tuesday.

The EU is preventing price discrimination within the EU.

They do have that requirement as part of the Digital Markets Act, but I don't believe that that's what the case here is addressing. That is not what the article OP posted or the article I linked to is saying: they are specifically saying that what is at issue is sales outside Europe.

EDIT: I am thinking that maybe the article is just in error. I mean, just from an economic standpoint, the EU doing this would create a major mess for international companies.

EDIT2: Okay, here's an archive.ph link of the original Bloomberg article:

https://archive.ph/JuM0z#selection-4849.212-4863.277

In the contested arrangement with Valve, users were left unable to access some games that were available in other EU nations.

Yeah, so it's just that these "mezha.media" guys mis-summarized the Bloomberg article.

But retail law attaches to a location, not to citizenship. Why would the EU be mandating sale of things in other regions? I mean, it's not like the US says "if an American citizen is living in the EU, then vendors operating in the EU must follow American retail law when selling to him".

EDIT: Okay, I went looking for another article.

https://www.gearrice.com/update/steam-cannot-block-the-activation-of-a-game-depending-on-the-country-of-purchase-europe-confirms/

Steam specifies in its terms of use that it is prohibited to use a VPN or equivalent to change your location on the platform. Except that it takes the case of the activation of a game given to you by someone and sent to your account. Following Europe’s decision, this should technically change and it would be possible to change region in Steam directly to buy a game then activate it in France. Valve has not made a comment at this time.

Hmm. Okay, if that is an accurate summary -- and I am not sure that it is -- that seems like the EU is saying "you must be able to use a VPN to buy something anywhere in the world, then activate it in Europe". Yeah, I can definitely see Valve objecting to that, because that'd kill their ability to have one price in the (wealthy) EU and one in (poor) Eritrea, say. Someone in France would just VPN to Eritrea, buy at Eritrean prices, and then use it in France. The ability to have region-specific pricing is significant for digital goods, where almost all the costs are the fixed development costs.

thinks

If that is an accurate representation of the situation, that seems like it'd be pretty problematic for not just Valve, but also other digital vendors, since it'd basically force EU prices to be the same as the lowest prices that they could sell a digital product at in the world. I don't know how one would deal with that. I guess that they could make an EU-based company ("Valve Germany") or something that sells in the EU, and have a separate company that does international sales and does not sell in the EU.

I mean, otherwise a vendor is either going to not be able to offer something in Eritrea (using it as a stand-in for random poor countries), is going to have to sell it at a price that is going to be completely unaffordable to Eritreans, or is going to have to take a huge hit on pricing in the EU.

I'm a little suspicious that this isn't a complete summary of the situation, though; that seems like it'd create too many issues.

EDIT2: Though looking at my linked-to article, it seems to be that the author is saying that that's exactly what the situation is.

Why is it even possible to turn off or delete footage from these cameras?

I mean, police have a lot of privileged access to various locations. If they think that there's an emergency, they can enter your house, say. I think that I'd want to have the technical ability to have footage of that deleted.

EDIT: Also, while I can understand not wanting deletion to be available to an individual officer if the camera is acting as a check on them, I don't think that the main reason that police carry cameras is as a check on police. I think that it's partly because people make false claims about police officers (e.g. "you planted those drugs on me!") and if there's video footage, that can disprove that. I think that part of it is gathering evidence. And I think that part of it is as a check on procedure, to figure out how things go wrong.

Valve was fined €1.6 million ($1.7 million) for obstructing the sale of certain PC video games outside Europe. However, the company pleaded not guilty.

Wait, outside Europe?

Some countries make it illegal to buy certain video games. If Valve can't geoblock sale of them outside Europe, how are they supposed to conform with both sets of laws?

I remember that the EU didn't want country-specific pricing inside the EU, and had some case over that. That I get, because I can see the EU having an interest in not wanting it creating problems for mobility around the EU. But I hadn't heard about the EU going after vendors for not selling things outside Europe.

Why would you expect USB to constrain your audio quality?

You're not getting better 0s or 1s based on which bus they're sent over to the DAC.

Yeah, I think I tried it and it didn't do something I wanted and so used a homebrew script for the same thing, but it or a similar package or script is definitely what I'd recommend.

That should work with dotfiles in .config, in the home directory, any other config you want to be portable across machines, etc.

They may not want their configuration stored in $HOME, for example:

they’re on a machine that isn’t under their physical control and /.config is mounted over the network from their personal machine;

That sounds like it's a bad way to handle configuration, since among many other problems, it won't work with the many programs that do have dotfiles in home directory, but even if that happened, you could just symlink it.

they prefer to version control their configuration files using git, with a configuration directory managed over different branches;

I do that. I symlink that config into a git-controlled directory. If OP plans to put his entire /.config in git, he is doing things wrong, because some of that needs to be machine-local.

the user simply wants to have a clean and consistent $HOME directory and filesystem

If whatever program you are using to view your home directory cannot hide those files, it is broken, as it does not work with a whole lot of existing software.

less secure,

If your home directory is "not secure", you're probably in trouble already.

Like, there are reasons you may not want to put dotfiles in a homedir, but none of the arguments in the article are them.

EDIT: I will ask developers to stop dumping directories and files that don't start with a dot in people's home directories, though. I gave up over twenty years ago and put my actual stuff under /m just to keep it from being polluted with all the other things that dump non-dotfiles/-dotdirs in a home directory. Looking at my current system, I have:

• A number of directories containing video game saves and configuration. I am pretty sure that these are mostly bad Windows ports or possibly Windows programs under WINE that just dump stuff into a user's home directory there (not even good on Windows). Some are Windows Steam games.
• WINE apparently has decided that it's a good idea to default to sticking the Windows home directory and all of its directories in there.
• Apparently some webcam software that I used at one point.
• A few logfiles

I use kbin rather then lemmy, and the kbin API isn't complete, but looks like there's lemmy support in:

https://codeberg.org/martianh/lem.el

Hmm. Yeah, though I have to say that the USB route looks cheaper.

https://thepihut.com/collections/raspberry-pi-audio-hats

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=usb+audio+adapter