My current setup is Uptime Kuma sending notifications via Ntfy.

I need to resolve the issue of what to do when the internet is down (and thus Ntfy cannot be reached), but it has so far done everything I want it to do. It also means I get push notifications on all the devices I care to receive them on.

For what it is worth, yesterday I tried to do place the machine first exactly because of that. The machine complained. I did not insist, since it was faster for my five items to just do what it wanted me to do, but it is possible the setup just does not like it.

That is silly, though, since that's something that each developer should be arranging for as part of obtaining the rights to use the music. Either the developer has the rights to use the music as part of the game (and thus sell the game with the music), and by extension Valve can be granted the limited right by the developer to transmit and/or perform the music (in trailers), or the developer does not have such rights and they should not be selling the game in the first place.

There is much to critique Steam for... This? This is nothing but a cash-grab, in my opinion.

I love this! I love that it's getting more attention and cross-platform support.

I just wish it wasn't yet another launcher, and that all these companies got together to develop the one Open Source version everyone writes adapters for. Galaxy, at the time it was released, promised to be a way to have all of them... and then I discovered playnite (which worked better and has more options) and I cannot help but wonder if GOG's efforts wouldn't be better directed that way. Specially since my understanding is that the tool is undergoing a rewrite for cross-platform support.

People keep saying that they verify your age at the super market and I keep trying to remember the last time that happened to me and I just cannot. Nor, for that matter, at bars or coffee shops (for after lunch chat chilling before returning for the afternoon stint).

It may just be my corner of the European Union being much more lax than others.

Under FAQ of the digital euro's page Q9. How private would the digital euro be?, that they want it to be equivalent to cash when it comes to privacy.

The digital euro is designed to be able to function offline in a way that would offer users a cash-like level of privacy, both for sending money to other people and for making payments in shops. When paying offline, only the payer and the payee would know the personal transaction details of the payments made. Anti-money laundering checks would be carried out by the distributing payment service provider (PSP) during the funding and defunding process, just as it is the case with cash withdrawals and deposits today.

In the case of online transactions, the Eurosystem would not identify users making or receiving payments, thereby protecting their personal data, but PSPs would be able to identify users for the purpose of compliance with anti-money laundering rules.

I... am not entirely clear on the technical aspects of it, or if what they said can actually accomplish what they claim. However, it is a factor they are considering, however much you actually trust them aside.

I would be interested in an explainer, for sure, on how they actually accomplish any of this (assuming they deliver).

I think that with enough community effort, it could.

Some of what I think is missing is just community documentation (manuals, tutorials, troubleshooting pages) that are easy to find and recent. While yes, solutions from 5 to 10 years ago still work, they often don't reflect the full recent reality, never mind the tendency for CLI solutions (which are great, but plenty of people are intimidated by the CLI).

The other thing that I think is missing is polish around things that are just off the beaten path... the kinds of things that not everyone will do, but that most will do at least one of.

The issue with "children" local accounts (assuming they ever remained 100% local anyway) is that for it to be effective, you would have to control who install the OS for it to be effective.

I have been managing my own OS install since I was a teen, so I could have just created an adult account for me. But, okay, you could say that you could just regularly check your child hasn't reinstalled the machine.

Well, see, they could just install a Virtual Machine. There is plenty of Virtual Machine software out there, and then we're back at whoever installs it being responsible for filling in that information. And Virtual Machines are very useful for a bunch of things: from running software not made for your hardware (see Android emulators, WSL), to being safer around dodgy software.

You could counter that by not letting them install things with your permissions... but there are portable versions of software that people make for a bunch of reasons which don't recall an installation. And I am not talking about hypotheticals: back when I was in school people would carry portable versions of games in USB sticks to copy around school machines so they could play video games during IT class.

Never mind that it means that whenever they want to install something, they will poke you about it, and now you're on the hook for reviewing that. Which you should already be doing because you care about what your child does and they don't have the years of experience to not break their OS.

But if you are doing that, why not use proper parental control software that let's you have much finer-grained control over what they can see or not online, along with other controls around how much time they can spend on the machine and a few nicer things?

I tried Vampire Survivors and despite how fun it was to see the game played, I am not sure I actually enjoy playing it. Then again, I have put quite a few hours on Time Wasters, and that may just be more my jam.

Otherwise? Playing Infested Planet. The control scheme is serviceable, if awkward, but I can also just pick it up whenever which is the use case for the Steam Deck.

I got tired of Microsoft. I had seen that Linux was now good enough for what I wanted to so, so I decided to jump ship.

It wasn't a quick decision. I only transitioned from Windows because I finally got around upgrading the PC.

So far? I mean, there was the kerfuffle with the AUR recently. And I still haven't figured out a few issues here and there. But damn it just works and there is no worrying about updating or not updating or anything like it.

FWIW, in Portugal, during my youth, I ate at the cafeteria rather often. It was decent food for the most part (it was also my first exposure to soy minced meat). It was hot, didn't involve carrying a lunchbox, and it was tasty and convenient and cheap. Eventually I opted to go back home because I lived close enough to walk, and mom's food is better.

We did not get ways to heat up food (though I bet you could have asked the cafeteria staff if you needed it) of our own, though.

While I get what you are saying, I'm not entirely sure where else could the people focused on consumer/passenger rights be focused on, considering it was introduced as part of a series of other reforms around this particular form of travel which millions of Europeans use. It isn't like this was a whole procedure brought about just for the seating of kids, either.

Standardized parental controls would be great, actually. But it should be proper parental controls, not whatever this is. Because at the end of the day, the parent* should be involved in what their child is up to, and allow (or not) based on what the child needs and/or wants, instead of whatever we are doing now.

Or, to put it another way, if your teen has read Games of Thrones (the physical books), I don't see much of a point in forbidding them from going to the wiki of it, and I'd be hard pressed to justify stopping them from talking about it online with other people who have read the books. The tools should allow for this kind of nuance, because actual people are going to use it and these kind of situations happen all the time.

* some parents are awful and would abuse this, see LGBT+ related things, but that's a social issue, not a technological issue.

I would love to see a grand sci-fi game that's a mixture of Titanfall and mirror's edge.

You would have open world runner sections where your entire job is to run messages between agents on a city/station that is working hard to steer the war... and then you go and do big stompy robots combined arms, titalfall-esque fighting, just open world instead of the (rather great) map, point-to-point of the original.

Alternatively, just give me either a single player or MMO implementation of The Allbright System.

Whatever I choose, I would just like the engine to be released under GPL, and the assets under CC-3.0-BY-NC-SA so that it lives on, regardless of however well it does.

There are a multitude of reason why I like it.

The most important is that I am not wasting an hour and change commuting. I don't need to worry about train schedules. Commuting by car would have been worse: I'd spend hundreds of euros on gas and tolls, never mind parking. I also don't have a bunch of dead time I cannot really take advantage of. Sure, some of it I could use to read in public transport, or listen to podcasts, but there is a limit. I am prone to motion sickness, so there are limits to when I can do it and for how long. And during peak hours? The experience of getting on a train is, sometimes, not great. Too many people, too hot. As much as I love public mass transport, the experience during peak hours is miserable.

The other thing about WFH, in my current setup, is that... I can just step away? I have gone to a friends house to give them and/or deliver something during work hours because I just have enough time. I have driven parents for appointments because it was quick enough, or I could just take my work laptop with me and work from the car. I have worked from another country entirely, and the biggest difference was the timezone. And if I really want to, I can visit a teammate and work from his house instead!

There are few other reasons why work from home is great, though they are not that important in the grand scheme of things. In the places I have worked, we have had open spaces. This means noise. Others might need to be on a call, or you might need to be on a call. It means that multiple people in the same call is now an exercise in mute discipline so you don't distract others hearing themselves through your microphone. It also means I cannot just pace around while on a chat, which I sometimes do thanks to the wireless headphones I invested in. Actually, it means I need to use my headphones much more because if I want music, I need them on, whereas at home I can just use speakers instead?

We do get togethers once a month, though I don't go to all of them. We also are relatively liberal with audio chats for not so serious subjects. I don't feel lonely for two reasons: I just deal well with calls and other such ways of interacting with people; and I can use the extra time I don't commute to actually go out with people I like after work.

We have had similar reactions to things like tracking by websites and other such cases. And to a certain extent, I get it: sometimes you just want your tools to work and move on with your life. And if that means that something you don't particularly use or immediately care about is worse, then that's just the cost of doing business.

Specially around "NSFW", a lot of people just don't engage with it in "public". They leave "NSFW" stuff to one on one conversations with people they are close with, if at all.

The thing is, I say "NSFW" in quotes because we have seen, repeatedly, that what might be NSFW is not just porn. It has been extended to things around identify, sexual health and so on. Never mind that "you don't care about privacy" until you realize that you were in a data breach and you now have to worry about malicious people getting you into financial peril by abusing your identity. Or worse.

I'm not sure how you get people to care, though, before things get bad enough.

I really don't think the article makes a good case for why they are using "withdrawal symptoms" (which clearly evokes drugs) beyond being a nice quote. Could the behavioural issues be, say, kids figuring out what to do (or what they can get away with) now that what they used to do is no longer available? The article certainly doesn't say so.

The other thing is that these are things that are taking years to play out, which suggests to me that there may be more than just cellphones in the classroom. There is certainly a point to be made that if the smartphone is still used at home, you may up in a wash anyway. A reductive scenario I could think of, for example, might be that a student may say they are more attentive, and they may look more attentive, but if they aren't really engaging with because they will just go home and ask an LLM for the answers to the homework.

I've been slowly setting up my own services locally, and one of the issues I quickly ran into was simple: what's the point of running the uptime monitor in the same machine? Granted, it still serves is purposes, but...

So, if you do find a way to get something going, I think it'd be really cool. My biggest concern would be, though, on how to ensure you don't accidentally build a DDoS network instead. A though issue I have no idea how to solve, but which should be solvable!

I appreciate the heads-up, though. I was planning on getting it for the beta, but I guess I will just keep waiting. My Steam library isn't hurting for other things to play, even within the genre.

I wish you the best of luck on your future endeavor. I admit I never quite managed to just pick up a textbook to read through ahead of time, though it would have (perhaps) helped.

I would give a few pieces of advise to my younger self, and I think they should still be valid for others:

First: it is very important to sleep, for a bunch of learning-related reasons. But, perhaps more measurable: if you feel the need to pull an all-nighter, it is very likely you are falling behind and trying to crunch your way through. I'm not saying don't do it, because if you are there, you are there, but maybe take the opportunity once it is all said and done to see if you can avoid it in the future, yeah? Sleeping enough is cool, and helps you learn better.

Second: understanding the fundamentals really helps you understand everything else. I struggled with some of the mathematics classes in my course exactly because I did not have a solid grasp of the fundamentals.

Third: you're going to be in class anyway, so pay attention (not that I didn't) and then, afterwards, review the class. Probably by writing a summary/notes about it. The point isn't to produce something that I can then look up, but to see what I retained and what I didn't, and thus I should review.

Fourth: put it into practice. Try to teach others (even if it is just a video you're never going to upload to youtube), or work through a project that exercises it. Theory is great. Toy exercises are great too. The best thing my university did for us was to get us 2 weeks worth of project at the end of each semester.

Fifth: the better you are at language, the better you will be at everything. Why? Simple: your classes will use language to transmit the knowledge to you, whether spoken or written. You will use language to transmit your answers to whoever is grading you. You can have the most amazing teacher and the most amazing learning materials, know all the right tools and techniques... but if you cannot really parse and understand what you are hearing/reading, then you won't learn. Likewise, you may know the material perfectly, but if you cannot articulate your answer? Not only will you not get good grades (which sucks), you will later on struggle to work with others as they, too, need to understand what is going on.

There are plenty of tools to help with all of the above. Index cards are great, whether physical or digital. But I would try to avoid falling into the pitfall that highlighting/underlining or writing notes is learning. They can definitely be tools for learning, but I have seen people who were prolific highlighters and note takers who did not have such a great domain over what they were supposedly learning.