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1 hour agoI’ve used Epson and Brother printers without issue, though I suppose things could change on a per-model basis or over time.
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Cake day: October 4th, 2023
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1·8 hours agoI mean, he’s using Linux, so it’d run on Proton. I’m pretty sure that it just fires right up. I don’t think that I did anything special myself.
Getting Mod Organizer 2 set up to mod it or something like that might be more-obnoxious on Linux, but honestly, I’d say that Linux plus Proton might compare favorably against current Windows when it comes to backwards compatibility on older games. I’ve read a bunch of Steam descriptions where there are a bunch of upset reviews from people saying that they can’t get a game working on current Windows, and it just runs on Proton without problems or configuration for me.
Fallout: New Vegas lists an ATI X1300XT as the minimum and 2GB of RAM. That card has a Passmark score of 69. I’d guess that he’d probably be more than fine.
IIRC, New Vegas was really CPU-constrained, too, not GPU-constrained, and the systems he’s using are probably pretty comparable to any other system from the time CPU-wise – it’s just that they don’t have discrete 3D hardware.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/17410/Mirrors_Edge/
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 or better
1GB RAM or more
The GeForce 6800 has a Passmark score of 113 and he’s fine on memory, so, yeah, I’d give decent odds that it’d probably run well on his system.
Well, it depends. I mean, I play rather newer games that I suspect either can handle fine, but they’re light on 3D rendering.
Nova Drift is one favorite.
That exited Early Access this year. I play it regularly. But…it just uses 3D hardware for some lightweight effects.
goes to see what minimum system requirements are
Yeah, that actually lists your older Intel integrated GPU, the one on the MacBook, as being the minimum requirement.
CPUs haven’t advanced all that rapidly for quite some years, so games that are CPU-bound are also less of an issue than those GPU-bound.
EDIT: And some games won’t use 3D hardware at all. I also regularly play Rule the Waves 3, which is a 2023 naval warfare military simulator that doesn’t use 3D hardware at all.
EDIT2: I’ve also played Balatro recently, and that just uses the barest of 3D hardware to do stuff like stick rotated sprites on the screen. They just say “integrated graphics” on their system requirements. That’s a 2024 release.
I’ve run it without issues, on a much newer system.
I don’t know why it wouldn’t run at all, but as you point out, you’re running it on a pair of pretty low-end systems. One is from six years prior to the game’s release without discrete video, and the other came out in the same year, but is a very low-end system with no discrete video card; those things aren’t really aimed at playing 3d games. I don’t think that you’d likely be happy with performance even if it ran.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/323190/Frostpunk/
Windows:
Minimum:
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: GeForce GTX 660, Radeon R7 370 or equivalent with 2 GB of video RAMRecommended:
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: GeForce 970, Radeon RX 580 or equivalent with 4GB of video RAMMac:
Minimum:
Memory: 16 GB RAM
Graphics: 4GB AMD Radeon Pro 5300M, Radeon Pro 560X or betterMy experience is that minimum requirements tend to be kind of optimistic.
The minimum system requirements specify a discrete video card.
You’ve got an 8GB RAM Surface Go with a non-discrete GPU and no VRAM, and a 16GB RAM Macbook also with a non-discrete GPU that had been around for six years prior to the game’s release.
I’ve never returned a game, but IIRC Steam does have a refund policy for a short period of time after purchase, so if you buy a game and it doesn’t run, you can refund it.
goes looking
https://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds/
You can request a refund for nearly any purchase on Steam—for any reason. Maybe your PC doesn’t meet the hardware requirements; maybe you bought a game by mistake; maybe you played the title for an hour and just didn’t like it.
It doesn’t matter. Valve will, upon request via help.steampowered.com, issue a refund for any reason, if the request is made within the required return period, and, in the case of games, if the title has been played for less than two hours.
The Steam refund offer, within two weeks of purchase and with less than two hours of playtime, applies to games and software applications on the Steam store.
EDIT: Here’s a Passmark comparison of your two Intel integrated video things and the lowest-end video card they list in their system requirements, a Geforce GTX 660. This gives a score to give a rough idea of how they’d compare in relative terms:
GeForce GTX 660: 4013
Intel HD 4000: 348
Intel HD 615: 705I mean, you might get it running, but I’m skeptical that you’d have a good experience with it.
EDIT2:
Their “recommended” card is a GeForce GTX 970. Adding that:
GeForce GTX 970: 9634
EDIT3: Hmm. I’ve never really thought about it, but you’d think that Valve could get minimum requirements plonked into a database, and then have the Steam client, which can see your hardware – assuming that you’re shopping from the Steam client – warn you on the game page if your system doesn’t meet them.
That’s a broad brush to paint with. Pretty sure that there are people out there entering the workforce who know what an edge case is.
6·22 hours agoFlorida man strikes again.
Also…why is the Miami Beach squad car painted in rainbow colors? That can’t be their regular logo.
kagis
Ah. Apparently this is an ongoing thing in Miami Beach PD of which I had been unaware.
2019:
https://beantowncubanito.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-rainbow-police-car.html
The rainbow police car
Miami Beach also has a patrol car with “POLICE” decorated in rainbow hues. The Ford Crown Victoria is used at community events such as the annual Miami Beach Pride festivities on Ocean Drive… (Photo below from Miami Beach PD)
2022:
Miami Beach Police Criticized for Pride-Themed Squad Car
Miami Beach Police Department’s rainbow-colored car sparks criticism from both homophobes and the LGBTQ community.2023:
Miami ‘Pride’ police cruiser mocked after going viral on Twitter: 'Society is unsalvageable’
The Miami Police Department confirmed that the rainbow covered SUV is a working law enforcement vehicle
2024:
https://www.newsflare.com/video/651713/miami-pd-joins-pride-trend-with-rainbow-coloured-car
Miami PD joins Pride trend with rainbow coloured car
Officers from the Miami Police Department joined the Pride trend with a rainbow-coloured car.
Footage shows the cops with the event-goers doing a countdown to reveal the patrol car that was repainted for the day on June 4.
It sounds like it mostly has media on the right upset.
I have no idea why The Guardian is using the image, but maybe they just searched for “miami police” to get a stock filler image and slapped the first thing that came up into their article.
the constitution being violated on the federal level
What ways do you feel that the Consitution is being violated on the federal level that the courts have disregarded?
There is almost a zero chance Trump will run in 2028. He is old and that would be his third term.
Prior to FDR, there was a convention – but no legal restriction – that Presidents would only serve two terms. This stemmed from some statement that Washington made – he was getting really old, not far from dying and didn’t really want to be President in the first place, but got repeatedly argued into it, as he was one figure that had widespread support across the country.
FDR broke that convention, served three-and-some terms and died in office.
After that, Republicans passed the Twenty-second Amendment prohibiting Presidents from serving more than two terms.
Today, you can only do two full terms. If you succeed an existing president – like, you’re Vice President and the President dies in office, you can do part of that, can’t recall what portion is permissible. So Trump is out after this term.
pokes around
Yeah, can be any partial amount of their term, isn’t like “over 50% of their term” counts as a term.
2·1 day agoand uses btrfs send/receive to create backups.
I’m not familiar with that, but if it permits for faster identification of modified data since a given time than scanning a filesystem for modified files, which a filesystem could potentially do, that could also be a useful backup enabler, since now your scan-for-changes time doesn’t need to be linear in the number of files in the filesystem. If you don’t do that, your next best bet on Linux – and this way would be filesystem-agnostic – is gonna require something like having a daemon that runs and uses inotify to build some kind of on-disk index of modifications since the last backup, and a backup system that can understand that.
looks at btrfs-send(1) man page
Ah, yeah, it does do that. Well, the man page doesn’t say what time it runs in, but I assume that it’s better than linear in file count on the filesystem.
You’re correct and probably the person you’re responding to is treating one as an alternative as another.
However, theoretically filesystem snapshotting can be used to enable backups, because they permit for an instantaneous, consistent view of a filesystem. I don’t know if there are backup systems that do this with btrfs today, but this would involve taking a snapshot and then having the backup system backing up the snapshot rather than the live view of the filesystem.
Otherwise, stuff like drive images and database files that are being written to while being backed up can just have a corrupted, inconsistent file in the backup.
I bet some of 'em live in the 2.4 GHz range to use unregulated spectrum.
https://d-fendsolutions.com/blog/issues-with-jamming-drone-frequencies/
Commercial drones operate on four frequency bands: 2.4GHz, 5.8GHz, 433MHz and 915MHz.
You probably have something like a 2000 watt 2.4 GHz cavity magnetron transmitter. It’s just normally got shielding around it – your microwave oven.
Dunno if they hit a wide enough spectrum to blot out drones, though.
kagis
https://www.uavjammer123.com/introduction-to-drone-frequency-bands/
- 2.4 GHz ISM Band
Frequency Range: 2.400 – 2.4835 GHz
Usage: This band is widely used for remote control and data transmission, including consumer drones.
https://www.sfu.ca/phys/346/121/resources/physics_of_microwave_ovens.pdf
The magnetrons in domestic microwave ovens emit microwaves at 2.45 GHz (repeatable, each time the magnetron is switched on, to ±10 MHz) with bandwidths of only a few MHz [6]
So, looks like not, if the frequency range is ~83 MHz wide and the magnetron in use only has bandwidth of a few MHz.
2·2 days agoI’d add that if I had to make a guess, he was apparently involved with creating spring-making machines, forming wire, and that seems like a good guess as to the relevant job he was at. I don’t know how those spring coils are made, but I wonder if they involve jamming wire down a hole about that size.
hits Google Images
They do have some components on them that look similar to what you’ve got there:
https://www.google.com/search?q=spring+making+machine&tbs=imgo%3A1&udm=2
Like:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=yYTgiAMSTNA
Or:
https://www.instructables.com/Spring-Making-Wire-Bending-Machine/?amp_page=true
There’s an “Ed Champ” here that sounds like he’s done part fabrication. Maybe try asking him? He’d probably get a kick out of it if he’s Eddie.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ed-champ-202022154
Automation Engineer
Hobart Brothers LLC
Oct 2023 - Present 1 yr 5 mos
Troy, Ohio, United States

Systems Integration Director
Navus, Inc.
Aug 2015 - Oct 2023 8 yrs 3 mos

Staff Engineer
Myers Spring Co., Inc
Jan 2014 - Aug 2015 1 yr 8 mos
- Designed, developed and programmed automated wire-forming equipment
- Engineered spring grinding and wire-form tooling
- Developed proficiency and trained operators on state-of-the-art spring end grinding equipment
- Updated plant-wide manually controlled processes to improve equipment power efficiency and create automated control solutions

Automation Engineer
A. Raymond Tinnerman Manufacturing, Inc.
Apr 1999 - Jan 2014 14 yrs 10 mos
- Engineered electrical control systems for automated assembly equipment and process control
- Developed PLC and HMI applications using Rockwell Automation products
- Integrated machine vision inspection systems for high-speed sorting equipment
- Installed and programmed Fanuc 6-axis robotic welders and Epson SCARA robots
- Developed electrical schematics with AutoCAD
- Updated machinery to improve overall equipment efficiency and operator safety

Electrician
Whallon Machinery, Inc.
Apr 1996 - Apr 1999 3 yrs 1 mo
- Fabricated electrical control panels for automated material handling systems
- Installed conduit and wired systems per customer’s specifications
- Engaged in initial machine start-up and testing

Engineering Technician
Indiana Department of Transportation
Dec 1992 - Aug 1996 3 yrs 9 mos
- Operated and maintained mobile highway surface deflection testing equipment
- Analyzed test data and reported to engineering department
- Worked independently and coordinated support personnel
Education

Purdue University
Bachelor of Science - BS Aviation Technology
1987 - 1992
It doesn’t appear to be set
Ah, okay. Bit of a long shot.
and additionally I don’t appear to have the libgl1-mesa-swx11 package mentioned in that post.
You shouldn’t need it – that’s for software rendering.
You might want libgl1-mesa-glx, but it sounds from that page like that was restructured prior to your distro release.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1517352/issues-installing-libgl1-mesa-glx
ibgl1-mesa-glx has been a transitional package for a while and is now obsolete from Ubuntu 23.10 and onwards.
Installing libgl1 and libglx-mesa0 instead of libgl1-mesa-glx will result in equivalent behaviour and should work on Ubuntu 18.04 and newer.
Both libgl1:amd64 and libglx-mesa-0:amd64 are installed on my system. Are they installed on yours? If not, if they are available in your apt repo, maybe do so and see if your problems disappear?
[continued from parent]
And the article makes the same prediction that I made above, that if the Trump administration truly wants to restrict international trade on a serious and continued basis, rather than conduct political theater to score domestic points, that’s going to make life a lot harder for competing with China:
Under these conditions, the U.S. will need to accelerate domestic and allied mining efforts while tightening enforcement on chip exports through global cooperation. This will be a challenging task given mounting international resistance to the Trump administration’s potential trade policies
As the United States and China careen toward intensified economic decoupling and geopolitical rivalry, trends in the semiconductor and minerals sectors will define their strategic competition. Both great powers aim to consolidate competitive advantages by hampering the other’s technological development and hammering their trading partners. Both are doing so using increasingly damaging measures—but from opposite ends of tech supply chains. The American position remains strongest in advanced technologies, an edge that the Joe Biden administration sought to preserve and extend through an unprecedented series of export controls. China, meanwhile, is just beginning to implement a parallel export control regime that leverages its dominant market share in critical minerals as well as niche but strategic industries.
Recent tit-for-tat actions mark a troubling new level of severity in this escalating struggle for technological advantage. On December 3, 2024, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) imposed its first outright ban on the export of certain “dual-use” critical minerals to the United States. This export control went into force for germanium, gallium, superhard minerals like synthetic diamonds, and imposed additional licensing restrictions on graphite exports. In adopting this ambitious new measure, China was retaliating against U.S. semiconductor chip and manufacturing equipment export controls unveiled only the day prior. On February 4, 2025, in response to new U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods, MOFCOM announced restrictions on additional minerals including tungsten, tellurium, bismuth, indium, and products that include molybdenum. In initiating these outright bans, Beijing has aimed to mirror U.S. long-arm jurisdiction by, likewise, seeking to enforce its export controls extraterritorially in third countries, which could re-export the restricted goods to America.
Juxtaposing “chips” and “rocks” reveals a basic asymmetry between each party’s points of strategic leverage. Beijing is building a dam upstream, threatening to choke off the flow of raw materials and intermediate goods required to produce certain advanced technologies—including semiconductor chips, high-capacity batteries, and a range of defense and aerospace products. Washington’s fortress is further downstream and depends heavily on guarding the intellectual property of American and allied firms employing the technical capabilities of a network of allies and industrial partners. This position has enabled U.S. government efforts to restrict Chinese entities’ access to the latest semiconductors and delay, but not halt, their development of cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.
My understanding from past reading is that China’s strength mostly isn’t in access to raw materials, but rather in processing of those raw materials. That is, China is not especially unique in terms of what’s in the ground, but rather in that it has large-scale industry to refine those materials, so withholding access to these processed materials permits for leverage. My guess based on past reading as to why processing has gone to China and without looking into individually-processed substances, is that their advantages lie in (1) low labor costs, (2) restricted environmental regulations, and perhaps (3) scale of domestic market and possibly (4) government subsidies.
The first item, high labor costs, is inevitably going to be a US weak point, but we can find a poor-but-friendly country to trade with, probably one poorer than China is in 2025. It’s also possible to possibly partly make use of automation to partially mitigate that; I doubt that this will wholly offset this, though, or manufacturers would have done so.
The second item, restricted environmental regulations, are also probably going to be hard. Maybe some US ones are going to be unnecessary, could be removed, but there are also probably going to be countries that would rather have the economic activity than reduced pollution, so, again, trade is an answer.
The third item, scale of domestic market, is going to be hard to overcome in the longer term. China has a population over four times larger than the US, and even around 2100, after which point the US is projected to have grown and China will have dropped in size, is expected to be about double. China will tend to develop, converge on a per-capita wealth basis with the US. That’s probably going to involve international trade, and not just with one or two countries.
The fourth item, government subsidies, are doable if the US wants to do it, though doing so will weaken other industries. Probably somewhat-easier for the US than China; the US has a larger GDP in 2025.
It’s also important to note that one critical US advantage regarding chip manufacture is in extreme ultraviolet lithography. I understand that this is not something that the US commercialized or presently control, but rather the Dutch, in the form of ASML – the US government paid to develop the basic technology and a prototype, but the Dutch then finished the work to bring it to market. Something that the Trump administration might keep in mind insofar as it is concerned principally with competition with China and not so much with things that Europe cares about, like Russia; actively antagonizing the Netherlands probably isn’t a good idea.
Rare earth elements (REE) have been a focal point in China’s evolving critical minerals policy. As early as 1992, China’s paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, declared, “the Middle East has oil; China has rare earths.
The US has very little active production, last I looked, but does have inactive production, and Congress was looking at subsidies to remedy that fact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Pass_Rare_Earth_Mine
As of 2022, work is ongoing to restore processing capabilities for domestic light rare-earth elements (LREEs) and work has been funded by the United States Department of Defense to restore processing capabilities for heavy rare-earth metals (HREEs) to alleviate supply chain risk. [4]
I also seem to vaguely recall that Canada and Australia have rare earth reserves…they just haven’t done extraction, as it hasn’t made financial sense.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/canadas-rare-earth-rush-frontier-200000822.html
As Canada rapidly develops its LNG production and export capabilities and expands its oil industry, the North American country may also be looking to boost its reputation as a rare earth elements producer. Canada has produced rare earth elements (REE) for several decades and is thought to have extensive untapped reserves. It has supported other countries in the development of their REE industries and is now looking to expand its domestic mining activities to help achieve net-zero goals and develop a regional supply chain.
Canada’s 2024 Critical Mineral Strategy Annual Report outlines plans to mine for over 30 critical minerals, with a focus on lithium, graphite, nickel, cobalt, copper, and REE. The U.S. government has repeatedly stated concerns about the growing dependence on China for critical minerals and REE, as well as other energy sources and products, as it looks to develop more regional supply chains. The expansion of Canada’s mining industry could help it provide a stable domestic supply of REE as well as support the development of a North American supply chain. James Edmondson, the research director at IDTechEx, said “It is believed Canada has very large quantities of these materials, even if they have not yet begun processing them in significant quantities.”
That’s maybe a short-term issue, but probably not long-term.
Graphite, essential for lithium-ion batteries, represents a critical vulnerability for the United States, which is in the midst of a $70 billion domestic manufacturing boom in the battery sector
Graphite’s just carbon; basically, very high grade coal. Surely it’s manufactured via refinement of readily-available stuff like coal? The US has, IIRC, something like 40% of known global reserves of anthracite (the next grade down below graphite) within its borders, which is considerably ahead of China, not to mention substantial lower-grade stuff. Also, unless one needs enormous amounts, which I assume is not the case for lithium-ion batteries, any fossil fuel power plant, including crude oil or natural gas, is also going to have as an input something containing carbon, and given energy, that can be reduced to carbon. I cannot imagine that this represents any kind of a long-term constraint for the US.
kagis
This sounds like graphite is indeed obtained by processing coke.
And that is derived from coal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coke_(fuel)
Coke is a grey, hard, and porous coal-based fuel with a high carbon content. It is made by heating coal or petroleum in the absence of air.
Ah, yeah, they mention the Netherlands:
For China, U.S. export controls on advanced semiconductors and chip-making equipment have created a chokepoint for China’s technological ambitions—but with notable examples of innovative workarounds beginning to materialize. These restrictions, reinforced by alliances with Japan, the Netherlands, and South Korea, have sought to block access to key tools like extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines, which are required to produce high-performance graphic processing units (GPUs), leaving Chinese firms struggling to compete at advanced nodes.
[continued in child]
How do I even know if I’m using plasma?
It’s part of KDE, if you’re using that. The default in Fedora is GNOME, but you may have selected KDE when installing Fedora.
I don’t, myself, use KDE, so I’m afraid that I can’t describe what it looks like.
how do I apply that flag?
It looks like the convention is for the display manager to source /etc/profile and files in /etc/profile.d prior to starting the desktop environment.
So, as root, create a text file called something like /etc/profile.d/plasma-triplebuffer-fix.sh that contains:
export KWIN_DRM_DISABLE_TRIPLE_BUFFERING=1Then log out and log in again. If it’s worked correctly, then that environment variable will set set in all programs after you’ve logged in: if you run, in a shell,
set|grep KWIN_DRMand it should show that value set.If it doesn’t fix the problem, then just go ahead and delete the file.
EDIT: If you are using Plasma, I’d check the version first, because they say that they’re gonna have a workaround in 6.1.3.
The situation here is that the government is imposing a tax and that it’s getting passed on to consumers. I’m not sure why you’re complaining about “capitalism”. If Acer were part of the government, they’d be charging more too.
You can’t impose a tax and then just have the revenue materialize out of thin air.
But otherwise Acer couldn’t have raised their prices!
Acer can set their prices wherever they feel like. They can double them tomorrow, regardless of whether tariffs show up. What limits their prices is competition, and the fact that consumers will buy from competitors if they do so, not a lack of some event to act as an “excuse to raise prices”.