kbal

What is going on with loops.video? Once in a while I follow a link to there and it plays the video no problem, on a nice minimalist web page with no distractions... and then I wonder what other videos might exist and there seems to be no way to find out. It just plays that one it started with, looping forever. What am I missing?

As expected, the long-awaited ntsync has made its way into kernel 6.14.

ntsync "driver" to handle Windows locking types enabling Wine to work much better on many workloads (i.e. games). The driver framework was in 6.13, but now it's enabled and fully working properly. Should make many SteamOS users happy. Even comes with tests!

If 2024 was the year of "age verification" let's build on this success and make 2025 the year of height verification. We must develop a consensus about where to draw the line, so that we can finally say "you must be at least this tall to use social media."

If modded Skyrim isn't the best game you ever played, you just need to add more mods. Sometimes they combine in ways that are better than expected. Today's discoveries:

1. Walking around at a somewhat normal pace in the game most of the time thanks to "Controller Walk Run Toggle" (speed configured with Autorun) means travel takes long enough that even the relatively mild effect of cold that's the default in Sunhelm becomes significant. It's not seemingly instant like some versions of survival mode, more like you've actually been outside for enough time that it makes sense you'd be feeling the cold.

My Skyrim time scale is set so there's still enough time to travel pretty far in a day but at one point it was getting dark and I had to think for a moment about how to stay warm that night. Just then the lights at the inn came into view. It felt a lot like it does irl when you're walking in the woods, it's a little longer than expected to get home, and it's getting dark. Peak hiking simulator. Combined with dense forests and combat that's deadly and quick, it feels pretty good.

2. With the dodge mod I'm using, going into sprint mode by holding the button for a moment toggles from walk to run, as it should. Exiting the sprint by doing a dodge roll doesn't toggle it back, so you're left doing the default Skyrim jogging. But then another dodge roll (if you're out of combat and no weapons drawn) does go back to a walk for some reason. So after a little practice to get used to the sequence you can just use that one button to toggle it, leaving the d-pad button free for other uses.

Holiday Skyrim binge initiated.

It's going to be a long time before I level up enough to start Dac0da. Best of the newly added mods to make a difference in the early game so far:

Passive Mudcrabs Controller Walk Run Toggle Cast Spells As Lesser Powers

Revel in the joy of our grand tax holiday! There will be no sales tax on thousands of items, to boost your solstice spending power! Video games, so long as you don't buy them the normal way. Some beverages, depending on size and ingredients. Pencil crayons, if they're bought as part of a package that contains blue ones. What spectacular benevolence!

NPCs keep the outfit even after uninstalling SPID or mods that distributed those outfits.

Oh damn, THAT was the problem with SPID 7.2RC1? I'm okay with that. I'm not one to uninstall things and not expect problems. According to tonight's test results that's the version that successfully distributes outfits that get equipped (unlike the previous version) and doesn't crash (unlike the newer RC builds.) It's no longer available on nexus but you can find it on github.

If you routinely start #steam in offline mode and it suddenly stopped working in the past few days (first time I ever saw such a thing), you may be able to fix it by temporarily taking it out of offline mode as described on github.

https://github.com/Abev08/VolumeControlExtension

That's two longstanding items on my firefox wishlist taken care of by an extension: Actual working volume controls on the built-in media player, and a volume control for other crappy web players that don't have them.

#firefox

Act 1: It started with some fun little quests to introduce you to the narrative style. The fights were too hard, so I improved my character stats until I could handle them. It's not easy to know when there's no choice but to go along with whatever is suggested, and when you can do something else, but I guess I got it more or less right.

Act 2: A nice meaty dungeon crawl. My efforts to make my character stronger paid off, the difficulty was just right.

Act 3: Holy shit it's too hard suddenly. One does not level up quickly in my version of Skyrim, maybe that's why. At one point there's an option that suggests you can skip the whole thing, but I didn't take it and would guess it probably isn't so easy. I had to resort to stealth archery and I didn't bring a lot of arrows. Some horror game stuff of a kind I don't normally enjoy, but it was well-executed. It was a pretty long slog.

Act 4: Okay we're in Dark Souls now. Except the boss fights are even longer. I had a legendary weapon, shiny superhero armour, lots of magic resistance, a good healing spell, all the equipment a skyrim paladin could want, and yet even some of the non-boss fights took a lot of time and effort. Hit, dodge, run, heal, repeat. Forever. To be fair I do have the difficulty settings turned up pretty high. I wandered around lost for a very long time. Some of the battles were epic. There was only one area I had a really hard time with: There doesn't seem to be any resisting the tentacle attacks so they were pretty much instant death.

The ending was quite good and made it all seem worthwhile.

Well here's a linux modding tip: Turn off ESYNC and FSYNC when running DynDOLOD. If it randomly goes wrong in the middle of its hour-long run, that could be the problem.

First time since March 2023!