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So, obviously not a real owl, but germane.

This was taken in Paris, in one of the side streets around Sacre Coeur, in 2010. It is a decoration set into a wall; the alcove was probably around 30cm high, so the owl figurine is small. I have no idea how long it'd been there, or why it was there; there was no plaque or other marking, and no other decorations on the wall.

I do recall that I took it from across the street and without telephoto, so this is massively cropped and this is the best resolution I have. The paint was more white and it was a brilliantly sunny day; I made it more warm in post-processing.

Sadly, this was before digital cameras came with GPS to stamp locations; I'm not sure if I could find this anymore.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/55039423

Despite the click-bait tite, I am thinking about a couple of factors. First, the context I'm considering is specifically about inviting well-known/published authors to an AMA. I'm posting this question here, because most authors write in one or maybe two genres, and the authors I'd like to see answer AMAs are fantasy and sci-fi authors. I haven't yet come across any "big name" AMAs in any community yet, but I'm impatient.

1. Reach: the largest subscriber size I see is !books@lemmy.world. The issue there is that the topic is rather broad, but to make an AMA worthwhile for the author, I'd think the larger the audience the better.
2. Moderation. Doing an AMA well is significant work. There's advertisement to reach people who may not be subscribed but who may be interested; there's reaching out to the author and coordinating the details; and then there's moderation to prevent it from being overrun by trolls.
3. Interest. I haven't been on Reddit in a couple of years now, but something thing I miss is AMAs from authors I'm reading. Some, like Scalzi, had a Reddit account and both did AMAs and also responded directly to random posts aimed at him. I'm aware that it's possible I'm in a minority and the Lemmy community at large isn't interested in AMAs, and while I doubt that, it's still something that'd need to be cleared with whichever community hosted the AMA
4. Adjacently, I wonder how many authors lurk on Lemmy, and how would one find out? Is there a channel where authors could express willingness?

I feel a hole here, and I'm not going to fill it with Reddit. It's an area where I think a federated platform like Lemmy may be at a disadvantage to a platform like Reddit: with Reddit, it's pretty clear who might host any given AMA, and Lemmy's decentralized -- and often redundant -- communities complicate matters.

I've been on a Miles Cameron binge lately, and have a couple of questions I'd like to ask him; I could write him through his publisher, but I find AMAs to be much more interesting.

Is Lemmy ready for AMAs?

I normally go for odroid for these sorts of things but have had a bad run recently.

What I want is a bare minimum computer I can hook to some externally powered speakers and run snapclient on. That's it; nothing else will run on it. It's part of a project to get audio casted into every room.

Arch, because I'm most comfortable with Arch; I don't have to learn any new peculiarities; Alpine would also work. deb and rpm-based distros aren't options.

It needs WiFi, or the ability to take a module. And of course an RCA out jack for the audio plug.

Cheap would be nice.

I have no experience with Pis, but there's a bewildering variety of them with varying capability; many don't come with WiFi, and some not even with audio out. It's frankly hard to tell what's the minimum Pi I can get away with for my use case, and what components I need to add on. I don't want to have to become a Pi expert just to get one device for this.

IME getting Arch running on odroid is a bit of work, and Mint or whatever they sell on the micro SD cards may be the worst distro I've had to deal with in recent years.

I'd love to try a RISCV board, but I feel like that's just asking for a whole different level of protracted tinkering to get what I want.

Basically, if I could get a plug-and-play Arch SBC with WiFi and audio out, even if I had to boot it first on ethernet the first time to set it up, for a good price, that'd be ideal.

What are good options here? So many Pis are for tinkering or as project components. Odroid seems like they're only half-heartedly doing business. RISCV is bleeding edge and still sounds fussy and iffy except for very specific problem domains. Micro PCs like Trigkey or Beelink are full desktop replacements and are both overkill for my use, and too expensive.

What do y'all advise?

I do my keyboard configuration with Vial, which may or may not be relevant.

I am unable to momentarily switch layers from a particular layer, and I'm looking for tips.

I have a base Dvorak layer, with all of my layer switches as tap-dance keys under my left hand, with holds triggering a momentary layer switch and all of the other keys under my right hand: a layer for punctuation, a layer for numbers, a layer for function keys, for WM navigation, for tmux navigation... 9 layers in total. It all works well.

Recently, I started playing Factorio again, so I set up a combo switch to the 9th layer, which is bog-standard QWERTY, it being easier to just learn new muscle memory than to reconfigure all 9,000 Factorio key bindings for Dvorak. But now entering numbers was a PITA because my keyboard has no number keys, so I have to switch back to the base layer to use the MO binding to switch to my number layer.

Eventually, I decided this was too much trouble, so I created a tap-dance MO binding for the same physical key in the QWERTY layer... but it doesn't work, in that the layer is not switched to the number layer - except for "0": that combination works. The fact that one key works makes me think it is actually sorta switching layers? But all of the other keys just enter the un-switched QWERTY keys.

I've tried setting the trigger key to a different one, with identical results. All of the keys on the left hand (and under the trigger key) are KC_TRNS on the number layer, so in both cases I've tried the trigger key is KC_TRNS on the number layer. I have not yet tried duplicating the number layer and using that instead.

Does the target layer (the number layer) have to be a layer number greater than the starting layer? Number layer is layer 4, and QWERTY is 9 - do I need to move 4 to 10? Is there some other, common, issue I'm encountering?

On linux, this is trivial. I have my private subnet over Wireguard and hosts with static IPs all on the 10.79.x.y subnet. All other traffic goes through my commercial VPN provider.

Problem is, ya cain't do that on Android, as it supports exactly one VPN connection at a time. The best you can do is white/blacklist traffic to either go through the VPN, or not.

Do how do I achieve this? My commercial VPN provider will not nest and route on their end; I could route all traffic through my VPS servers, but that's a lot of traffic for my little VMs. It may, however, be my only option:

1. Phone is connected to my VPS over WG VPN
2. VPS is connected to internet via commercial WG VPN
3. Routing tables on VPS send 10.79.x.y to destinations over the private VPS
4. Public destinations get sent over commercial VPS

Am I missing an easier, more efficient work-around for Android's utterly stupid networking limitations?

Like, not technically how, but emotionally? If I spend too much time messing around on a platform, critters inevitably attack my base. Even if I build a fortress, I worry that something will run out and guns will run out of ammo... or that something will run out and The Factory will grind to a halt. I could just stack up a vast area of capacitors and rely on lasers and a fission reactor, but is this really what you guys are doing?

How do you emotionally detach from Nauvis and commit to not being able to troubleshoot on the home factory? Heck, once I establish factories on other planets, how do I leave them to return to Nauvis and not worry that they'll be overrun??

When Space Age was released I restarted, solo, with a new base, and I'm getting close to building a traveling platform; how do I ensure the security of Nauvis before I depart?

(My first, and as yet only, station attached for giggles)

I was thinking about this before the Tholian wave, but it's apropos.

It unscientifically appears to me that TOS had a far higher incidence on non-humanoid aliens than later series. Tholiens, Horta, the flying neural parasites on Deneva; while there were many bipedal aliens sometimes differing only by skins color, many were non-bipeds or were bipedal but radically different from humans, like the Gorn and the salt vampire. In later series, it seems nearly all aliens were reduced to bumpy head species.

TOS ran for only three seasons, and truly different aliens are expensive; I understand the economics of going the prosthetic forehead route. And it's difficult to have recurring truly alien biology in a series.

My question is whether anyone's done a statistical analysis covering the originality of aliens, per series, based on divergence from the humanoid base. Does it only seem like TOS had more different types of aliens (intelligent and non) because it was so short, or was the universe really more diverse in TOS?

Rook provides a secret service a-la secret-tool, keyring, or pass/gopass, except backed by a Keepass kdbx file.

The problem Rook solves is mainly in script automation, where you have aerc, offlineimap, isync, vdirsyncer, msmtp, restic, or any other cron jobs that need passwords and which are often configured to fetch these passwords from a secret service with a CLI tool. Unlike existing solutions, Rook is headless, and does not have a bespoke secrets database full of passwords that must be manually synchronized with Keepass; instead, it uses a Keepass db directly.

Rook is in the AUR and in Alpine testing; binaries are available from the project page.

From the changelog, since the last Lemmy release announcement v0.1.3 on May 20:

[v0.2.0] Fri Oct 11 09:01:03 2024 -0500

Added

• support for password + key file credentials
• show --no-eol option, to strip CRs after, eg, passwords

Changed

• show matches search: it's now case insensitive

Fixed

• successful OPEN with password wasn't clearing the one-time pin, so the DB was staying locked.

stmps is a fork of stmp, under active development and with several additional features. (*) items are PRs which also been accepted by the stmp project.

• mpris support (*)
• improved help text
• improved playlist handling, including concurrent loading in the background
• improved browser behavior, e.g. add all songs by an artist
• global, server-side search
• artist search in the browser (*)
• TUI-less server information query
• queue reordering
• queue shuffling
• randomly add songs to the queue
• randomly add similar songs to the queue, using the Subsonic "get similar songs" feature

It's fast, keyboard driven, and a single executable; it is regularly tested against Navidrome and Gonic.

stmps can be installed by a simple go install command, and it's also in AUR as stmps.

I'm not the author, but am one of the active contributors.

The reactions to most posts are overwhelmingly negative and critical. Ironically, posts to c/unpopularopinion tend to argue that they agree with the post, and are consequently more supportive.