I left the pc gaming scene about 20 years ago and only came bacj this year. I found my steam credentials from when they were initially seeking players and revived my account (I closed my email on the account back in 2009, so i couldn’t recover).

I’ve mostly been playing vSkyrim, BG 3, and a few emulated Zelda games. I finally ordered a new gaming laptop because Cyberpunk 2077 is hard to rrad on the Deck, even on a 50" tv on hi-res.

All that is just so you all know where I’m coming from, i am both a newb and a veteran!

From a business standpoint, looking ant it form the non-gaming financial point of view, the move to online-only makes very compelling sense.

It fully implements the licensing model, gives them total control over the property, enables them to generate reports that accurately identify trndsvin user populations, pinpoint steady revenue figures, and they can kill the game as soon as it isn’t valuable to them anymore, and they don’t have to worry about losing revenue from sharing, passing the copy to an otherwise paying customer for free, or a significant pirtiin of piracy loss.

Itvis the end state of the “we are mearly licensing it to you until such time as we decide ee want it back” model.

It sucks, and if i can know it is online only before buying, i will pass. All of us should. Revenue is king to them, and if they lose even a little, they will try something else.

Well said… Two weeks before the equivalent i posted moments ago.

I’ll elaborate for him/her: mesh devices sold by untrusted companies with a profit model will almost surely be collecting your data.

The problem is not “mesh”, it is the companies using a new, cool, buzzword to sell their spyware that is the problem.

They are basically enhanced repeaters that don’t require a seperate network access point.

If you get a device that is primarily marketed as basic hardware, like the Asus router, you are more likely to avoid the collection. Bonus points if you can flash FOSS software to it, also like Asus, so yiu know it is clean. Regardless, use a VPN for external communications.

My home is small enough that mesh is unnecessary, but I’d buy another Asus device for mesh if it were necessary.

Well, i haven’t neen much of a gamer for years (got too adicted to WoW), but just started again this year. I am amazed by Skyrim, and am now modding it up.

I also just got Cyberpunk 2077, and will get into it soon.

It’s configured to run at the native resolution of the device, and looks good, but I’m not sure it is really at 4k.

Skyrim performs flawlessly, but Baldur’s Gate gets sbout 15 fps at this rez, so I have to lower the graphics setting. I’m nesr endgame, so there is a lot of city animation.

I can’t speak on multiplayer experiences, but i have several emulators set up on my OLED deck. GameCube, N64, switch, ps2. They work well, and i have a 3DO pro2 i use while it’s docked to my 4k tv, sound through a surround sound bar with woofer - amazing sound. I mostly run skyrim and Balder’s Gate 3 at the moment, but i enjoyed BotW and my son likes sonic.

I’m late to the comment board, but I had to say something. I was amazed when one day my broken Balders’ Gate III P22 install suddenly not only worked, but worked with Vulkan. Until now, I figured it was an improvement to the Proton-GE or Experimental that came down around that time. Anyway, when I loaded my game (in the underdark) on my OLED, I was shocked at the improvement.

Not only was the framerate closer to 40+ vs 28-30, but it was vibrant. The resolution appeared to be better, too. It was gratifying to see it looked better than on my ancient Lenovo gaming laptop (circa 2016), which, to my surprise, handled it quite well considering the age of the NVidia card.

I don’t know, but there might be pdf viewers that permit editing layers. Try LibreOffice Draw or gscan2pdf. Maybe The Gimp can do it.

No, you aren’t. You just haven’t been conditioned your whole life to accept 100% surveillance.

Only if it earns a profit.

That is a trust based transaction when parent asks where their child is going as well.

Putting tracking malware and using surveillance all the time is invasion of privacy, teaching the child that surveillance is okay, and completely lacking a trust relationship, which is bad within a family.

Anti-trust lawsuit in 3… 2…

*rolls D-100* … I disbelieve!

I don’t know how well it scales, but I find Metro to be rather good. Find it of f-droid. I like that it randomizes the playlist rather than gets the list of songs and applies randomization to the play order. It also shows lyrics at a touch, if they’re in the metadata, and apparently recognizes lyric synchronization if it is there.

Find someone in your community who has professional map tech skills. That person can get detailed map data from your municipality and upload it into openstreetmaps, and you will then have the best maps :) if you are so inclined, you can learn yourself from their site.

The reason you can’t find addresses is likely because the data is not added to the maps in your region. I have similar problems here, though my state got much detail from batch updates last year.

I found a resource that merges addresses into osmand maps monthly, for north america and beyond. Even better, it does so in a way that normal address layout for north Americans can be used when searching.

Here in north america, we search by typing “255 maple street, some town 01234”, while osmand expects something like " USA some town street 123".

You can download merged maps from opensupermaps.com, and find almost any address you seek, then you can navigate. Osmand is pretty good with directions, but sometimes messes up. Magic Earth is better at navigation, and has similar features to Waze. OSMAnd has much greater map detail, where people have uploaded it.

I can confirm the experiences of the OP. As for OSMAnd, see my response to the post, which i am writing next.

I use ocrmypdf, after being a bit frustrated with gscan2pdf. There is a simple ui available, but I just created a tiny script that does the ocr , deskew, etc. In one operation with wildcard file selection.

I also installed a jbig compressor that really shrinks images. My processed docs are generally 40% to 80% smaller, and it seems to get better tesseract output than gscan does.

Any DNS based blocker will filter out anything from URLs at the source, so no data is received. I use AdAway with Magisk. Blocklists are updated regularly.

Check out https://lemmy.ml/c/sopranica for full featured XMPP implementations.