Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 20

I finally tried Stellaris after buying it who knows how long ago. Probably around the same time I bought No Man’s Sky, only I tried that first and stuck with it.

It’s an empire-building game. Not a type I tend to play much - in fact my main experience with this type of game is the Heroes of Might and Magic series (the map parts, not the battle parts). Though I played a lot of Heroes 3 back in the day.

And just like with Heroes, you start out exploring, gathering resources, establishing towns colonies…and then in phase 2, other factions start invading and you frantically try to fend them off while building up troops fleets on the opposite side of where you expected the attack to come from.

Unlike Heroes, in Stellaris you can also engage in diplomacy, espionage and alliances with the other factions, and so forth. It’s a much more complicated game.

Still, I stayed up waaaaaay too late last night trying to fend off an invasion when I should’ve just hit “save” and picked it up again later.

I wanted to like this keyboard. The other Fossify apps have worked out well, and unlike, say, GBoard, I know nothing’s leaving my device. And it does support multiple languages, which helps when I’m practicing Spanish in Duolingo. But it only supports tapping, not swipe gestures or auto suggest, and I just can’t seem to type reliably that way.

The problem is that I have a lot of trouble tapping the right letters with my thumbs. (I swear this has gotten worse over time – I’d assume my hands had just gotten clumsier, but I’ve gotten better at touch typing on a real keyboard in the same timeframe.) That’s been mildly annoying with GBoard, but GBoard also supports swiping gestures, and autosuggest usually includes the word I wanted if I’m a little bit off. And I think the hit boxes might be a bit bigger, or adjust based on what autocomplete thinks is more likely.

So with Fossify Keyboard, I frequently end up with severalbwordsblumpedntogethrt because I keep hitting “b” or “n” instead of space, and then I have to go back and fix it (which of course is a pain on a touchscreen).

I gave it about three weeks on my phone, during which I used it for all the usual text messaging, social networking, email, and so on. I’ve since switched back to GBoard.

It seems to work better for me with a tablet, though, where I can sort of touch type or hunt and peck. I’ll keep it on there for a while and see how it holds up.

Good coffee, pastries and sandwiches, maybe a bit expensive. They also sell artisan honey and beeswax products. Lots of tables inside, and a large patio with covered tables outside. Free WiFi and a couple of outlets in the dining area. Small parking lot plus street parking. Restroom door is outside.

Is it better than stopping by the bank every other week for more rolls of quarters? Maaaaaybe. It was during the 2020 covid-lockdown coin shortage, but now?

It means doing my laundry depends not just on the washer and dryer working, but on the control box working, the control box’s internet connection working, my phone being charged, my phone’s internet connection working, and the CSC online servers working.

I can’t remember the last time the washer or dryer broke down. But there’ve been plenty of times when the app couldn’t find them, or couldn’t find my account.

On the plus side, it is nice to be able to check whether a machine is available before going to the laundry room. And sometimes it alerts me when a cycle is done. (It’s supposed to always, but it doesn’t.)

But that’s a lot of extra points of failure for not much improvement.

Update August 2024: They’ve started sending me ads through system push notifications, which I consider an abuse of notifications. So I’ve turned off notifications from the app entirely and lowered my rating. The only alerts a laundry app should be sending you are “your cycle finished” or “the machine you were waiting for is available.” And that never worked reliably to begin with.

An extremely lightweight Linux distribution that still packs a lot of modern capabilities into it, including smooth package installation, removal and updates. I use it for small (1GB RAM) cloud servers because of its low resource requirements and smaller attack profile on installation. It would also be a good choice for old hardware or low-powered physical machines like a Raspberry Pi or a Pine Star64: it supports ARM (both 32-bit and aarch64) and RISC-V, and still supports older architectures like PowerPC and 32-bit x86 in addition to the more common x86_64.

Desktop environments work smoothly, though it does take a little effort to set one up.

The main things that have tripped me up:

• Remembering which set of commands I need to manage daemons. (openrc vs. system vs. systemctl vs…)*
• Remembering that apk uses add instead of install.
• Occasional compatibility issues when building (or trying to run precompiled) third-party software that doesn’t work well with musl.

On the last one, the two that stick in my mind are a bug where super-long threads crashed Snac on musl systems (the dev ended up adding a configurable limit to how far back it would try to fetch) and being unable to run Servo on a desktop VM I’ve been using for testing.