dingdongitsabear

prompted by this post in [email protected] I decided to ask you about my predicament.

I live in the attic of a rundown house that's close to 200 years old. looked like shit when I moved in, I've made it livable, I add and fix things here and there when I can, by youtubing stuff and using the tools I have.

recently, a cheap electric kettle caught fire and burned for several minutes, incinerating nearby items and the (plastic) base it was on. the result was a black smoke so dark you couldn't see light from the windows, vantablack type of deal. once I dowsed out the flames (and surely inhaled that crap in major unhealthy doses) it took ages to air the place out.

in the aftermath, every surface was covered with greasy, black residue that you can't just wipe off/vacuum.

I've thrown away most things that were covered with it, cleaned others over the past months. only upside of this mess is, it sticks to the surfaces so it doesn't fall down and/or circulate in the air.

now I'd like to paint the walls. tried cleaning them with anti-grease and sponges and paper towels and stuff; that worked on kitchen cabinets, but it's a no-go here, just makes a mess and dissolves the stuff underneath (lime-based paint with god knows how many layers).

I figured, if I paint the walls and the exposed wood beam with the right type of paint, it'll just cover/trap the whole mess and I'd be done with it. then I'd like to clean/paint the ceiling paneling somehow.

can't afford to move into healthier dwellings and the owner has zero fucks to give about the situation and is fine with whatever I come up with, including leaving it as is; even with the fire damage, the place is in way better shape now than when I moved in.

doable? tips? ideas?

edit: images

edit2: I wish lemmy's UI would state the what the image limits are, it gets tiresome guessing how large is "too large".

so my Fedora installation was upgraded in place from 35 onward, survived three SSD upgrades (all glory to btrfs send | receive), got switched to systemd-boot, then from Gnome to Plasma, so there's some junk hanging about.

one of those is my flatpak setup that's system-wide, as was the style at the time, instead of the current user-level. although everything works, there are enough irritants (like forcing crappy electron apps to use wayland) that the old way is just a chore now. so, here's my brief write-up on how I made the switch.

flatpak --user remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo  
/flathub.flatpakrepo

flatpak list --system --columns=application > system_flatpaks

edit the list by removing various org.kde., org.gtk., org.freedesktop., etc. runtimes and save it as e.g. flatpak_apps. otherwise, the following install and remove processes will ask tons of questions as to versions and nobody got time for that; the unused runtimes will be autoremoved later.

flatpak install --user $(cat flatpak_apps)

after it's done, time to pull the dependencies; no idea why they don't get pulled in the first place, when installing? anyhoo:

flatpak --user upgrade

will pull everything that's needed. thanks to the glory of btrfs deduping, this won't take up any additional space as it's already on the disk. to remove the system apps:

flatpak remove --system $(cat flatpak_apps)

after it's done, the runtimes:

flatpak remove --system --unused

and finally list all the system repos and remove them:

flatpak remotes --system

flatpak remote-del --system {flathub,flathub-beta,fedora-testing}

all app data remains safe and untouched in ~/.var/app, everything works as before and no reboots necessary. from this point forward, it's not neccessary to include the --user switch.

bonus content: if you haven't set up flatpak autoupdate, fix that post-haste.

~/.config/systemd/user/flatpak-autoupdate.service

[Unit]
Description=Update user Flatpaks  
  
[Service]  
Type=oneshot  
ExecStart=/usr/bin/flatpak update --assumeyes --noninteractive  
  
[Install]  
WantedBy=default.target

~/.config/systemd/user/flatpak-autoupdate.timer

[Unit]  
Description=Update user Flatpaks daily  
  
[Timer]  
OnCalendar=daily  
Persistent=true  
  
[Install]  
WantedBy=timers.target

systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl --user enable --now flatpak-autoupdate.timer

hiya!

I got a cheap LED strip with PSU, controller, and IR remote. I didn't look at it too much, figured it would be easy to stick it under my kitchen cabinets.

however, this thing blinks and fades and whatnot and I'm supposed to switch it over to constant light by repeatedly pressing the remote, which a) works shitty and also b) don't wanna do that. I just want to plug it into power and it lights up and that's the end of our interaction.

so, I opened up the PSU/controller and I'd like to locate the spots that give me +12V and GND and I can bypass the whole blinky fadey mess.

it's a single-sided PCB. the top three wires on the right are for the IR receiver, ignore 'em. the bottom 4 are R, G, B, 12 V, respectively. I'm shorting RGB as it's a white-only strip.

can you hazard a guess where I'm most likely to succeed?

not really "build" a PC, more "upgrade" but I guess people here might know relevant stuff.

anyhow, I'd like to upgrade storage and get a 2 TB drive. in the $100-region I have these models available:

• ADATA Legend 710 ALEG-710-2TCS
• ADATA Legend 800 ALEG-800-2000GCS
• Crucial P3 CT2000P3SSD8
• KINGSTON SNV2S/2000G
• KINGSTON SNV3S/2000G
• Lexar LNM620 LNM620X002T-RNNNG
• Seagate BarraCuda Q5 ZP2000CV3A001
• Seagate BarraCuda ZP2000CV3A002

I imagine they're all bottom of the barrel type of deal, no DRAM cache, QLC, etc., but this would be my third drive of such variety (500 GB and 1 TB previous) and I had no issues daily driving 'em, linux with btrfs with HMB support.

so, before I start researching them all one-by-one, does one of these stand out as way better? the target hardware is AMD Ryzen 5 5600 on a B450 board. thanks!

edit: so, I got the data for the models from here and here's an image of the result (can I post tables in markdown?)

just as I though, no DRAM on either of those.

so, I have a couple of Flatpak electron apps that need to be coerced into running under Wayland (Element, Freetube, etc.). they run fine with Xwayland, but I need xlsclients (show Xwayland apps) output to be empty for unrelated reasons. so what I'm doing is:

1. determining where the .desktop file is, by way of right-clicking app in the Application Launcher, Edit Application, etc.
2. reconstructing where the file actually is, as I usually get a symlink
3. copying the file to ~/.local/share/applications/
4. editing the file to add --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform,WebRTCPipeWireCapturer --ozone-platform=wayland or whatever its case may be

that's it, Plasma picks up the change almost instantly.

this seems super-convoluted, is there a better way?

this may be old news to y'all, but I've discovered this freakin' thing: https://downloads.fcmodding.com/fc5/. it's a moding tool that allows various upgrades to the standard Far Cry experience. there's a linux version which works wonderfully - point it to the FarCry.exe and it does its thing!

in addition to the tool, there's the Resistance mod with tons of tweaks. for me, the most important one was lowering the rewards so I have to finish all the missions, side quests, etc. before facing the Seed family members. otherwise, the game is over way too soon.

I also enabled skip intro (AMD, epilepsy, etc.) and start the game at Dutch's bunker, skipping the flight in and the car chase, thus eliminating prime irritants for replaying. I might try a patch that forces Vulkan instead of DX11 later on.

also, it works without issues with my game that I found somewhere, fell off a truck or something, I don't know...

Libreboot support for T480/T480s is here!

Jamie Zawinski's (of Netscape/Mozilla fame, check out Code Rush if you're unfamiliar) humorous but enfuriating take on his club's battle with the music "industry" shakedown.

I mean, come on.

other than changing theme or userChrome any other options?

the transparent hair and beards, I seem to remember there was some antialiasing setting or something that causes this but I can't remember which. naturally, searching the webs is useless. help?

all AMD, wine 9.1, lutris

are there any older ex-office mini PCs like the elitedesk, optiplex, thinkstation, etc models that can fit a 3.5" drive? Not looking for anything new and thus expensive, just want some old junker (6/7/8th gen Intel) that can host some light stuff. thanks