This is basically it, yes, but sometimes I’m drunk-ordering 40 nuggets and a milkshake and adding the mint myself is enough effort to make me reconsider my reckless disregard for my wellbeing.

Nord Light was also pretty good when I tried it. I waffle back and forth between light and dark themes now and then and there’s always a few good options that brighten the space without flashbanging you.

DRM in many games doesn’t work on Linux. In some cases, like games that use EAC, this is technically just a checkbox at build time where they decide not to support Linux.

There are also some weird libraries and low-level interfaces that refuse to even work through wine/proton, but that’s pretty rare nowadays. You have to be actively trying to find something that won’t work at all on Linux.

For your first case while evacuation and such, there are alternatives and you shouldn’t need full internet access for situations like that. (obviously this isn’t the case right now)

People absolutely need internet access in evacuation situations. They need information to know where it’s safe to go, where they can get help, what routes are still open, whether it’s safe to return home, whether their home still exists… in some cases the only communication methods are either internet-based or literally flying a plane in, there aren’t even roads to some communities that need to be evacuated. There is way too much information people need to be able to rely on local communication methods like radio.

And that’s really one of the only other options in these situations. The fibre line (pretty much singular, because the cost to run fibre over thousands of kilometers is enormous) going through the NWT was destroyed in the fires as a fire was approaching Yellowknife. Cell towers can literally melt from the heat of some of these fires. Ground infrastructure is vulnerable to all of the climate disasters our world is currently facing. And that’s ignoring it getting destroyed by actively hostile actors like in Ukraine.

Do Starlink and Musk suck? Absolutely. Fuck them. But satellite internet is increasingly showing itself to be a necessity, and to think otherwise really underestimates the size of our world and the vulnerability of our infrastructure. We need better management of it, but we definitely need it.

Shit, that picture outside Edmonton is hardly even distant, there are a bunch of communities in northern Alberta and BC that don’t even have roads going to them because they’re too far away.

There are actual use cases for satellite internet. I heard from an evacuee from the Northwest Territories in Canada here that he was basically only able to get updates on what was happening—i.e. what roads weren’t on fire and where evacuation centers were—because of a couple of people with starlinks. There are huge areas up there with little to no internet infrastructure, and this summer much of that was damaged in the fires.

Ground infrastructure is expensive to run out to extreme rural areas, and it’s also vulnerable in different ways from satellite infrastructure. In the US, yeah, it’s dense enough that ISPs mostly need to get their shit together, but there are very large areas where running a cable has a lot of problems.

Shit. I used to use most of these apps when my life was more degoogled, but even now I like the gallery a hell of a lot more than other options I’ve found. Guess it’s an opportunity to see what else is out there.

Cats. Mastodon has a lot of cats. It’s great.

I follow hashtags on Mastodon sort of like how I follow communities on Lemmy, but instead of “content” I get quick thoughts from people. It’s different but, as someone who also didn’t use Twitter, it’s nice to have a space where the barrier to engagement is a bit lower; you need a thought, not a link or discussion, and sometimes that’s enough to prompt engagement.

They sort of have watches categorized by sport/purpose if you know why you want a watch, but most of them do basically the same stuff and the main differences are battery life, appearance/build, and whether it has GPS.

I wanted something I could use to navigate and track multi-day backcountry hikes, so I got a Fenix. My wife wanted to go for a run without bringing her phone with her, so I got her a forerunner. There are lots of options, but even the cheapest watch is good enough if you just want to track steps and basic activities.

I’ve been using Obsidian lately. Proprietary with an open plugin ecosystem. Works well, makes it easy for me to integrate with other notes and such, but I haven’t figured out a good workflow for exporting work for submission. That said, it’s all markdown and there are lots of plugins for stuff like that, so it’s probably mostly just that I haven’t tried very hard.

In the past I’ve used Google Docs (proprietary), Scrivener (proprietary), Manuskript (open), Zim (open), and probably a few I’m forgetting. Really it just comes down to what you’re looking for out of the software, there are lots of options.

The biggest thing to keep in mind from a self-hosting perspective is local storage and easy backups under your own control. I use syncthing to keep my whole Obsidian vault synced across a few devices; for some software that’s easier or harder due to file formats and accessibility.

I’m surprised there aren’t more people listing game servers here. A good chunk of my networking knowledge just comes from hosting game servers and fighting routers in my teens and early adulthood.