The Sonic “All-Stars Racing” games were actually really good, but then Team Sonic Racing was a disappointment. I feel like that this one is going to try to pick up fans with licensed characters instead of solid gameplay, but maybe I’m wrong. Actually, the existence of a demo at all is encouraging.

I’m not going to buy it since I want to get through more of my backlog and stop buying new games, but I’ll check out this demo.

I didn’t think that Steam was crashable at this point. Great to see that a game made and published by an indie developer is getting so much attention.

Oh nice! That is very encouraging.

Yeah, I don’t think the Fairphone 6 is quite ready. In fact, since none of the previous Fairphone models ever got to full Linux usability, I don’t really expect it to happen.

I think the best option – and really the only option – right now is the Furilabs FLX1. I’m planning on getting one soon.

There’s a distributor, Murena, selling the Fairphone 4 and Fairphone 6 in the U.S. now. The Fairphone isn’t fully usable with Linux yet, though. Calls, camera, and GPS all still apparently aren’t working 100% with postmarket OS. I’m not aware of any other distribution that does any better. https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Category:Fairphone

It’s a Linux phone. That’s going to turn away exactly zero people, and turn on at least a few…

Likewise, I think I’m just about to buy one for myself. I’ve never used tap-to-pay with my phone, nor a voice assistant, and I don’t really want to. My phone is a web browser that can send text messages, make phone calls, and take pictures. My phone carrier is VoLTE-only for calls, and the FLX1 says that it has VoLTE now. I also need to use one specific Android app for work, but the FLX1 has some type of Android emulation which hopefully will make that usable.

The FLX1 is also the only one that claims to have a working camera. I’m not sure how good the pictures look, but every other Linux phone always just says “partial support” for the camera on the PostmarketOS wiki. The FLX1, with the stock OS, should take adequate pictures from what I understand.

I think syncthing already adds itself as a systemd service, and systemd has an “AC power only condition.”

I can take a closer look tomorrow, but here’s a page about systemd’s AC power condition: https://askubuntu.com/questions/654335/systemd-how-to-start-stop-services-on-battery

Edit: bah, the built-in AC power condition only checks once when it starts up, so you’ll probably have to do the custom option that was selected as the answer in that post I linked to.

Wow, thank you for this response. I hadn’t thought of tracking music preferences as a tool for self discovery.

I’ve been thinking about setting up a scrobble server, but haven’t been sure what I would do with it. What do you use the information for? Does it affect how you listen?

Realized last week that my fail2ban settings are too strict – I get banned immediately if I visit my funkwhale (music server) domain without being logged in. In fact, I think much of my “downtime” might have actually just been me banning myself for 15 minutes now and then…

I was thinking about getting rid of Grafana, which is overkill for my server, and replacing it with Logdy this weekend, but didn’t get around to it.

Nice. I had borrowed a friend’s physical copy of Crysis, and that’s how I played it back in the day.

Yeah, I had forgotten how slow an optical drive was, and how that was usually the limiting factor. I installed Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear from the original CD a couple days ago, and it took about 20 minutes to install on my current PC. I’m pretty sure that’s about how long it took in 1999, too.

Downloading it from Steam takes about 10 seconds.

Very cool. I’ve never backed mine up; I should do that. What game was it last week?

Piracy hysteria was at an absolute fever pitch in 2007 – those online activations are what make me think that much of my physical collection won’t be playable anymore.

Oblivion was also one that I owned physically. I just assumed that I had also acquired it on Steam by now, but it looks like I haven’t. Also great memories with Oblivion. I think it’s still my 4th or 5th most-played game. (I have to guess, based on remembering the number of hours that Xfire said I had back in the day, which is a whole nother nostalgia trip right there, lol.)

Nice. I haven’t tried OpenMW yet, but I definitely want to. Are you running a bunch of mods with it?

Oh dang, that is a good idea.

I’d say that absolutely counts!

I’ve been wanting to do this, too, for games that I bought on Steam. Like, make a bootable Linux DVD that has Steam and the game preinstalled on it, with Steam already logged in as my account.