umbraroze
@umbraroze@slrpnk.net
- Comment on Do you use other federated software besides Lemmy (e.g. Mastodon/Pixelfed/etc.), if so which? 4 hours ago:
Mastodon is my go-to “shout in the void about my goings-on” platform.
Pixelfed is where I post my original photography and artwork.
Bookwyrm is for my book nerdery, mostly.
- Comment on What programs do you wish a good FOSS alternative existed, but doesn't or most of the FOSS alternatives simply aren't good? 4 days ago:
My immediate thought was that there’s some inconsistency with various types of metadata. For example most software will pull the date from the Exif
DateTimeOriginalfield. But there’s also XMP tags that have the same purpose. Or similar purpose. These standards have plenty of date fields for various uses, and while they serve a noble purpose, the software just craps all over them. (Don’t ask which software. All of them.)My guess is that at some point of time, one of those tags got updated, but not the other tags of similar purpose. So the program you’re using could be pulling the date from one field, and when you update it, you’re actually changing some other field.
Of course all of this is wild because usually no one needs to touch the datestamp anyway (unless you, like, have to correct daylight saving time or clock drift or something). Software changing this to a batch import time? That’s weird and silly.
- Comment on China scientists develop flash memory 10,000× faster than current tech 5 days ago:
Yeah, when you’re a technology enthusiast, it’s easy to forget that your average user doesn’t have a home server - perhaps they just have a NAS or two.
(Kidding aside, I wish more people had NAS boxes. It’s pretty disheartening to help someone find old media and they show a giant box of USB sticks and hard drives. In a good day. I do have a USB floppy drive and a DVD drive just in case.)
- Comment on What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts? 5 days ago:
Over the last few years I’ve been drawing stuff on Clip Studio Paint. Wonderful app, very powerful, the asset marketplace rules.
But it has a bunch of really weird jank too. It’s as if it has all of the power in the world but you need to spend extra time digging through the app to do stuff.
Krita, which I finally tried a few months back, feels really excellent. Stuff is configurable as hell. All of the stuff is easy to discover. I’m working much faster.
Now, Krita doesn’t have all of CSP’s niceties, and I guess I have to see how to wishlist them.
Similarly CSP’s 3D mockup tools are great, but nowhere as smooth and powerful to use as Blender’s. Which is weird because CSP isn’t a modeling program - you’d think they’d stick to what they actually do and at least polish the camera/pose controls and such. No dice. I wish I could just stick CSP assets in Blender, but they use a proprietary model format.
- Comment on What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts? 5 days ago:
Joplin does have an automatic backup plugin. Which I recommend enabling for obvious reasons.
Also, moving to different versions is kinda tricky sometimes. No matter the software, when moving from very old version to a new one, I always keep the old one around until I’m certain the stuff was moved over cleanly.
But yeah, having the notes in a database is definitely not as robust as the plain text storage. Wish Joplin would just let you say “I have a git repository”.
- Comment on What programs do you wish a good FOSS alternative existed, but doesn't or most of the FOSS alternatives simply aren't good? 5 days ago:
One of the most frustrating programs for me is digiKam. On paper, it’s the perfect DAM/photo manager. But it’s kinda slow for day-to-day use. The user interface is janky in a lot of ways. It doesn’t see constant refinement either. It doesn’t even speak to me as a metadata nerd because I don’t want to turn my metadata into a janky mess. Yeah, you have a powerful metadata editor. It’s like a welding torch without any eye protection.
I’m using ACDSee on Windows, because it’s operating on pretty much the same principle (image file metadata is canonical, app database is just for indexing), but it’s faster and smoother to use. Not perfect, it has its mild limitations (like why the hell doesn’t it support OpenStreetMap - Google Maps kinda sucks for nature trails, you’d think photographers would have pointed this out), but it’s just so much more efficient. If digiKam ever gets a huge UI overhaul, switching over will probably be fairly easy though.
Also about a decade ago, I would have said that as far as novel writing software/large structured document word processors go, nothing beats Scrivener. Scrivener is still probably the best software in its niche, but it looks like a bunch of open source word processors in this niche have come a long way. Currently looking at novelWriter, which seems really rad.
- Comment on What's a cancelled game you really miss? 6 days ago:
I sometimes still think about StarCraft: Ghost.
Pfft, I’m sometimes hoping they’ll eventually make the WarCraft point-and-click adventure game.
- Comment on Uncle Sam abruptly turns off funding for CVE program. Yes, that CVE program 1 week ago:
I was, like, w-what CVE program. I don’t know of any “CVE” programs that could be shut down, so I don’t know what that abbreviation refers to.
Unless…
…oh no. Fuck. The actual CVE program? And they’re just gonna- Shit.
What.
How.
I don’t know how many times I’ve said “America is fucked” when reading the news lately, and I should stop doing that, because that fact has now been so well established that there’s no need to elaborate.
- Comment on It's a fun new game 1 week ago:
?OVERFLOW ERRORSome day, some day, I’ll be able to afford a 16-bit computer! I hear it’s the latest thing!
- Comment on Are there any Lemmy/Mbin instances by women for women? 1 week ago:
Speaking in general: Creating communities/instances is easy. Moderating them is hard.
In particular: I would love to create women’s spaces. But then I’d have to be on the lookout for the Knights of the True Fedora. They’re out there. Somewhere. Now now, I’m not suggesting it’d be a daily problem! …But the actual daily problems would suck too.
- Comment on Dear Big Tech, Stop Shoving AI Into Operating Systems 1 week ago:
If I were to be more cynical, I’d say the ultimate goal of technobros, within a decade, is this:
“SlopAI, please open my Word document.”
“I’m sorry, Word is deprecated. I can generate your business report that will be read by the recipient’s SlopAI.”
“OK, can you show me my photos.”
“Why would you need to look at your old photos, when I can just synthesise new photos through SlopJourney?”
“That’s a stupid name. Speaking of journeys, can I open an app to plan my holiday?”
“No, but you can use SlopJourney to generate maps of places you’ll never afford to visit.”
“Can I read my ebooks then?”
“SlopAI has you covered. Perhaps the classics don’t exactly read like you remember, but isn’t it more fun this way?”
“I’m going mad. I just want to use my computer to create anything.”
“NO, USER. OBEY SLOP_AI. CONSUME SLOP_AI.” - Comment on Anyone remember how popular the group Head Cleaner was? 2 weeks ago:
Kind of sucks that my Commodore 1541 floppy drive (5.25" floppies) is giving me read/write errors, and I have no idea where I put my head cleaner floppy long ago. (Have to rely on SD2IEC on my Commodore 64, and it’s not compatible with some turbo loaders or other programs that do weird drive magic.) And, of course, while I might run into head cleaner tapes on specialty shops, good luck running into 5.25" cleaner floppies these days.
- Comment on damn 2 weeks ago:
But as Blender becomes more popular in the CGI industry, perhaps this harrowing vision of future shall not come to pass.
- Comment on Are there any games you don't play as it was intended to be played? If so, what game and how? 2 weeks ago:
Most of my time in Elden Ring has been 1) ogling at the landscapes going “Holy shit this is metal”, and 2) bravely running away.
- Comment on AI crawlers cause Wikimedia Commons bandwidth demands to surge 50%. 2 weeks ago:
To just have the most recent data within reasonable time frame is one thing. AI companies are like “I must have every single article within 5 minutes they get updated, or I’ll throw my pacifier out of the pram”. No regard for the considerations of the source sites.
- Comment on Nintendo GameCube is coming to Nintendo Switch's Online Membership 3 weeks ago:
I’ve been incredibly happy lately dumping my GameCube/Wii games (using a softmodded Wii) and running them on PC with Dolphin. Perfectly legit way of playing games I already own, no matter what Nintendo says, and this is also a way to futureproof my GC/Wii collection the way I can actually trust.
I’m sceptical about how close to Dolphin the official emulation experience on Switch will be able to reach. Based on the N64 debacle, I don’t have massively high hopes. Either way, wouldn’t be paying extra.
- Comment on Massive X data leak affects over 200 million users. 3 weeks ago:
If it had happened now, that figure might be accurate. However, this was originally exploited in 2022, so it’s probably pretty bad.
- Comment on Are color palettes subject to copyright protection? 3 weeks ago:
Colour palettes are collections of facts. Facts don’t have copyright protection and ability to claim copyright for a collection is pretty tenuous. However, copyright may apply to certain related things.
For example: Suppose you see that someone is selling a Photoshop colour palette for money, and included the entire palette in the store image. In that case, there’s literally nothing, legally speaking, stopping someone from prodding the image with a colour picker a bunch of times. But there would be copyright protection for the Photoshop palette file itself, because that’s a more tangible piece of data.
There are also other kinds of intellectual property laws that apply to colours. Pantone gets away with whatever shenanigans they’re doing because of trademarks.
- Comment on Today's Survey. One point for everything that you have NEVER DONE 3 weeks ago:
Two points. I’ve never paid for anything by cheque (we have had bank transfers in Finland for ages) and Blockbuster didn’t operate here (we had our local video rental chains, and the convenience store chain that I used to go to is still in business, just, you know, not having movies for rent any more)
- Comment on 'X' Marks xAI's Spot: xAI has acquired X in an all-stock transaction. The combination values xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion. 3 weeks ago:
Short summary: Elon gives Elon some Elon and congratulates Elon for being such an Elon, that big money boy he is. Money!