Most of the indicators you're talking about are, in my opinion, superficial markers of adulthood. Do you show up for the people you care about? Do you fulfill your commitments? Do you look for opportunities to grow and improve? Do you do the hard thing you need to do instead of the easy thing?
These are the traits that make you an adult, not how many kids you have or whether you own or rent housing. You can have 10 kids or none and still be an adult. You can own, rent, or live in your parents' basement and still be an adult. You can't be making promises you don't keep or always taking the easy way out and be an adult. Those other things are all vanity metrics.
I don't know what the reception was at the time, but people seem to hate Stuntman, at least in retrospect. I loved it though. It's a driving game in which you play the part of a movie stuntman, driving through a movie set as the director barks orders at you, telling you live how to drive the scene. It has a nice variety of movies, and the scenes are actually cool to drive and to watch.
It tickles a part of my brain that loves repeating a task until I perfect it... and boy, you get to do a lot of repetition.
The one thing I don't like is that you suffer a PS2 load time with each failed attempt. We're talking minutes between attempts. Loved it apart from that though.
Seconding Quartz, but I also wanted to share how I self-host all the services required. I self-host Forgejo and use obsidian-git to make it easier to push my vault changes to my self-hosted repo. The repo has a workflow that runs the Quartz build on any new commit, building to a location my web server points to.
It works pretty well. About 2 minutes after a change is pushed, the build with those changes is done and being served.
Thanks for the clarification. By "persist across restarts," I'm referring to the fact that if I just install the agent in my container, it won't persist if I restart the container, unless I install it on a volume which seems clunky. Running the agent alongside in a separate container with network access is the solution I was looking for.
On the Redis and Valkey restores, that makes sense. Disaster recovery is my use case anyway. Do you document the manual restore process for those? I didn't notice it in a brief review of the docs, but I may have overlooked it.
How would I deploy an agent into an existing docker container in a way that makes it persist across restarts? Most of my databases are running in containers.
Regarding redis and valkey: what good does backup do without restore? Not trying to denigrate; I just really want to understand how that is useful.
This has been my experience with Matrix, and the message decryption problems are a dealbreaker. I hope the person who replied to you saying those have very recently been fixed is correct, but the fact that such a fundamental feature was broken for so long leaves me with little confidence in Matrix. I had this problem years ago on a Matrix community, then again maybe a year ago on a different community, and even more recently on my self-hosted instance. Don't understand how you can push a chat platform that effectively doesn't deliver ~1/12 messages to random users and let that issue hang around for years.
XMPP looks really interesting as an alternative. Hope that development continued at a brisk pace.
Couldn't the same be said for just about any self-hosted app? You can watch video files with a local video player, so no need for Jellyfin; you can save passwords in KeePass, so no need for Vaultwarden; etc.
Seems to me like, if you'd like to have access to this app along with your data from any computer without having to overlay a separate data syncing solution and install a local app on each of those computers, that's justification enough. Or maybe I'm just not understanding your critique here...
I found a review summary that said the background music in the game made it difficult to see enemies and that I should turn down the BGM track to fix it. 😆
Another frequent transit user here. When people complain that I'm early for something, I like to tell them that, since I ride transit, my choices are to be early or late, but I can't choose to be on time. 😅
I’m running this. There are a few things I don’t like about it. The biggest issue for me is that it touts itself as a privacy-centric file converter, but then it makes requests to Google Fonts and Cloudflare. I’ve blocked loading of those scripts in my browser, but I don’t understand why you would add those things to a service that’s supposed to be focused on privacy.
The other issue I had is that the default video conversion server URL is baked into the Docker image. Whereas normally I would configure something like this by simply passing an env var through to the container, here I have to build my own image which makes updating the container more of a hassle.
This may be a controversial inclusion, and it’s based on my relatively unsophisticated understanding of Linux. I believe the reason casual computer users hate Linux (generalizing here) is that “Linux” is not one thing.
Commercial operating systems are monoliths. Windows 11 is Windows 11. macOS is macOS. Apart from a few surface-level settings, all instances of them are the same. If you know how to use that operating system, you can go to almost any computer running that OS and start using it, just like you use the one you have at home.
“Linux” is entirely modular. There’s no single thing called “Linux.” You can pick and choose each component to build up your own customized OS from the ground up, and distros take advantage of this. I know just within my household, I have three Linux systems, and casual usage varies wildly across the three. One is a SteamDeck, which is a different kind of thing, but if I just take the two computers as an example, on one, you have an application menu in the top left where the other has an application menu in the bottom left. Also, those menus look completely different. That alone is enough to frustrate a casual user. Now take the fact that they each have different settings panels, different bundled apps, etc. and you have a recipe for making users always feel lost when moving from one system to another.
I don’t think this means you need to teach how to use every available desktop environment, window manager, or sound settings panel, but I do think it would be useful to introduce this concept as part of your curriculum. The sad part is that I think a lot of your audience will tune out at this point because they never had to know that on the commercials OSes, but I think it’s important to be forthcoming about it rather than having your audience blindsided by it.
If I tap-and-hold the image of an image post and tap “Share image,” it shares the image with a URL, which in Signal results in a message containing only the URL. If I use the share button instead of tap-and-hold+share, it shares the actual image. Why are the behaviors different? Why would sharing an image ever lead to anything happening other than just sharing the image?
I’m on a much weirder setup than you’re proposing — Bazzite Linux with a Pico 4 connected wirelessly via ALVR — and it mostly just works. I had to jump through a few hoops to get everything working to start, mostly related to tweaking wireless and audio configuration, but these are things I doubt you’ll encounter at all with an Index. I haven’t tried a game yet that doesn’t work. I mostly just care about Beat Saber and a couple of others, but they’re all working well. I’ve even bought a few new games since switching to Linux, and I can’t recall any I’ve tried that don’t work, out of maybe a dozen or so total I’ve tried. I suspect you'll have a much smoother experience with the Index.
I’ve tried a few of these, and I’ve never found one that doesn’t feel like I’m inviting a sales rep to live on my home server. They’re technically open source, but it’s obvious their primary purpose in this form is to upsell you. I understand it, but it’s just not what I want so I’ve ended up getting rid of each one after tinkering with them for a while.
I guess the same could be said for n8n, but I find it more tolerable. I have set up a Valkey instance though and use it for persistent storage through n8n’s Redis support. That works well enough for my fairly limited use case.
I’m using ALVR with a Pico 4 headset on Linux, and it’s pretty solid. I’m not playing a ton of VR games, but so far I haven’t found anything that doesn’t work. It has some quirks, but it works pretty well. I’m very happy with it.
I liked Gates of Zendocon as a kid. I wouldn't swear to you that it's good, but I got a kick out of it.
I was already pretty low in my estimation of LinkedIn, but this post gave me a little push to decide to close the account.
Most of the indicators you're talking about are, in my opinion, superficial markers of adulthood. Do you show up for the people you care about? Do you fulfill your commitments? Do you look for opportunities to grow and improve? Do you do the hard thing you need to do instead of the easy thing?
These are the traits that make you an adult, not how many kids you have or whether you own or rent housing. You can have 10 kids or none and still be an adult. You can own, rent, or live in your parents' basement and still be an adult. You can't be making promises you don't keep or always taking the easy way out and be an adult. Those other things are all vanity metrics.
I don't know what the reception was at the time, but people seem to hate Stuntman, at least in retrospect. I loved it though. It's a driving game in which you play the part of a movie stuntman, driving through a movie set as the director barks orders at you, telling you live how to drive the scene. It has a nice variety of movies, and the scenes are actually cool to drive and to watch.
It tickles a part of my brain that loves repeating a task until I perfect it... and boy, you get to do a lot of repetition.
The one thing I don't like is that you suffer a PS2 load time with each failed attempt. We're talking minutes between attempts. Loved it apart from that though.
Seconding Quartz, but I also wanted to share how I self-host all the services required. I self-host Forgejo and use obsidian-git to make it easier to push my vault changes to my self-hosted repo. The repo has a workflow that runs the Quartz build on any new commit, building to a location my web server points to.
It works pretty well. About 2 minutes after a change is pushed, the build with those changes is done and being served.
Thanks for the clarification. By "persist across restarts," I'm referring to the fact that if I just install the agent in my container, it won't persist if I restart the container, unless I install it on a volume which seems clunky. Running the agent alongside in a separate container with network access is the solution I was looking for.
On the Redis and Valkey restores, that makes sense. Disaster recovery is my use case anyway. Do you document the manual restore process for those? I didn't notice it in a brief review of the docs, but I may have overlooked it.
This looks exciting! A couple of questions:
Thanks for building this!
This has been my experience with Matrix, and the message decryption problems are a dealbreaker. I hope the person who replied to you saying those have very recently been fixed is correct, but the fact that such a fundamental feature was broken for so long leaves me with little confidence in Matrix. I had this problem years ago on a Matrix community, then again maybe a year ago on a different community, and even more recently on my self-hosted instance. Don't understand how you can push a chat platform that effectively doesn't deliver ~1/12 messages to random users and let that issue hang around for years.
XMPP looks really interesting as an alternative. Hope that development continued at a brisk pace.
Not many... but this community isn't for those people. It's for people who are already predisposed to self-hosting software.
Couldn't the same be said for just about any self-hosted app? You can watch video files with a local video player, so no need for Jellyfin; you can save passwords in KeePass, so no need for Vaultwarden; etc.
Seems to me like, if you'd like to have access to this app along with your data from any computer without having to overlay a separate data syncing solution and install a local app on each of those computers, that's justification enough. Or maybe I'm just not understanding your critique here...
Ah, true! Unfortunately for the anonymous LLM whose reputation is at stake, this was something like a platformer.
I found a review summary that said the background music in the game made it difficult to see enemies and that I should turn down the BGM track to fix it. 😆
Another frequent transit user here. When people complain that I'm early for something, I like to tell them that, since I ride transit, my choices are to be early or late, but I can't choose to be on time. 😅
I’m running this. There are a few things I don’t like about it. The biggest issue for me is that it touts itself as a privacy-centric file converter, but then it makes requests to Google Fonts and Cloudflare. I’ve blocked loading of those scripts in my browser, but I don’t understand why you would add those things to a service that’s supposed to be focused on privacy.
The other issue I had is that the default video conversion server URL is baked into the Docker image. Whereas normally I would configure something like this by simply passing an env var through to the container, here I have to build my own image which makes updating the container more of a hassle.
Seems to be fine as a file converter though.
This may be a controversial inclusion, and it’s based on my relatively unsophisticated understanding of Linux. I believe the reason casual computer users hate Linux (generalizing here) is that “Linux” is not one thing.
Commercial operating systems are monoliths. Windows 11 is Windows 11. macOS is macOS. Apart from a few surface-level settings, all instances of them are the same. If you know how to use that operating system, you can go to almost any computer running that OS and start using it, just like you use the one you have at home.
“Linux” is entirely modular. There’s no single thing called “Linux.” You can pick and choose each component to build up your own customized OS from the ground up, and distros take advantage of this. I know just within my household, I have three Linux systems, and casual usage varies wildly across the three. One is a SteamDeck, which is a different kind of thing, but if I just take the two computers as an example, on one, you have an application menu in the top left where the other has an application menu in the bottom left. Also, those menus look completely different. That alone is enough to frustrate a casual user. Now take the fact that they each have different settings panels, different bundled apps, etc. and you have a recipe for making users always feel lost when moving from one system to another.
I don’t think this means you need to teach how to use every available desktop environment, window manager, or sound settings panel, but I do think it would be useful to introduce this concept as part of your curriculum. The sad part is that I think a lot of your audience will tune out at this point because they never had to know that on the commercials OSes, but I think it’s important to be forthcoming about it rather than having your audience blindsided by it.
If I tap-and-hold the image of an image post and tap “Share image,” it shares the image with a URL, which in Signal results in a message containing only the URL. If I use the share button instead of tap-and-hold+share, it shares the actual image. Why are the behaviors different? Why would sharing an image ever lead to anything happening other than just sharing the image?
This is Voyager, btw.
Skate Story was a real trip. I love the surreality of the thing. It may be my favorite skateboarding game apart from Tony Hawk.
I’m on a much weirder setup than you’re proposing — Bazzite Linux with a Pico 4 connected wirelessly via ALVR — and it mostly just works. I had to jump through a few hoops to get everything working to start, mostly related to tweaking wireless and audio configuration, but these are things I doubt you’ll encounter at all with an Index. I haven’t tried a game yet that doesn’t work. I mostly just care about Beat Saber and a couple of others, but they’re all working well. I’ve even bought a few new games since switching to Linux, and I can’t recall any I’ve tried that don’t work, out of maybe a dozen or so total I’ve tried. I suspect you'll have a much smoother experience with the Index.
I’ve tried a few of these, and I’ve never found one that doesn’t feel like I’m inviting a sales rep to live on my home server. They’re technically open source, but it’s obvious their primary purpose in this form is to upsell you. I understand it, but it’s just not what I want so I’ve ended up getting rid of each one after tinkering with them for a while.
I guess the same could be said for n8n, but I find it more tolerable. I have set up a Valkey instance though and use it for persistent storage through n8n’s Redis support. That works well enough for my fairly limited use case.
I’m using ALVR with a Pico 4 headset on Linux, and it’s pretty solid. I’m not playing a ton of VR games, but so far I haven’t found anything that doesn’t work. It has some quirks, but it works pretty well. I’m very happy with it.