Captain Aggravated

Here’s the best way I’ve seen it illustrated:

Imagine walking into a physical retail store, something like Best Buy. You want to buy a TV. A blue shit salesman talks to you for awhile, helping you pick out the TV you want with the features you like. He says “Okay, so take this slip to the register, pay for it there and they’ll bring out the TV to your car.” The slip has the salesman’s name on it so he gets a commission on the sale.

On your way to the register, a slimy guy in a suit says “Hey let me see that sales ticket, maybe I’ve got a coupon for that TV, save you some money.” So you hand him the sales slip, he says “Yeah, here’s one for $2 off on this $900 television.” And he hands you that coupon plus a sales ticket…not the original one, another one with HIS name on it instead of the salesman. The slimy guy in the suit is stealing the salesman’s commission.

Now imagine doing this with software on the internet and you’ve got a class action lawsuit from Legal Eagle.

Which I’ll use as a lighthearted excuse to mention things like the block edit mode.

I’ve used Vim for some pretty non-nerdy stuff. Like ripping my DVD collection, when I got to the TV section I had a lot of file names to modify in bulk, and Vim let me do that. Also guitar tablature, the ability to edit plaintext both horizontally and vertically is surprisingly handy. Just having a macro to be able to add a bar line saves a shocking amount of time.

Which feels a little wild to someone who was “there at the time.” Op For was the one that got the praise at the time for having the cool new weapons and interesting new enemies and such, Blue Shift had normal Half Life weapons, basic armor pickups and I guess some cool level design. Plus I think there’s still backlash against the HD models that came with Blue Shift.

I think it got easier to dismiss the Gearbox expansion packs as non-canon when basically the only thing they kept from them was Barney’s last name.

It may be The Algorithm reacting to my search history but when it shows me Half-Life content it’s often centered around Half-Life 2 or Portal. I don’t get “Cut unreleased content from an old build of Opposing Force.”

I think one thing that might be a factor is, Op For and Blue Shift don’t pose more questions than they answer. Half-Life still has some mystery to it, there’s a lot of intrigue to it, people want to know more about the setting.

Tangentially related note: I had an idea for a video game but no one will ever make it. You almost have to glom onto an existing project. Imagine a normal open world sandbox game like GTA 4 or something, and the normal game is there, but if you pay close attention some of the NPCs are a little weird, and if you follow them there’s a WHOLE OTHER, BIGGER STORY.

Problem with that is you have to make an entire game to hide the “real” game in, and what you want to bet it would be found by people going through the game files rather than playing.

This sounds like it can be engineered around.

We transitioned from USB Micro B to USB-C.

I hit the “Okay we have solved video game graphics” moment when they zoomed in on the hair on Aloy’s face from Horizon: Peasant’s Quest or whatever it was called. Like okay we don’t need to try any harder than this.

So they’re not checking the contents for copyright violations, but the source and destination.

I bet it would be a boon if it only replaces celophane.

Explain to me how that works if the traffic is end to end encrypted.

No, Gnome is a non-starter for being as mouse negative as it is. You are very heavily supposed to use Gnome with keyboard shortcuts and it will only sometimes begrudgingly allow you to use the mouse.

I also really want to kick the app drawer in the head. Why is it two operations deep? Why can’t it be sorted by category like every other Linux app menu?

I would go with Mint Cinnamon, increase font sizes or UI scaling, switch to the Cinnemenu because it offers bigger square icons rather than a tiny list, turn off a lot of its extra features, and put launchers for commonly used applications on the desktop. Configure updates to automatic, and otherwise sand down a few rough edges and I think you’re good to go.

Wait are we talking “Ah they took my freakin’ kidney!” Charlie the Unicorn?

The other day I was thinking about the movie Scrooged with Bill Murray, and how during one of the Scenes of Christmas Passed he got his girlfriend a pack of Ginsu knives for Christmas and how that’s on-theme for his character who is obsessed with TV because Ginsu knives were a big As Seen On TV product and how someone on the writing staff must have went to college to think of that.

Yes. Which is why, when you see a novel service being advertised, it is a useful exercise to ask of them “What is your business model?”

Free and benevolent maybe not. but genuine and non malicious?

“What’s your business model?” “we make and sell delicious sandwiches. Customer buys the sandwich for a little mote than it costs to make so we get money for ourselves.” That isn’t a scam.

A useful question to ask when hearing about a new company is “What’s your business model?”

Good luck! Hope it does what you want it to!

Actually no I don’t.

Linux doesn’t lack GUIs; there’s at least ten entire Desktop Environments in active development at any given time and several of them are quite feature complete such as Cinnamon and KDE. Then you’ve got GNOME which is polished if deliberately feature poor.

A few DEs do have GUI applets for editing the context menu but not all do. Windows doesn’t have one built in. Quote the second page of that thread:

Id prefer NOT to use a third party app to make it work. I just wish Microsoft would just make is fully Customizable for us all.

I’m a subscriber to the old adage “GUIs make simple tasks easy, CLIs make complex tasks possible.” This task is either within the city limits of shell scripting or close enough to read the “Speed limit 35 unless posted” sign, so it might as well be left as a “write a config file” type thing.

I’ve often said the perfect GNOME utility applet is a blank window titled “Gnothing” with a button in the top bar that says “never mind”, while the ideal KDE utility applet is the instrument panel of an Apollo CSM crashed at an oblique angle into the Chernobyl control room labeled “text viewer.” And Cinnamon usually sits somewhere between those two extremes.

In the Cinnamon desktop, there’s a directory in ~/.local/share/nemo/actions. Navigate to this directory in Nemo file manager and a message will appear across the top, it has a built-in tutorial as to how to do this. You create a short config file with a .nemo_action that defines what an action does, what context it appears in, what text it displays, what icon it displays etc. and the command to run when chosen.

It’s been about a year since I’ve messed with this, but IIRC if it’s set up to fire with one or more files selected, it will pass the file names to the command as arguments. You can configure it to run on exactly one, one or many, or specifically plural files. A thing I did a lot was allow it to take multiple files and then iterate across the variables in a for loop, so say I used pandoc to convert .docx files to .pdf, I could highlight 50 of them, click one option and it would churn through all of them.

I’m not going to build the script for you, but the first approach that occurs to me would be to write a shell script that calls ffmpeg to do the conversion, get that to where it works when you invoke it from the terminal, then write a .nemo_action file to fire it from the GUI.

As for the playback speeds…I’m not sure how to get that done. If you mean “take this .mp4 and make an .mp3 out of its audio that is 25% faster” I think what would happen there is you’d write a little GUI pop-up window, I would do it in Python with either a GTK or QT module, that would open up to ask parameters before passing that back to the main script to do the work.