yote_zip

yote_zip, 1 year ago

You’re right, and I suppose I was half-thinking along the lines of “we have all the pieces to solve this, but we don’t because we’re frozen in place by greed” instead of “this is something we could do with infrastructure today”. If everyone could collectively let go and re-distribute wealth and materials efficiently everyone would be much better off for it, but instead we’re stuck in some game theory hell where the optimal personal choice results in one of the worst outcomes.

yote_zip, 1 year ago

Semi-related, can these automations really be relied upon for quality, or is there a system to help find the best copy? When I’m downloading books I do it manually through Anna’s Archive and I always download as many unique versions of a book that I see, then open them all and compare their internals to see which one I keep. Often not many ebooks are suitable for using my own font and layouts with Koreader.

yote_zip, 1 year ago

Arch should be fine for university stuff. The main problem with Arch is not Arch itself, but all the software it tracks being very fresh. You’ll be pulling updates as they come down the line, and that may result in temporary bugs or day-to-day workflow changes - caused by the software developers themselves. I don’t think an Arch system is unusually unstable or prone to breaking, but last year they did brick everyone’s GRUB loaders by pushing an update too early (post-mortem here). It’s up to you, but if you want to err on the side of system/software stability I would go for Mint/OpenSUSE Tumbleweed/Debian.

I don’t have any practical experience with EndeavourOS but TMK it’s just preconfigured Arch and it uses the default repos, so that sounds good to me. Vanilla Arch is not inherently better or worse, it’s just a more minimal starting point.

yote_zip, 1 year ago

The readme links to this one. It will automatically update after manual installation.

yote_zip, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

I haven’t used Kali Linux before, but hcxtools is available in the Debian repos so presumably your /etc/apt/sources.list is invalid (probably the LiveUSB has disabled non-iso sources). Can you post what is in that file?

Edit: Actually it looks like Kali uses a single line for its repo. Can you add

deb http://http.kali.org/kali kali-rolling main contrib non-free non-free-firmware

to your /etc/apt/sources.list, run an apt update and try again?

yote_zip, 1 year ago

Did you actually apply the crack over top of the original files? You say you’re running the executable in the CODEX directory, but the CODEX directory would be where the temporary crack files are, not where the game is expecting them. You can also try installing the latest repack from KaOs, which you can find on 1337x by searching for “skyrim repack kaos”. The repack will auto-crack everything so you can be sure that at least that is done correctly.

yote_zip, 1 year ago

Flatpak is like an alternative packaging system that exists outside of your distro’s normal packaging model, e.g. apt/dnf/pacman etc. The killer features are that Flatpaks work on any distro with a single universal package, and that the software versions will be cutting-edge without needing cutting-edge system dependencies. Flatpaks run in their own dependency network and generally don’t rely on anything from the host system - this means that you can have arbitrary software on your machine that your distro/repo maintainers don’t need to compile/quality-control/stability-test/etc. It also comes with an easy sandboxing framework out of the box as a bonus.

In my case I usually use Flatpaks to get more current versions of software without totally messing up Debian’s “Debian does not break” stability model - Debian is meticulously maintained so that its “Stable” branch only has ultra-stable versions of software, at the expense of those packages being older and frozen. If you use a distro with smaller package repos (e.g. OpenSUSE/Fedora/etc) you’ll probably appreciate finding Flatpak versions of software that you’d normally need to manually compile.

Flatpaks are cool, and they have a specific use. They’re not the end-all be-all of packaging and they’re (hopefully) not going to replace apt/dnf/pacman. As for why they hate apt I have no idea. apt is good, and you can even make it a little nicer by installing nala and using that instead of apt.

If the basis of this thread is that you’re digging for distro recommendations I’d personally steer you towards Linux Mint and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for their ease of use. Debian is a little more difficult to set up than Linux Mint but not tremendously so. Arch is more of an “intermediate” difficulty distro where the main challenge is that your system packages are fast-moving and can break/change in small ways from day-to-day. If you aren’t comfortable with Linux you might get frustrated with minor bugs that you don’t know how to troubleshoot. Conversely, if you want to learn Linux then dealing with Arch’s shenanigans will help expose you to various parts of the system naturally.

yote_zip, 1 year ago

ZFS and BTRFS could update their codebase to account for these (if they haven’t already), but I agree that their extra mechanical parts worry me. I really don’t care about speed - if you run enough HDDs in your RAID then you get enough speed by proxy. If you need better speeds then you should start looking into RAM/SSD-caching etc. I’d rather have better reliability than speed, because I hate spinning rust’s short lifespan as-is.

yote_zip, 1 year ago

Architects vs developers.

yote_zip, 1 year ago

Where’s the fun in paying someone else to do it all for you?

MergerFS+SnapRAID will give you a very similar set of features/flexibility compared to UNRAID storage. OpenMediaVault has native MergerFS+SnapRAID support and can also do ZFS - I would look at that for a comparable alternative. Otherwise, I’m very fond of a Proxmox host with a TrueNAS VM for ZFS pool management, or just managing the ZFS pool with the Proxmox host itself through this cockpit extension.

yote_zip, 1 year ago

Probably because they pack a ton of files into a handful of compressed archives, which means the full archive needs to redownload when a single file is changed. Does Steam not have a delta patching system to handle this? They already compress downloads so it’s not like a delta patch framework would cost extra CPU in comparison, and the bandwidth savings would be immense. Seems like low hanging fruit to me?

yote_zip, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

Do you have any examples? I have never seen a paywall while using this. They have a list of supported sites, though I’m not sure if all of them are guaranteed to work 24/7 or if they need frequent updates.

yote_zip, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

The link I posted is for Firefox. The Chrome version is here, and it looks like it should continue working with MV3. (Obviously, the better solution is to stop using Chrom*. Mozilla is modifying Manifest V3 so adblockers/etc will continue to work in a post-MV3 world).

Edit: Added dev’s comments/issue-link on MV3

yote_zip, 1 year ago

A couple nits to pick: BTRFS doesn’t use/need journaling because of its CoW nature - data on the disk is always correct because it doesn’t write data back over the same block it came from. Only once data is written successfully will the pointer be moved to the newly-written block. Also, instantaneous copies from BTRFS are actually due to reflinking instead of CoW (XFS can also do reflinking despite not being CoW, and ZFS didn’t have this feature until OpenZFS 2.2 which just released).

I agree with the ZFS bit and I’m firmly in the BTRFS/ZFS > Ext4/XFS/etc camp unless you have a specific performance usecase. The ability to scrub checksums of data is so invaluable in my opinion, not to mention all the other killer features. People have been running Ext4 systems for decades pretending that if Ext4 does not see the bitrot, the bitrot does not exist. (then BTRFS picks up a bad checksum and people scold it for being a bad filesystem)

yote_zip, 1 year ago

Arch is bleeding edge and frequently has minor bugs as a result. This is probably fine for power users and people who want to learn Linux but I wouldn’t give an Arch distro to someone who isn’t techy. They also likely won’t appreciate the frequent updates to applications that they depend on to actually do work.

(I used Arch for almost five years and think it’s one of the best distros)

yote_zip, 1 year ago

Aside from philosophical issues my experience with Flatpak has been excellent. There’s some theming steps you need to do to make them feel like regular apps, which I feel is clunky design. No Flatpak-induced instability from what I can tell. Setting up directory permissions is sometimes slightly annoying but Flatseal makes it trivial, and most Flatpak permissions are set up properly out of the box these days.

I haven’t noticed any start-time delays when launching Flatpaks as opposed to regular apps - I don’t know if they’ve fixed that or if my system is just too powerful. The only app that I’ve personally noticed is weird is VSCodium, which has trouble escalating to admin permissions when you’re trying to edit privileged files. I still use the regular version for that reason.

yote_zip, 1 year ago

I use a few packages from Homebrew and don’t have any problems with it. By default it installs itself into /home/homebrew or something which I didn’t like so I put it into ~/Applications/Homebrew instead using these steps. It warns that you may be forced to compile software if you do it this way but I’m down to clown so whatever.

The biggest problem I have with it is that you’ll need to keep it updated alongside your regular packages, which I do by aliasing a simple upgrade command that runs all my package manager upgrades.

I would also recommend ungoogled-chromium as an alternative to Brave, which does have its own official Flatpak (not marked as such but it’s linked to in the ungoogled-chromium project github).

yote_zip, 1 year ago

Yeah. What repackers do is they source the game, source all the updates, source the DLC, and source the cracks, then put it all together, make sure it works, compress it into an installer, and distribute it. As an end-user you run the installer to decompress the game and then click play. Repackers don’t actually do any of the cracking themselves, they just put it all in one package and make it easy. The installer will run CPU-heavy while it decompresses their heavy compression so don’t be alarmed by that.

yote_zip, 1 year ago

Any sort of malicious activity that’s not bitcoin mining can be disguised easily within the background noise of normal CPU usage. If you’re getting pwned, assume you’re getting pwned for longer than the duration of the install program - any strenuous pwning could be spread out across hours or days if they really wanted. If you’re ultra-worried about whether repackers are trustworthy, you can always source clean game files and crack the game yourself.

yote_zip, 1 year ago

Seems like there’s some bitrot in the middle of the file, and whatever you’re using to play back the original file just skips it and doesn’t care enough to halt playback. You might try looking for ways to restore as much of the file as possible with something like this, assuming the mkv is a unique copy that you can’t get anywhere else.

Edit: I’m also curious if this file lives on an XFS/BTRFS/ZFS filesystem. The reflink property of these filesystems may be the reason that you can copy within the same folder without it throwing an error.

yote_zip, 1 year ago

Yes, you should. There’s a low probability that anything bad will happen but you might as well reduce that to zero. Private trackers (should) only email you for account creation confirmation and whenever you want a password reset.

yote_zip, 1 year ago

Yeah. It’s a good piracy resource anyway, so you might want one regardless. Just fill out junk information if you need to.

yote_zip, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

The keygen generates a key based on your system’s perceived HWID - this is sort of how Denuvo operates as well. Keys generated on one system won’t work on another. I don’t know why there’s an Android version though.

80_PA running under WINE looks like this.

Edit: From a glance at their website it seems like this newer 80_PA is based (only?) around offline activation codes (Request Codes), where you can take a code generated from a Securom program, plug it into the keygen, and put the Unlock Code back into the program. This would work on Android/wherever as it doesn’t directly rely on the HWID being visible. The older 80_PA version worked based off of system HWIDs, and generated keys without needing request codes. The older 80_PA does include some request code decryption tools but as far as I can tell doesn’t directly translate a request code into an unlock code?

yote_zip, 1 year ago

That version does not work for me either, but the copy available on cs.rin’s dedicated Fable 3 thread, posted on page 12 by arthurclg17 (thread ID 59454) does work properly. Alternatively, you can try generically defeating Securom with a DLL-based method, though it’s a little more involved. I have a guide for that here.

yote_zip, 1 year ago

Emphasis on #4 here - the anti-adblock will trigger if it detects any subpar adblocker, including e.g. Brave Browser’s “Shields” thing (even if you also use uBlock Origin). Helped a friend figure this out lately and found out they were running 3 adblockers and Brave Browser. Some people are truly special.