True. At the same time, if I were forced to invite one to Thanksgiving dinner, I’d have to choose Kai Winn because it’d probably be easier to make her shut up.

I don’t know about that.

While Kai Winn is really fun to hate and has a repulsive personality, on an objective level, she’s better than Dukat. All Kai Winn has to her name is 1 murder (maybe 1.5 if we count her making Bareil meaninglessly sacrifice himself), a failed assassination, some back alley political deals, and a school bombing that killed no one, which, while all horrible, is relatively tame compared to killing millions, sexually assaulting dozens, and running a suicide cult.

Also, while I wouldn’t call Kai Winn humble, she’s much less narcissistic than Dukat. She seems to express a genuine sense of insecurity throughout the series that, while not altruistic, is not expressed (though certainly felt internally) by Dukat. Winn is like, “Why am I not enough for power?” while Dukat is like “I deserve power and someone is cheating me of it.”

Also, when she kills Solbor, she seems to feel a genuine remorse, while Dukat tends to justify his murders.

At least they provide an official Flatpak now.

Also, this isn’t an official repository, but https://github.com/palfrey/discord-apt works pretty good for me. If you look at the source code for the fetching script and the Github Workflows, you can see that they just pull directly from the Discord website, and comparing file hashes further confirms it. I no longer use it since the official Flatpak is an option now, but it’s still useful.

I would ditch Discord, but the TMBW server is just so darn good and I can’t leave that behind. Maybe I could convince them to set up a Matrix bridge (they already self-host MediaWiki), but then they’d probably end up basically doing this just for me.

My university’s Linux User’s Group is on Discord, but they have it bridged with a Matrix server; due to the current state of things in the US, they only allow political discussion in certain encrypted channels that are exclusive to the Matrix server.

Me waiting for Star Trek Lower Decks Volume 2, or at least a repressing of volume 1:

I also recommend dd on a live USB, but with some advice.

First off - and I’m really surprised nobody’s warned you - be EXTREMELY CAREFUL with dd; it is a very powerful tool, but with great potential for data loss. Check your command over and over again to make sure it’s doing what you want before running it, and make sure you have a backup beforehand; it will happily mow over any disk you tell it. Also, do it when you’re fully awake, not at 1 AM or something.

I would call myself an experienced dd user, and even I messed up once recently; I was trying to create a bootable USB when I was really tired. Instead, I overwrote a drive. Luckily, it wasn’t my root drive, and I had a full backup of its contents, so I was able to reformat the drive and restore from backup.

Also, don’t run a bare minumum dd command like dd if=/dev/whateverdevice1 of=/dev/whateverdevice2; it’s going to be an absolute pain in the rear.

dd bs=1M oflag=sync status=progress if=/dev/whateverdevice1 of=/dev/whateverdevice2

• bs=1M: The size of block it tries to copy at a time. Play with this a bit, as different drives have different optimal block sizes.
• oflag=sync: Basically, most operating systems don’t actually write data to the drive right away, but store it in a buffer in RAM to be written later. This is usually fine, but sometimes, you want to be certain that data has actually been written to a drive; this flag turns off that buffering so that when dd is done, the data will for sure actually be on the drive. In lieu of this, you could also just run the sync command afterwards, which forces it to write the current buffer to disk, but I prefer the dd way. It should also do it automatically during shutdown, but I have had cases where a system hangs during shutdown and I’m not certain if syncing is done or not.
• status=progress: Gives the command a progress bar. It’s just really darn convenient and allows you to see how much time is left, how fast the drive is going, etcetera. I don’t know how anyone uses dd without this. Otherwise, it just shows nothing, and you’re left anxiously wondering when it will be done.
• if is input drive, of is output drive. I prefer lsblk for looking at the list of drivers.

You’ll usually need to run dd with sudo.

Once you do a successful copy, you’ll need to extend your BTRFS partition using GParted or similar. If you have a partition after your main one, like swap, you’ll need to delete the swap partition before extending, then recreate the swap partition and update fstab accordingly.

Cool. Probably still not using it. If I want to run an out-of-tree COW filesystem, I might as well be using ZFS - stable and with less drama.

They did do something with the butt bugs in the IDW comics recently…

It’s nice that they still put out Trek physical media.

It’s just really weird that SNW stuff seem to be the franchise’s only 4K Blu-Ray releases (besides film remasters and Kelvin timeline, of course) - everything else with a decent resolution has only been released in 1080p. Like, objectively, I can hardly complain about 1080p, and any more than that for LD and PRO is probably pointless, but it’s really weird that PIC and DIS don’t have it for the seasons that were filmed for 4K.

Also, if they’re not going to renew PRO, can they at least give it the dignity of a complete series set, or at the very least a season 1 Blu-Ray so I don’t have to buy episodes 1-10 and 11-20 separately?!

Yeh, perhaps it’s one of those things Star Trek should leave unanswered, like they should have done with Breen. The Breen are supposed to be a meme!

It’s kind of hard for me to watch the HP movies these days with all the Rowling stuff, which is unfortunate because Radcliffe and Watson have stood up to Rowling’s transphobia. There’s also a lot of stuff from reading the books as a kid that is, in retrospect, rather horrible.

Maybe I could see myself one day re-watching them through a means that doesn’t directly fund Rowling (or, in the future, her estate, if its activities are malicious) and enjoy the work of the other people who aren’t involved with the stuff Rowling is doing, but for me, that day is not today; I just feel too conflicted about it.

For now, though, if I want to enjoy Radcliffe, I throw on 2022’s Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.

I’m very close to finishing my current TNG rewatch and am looking forward to throwing on Generations to commemorate the season.

Despite the issues with S3, I’d still say it isn’t horrible and worth watching. There’s a couple good episodes, and hey - it’s not TNG S1.

According to this, they used “the original 3D scene files”

https://trekmovie.com/2017/03/01/ds9-clips-in-hd-cgi-re-rendering-next-on-wish-list-for-documentary-exclusive-details-video-sample/

Memory Alpha cites this as well as several other sources, showing the files were preserved and used at least in part in the documentary due to vigilant former effects workers.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/CGI#Remastering_projects.27_ramifications

Not quite. The base footage was all 35mm; they were just transferred to tape when doing the editing and VFX shots.

It is very much possible to remaster DS9 at the very least - they did a few select scenes for the documentary “What We Left Behind”, complete with re-rendered CG effects, as the assets still existed on VFX artist’s computers.

Actually, a lot of the CG seems to have survived and is in the hands of VFX artists; they actually remastered a few select scenes and showed them in the documentary “What We Left Behind” and re-rendered the ship battle from the original assets.

I need to play with HomeAssistant more. My last bit of hesitation was I was struggling to find a replacement for the announcement and intercom functionality, which is half of what my family uses Alexa for.

It looks like it got announcements with the “broadcast” intent in February; for the intercom, there may be a plugin. This seems like it might have me covered on the intercom front: https://github.com/JoeHogan/ha-intercom

Perhaps I’ll mess around with it again once the semester’s over; a lot of my family would really like to jump the Amazon ship and certainly be willing to try it if I give them the option.

I haven’t used Nautilus in ages, so I can’t say for certain, but Thunar is a more traditional-feeling file manager. It feels more like an older version of the Windows file manager but with tabs, while Nautilus seems more Mac-like.

That joke’s so funny, it’s making me a bit wheezy…