For 3DS games I use NDSTokyoTrim to remove useless data from the game files to make them smaller.

DreamCast, PS1 & PS2 games get compressed to chd with chdman.

GameCube and Wii are compressed to rvz with Dolphin.

PS3 I remove the PS3_UPDATE folder, 256MiB for each game adds up. I also use Gnarly Repacks for PS3 games since they have better compression than anything I've tried so far.

Switch games, I use nsz.

Then I use tar with zst on all of them, Nsz and rvz already use zst so theres no change but I just like to keep everything the same accross all of my roms and pc games.

Everything else, GB, NDS, SNES etc all get archived and compressed with tar and zst. For these I'll also use the --ultra -22 option since they're small enough files anyway so they don't take long to compress/decompress. If anyone knows any specific compression/trimming methods that are better than zst, I'd love to hear about them!

Copies of all the tar archives are kept on 2 separate drives and a copy of the games are on my PC in whatever the smallest format is that is compatible with their emulator.

https://support.rockstargames.com/articles/33490543992467/Grand-Theft-Auto-Online-BattlEye-FAQ

Steam Deck does not support BattlEye for GTA Online

Such a crappy way of wording it and trying to blame the steam deck when BattlEye has said that they have had linux and wine support long before the steam deck came out

Official Rockstar Community (RP) Servers will not require BattlEye to play. Community Server launchers will disable BattlEye as part of their launch processes.

What makes RP servers so special that they don't need BattlEye?

https://www.pcgamer.com/battleye-anti-cheat-confirms-steam-deck-support/

BattlEye has provided native Linux and Mac support for a long time and we can announce that we will also support the upcoming Steam Deck (Proton). This will be done on an opt-in basis with game developers choosing whether they want to allow it or not.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/genetics-firm-23andme-says-user-data-stolen-in-credential-stuffing-attack/

The information that has been exposed from this incident includes full names, usernames, profile photos, sex, date of birth, genetic ancestry results, and geographical location.

The threat actor accessed a small number of 23andMe accounts and then scraped the data of their DNA Relative matches, which shows how opting into a feature can have unexpected privacy consequences.

• Usernames Profile Photos DoB

They can be linked to other online accounts. This allows for phishing, potentially scamming or getting additonal information on them which can lead to more sophisticated/personalised scams. Older, less tech savvy users are better targets for scammers.

• Username Sex DoB Genetic Ancestry Location data

Data aggregators can sell this info to Health Insurance Companies or any other system who can then discriminate based on genes sex age or location

• All of this information

Can contribute to people committing fraud with their information if they collect enough information from different sources.

• DNA relatives

Having enough information about a user to use it to target their now known relatives in personalised scams.

The people that did this probably didn't know what information they were going to get, maybe they were hoping for payment info, and settled for trying to just sell what they got.

Any information, no matter how useless it might seem, is better than no information and enough useless information in the wrong hands can be very valuable.

Theres countless data breaches every year and people will collect it all and link different accounts from different breaches until they have enough information. Most people use the same email address for every website and a lot of people reuse the same passwords, which is how this data leak occurred. Knowing that these users reuse the same email/password combination here means theres a very good chance they've reused it elsewhere.

You can check out what data breeches have occured and if your email or password has been posted in any of these dumps here https://haveibeenpwned.com/

Once the information is out there, its out there for good and what might seem trivial now to you could be valuable tomorrow to someone else

Finally a good take. Or maybe I'm just a pessimist lol

Microsoft are masters at dancing around anti competitive regulation. Xbox is struggling, they've said so themselves. I think they're going to focus more on Gamepass and the Windows Store so making it as difficult as possible for the likes of the Steamdeck to succeeded is in their best interest. If they can push companies to adopt their new framework and at the same time make that framework almost impossible to implement into wine then its a win win. They can hurt wine while painting it as better security so they're isn't another CrowdStrike incident.

Anticompetitive practices disguised as user security.

I know linux isn't very popular for the general public but Apple has their own implementation of wine in development and Google has flooded schools with Chromebooks. If I was Michaelsoft, I'd want to crush the competition quickly and discreetly now before I implement my Windows subscription so people don't have any good alternatives left

Yeah, sometimes there just isn't another option. I have a 60GiB Win11 VM for things I use every few months for a couple of minutes at a time

I'd recommend https://www.qemu.org/ for virtualisation

https://virt-manager.org/ for a gui to manage VMs, you can easily add or remove cores, memory, internet, directories etc really easily.

https://github.com/winfsp/winfsp lets you add a directory from your host to the VM to easily share files

https://github.com/virtio-win/virtio-win-guest-tools-installer makes the cursor seamlessly move between the VM and host instead of pressing ctrl alt g to escape.

Win11 23H2 still allows for offline set up. Just press shift f10 when you're at the internet set up and type

oobe/bypassnro

The VM will reboot and give you the option to select I don't have internet so you can just use a local account

https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat/ for getting rid of the unwanted bloatware

Theres also an easy way to activate windows for free, I don't think I can link it here but its on github and MAS-sive amount of people have starred it.

I started The Witcher 3 for the second time. I tried it a year ago and I kept getting absolutely wrecked by the ghost thing in thr very first crypt so I gave up but this time I killed it straight away so who knows what I was doing wrong last time! Also, probably a bit controversial but I refuse to learn how to play Gwent, I don't have the time or patients to learn a card game inside an already massive game

I also started and finished American Arcadia this weekend and I absolutely loved it. I'm trying to play shorter games that I wouldn't usually play in between The Witcher 3 since its long. AA is probably one of the best games I've played. The story is fantastic and the gameplay is pretty basic, which suits me. It doesn't take itself too seriously and has some fun twists at the end.

I've also been playing Supraland, its a pretty fun, chill game. The areas aren't very difficult and the upgrade system is fun. I love the funny dialogues from the NPCs and again its a fun game that doesn't take itself seriously and I find myself smiling while playing it

I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as Manjaro, is in fact, Arch/Manjaro, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, Arch plus Manjaro. Manjaro is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning Arch system made useful by pacman, yay and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.

Over and over and over and over the gaming community has been screwed over by Publishers so I'll stop grave dancing when Corpos stop being so horrible

• Requiring a third party account to play a game months after it was released and after selling it to customers who can't legitimately make an account because you don't feel like their country can make you enough profit. Helldivers 2

• Attempting to take away peoples digital "purchases" of media because you can't be bothered to pay licencing. Sony

• Changing the definition of "purchase" an established word in English and not defining your new definition until page 22 of a EULA that you know nobody is going to read. Sony, and everyone else

• Shutting down a server and rendering a game with a whole single player aspect completely useless and not telling consumers this at the time of purchase. The Crew (https://www.stopkillinggames.com/)

• Selling a terribly incomplete game filled with glitches for the price of a full game. Cyberpunk 2077 and so many others.

• Selling Pre-Purchases to let people play the game early but really its just another way to get people to pay to be Guinea pigs in your buggy game. That new Star Wars game and so many others.

• Adding so many stupid "micro transactions" to games to milk players as much as possible for useless skins and camos etc. Diablo 4 and so many more.

• Adding a "Season Pass"???? I don't even understand what this is??? Buy a full priced game and then buy a subscription to that game??? But still not have access to all of the content and then be shown a magic glove that costs €500, why is this not part of the subscription or is it???? I hope it is. New COD and probably others

• "Making" a game and selling it to people but really its just a scam where they got "volunteers" to work on the game for free. Then shutting the game down instantly. That zombie game with Will Smith.

• Something, something Overwatch 2 is a totally brand new game.

• Shutting down third party mods for an unsupported and dangerous game just after the sale for that game is over. Fine, they didn't own all of the assets used but they did fix the issue where people could infect your system with malware. COD

• Increasing the prices of all of your subscriptions and making those subscriptions worse by offering less while your parent company is posting ~$20 Billion profits in the most recent quarter, yes quarter, thats like 3 months...

Btw all of these examples have happened within the last 4 years. Its pretty sad that I can list these off the top of my head. I only play single player games and I only got back into gaming a couple of years ago after ~10 years of not really playing anything

Wow that's crazy, banning specific types of restaurants in cities has to be one of the weirder things I've heard of. Also, there are loads of vegan restaurants in the main cities in Italy so no need to worry if you plan to visit!

I think it means lives, as in you don't eat a whole pig but if you have some bacon that could come from one or more pigs that have had to be murdered for you

If your phone has a password on it then its data is going to be encrypted until you unlock the phone.

You can temporarily boot a twrp recovery image. It will let you put in your password and decrypt your storage.

You should be able to transfer the files to your PC with a cable then

No, its the same character model as a normal Mind Flayer. At least it was a few months ago when I did it but I doubt they've changed it since then

Even if your coutry reaches 100% and you haven't signed, please still do incase some signatures are invalid

TIP – It is better to collect more signatures than required. Sometimes the national authorities might not be able to validate all the statements of support you provide.

https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/how-it-works_en

Around 16 TiB and I keep 3 copies of everything so 48 TiB used of around 65TiB. I encoded all my TV shows and most of my movies with AV1 and keep most of my files compressed, which saves a bunch of space so hopefully I won't need more drives any time soon

For me the issue here is, why put so much time and energy into basically rebranding an LLM. I've seen LLMs running on RPi and android phones. Why not write a blog post showing how to run LLMs locally with existing tools for the best privacy instead and put more focus on their existing services. It just seems like they're jumping on the AI bandwagon and charging a premium for an already freely available LLM.

I see some benefits of AI like quality tts when using OSM and stt when transcribing/translating audio but other things like Googles AI answers and Microsofts Copilot leave me scratching my head wondering why consumer would want this

Am I out of touch?

a writing assistant was one of the most requested features in our recent survey

Apparently, I am. People actually want this

For Proton Mail, 59% of respondents want an easier way to send end-to-end encrypted emails to non-Proton users, while 29% want a writing assistant for proofreading, grammar, and composing emails.

Nothing I hate more than not giving a link to the repo

Scribe relies on open source code and models, and is itself open source and therefore available for independent security and privacy audits

Not on their support page specifically for it either

Had to got to Reddit and look at their comments to find out they're using Mistral

https://reddit.com/comments/1e68sof/comment/ldsbs24

We built Scribe in r/ProtonMail using the open-source model Mistral AI to empower anyone in need of email productivity to use a privacy-respecting alternative to r/ChatGPT or r/GeminiAI that:
 ❌ doesn't log or save prompts
 ⛔️ doesn't use your data for training
 🔎 open-source code that anyone can inspect
 🖥️ can be run locally, so your data never leaves your device
 
See the official announcement here: https://proton.me/blog/proton-scribe-writing-assistant

https://huggingface.co/mistralai/Mistral-7B-v0.1/discussions/8

Hello, thanks for your interest and kind words! Unfortunately we're unable to share details about the training and the datasets (extracted from the open Web) due to the highly competitive nature of the field. We appreciate your understanding!

I've run into issues where a game will work with a specific version of wine but then not work with a newer version but then other games that don't work with the older version, work with the new one.

Theres also potentially issues of dependencies for one game breaking another game. Separate prefixes just make it easier to troubleshoot a game not working since you can just install/uninstall whatever dependencies that it might need without worrying about messing up other games.

Its also just easier to delete the entire prefix when you realise you've installed too many useless dlls and you've finally found the one thing you do need to make the game work lol

I also like to archive games I like since companies can just decide to remove their games from existence whenever they want. So I just add the separate prefix that has any extra dlls or tweaks to the archive so that the game should still work in 3 years without having to try and download dependencies that may not be as easy to find in the future

But if you don't have issues I don't think its a big deal and if you do have issues with a game, you can just make a separate one for that anyway.

You could chance it, but they probably have logs of your IP/location data or they bought your data somewhere and so they could check, if they cared enough, but if you're not an EU citizen and you live in an EU country then GDPR applies to you

Guide is maybe not the right word lol, it just exactly what I click to set up the majority of my games

I'm not 100% sure, but from my understanding yes the regisrty in the "prefix" folder would be changed. You can manually edit the wine prefix registry with regedit https://www.winehq.org/docs/wineusr-guid<br />e/using-regedit and Lutris supports this, just click the arrow that brings up the winetricks option and its under Wine Registry

Every few months I like to clear out my password manager of any accounts I don't need anymore, usually just throwaway emails aliases.

I'll usually attempt to log into any services that I know I've deleted/requested to delete to make sure they're not accessible anymore and so far I haven't been able to log in to any of them so I can only assume my requests are working.

I suppose if a service had a data breach, after my information was meant to be deleted, and I found my information there then I'd make a complaint to my regulator about not deleting my data. I would have proof of my request and their acknowledgement of the request so it'd be pretty silly of them not to delete it after saying they did

I rarely use anything but email aliases and fake information anyway and I never let online retailers save my card information. And if my address in on my account I change it to P. Sherman 42 Wallabyway Sydney before I delete/request to delete my account.

I spend too much time reading emails so I try to keep mine short, especially when they're going to a generic email like support or privacy.

https://gdpr.eu/right-to-be-forgotten/

The GDPR does not specify what a valid request to erasure entails. An individual can make a request for erasure verbally or in writing. This request can also be made to any member of your organization, not just to a designated contact. As long as a request meets the conditions above, it is valid, even if it does not refer to “Request for Erasure” the “Right to be Forgotten,” Article 17, or the GDPR.

There's no template to follow for a request. Once GDPR is mentioned, they usually just email back saying that they're doing it or its done.

I haven't come across any difficult companies but I've heard some make it as hard as possible and follow the Erasure Request form template in the link above and ask for proof of I.D etc

I use Lutris and set up my directories a "GameName" and then 2 subdirectories "game" "prefix" and point Lutris to these.

All of the game files go in "game" and the prefix is created in "prefix" when I press play in Lutris. Any extras dlls that are needed can be installed with winetricks within Lutris to that specific prefix

This way you can just compress and decompress "GameName" folder and point Lutris to these locations on whichever machine.

You can choose which prefix version you want in Lutris and it will download that version for you. I'm pretty sure it saves the version to somewhere in ~.local/share/lutris I'm not at my PC now so not 100% sure of the path.

It saves it to ~.local/share/lutris/runners/wine and you can put a custom wine build here and Lutris should recognise it when configuring the runner options

So you could copy this over to the corresponding location on the deck and Lutris will automatically detect this version as installed and won't have to download it again but its not necessary unless you don't have internet on the deck, or you're like me and want to keep an archive of the working prefix for the future in case the prefix version is no longer available for whatever reason and other version just won't work.

If you're new to Lutris, I wrote a step by step guide on how I use Lutris on a different community

https://sopuli.xyz/comment/9858101

I usually just write

Hi,

Please delete my account and all data associated with this email in accordance with Article 17 of GDPR, I'm an EU citizen

Thanks x

I just assume if they haven't made it easy to delete your account by now then they never will but these are really good points that will hopefully make companies change their policies, especially since its all things that benefit them

Theres at least 4 websites in the megathread under the ROMs section that have a bunch of Switch games. 3 begin with N and 1 begins with Z. In the FAQ section of the Z website is where I got keys and firmware

Pretty sure its because of the piracy shield thingy. Secure Core might be an option as long as no Italian servers are used and you're using the VPNs DNS

https://torrentfreak.com/airvpn-stops-serving-italians-due-to-piracy-shield-blocking-requirements-240206/

“[A]ll parties in any capacity involved in the accessibility of illegally disseminated content – and therefore also, by way of example and not limitation – VPN and open DNS service providers, will have to execute the blocks requested by the Authority [AGCOM],” the notice read.

I see the Extend part of Embrace Extend Extinguish is about to start...

Use one of the websites in the megathread, unless you want to use the dev tools on a pc to find the video source link and try to download it from there but thats a whole lot of unnecessary effort

???? Theres a download button beside the play button that gives a bunch of sources and each source has a torrent file or magnet link to add to your torrent client

I've never used miui devices but I think you need to make an account and use this https://en.miui.com/unlock/download_en.html so you will probably need to have wine installed to run it, unless it has a native linux version in the zip file. Then you should have an unlocked bootloader

The "media network" is https://kinectivemedia.com/ and they have a link for US customers to opt out that leads to here https://uniteddigital.iad1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_88OQmAbr20oeHn8 but of course you're going to want to also read Qualtrics privacy policy before using their services https://www.qualtrics.com/privacy-statement/

Clicking https://kinectivemedia.com/ privacy policy links to https://www.united.com/en/us/fly/customer-data-privacy-policy.html

They collect the usual stuff you use for travel like name, address, payment details, biometrics, I.D etc and also

Information collected in your use of our mobile application(s) includes, but is not limited to:

• With your consent, your pinpointed physical location information from technologies like GPS, Wi-Fi, or cell tower proximity (geo-location tracking)

• With your consent, while at or near certain airports in the U.S., your pinpointed physical location will be tracked continuously to provide you location-based offers, services and other information. For more information, see the Location Services FAQ located on the side menu of the United App;

• Your domain name;

• Device ID or alternative ID where required by the platform provider;

• Electronic data concerning operating systems and computing devices/browser, including types;

• Features you use and links you click;

• Amount of time spent in the application;

• Installs and uninstalls;

• Transaction details and history.

We may combine this information with information that we already have collected about you.

We collect information about you from third parties. If you make a reservation through a travel agent, we will obtain your travel information from that agent. We may also obtain information about you from our marketing partners, advertisers and other third parties.

We primarily use your information, including personal information, to provide our services to you and to fulfill your requests. In certain circumstances, such as for advertising purposes, we combine your information with other information that we have about you, that is publicly available and/or that we have obtained from third parties (either individually or in the aggregate)

We also use your information for the following purposes:

For marketing and advertising. United uses your information, consistent with applicable law, individually, in the aggregate, and/or combined with demographic information that we maintain or collect from third parties, for marketing and advertising purposes (via email, direct mail, telephone, web or other electronic advertising) and to send you news and newsletters. Specifically, information that we collect about you may be used to send you email, direct mail, or telephone communications about offers from United, its partners or other third parties, that might be of interest to you (please see the section on Disclosing your information below and the section on Changing your marketing preferences below). We also use your information to determine appropriate advertising channels and venues and to place ads on such channels and venues, including placing advertising on social networking sites.

I'm sure the money they make from this will subsidies flight costs that will be passed on to the end user for cheaper flight!

You should be able to kind of do both through android settings

Settings -> Apps -> YourApp -> Mobile data usage -> Allow Network access and Mobile Data

For VPN you'll need to add a VPN and then Settings -> Network and Internet -> VPN -> YourVPN -> Always on VPN and Block Connections without VPN. This blocks all apps. There is 2 issues with this though, Blocking connections will block split tunneling connections set up through VPNs and also potentially this depending on the apps you're using https://mullvad.net/en/blog/dns-traffic-can-leak-outside-the-vpn-tunnel-on-android

TBH I usually wouldn't recommend one vendor over another when it comes to motherboards because realistically nobody spends much time in the BIOS anyway, I'd just suggest the one that has the features you actually want but as the other comment pointed out Asus has been pretty crappy with customer repairs and warranty stuff so it might be worth spending a little bit more in case you do have an issue down the line but that's completely up to you, I have no idea if Gigabyte is better to deal with than Asus, but I do remember they had issues with exploding PSUs before lol

Asus Warranty and Repair Issues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pMrssIrKcY&t=0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3DwhTc7Z4o&t=0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYdtpU8FKO8&t=0

Asus issues related to AM5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbGfc-JBxlY&t=0

Gigabyte's Exploding PSUs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aACtT_rzToI&t=0

I have a Gigabyte B650 skew and I'm happy with it, I think the X670's are overpriced for general use tbh and the 7800X3D was my first choice but it was way too expensive where I live so I got the 7900x. I'm not sure if its still a thing but when I was buying last year, it was recommended to go with 6000 or lower speeds for AMD CPUs for better stability so that should be fine for you.

I'm in Europe so I can't comment on value because its completely different over here and also Microcenter is auto blocking me anyway lol

There was an issue with Over Current Protection on AM5 motherboards when EXPO is enabled that can cause the CPU (especially X3D) to die.

GamersNexus has a few videos on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiTngvvD5dI&amp;t=0

So I would defintely recommend checking Asus's website to see what firmware version they recommend using and upgrading to that before anything else.

https://static.al2.in/toward-nakba-as-a-legal-concept.pdf

Oh nice, we can all still read it. I would have never seen it if they hadn't taken it down since I don't follow Columbia Law Review

I've used https://github.com/Softcatala/whisper-ctranslate2 before for transcribing English and translating non English audio into srt files and its been pretty good for TV shows for me. Its not perfect but it usually gets me about 95% of the way there

Oh nice, I haven't heard of Vanguard! I love how creative some fan games are, especially compared to the main games that have gotten a bit stale. I'm definitely adding it to my list now, thanks!

I'm the type of player that needs the bright yellow markings, that people seem to hate, to be able to get around! So I constantly have to read the signs in Control and even then I still second guess myself.

I did the part where you have to answer the phone at the end of the hallway thingy. The amount of times I just walked off the edge because I didn't understand I had to pull the chord is embarrassing. And then trying to get back from the motel thing I genuinely thought my game was bugged, I was so comfused lol

Ah damn, I know how you feel! Alan Wake remaster kept going black screen every few seconds for me and the only way to fix it was to pause it for a few seconds every time so I had to give up.

Maybe updated drivers or something could have fixed the bugs since then, I definitely recommend checking it out again for a fun linear single player game that doesn't take weeks to finish

Yes! I feel like there really aren't enough games like it! Just a fun little linear shooter with some cool time travel/ superpower elements.

I heard there were references to each other, that's why I wanted to start with Alan Wake before playing Quantum Break but tbh I'm so bad with names and stuff I probably wouldn't even notice them anyway lol

I didn't know Remedy didn't own the rights to it, that's unfortunate because its such a good concept but at least we got Control after it, hopefully they continue with more games like them

Tl;dr Step by step how I setup lutris to run pirated games

I use Lutris, its pretty easy to setup and is pretty much the same setup for most games.

Install lutris wine and winetricks with your package manager. Wine is a windows compatibility layer for linux and winetricks is a helper for downloading and dependencies that a game might need and lutris integrates both of these.

In the file manager, I like to create a folder with the name of the game and then inside of that folder I make 2 folders "game" and "prefix" I put all of the game files in the game folder and leave the prefix folder empty for now.

When you open lutris, on the left, hover over wine and click on the little box icon to manage the wine versions. I recommend, wine-ge. Its a custom build/fork of Steams Proton that adds some extra stuff

Once you have installed that, back on the main page at the top left is a + to add a new game. Select the bottom option, "Add locally installed game". Give the game name and select "wine" as the runner from the dropdown.

Then on the next tab, Game Options, select the games executable location, inside the "game" folder. Set the Working directory as the "game" folder. You can just copy the path that you put in the executable section and backspace until the folder called "game".

For wine prefix, copy the working directory path and replace "game" with "prefix" this is where all the wine/windows stuff will install.

Set the Prefix architecture to 64-bit

On the next tab, Runner Options, you can select the wine version you want to use. It should default to the wine-ge version you installed. At the top right press save and your game should be good to go. There are a whole bunch of other options you can play around with but for pretty much every game I've played I just leave them as default.

This should be fine for most games but sometimes wine updates can break older games and so you may have to try older versions of wine-ge or different versions of wine like lutris-fshack or wine-staging. Or the game may need a special dependency that you need to install. This is why I set a separate prefix directory for each game.

You can look at the logs for a game by selecting it and pressing the arrow beside the play button, this may or may not be helpful for trouble shooting.

If you do need to install an additional dependency, select the game and press the arrow at the bottom right and select winetricks. "Select the default prefix" should be selected by default, press ok and at the top of the next screen you should see the path to the games prefix, then select the "Install a Windows DLL or component" Then you should have a list of packages you can install.

If you're using a repack that needs to be extracted, put the path to setup.exe as the executable on the Game Options tab and run through the installer, selecting the "game" folder that you created as the install location, it is probably under the Z drive. Then when you're done installing, right click the game in lutris and press configure and then back to game options and replace the setup.exe path with the path to the games exe and save.

There's a whole bunch of other ways to do this, like bottles or just using system wine or adding the game as a non-steam game to Steam, I have a separate throwaway Steam account for this.

I like the way lutris is laid out and I like having separate prefixes for each game because I archive the games I like and its nice to have a known working prefix in that archive for games I had issues running.