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Cake day: July 14th, 2025

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  • Yeah I think he’s kind of right. The problem is it was successful as a British TV show, but it popped off in a small way under Matt Smith in the US, and so then it became “can this be a big export franchise?”. We’re in an era of everything being looked at as IP and franchises.

    Doctor Who might get rested but it isn’t going anywhere now; it’s too financially important to the BBC and also they (and other studios) think it has the potential to become a mega franchise that spins and spins money. The problem is it’s fallen into an “action adventure” trap, with ever higher stakes and a need to top the last idea with something bigger and better.

    It’s a bit like Star Trek in that regard. What made it successful initially was that it was a decently written Sci Fi show, story of the week, sometimes hit sometimes miss. When Star Trek was good though, it was VERY good. Same with it’s various spin offs like TNG, DS9 and to a lesser extent Voyager, etc. It always had some action but the films and competition with Star Wars also set it heavily down an increasingly action-adventure route instead of sci-fi or smaller people focus. When it came back it focuses on silly fan service while being lots of action sequences connected together rather than focusing on plot. Discovery was ok in parts but full of it’s own self importance, ridiculous kung fu sequences and trying to raise the stakes all the time to be a compelling action show. It also went down the mystery box route, but the mysteries also had to ramp up the stakes constantly. Star Trek has lost it’s way. Strange New Worlds started decently but again is gradually falling into the same trap - raise the stakes. It’s basically narrative inflation, and it ultimately makes bad stories.

    Doctor Who has been doing that for a while - constantly raising the stakes and getting further and further away from the characters being important. The Doctor is basically a god in the current series; he never was in the original. The way he’s treated by other characters and the story arcs just makes it impossible to focus the show back down and humanise him. When the stakes become the literal multiverse every week, it’s hard to care about smaller stories, and the characters smaller personal motivations and arcs just appear selfish or pointless. Who cares about a character’s personal struggles, if the stakes are the death of everyone? It makes a huge disconnect for viewers between the characters and the story around them. And it’s also hard to sell a show like Doctor Who to new viewers without focusing on the action and the set pieces. You start watching Doctor Who and you get told “here is this god, saving the universe”. It’s honestaly a crazy thing to ask people to jump into.

    Doctor Who at it’s best was just like Star Trek - smaller stories with compelling ideas and characters. But now it’s having to be not just “monster of the week” (which was already a bad enough trap to fall in) but now super-hero story of the week. Each episode has to focus on building up hype for the ending, and connecting action set pieces. There is no room for character and story - and so it’s become frankly boring and unwatchable.

    It needs a complete reset - it needs to be a smaller show, with a much more focused story with lower but more important stakes. For me an obvious arc is the Doctor journeying to find his missing grand daughter. Instead of saving the universe from some mysterious threat, he should be travelling for a personal reason and having smaller adventures that showcase interesting settings and characters. We don’t need monster of the week every week; it can be what the show used to do well - explore personal stories in a historical or sci fi setting. It can ground itself in a more realistic aesthetic and allow the characters and story to shine. The Doctor on a personal journey to find Susan opens so many possibilities for character development, and stakes that would allow us to empathise and connect with the character.

    That’s what I’d do anyway.



  • So on my linux PC, I have made a KVM (Kernal Virtual Machine) using QEMU and made a Windows 11 machine inside it (and I bought a digital license for it), which I have work office and email set up. I personally only need to use it occasionally. If you give it enough resources it works decently & runs all windows software; although as it doesn’t have a dedicated graphics card it won’t look as slick as native windows 11 machine and run GPU intense software well (you can get it it’s own dedicated video card and pass it through but really isn’t worth it for just using Excel). It means I can main linux but use Windows occasionally if I really have to. It means you can have a full Windows machine with work Microsoft account set up for Office, One Drive etc - depending on your employers policies of course. You can cut down the resources you allocate it if you want to be switching between the Windows machine and other software in Linux, but Windows can be laggy without enough resources as it’s so poorly optimised.

    There are sites that guide on setting up a windows 11 machine in linux, but essentially you need to install KVM modules and Virtual Machine manager in linux (available on all distros). You do need to access your PCs bios to ensure the settings that allow virtual machines to access the CPU are on (slightly different name between AMD and Intel CPUs).

    Then you create a machine in Virtual machine manager, give it plenty of resources (especially if the idea being when you use it if it’s the only think you’ll be doing, give it access to most of your CPU cores and the majority of your RAM), and create a decent size virtual hard drive file (I’d say minimum 128gb or more as Windows is bloaty - you can set the virtual drive file size to be flexible so it has a max size but the actual file size is only what is used by the guest system but some file systems still use the whole space unfortunately; not sure how Windows behaves). Download the Windows 11 installer ISO, and then add that file as a virtual CD drive for your guest machine, boot the guest machine, and you should get the Win 11 installer. The VM can only see the virtual hard drive file, so you can install Win 11 safely onto the drives it sees with no risk to your PC. Then reboot and you should have a new Windows install; test it - if it works, buy a digital license (if you want…) and install Office using your 365 account OR if you have old CDs then pass those through to the virtual machine and install as on any Windows PC.



  • Yeah it can be confusing; Flatseal makes it easier as it’s a GUI way of doing what is otherwise command line with flatpak itself but it still assumes some knowledge about what you’re doing and can be a bit of trial and error. The more you expose to the sandbox, the more “native” performance you can achieve but it’s at the expense of security.

    In Flatseal you can set global options for all apps, or individual apps. For graphics, in the Device section, toggling the option to make the GPU available to the sandboxes may be needed - “GPU Acceleration” in the Device section. That one option can be pretty effective as GPU hardware acceleration is often important, if not essential, for programs like Handbrake (which are video transcoding).

    This is equivalent to “device=dri” when launching the flatpak via the commandline.



  • I support KDE, Mozilla and a fediverse instance currently. A small amount to each, each month, but it is worth it to me. I pay for VPN, email, and password manager, so contributing to KDE, Mozilla and the fediverse feels just like another small set of subscriptions.

    I’m lucky I can afford to do this; I think any financial contribution of any size is appreciated by the FOSS world.

    EDIT: In terms of things I’m thinking of - Jellyfin and maybe Piefed. Mozilla is a bit of a question mark for me with the AI stuff; but I still value Firefox immensely.




  • This is fascinating research and does offer some hope for future research but is far from being applicable in humans. This is based on mouse models - mice don’t get Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) as the article says, so we’re inducing a similar illness in them via genetic engineering by messing with genes that are associated with AD in humans. It does not follow that this is the same condition that we see in humans. So reversing the articifically created AD-like disease in Mice does not mean that it has any relevance to humans.

    Also while the mice saw “full recovery”, even those who were treated after disease onset, that also does not necessairly apply to human AD. This kinds of experiments will have been run for weeks or months, while AD in humans has years of onset. The mice may not have had the same kind of fundamental damage seen in human AD. Mouse cognitive function is also quite different from human cognitive function - we are significantly more intelligent and complex beings.

    The research does have value, and does add further evidence to the role NAD+ might play in the disease or treatin the disease. But unfortunately this is a long way from relevance to treating people with AD now. This could be a useful finding or it could end up being an irrelevant curiosity - such is the nature of research. It should also be noted that this is a news article, not a peer reviewed article and is more of a “PR” piece; this research is being commercialised by those involved so the motivation is to talk up their findings. A dose of healthy scepticism is needed on the coverage for this. Fingers crossed this comes to something meaningful in the fight against Alzheimer’s Disease.


  • Yes but I wouldn’t recommend a Deck for streaming. The interface is geared for “on the go”. It’s great for gaming on the TV but it is a little clunky for streaming. You can open a browser and use that for streaming but it’s best done in Desktop mode. You can actually add Chrome as a custom “game” in Gamescope mode and set it up to launch a website like Netflix but I find it a little unreliable on filling the screen in that mode.

    I do have a mini PC that I use for both gaming and streaming, and it works well. You can get something more powerful than the SteamDeck (as it doesn’t need a screen nor to be mobile), and put pretty much any desktop on there. I personally use KDE with a remote keyboard and mouse, but if you want prefer a full screen interface, then probably Kodi is your best bet. For streaming you can add a Browser Launcher plugin to launch Firefox or Chrome, so you can run Netflix etc. But a mouse & keyboard is still probably needed as an interface.

    HDR viewing is an issue on Linux devices currently though. It’s improving but can be hit and miss depending on hardware and software.

    There are also other TV interfaces coming - like KDE Plasma’s Bigscreen; but it’s got a way to go as it’s only recently been resurrected.


  • I’m not aware of general Linux specific tools for this (game specific ones do exist). However:

    They both work by you running them in wine and pointing them to the game files created by Steam (or Gog or any windows game installed via Wine or Proton) in the Linux filesystem (e.g. /home/yourname/.steam/steamapps/common/game) instead of windows filesystem (e.g. C:\program files\game)

    Modloaders with “bootstrap” fixes will also work; they just have to be installed and run in the same proton/wine prefix as the game. I.e. if you install Cyberpunk 2077 via steam, the bootstrap type mods need to be installed into the game folder or fake-windows file system that Proton makes for the game. It even has it’s own “drive C” folder for the rare times you need 3rd party tools. You also put tools into the game folder as you would on windows. If it has it’s own custom exe you can tell wine/proton to run that instead of the game or even before the game in the same prefix.

    I mod games extensively on Linux; they work just as they do in Windows. I’ve played heavily modded Cyperpunk 2077 to completion (all the mod tools work via proton - that takes a little tweaking to get working but is doable - and many mods you just drop into specific sub folders; I played with about 50 mods and I didn’t find a single one that didn’t work on Linux specifically), Stardew Valley, Rimworld and Minecraft for example of bredth. Stardew, Rimworld and Minecraft even have linux specific tools to help.

    This is less a case of games run via Linux not being moddable, and more that it has it’s own learning curve (in the same way modding on Windows has a learning curve). Once you understand how the linux filesystem and how proton/wine work, the world is your oyster. Protontricks and Winetricks are not just useful for getting games running or tweaking them, they’re a modders best friend.


  • From what I’ve seen there has been some confusion over the state Lutris as the last version was seemingly 0.5.18 in Dec 2024 and “nothing since”. However version 0.5.19 is available as a tag within the github repository from Feb 2025, and they’re working on 0.5.20. It sounds like there is some issue with the 0.5.19 git, and development overall has slowed down as the lead dev is working full time.

    I think a lot of this shows how open source software is so dependent on a small number of active people keeping projects going and there isn’t money flowing into otherwise very important and popular projects.

    I like Lutris but I think Heroic is probably more fully featured than Faugus at present.

    Faugus is an UMU-Launcher. UMU Launcher is essentially a open implementation of the Steam Runtime Tools and Steam Linux Runtime, which can run independently of Steam itself - it essentially aims to be Proton as you get in steam, without needing steam running. It aims to be a single shared implementation to simplify Proton fixes and implementations which are otherwise fragmented and duplicated - each game gets fixes applied individually by each of the existing games launchers in their own projects. It’s a laudable aim, but it’s not clear whether it can achieve it’s aims as Lutris, Heroic, Bottles etc are still doing their own things. So at the moment it’s another launcher?



  • I loved CS1 and have had CS2 since launch. I just can’t get into CS2 - it’s just not fun.

    A large part of that is Paradox Mods in CS2. When CS1 launched from day one you could go onto the steam workshop and download player made models - houses, offices, train stations, roads etc. It grew rapidly and continuously, and it meant every city you made you could customise and change. The game was constantly refreshing and fun, and you could make whatever you wanted.

    For CS2, 2 years on and you still can’t add custom assets to the game. Paradox/CO have released themed region based asset packs that they have made and the mods are there, but the player made assets remain largely missing. And I suspect the reason is Paradox Mods and the upcoming console version - the PC version seems to have been held back from being good so Paradox can get it’s console launch. There seems to be a fundamental lack of understanding that the player made content was what made CS1 so great. I suspect CO get that, while Paradox only cares about DLC.