Here to follow content related to Star Trek, Linux, open-source software, and anything else I like that happens to have a substantial Lemmy community for it.

Main fediverse account: @f00fc7c8@woem.space

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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • I’m against a megathread. That would be too busy and I think there will be more than enough to discuss about each episode.

    For entirely selfish reasons, I’d like individual discussion threads for each episode that come out one or two a day, since that’s the pace I expect to be watching it (optimistically).

    Though, I think the best option for everyone might be five-episode blocks. That would allow both bingewatchers and slower viewers to enjoy the conversation without spamming the feed, and will match up well enough with the “parts” it would have been split into if it aired on Nickelodeon that both broad and individual episode discussions will make sense.



  • Debian! It’s stable, elegant, and doesn’t impede customization. I distro-hopped a lot over the years - some that I ended up disliking included KaOS (severely limited software repository), Clear Linux (only way to get ffmpeg was to compile it from source) and Fedora (very slow); most I liked, and just decided to move on at some point. But I kept coming back to Debian, and eventually got to a point where instead of trying a different distro when Debian broke, I would just reinstall Debian.

    I’d be interested to try VanillaOS or another “immutable” distro at some point in the future. See if they’ve matured enough for my day-to-day use.





  • TOS: The Cloud Minders. One of the show’s extremely heavy-handed message episodes, this time about classism and labor rights. It’s quite dramatically compelling in addition to expressing its ideas eloquently.

    TAS: Beyond the Farthest Star. One of the more “normal” episodes of that series, but it really works for me.

    TNG: Contagion. One of the most tense and action-packed TNG episodes, featuring computer malfunctions both amusing and terrifying, but also a great showcase for all the characters, and their ability to combine their talents to solve what seems like an impossible problem, to the point that it’s one of the episodes that got me into Trek in general (alongside Remember Me).

    DS9: Visionary. Pretty good episode of time travel weirdness, and one of my go to examples of what I think is best way to go about explaining time travel: don’t explain it, just do whatever wacky shit you want and laugh off the paradoxes with a recurring joke. “I hate temporal mechanics!”

    VOY: Latent Image. In addition to being yet another fascinating exploration of the rights and sentience of artificial life, with a hint of an ethical dilemma in there, I really relate to how the Doctor’s trauma responses are described.

    DIS: There Is A Tide. I love all of the scenes between Admiral Vance and Osyraa.

    PIC: The Impossible Box. I remember that being one of the more tense and well-made episodes of the show, especially Soji’s existential crisis and Picard’s Borg flashbacks, although I find it hard to think in individual episodes with this one.

    LD: Veritas. The show hadn’t really clicked with me before this episode. I loved the whole theme about the lack of attention the command crew gives to the ensigns, and how this just adds to their problems.

    I’ve only really seen the consensus classics of ENT, and while I have seen SNW and PRO, my favorites are all consensus favorites that get a decent amount of buzz already.




  • This is an interesting comment, actually, because instead of hating on the new shows and comparing them to the old ones, Matt’s hating on the old shows for being politically correct and saying DS9 and Voyager, the shows that were currently airing as of 1999, are the good ones. Even though DS9 was more diverse and less subtle about its themes, compared to TNG.

    Imagine if Dave Cullen, Doomcock, Midnight’s Edge, Nerdrotic, etc. dedicated their careers to saying that the new Star Trek shows were AWESOME because they were less woke than TNG and DS9. That’s what this is.


    1. Create a source control repository containing all your code, and publish it to an online code forge. GitHub’s docs might help with this: https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/start-your-journey
    2. Choose an open-source license and add it to the repository as a LICENSE file. If you want to require any projects that build upon yours to be open-source too, the GNU GPL is a good choice. If you want to allow proprietary programs to include your library without releasing any source code other than that which is directly based on yours, the GNU LGPL is good for that. If you want to allow people to do whatever they want, even use all your code as the basis of a proprietary program without credit, the Unlicense is a good choice. There are a lot of licenses with different degrees of “copyleft” and attribution requirements in between. Technically publishing with a license file is all you need to do, but there are more things you should do.
    3. Create a README text file describing what your program does, and instructing users on how to compile and run it. Consider including more detailed documentation on how to use it, as well.
    4. Clean up your code and file layout so that it’s as easy as is feasible for other programmers to understand.
    5. Promote your project to whoever you think might find it useful!




  • Unfortunately, the state of Android music players is not great. Currently I have two FOSS music players installed: Metro Music Player (the F-Droid version of Retro Music Player) and mucke. mucke has a ton of really cool features that improve the shuffle experience but it’s actually worse than most apps at pulling album art. Retro/Metro has beautiful UI, and has pretty good features for customization, but lacks the cool features mucke has and is less stable. Both have more than one annoying bug, but it took me a while to find music players that had this few dealbreakers.





  • You can start anywhere you want! I often recommend starting with Star Trek: The Next Generation, since it's aged a little better than the original series. You might prefer to jump ahead to season 2 or 3 to get to the really good stuff, but even season 1 is worth watching.

    Up until Enterprise season 3 it's pretty much all episodic (or in DS9's case, mostly episodic with a subset of the episodes forming a series-long story arc), so you can pick a random episode or movie with a cool-sounding description and start there if you want. That's how I got into Trek, just picking random TNG and Voyager episodes.