ffmpeg can use several different AV1 codecs, with varying levels of performance.

Most aliens have forehead ridges; some, like Tandarand, have giant cheeks. But the humans, they have… pronounced philtrums!

I was actually going through the audiobook of this trying to gather and classify enough data to fine tune a Piper TTS voice of the Star Trek computer.

Haven’t finished it yet, but maybe one day. While I normally would have ethical qualms about commanding the likenesses of the dead, they actually did try to collect voice data before Majel Barrett died; unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to actually pull it off, but the attempt feels as close to consent for this sort of thing as one can get.

I don’t know. There’s something about the description of the ENT novels that rubs me the wrong way.

Painfully true, unfortunately.

This is more a comic/graphic novel than a proper Trek novel, but I think Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way is possibly the best Star Trek comic I’ve ever read.

It stays true to the source material, and unlike a lot of IDW stuff I’ve read, doesn’t completely shark jump from the source material in an attempt to be mysterious, cool, or interesting just for the heck of it.

Probably the only other piece of IDW Trek I enjoyed this much was the TNG Mirror Universe, which did really well to achieve a “keep me on the edge of my seat” feeling.

I still need to read some other Trek comics, though, especially the TNG/Doctor Who crossover, which a local library branch of mine has. I also have a ton of PDFs from the recent Humble Bundle to burn through.

What do you use Photoshop for? I ask because if you’re just having fun with it or making simple edits like saturation or color curves, it’s probably easier to find a replacement. GIMP still has a bit of a clunky interface, but has become much more livable since it got some non-destructive editing in 3.0. Personally, I use a combination of Inkscape and GIMP for a lot of stuff.

However, if you’re using Photoshop in a professional capacity as say, a photographer or a graphic designer, I’m not sure you can effectively abandon Photoshop. As much as I hate Adobe, Photoshop is unfortunately an industry standard, and it’s rather difficult to get running reliably under Linux. There are ways, but I wouldn’t call them reliable. I thus can not in good conscience recommend you switch all your machines to Windows, though perhaps you can run Linux on one device and keep a dedicated Photoshop box if that’s possible for you.

Everything else should probably be fine. Depending on what you play, you might lose a few games to kernel-level anticheat, but honestly, my thought is “Why should I give a company access to an important part of my operating system just to play a video game?”

As others have said, you should probably use LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice; the latter isn’t really developed anymore, and the former maintains compatibility with your old files while having vastly better maintenance and feature updates.

Spotify and Discord both have native apps for Linux, so you should be good. I don’t really use VPN services (I could rant about why, but that’s best left for another time), but there’s probably ways to get them working.

I wasn’t intending to convey this timeline could be a dream; I was moreso saying I thought my mind had made up this Microcenter to distract me from this dreadful reality.

I could have worded my initial post better.

All I was thinking about watching this video is “I wish they’d open a MicroCenter in Phoenix”; I’d had a blast visiting the Tustin location after seeing TMBG in LA this May.

I then googled it for fun and found out they announced they’re opening one a month ago! I checked national news to see if I was in some jolly alternate timeline (unfortunately, no) or dreaming, and it appears not.

Just curious: which AV1 encoder were you using?

I ask because librav1e and libaom performance is dismal, but libsvtav1 can at least do ~1.00x speed, which is impressive considering how complex the codec is.

That’s not to say I don’t welcome improvements, though I think AV1 Vulkan requires hardware support I don’t have on my RX 580; it wasn’t until the RX 7000 series that AMD cards started getting hardware encoded support for AV1.

Are we counting S1 “The Elysian Kingdom”? I know it’s not technically a holodeck episode, but…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrxKX44qBJ0

I mean, I agree.

Thank you for saying this before people started crying, “Linux is getting encrapified!” without understanding what the article was actually about.

Technically Raspbian Jessie, I think- I was gifted a Pi 3 in ~2016 and fiddled around with it for a while. I also made some cursed choices, at one point running Windows 10 IoT Core on that thing… though luckily not for long.

In 2017 or so, I started toying around with Ubuntu in VMs. It wasn’t really until 2020 or so that I started trying other distros; Debian Buster was probably the first non-Ubuntu distro I’d tried (excluding RPi stuff), and I mostly stucked to Debian besides one Arch install.

At a certain point in 2022, I found myself using Unix tools so much I was starting to wonder if I should just use Linux instead of Windows. It was at this time that I tried NixOS in a VM for the first time and thought, “Wow, this is cool… I’m sticking with Debian, though.”

Around that time, I threw Debian Testing (then Bookworm) on a second 256GB drive, ostensibly as a “test run” for daily driving Linux, and by “test run”, I mean I de facto quit using Windows; a few months later, I opted to use dd and copy that “test install” over my Windows install on my bigger 1TB drive (of course with sufficient backups so I could copy my Windows files over). That install is still the one I use on my desktop today and has just transitioned into Debian Testing/Forky*

*A name I quite honestly hate, mostly due to the fact that Forky represents everything wrong with America today the Forky Asks a Question shorts beat out Steven Universe Future for an animation Emmy, though honestly, I don’t know else what I was expecting to happen.

Honestly, I don’t think I’ve met more than 2 or 3 people in my life who even had a headset.

In fact, whenever I see a VR headset in a TV show or film meant to depict the present day, it makes it abundantly clear that the writers are well off older people who are going to whine about the youth and are out of touch with how the majority of Americans live their life (or they’re being forced to make these choices by geezer executives that fit my description).

It’s kind of similar to how the 1980s-2000s sitcom archetype of weird hyper best friend has been replaced by the “my whole personality is social media” archetype that is frequent in lower quality media these days.

I know. It seriously just felt like a top tier episode out of the series - the ending is such a tear jerker.

The big 2⁵!

I mostly agree with you. However, I think there are some caveats to upscaling; there are so many lazy “4K AI UPSCALE BEST QUALITY” videos online that just don’t look good and were clearly put there just to get views.

However, I’ve also found they have their uses; for instance, I wanted to laser cut a TMBG Flood logo once, but there were very few good images online that traced well in Inkscape. I ended up doing an AI upscale of the least terrible one with a white background, and that traced pretty well in Inkscape.

I was messing around with HomeAssistant the other day, which uses the same speech recognition engine, and I found it to be decent.