A recent study published in the Journal of University Teaching & Learning Practice sheds light on people's motivations to use Z-Library. Expensive books and limited access to academic material play a key role among those surveyed. That includes a group of Chinese postgraduate students who believe that shadow libraries help to overcome (academic) poverty.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/28381676

Thrive the game taking the ideas from the ashes of spore and turning them into an far more intricate game, a game of balancing, surviving and as the title suggests thriving!

Thrive is still currently in development, with many ambitious goals still exactly that, ambitious goals. Development is slow, as in really slow, and that’s okay – given that the whole project is being freely and openly developed. Development ‘started’ in 2009, with programming properly beginning in 2012. Thrive seems to be a bit like vaporware in this regard with a lot of ideas but not a huge drive to implement them. Which is again perfectly fine. But as we will go on to see this mishmash of ideas and random bits of development work being undertaken by individuals who are willingly disposing of their time to help move the project forward has created quite the output, even if that output is a mere pebble in comparison to what it wants to be.

So I played the game. The introduction animation is incredible, it’s hard not to raise your expectations too much when watching it. The game natively supports Linux which is a huge plus. The menus are readable and overall the user experience before the game has begun is well thought out, although I did have to search what LAWK meant, (Life as we know it). Starting a game of thrive, you begin as a single piece of cytoplasm floating through a volcanic vent – unless you chose to start somewhere else. You can see lots of other copies of your simple cell running around you, you will have to compete for resources not just with other species but also your own species. A nice nod toward intra-species competition. The aims of thrive are simplified from the typical aims of life, not to the extent of other evolution games, with glucose needing to be collected to break down into ATP, as well as nitrogen and phosphorus needing to be collected to help reproduce each cell organelle, at the beginning only your singular mitochondria needs to be replicated, but this rapidly spirals as your cell becomes more complicated. Once you replicate every organelle. You can navigate into the cellular editor.

Thrive does this thing where instead of replicating many times and occasionally mutating, you gather enough resources to replicate once, and then it pretends that 100 million years have past, and you can then pick a few mutations. The game has an algorithm to take into account your skill and the shape and structure of your cell to determine how much your cell population grows or shrinks. As a design choice I like it, and with how the mechanics for nitrogen and phosphorus are built you will never be too long await away from being able to play in the editor. This balance that has been striked between game play and evolution decisions is almost perfect, it can feel just sometimes like a little bit too long between each step. When it comes to allocating mutations – you get 100 mutation points at the end of game play stage to spend on new parts for your cell, which each new part costing a set number of mutation points.

There is a great variety in the number of options for cell parts and upgrades, proteins that help break down iron and sulfur, flagellum and obviously the all important nucleus part, which unlocks all the eukaryotic cell parts such as mitochondria. Importantly you aren’t drowning in choice initially with most upgrades requiring you to jump a certain hurdle. Thyroids (the things enabling photosynthesis), require you to first be in a biome with a light level greater than 40%. Prokaryotic parts aren’t particularly difficult to unlock once you figure out how to move between biomes and patches. If you decide to take up a nucleus, you can unlock larger more powerful parts like the mitochondria, these are more difficult to get, either requiring you to engulf (eat) another species that the game has deemed suitable for you to turn into an organelle in a process called endosymbiosis. Or the game requires you to evolve a given number of proteins and then keep them for a set amount of time. This latter route takes a lot longer to achieve but is also much less effort.

At each evolution section of the game you can opt to move to different patch/biome, slowly exploring a map, starting in a thermal vent and moving upwards towards the sea surface and up river mouths, each environment brings different challenges and benefits. Sea caves bring with them massive sulfur supplies, whilst having no light to enable photosynthesis. Whilst Rivers have masses of light but a limited supply other usable compounds, such as iron. Importantly glucose supply rapidly drops off after the first few generations, this means that not finding a niche is a way to end up fighting over increasing limited and rare resources, as the game goes on.

The game does an amazing job of producing diagrams for the evolutionary history of your specific game, and an alright job of creating food chain diagrams at the end of each generation. The game also tries to give you an estimate of what your population will be based on what evolutionary upgrades you picked. For example, if you double in size then your population growth will probably half because the same amount of energy needs to go into producing more biomass. This is a nice touch although it can be demoralizing to see a single cytoplasm with a population 10x bigger than your own.

Finally the multicellular stage is clearly still in development, but its definitely playable. I felt that being the only multicellular organism got quite boring after a hot minute but planning out my designs was fun. The multicellular stage unlocks a second editor – one for the arrangement of your cells, as well as the ability to evolve different specializations of cells – enabling greater strategy. This editor pools from the same 100 evolution points as earlier – so like real life, evolution becomes very slow.

I liked the game, it was great fun for a few days until the waiting for evolutionary upgrades got to me and I decided to put it down. It’s got massive potential and a game to keep an eye on. I would 100% recommend to everyone despite the fact its in development.

Sorry this was a wall of text, I'm still getting the hang of Lemmy posting!

Hi!

I'm currently trying to use my Wacom tablet with 2 monitors on, however the tablet sees both monitor on the pad and the pen can travel to both monitors. I want to limit the tablet to only one monitor, both pad and pen.

I'm on river, so probably any wlroots solution would work.

This is my libinput output:

Device:           Wacom Intuos S 2 Pen
Kernel:           /dev/input/event4
Group:            3
Seat:             seat0, default
Size:             152x95mm
Capabilities:     tablet 
Tap-to-click:     n/a
Tap-and-drag:     n/a
Tap drag lock:    n/a
Left-handed:      n/a
Nat.scrolling:    n/a
Middle emulation: n/a
Calibration:      n/a
Scroll methods:   none
Click methods:    none
Disable-w-typing: n/a
Disable-w-trackpointing: n/a
Accel profiles:   none
Rotation:         n/a

Device:           Wacom Intuos S 2 Pad
Kernel:           /dev/input/event6
Group:            3
Seat:             seat0, default
Capabilities:     tablet-pad
Tap-to-click:     n/a
Tap-and-drag:     n/a
Tap drag lock:    n/a
Left-handed:      n/a
Nat.scrolling:    n/a
Middle emulation: n/a
Calibration:      n/a
Scroll methods:   none
Click methods:    none
Disable-w-typing: n/a
Disable-w-trackpointing: n/a
Accel profiles:   n/a
Rotation:         n/a
Pad:
	Rings:   0
	Strips:  0
	Buttons: 4
	Mode groups: 1 (1 modes)

By the way, I like how libinput let my tablet pen to use the cursor differently from the mouse and they don't interfere with each other.

Edit: I tried this but it didn't work. riverctl input "Wacom Intuos S 2 Pad" map-to-output DP-1

It seems river handles inputs like this but not sure what's wrong with this, maybe the name?

Edit 2: Found the solution. Apparently riverctl also can list inputs with this: riverctl list-inputs

I took the name from that list and added to the command above, which is:

riverctl input "tablet-1386-827-Wacom_Intuos_S_2_Pen" map-to-output DP-1

Thanks to the guys at libera-chat channel.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.studio/post/3409116

Ideas and Tips for Dual Boot and Audio Things on Linux (2011 Laptop)

Research post

--> Before you contribute anything to this post, please be aware that I research a Music Production related topic on Lemmy/Mastodon.

Check out more info here

Hi there,

not even sure if this community is still active, but I will give it a go ;) I'm looking for distro ideas and tips for setting up Audio.

So, here's the situation: I've been thinking about switching DAW for a while now and just tried LMMS so far, which I didn't like at all. I'm curious to check out Reaper and/or Ardour next while also considering Bitwig as another option.

Currently I use an old MacBook Pro (~2011) for Music Production - running MacOS and Ableton Live 10. The plan is to Dual Boot this machine for now, but I'm unsure which Distro to go for. SSD is new, I can dedicate around ~250 Gigs to this install, which is a lot since I mainly use external storage usually. 4 GB of RAM, I think some swap space would be ideal.

On my main machine I've so far tried Ubuntu Studio for about 3 Weeks, so this is absolutely not an option. Then I've tried Mint for literally just 3 Days because I really hated the look of it (maybe no surprise as a long-time Mac user). I'm on arch-based/Arch with Plasma 5/6 + pipewire now since around 2 years. Haven't been touching on anything Music Production related on here, just the average everyday use to play Videos and Music (which just worked out of the box) so I'm not really familiar with anything Audio-related on Linux.

I want the Music Laptop to just be pretty minimal, a bit of Note-taking and Office stuff besides the DAW's. The Laptop is usually offline, so I think going for Arch/ a rolling release is not very ideal. I thought about just Gnome or Plasma 6 on Debian, as I wanted to try out Debian for future projects anyways. Not sure how this will play out on that old Laptop, so just thought I'd ask if there's any experience with older machines before I get into it. Also open for other recommendations in case I missed some other good distro option, I feel like I'm also in an experimental phase currently and wouldn't mind distro-hopping for a bit.

Then, I feel a bit overwhelmed by the whole audio thing, so I would be very thankful for useful tips, videos, websites or similar that might help me to figure things out.

I own a Focusrite Audio-Interface, and it will be a problem if I can't get this running, but I will definitely try it out before I buy a new one. Another issue with this Laptop is that the Audio jack broke years ago inside the machine, so it's not even possible to get any sound out of this thing if not via the Interface lol. Well, actually there is: Bluetooth Speakers, which I also do own but... meh. Usually on Headphones for Music Prodcution, so I kinda need the Interface. Not a huge VST user, so this is less of an issue for me. I mainly use my Interface to record Instruments/Mics or just my field recorder and Samples.

Hope I can get some feedback on my throughts and recommendations, thanks a lot in advance!

I'm trying to do this

sudo apt install intel-level-zero-gpu level-zero level-zero-dev\

to get a help me run a chatbot with gpu but the packages aren't available. where do I get them?

Ding Ding Ding

In the blue corner, weighing at 400MB ram or less in usage. XFCE with a easy to use UI and light footprint. It has a good file manager and pretty much is the go to standard if you want a cinnamon windows like desktop but less weight for old machines and netbooks.

In the green corner, the ancestor of Gnome 3, born out of hatred for its future counterpart, we have MATE. MATE is also a lean desktop and is easily customizable using different panels if you were a mac, windows or unity desktop user. Without bias I exclusively use this on Ubuntu MATE for a laptop between me and my brother.

Which contender in the desktop ring do you prefer? Why? What's the positives and negatives for you?

Round 1, GO!

Which brands are generally more piracy-friendly? Do you suggest any specific model? Or maybe there are products that are easily customizable at the OS level? Thanks!

Hi everyone!

**Postiz is an open-source social media scheduling tool that offers scheduling on: ** Instagram, YouTube, Dribbble, LinkedIn, Reddit, TikTok, Facebook, Pinterest, Threads, X, Slack, Discord, Mastodon and BlueSky.

Check it out here :) https://github.com/gitroomhq/postiz-app/

I have been working on mostly bug fixes lately and improving the platforms, some of the latest things:

• Many failures of posting on small things like character limit or uploading size.

• Fix problems in LinkedIn not loading pages.

• Team invite was fixed :)

• A bunch of docker changes to make it super easy to load. It's now live on: Coolify, Ptah soon Cloudron

**But the most important thing in the roadmap here is what I was mainly asked: **

• Add and an option to schedule stories on Instagram and add music to them

• Public API

• YouTube community posts schedule

• Google Business schedule

• Auto Plugs (I'm super excited about this one): Once tweets get X likes, they will auto-repost, add comments to tweets, and so on; this will be sent to all social media.

• SSO

• I am happy to hear about more requests.

One clarification after seeing many comments over and self-hosted: Postiz will always be apache-2, no weird dual license thingy, and no enterprise-only SSO.

Postiz is not making much money. Today we are on a product hunt. If you can help me out, it would be amazing, but if not, I love you anyway :)

Thank you so much for this community for helping me with every post!

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/postiz