If you like puzzles, there is also fillets! Oldie but goodie.

apt install fillets-ng

Battle for Wesnoth. It's a fantasy-themed turn-based strategy.

Though I haven't played it recently, I have some very good memories. It teaches you gambling and probability (especially on small multiplayer maps), and you develop feeling for the difference between 40% chance to hit and 30%.

The single-player campaigns are nice too. The one that I have in especially good memory is "Under The Burning Suns", which made a few creative and artistic changes to the game. It shouldn't be the first campaign you play, but it can be the second.

Oh now you make me want to play planescape torment again. Really good writing. It always felt like the dialogs were about you and the questions you have, and immediately relevant to what happens next in the game.

I'm maybe a third through disco elysium, but I found the writing went off-rails too often for my taste, sometimes disconnected with your quest or what happens next. It's still very well written, maybe just not my "book". But now I have just derailed this thread from the original topic completely, so who am I to judge.

From the Luanti/Minetest games, I also like Exile very much.

It is a bit hard and nerdy (you'll have to read the PDF guide/tutorial as you progress), but I found it oddly calming. I recommend single-player only.

In contrast to other Luanti/Minecraft-Like games, in Exile it feels very rewarding just to have found shelter from a storm and a cozy fire going, after you were on the edge of collapsing from exhaustion. Though you're almost certainly out of food and it would be dangerous to go out looking before the storm passes, you're not quite dying yet and you have time to make your mud hole a bit more cozy. (It's not a good game if you want to build huge creative castles, but you'll need to build and improve your home a bit.)

I'm still proud of my rendering of the logistic map. It was mostly just to learn more Rust, but it rendered this beatuiful picture with relatively little code. And mostly by accident, I didn't know I would get those cool shadows!

Yes. I'm here for the long tail, the niche communities. And what do I see? Not enough photos of houseplants! Come on, you must have some too. And to add to the list, ![email protected] looks nice.

I don't keep track, but I'd say about 3 years from store-bought pineapple (fruit with crown, cut off the bottom leaves) to flower.

I have harvested several already. I don't know what I'm doing right, but I consistently get a flower and a fruit. I think it's the warm and sunny location.

Anyway, here is what I do: Water every 2 weeks (pineapples are specialized to survive dryness and store water in their leaves, so not too much I guess). The tap water is a bit hard here, and I read you should filter it so I always do, but never tested without. Standard soil, a few stones as drainage in the bottom (I doubt this matters a lot). Do not put the plant on the balcony on a sunny summer day, when I did it wilted within 2 days and didn't recover. I guess it really hates cool nights. The pot size has a big influence, the size in the photo seems to be optimal, with a smaller pot I get smaller leaves and a smaller fruit (600g instead of 1100g).

And before you take my advice, I should mention that many plants have wilted in my care at that window. Just not pineapples.

The only thing I noticed is that the size of the pot has a huge effect on its growth.

Apart from that, I have no idea what I'm doing right. It may be the sunny, south-facing window. I have harvested several pineapple fruits over the years. They seem to be absolutely unstoppable and unkillable and predictable in their growth here. They don't care about seasons (it's snowing!). The only time I managed to kill one is when I put the pot outside in summer - it went bad in just three days.

Older photos: https://log2.ch/gal/ananas/

Blender user here. I think you got it right, and FreeCAD is probably your best bet. Maybe give it a second chance.

OpenSCAD is in a different category, it's more like a coding tool or software library. There are other options if you're into that, e.g. build123d.

I can't use FreeCAD myself, but then I don't have a mechanical engineering background, so I was also learning the basic CAD workflow when I tried it. At work my colleagues (who occasionally 3D print some part) seem happy with it, and keep telling me I should use a proper CAD to design parts.

Personally I'm happy with Blender, using it for my hobby 3D print designs. Most have some playful/artistic touch in addition to being functional, and Blender shines at that. But you totally can do a parametric design in Blender natively, it just won't be a CAD workflow with the constraint solver you expect. The CAD plugins I have tried felt experimental. The native tools are very solid, and Blender is very polished and mature. But it is targeting expert users (including teams, since you asked about that). Learning Blender is an investment, it took me a long time. If you are still curious, look for a video demo/tutorial of someone designing a 3D part in Blender. Don't just open it and expect to be able to do stuff, you will not figure out on your own which tools/modifiers you should use.

(And since you didn't say what kind of CAD, also check out KiCad if you are doing PCBs!)

I also put a seed into a balcony pot, which isn't doing as well. I thought it was too cold outside maybe, but I have another suspicion...

(Edit: seems to be a rusty tussock moth.)

If you are considering rsync, you should also consider rclone instead, especially if you want to access cloud storage. Both are mainly for syncing in only one direction. They can be set up for two-way sync with conflict handling, but I'd consider that slightly dangerous.

Syncthing is two-way (or n-way) distributed continuous sync, devices can be offline/online at any time, and with robust conflict handling. I know it only from private use, you install it on each machine where the data lives (as opposed to accessing a cloud). It works great for that. I don't know if it is good in a multi-user or corporate context.

I'd start with some basic Linux networking and tools, if you don't have them already.

I don't know if that's the basics everyone knows these days, but... learn how TCP,UDP,ICMP,TLS relate, what a netmask is, what is ARP and MAC addresses. Fire up Wireshark and look around what is happening on your network. Learn some basic commands like ip -br -a and ss (or the older netstat) so you know how to figure out which program is listening where. Learn how to manually resolve a DNS name (dig or host). How tunnel a TCP connection or a webbrowser through ssh (port forwarding, SOCKS proxy). Learn enough of the HTTP protocol so you can manually enter a valid GET request over a simple TCP connection to port 80 with netcat or nc. Or use httpie or curl for the same purpose. You can't host a lot with that knowledge, but it helps to figure out why things are not working.

This is in Switzerland, near Zurich. Yes, sunny apartment. There is direct light from sunrise (left horizon on the photo) until 3pm or so (buildings block it on the other side).

You may be right that I don't use enough fertilizer, I usually do a bit in summer but I haven't used any during the last 8 months. And I don't know what the brown stripes on the leaves are about, but it doesn't seem to stop the growth.

But I know that the leaves also produce some white waxy substance on the underside, which is probably what you're seeing. It can be rubbed off. (Or at least I hope this is what I just rubbed off, lol.) The Pineapple manual (PDF) says it is to protect from moisture loss.

I see where this comes from, but it's funny because F-Droid is the very last place where I expect this to happen. Right after hell freezes over. Imagine them listing their own app with an anti-feature from their list: https://f-droid.org/docs/Anti-Features/

Cory Doctorow's "Walkaway" may fit, depending on what you're after.

Society hasn't collapsed exactly but they are building something new from scraps of deserted technology far away from civilisation. The setting is near-future, their motto: "The first days of a better nation." It is about a group building their own bed&breakfast for themselves and others to escape from the "default" society. There is a global support network of others attempting the same. They build in old ruins with 3D printers and abandoned fuel cells.

(Another topic of the book is mind uploading. The book is all on earth, no space travel. The main focus is on politics and society and a cultural rebellion against old money. I think the main characters are a bit weak in the sense that they are too similar and I sometimes confused them and it didn't matter. But it was still fun to read for the political ideas being spelled and acted out, and yes, for the enthusiasm of building something new.)

I didn't know either, I just put random seeds into pots, sometimes they work. I'm curious about the harvest too.

Thanks for the follow-up. Of course you would have some kind of mass-deployment, it didn't think of that. I thought you'd maybe copy the Windows MAC to Linux, but... then you'd remember doing that.

Next up, they will also all have the same ssh host key ;-) (Which may be an advantage actually, but still confusing.) Those are the kind of problems cloud-init is solving, I guess.

Easy: Most software is done when nobody uses it any more.

If the code you wrote 10 years ago still isn't quite done yet, you should celebrate. If someone still cares enough to consider it broken, or can think of improvements, it means that it is useful. In contrast to: finished and done with.

Sounds like a networking exercise on its own.

Do the attempted pings show up on the wire? (Switch LEDs, network card activity light.)

Does broadcast work? (Watch if it is received with tcpdump -n on both Linux VMs, and Wireshark on the Windows hosts, while doing ping -b 10.0.0.255. Or trigger a broadcast ARP by ping-ing a non-existing IP in the same network. Those should go through all bridge and switch devices, independent of IPs and routing setup.)

I think you need four distinct MAC addresses for this setup, are they all different?

The network card/driver is filtering received unicast by MAC. I'm sure something should set up the filters correctly, but maybe it went wrong, or there is a bug in the driver. Wireshark on Windows should be able to enable promiscuous mode, which disables the filter.

Side note: I don't think you need a crossover cable. Auto-crossover should just work these days.

At work I map a USB Ethernet device into my Linux VM when I do anything networking, exactly to avoid those kind of "is it Windows?" questions. Also, I can then check the Ethernet link at the lowest level using Linux tools like ip link or mii-tool or ethtool.

I'm using VMWare for this, which I cannot recommend any more. (It used to be good for this, but gut much worse in recent years.) I think vanilla VirtualBox doesn't allow to map USB devices.