TLDR: Curtail losslessly compresses photos without losing date/time metadata. What program like Curtail can do the same with video's (preferably with MKV support)?

Curtail is FOSS Software for Linux that I've found extremely helpful. It's designed to bulk losslessly compress your images and photos without losing the date & time metadata in them. I've found this really helpful for skimming down the overall storage-use of my photo's.

But the thing that takes the most space on my PC is video's. You see, I record all of my videogame gameplay and store them on a hard drive. This takes many hundreds of gigabytes of space and is ever-increasing; and compressing them without losing any quality while retaining the date & time metadata is invaluable to me.

I'd love a program that functionally acts the same as curtail, but losslessly compresses each individual frame of a video rather than a photo. Curtail doesn't provide this, so does anybody know of any programs I can use that do this? MKV support is preferable, as that is how I store my video's, but still tell me about it even if it doesn't support MKV.

Alternative link: https://invidious.darkness.services/watch?v=4XmJPb4Qt5Y

Mojang demonstrate how some of the games sound effects were made; from modern sounds, also going back to some of the older sounds. I find it cool that they recorded real dolphin sounds themselves. The way the phantom was recorded was outright creepy.

Odysee, a decentralised YouTube alternative focused on free speech, is officially ending the serving of ads on the platform, starting today. The post:

"Dear friends of Odysee, Starting today, we're removing all ads. We don't need ads to make money as a platform and we are confident in the development of our own new monetisation programs that will help creators earn a living and at the same time keep Odysee alive. Ultimately, sacrificing the overall user experience to make a few bucks isn't worth it to us and nor is it even sustainable for a platform that wishes to make something truly open and creatively free.

As we take this decision, one thing is certain to us, media platforms (even ones that market themselves as 'free-speech') typically devolve into advertising companies and end up becoming beholden to their paymasters. It's been that way for centuries and is never going to change.

As we see YouTube become more aggressive with their ad deployment and 'Free Speech' platforms try to build their own ad businesses it's apparent to us that we're building a model for Odysee that will keep it sustainable not only financially, but in its ability to provide an incorruptible user experience.

Our approach may be considered niche or unconventional, that's fine by us. Odysee will be used by the world on terms that are agreeable to its users, and we know our users don't like ads.

Best, Founder & Creator, Chief Executive Officer. Julian Chandra"

I find in retrospect that the legacy console versions of the game were always so much more cozy than Java or Bedrock. The worlds really felt more like your own home in the classic versions; not just a near-infinite display of eternally explorable land that always feels foreign. To an extent, you needed to be more careful with your resources too, as sometimes they were extremely rare and you could cause an item or block to go "extinct" in the world, because you carelessly threw it out. You can see that as a hassle, but I found it a more realistic and fun experience having to think a bit more about how you managed the world.

Unlike the infinite worlds, you can't just fly off to some far-off part of the world you never visit and demolish an entire beach or desert for infinite sand, because, with the limited world size, you would be tearing up your own home and making the world look ugly (unless you're the YouTuber ibxtoycat who loves doing things like that 😂).

I miss the small worlds, and even though the engine limitations of that old version would have made it a stretch, I would have loved to see the recent updates (1.15-1.21) come to the game.

There was a charm to multiplayer survival worlds in Legacy, too. Because of the small size, you would bump into your friends just doing their own things, minding their own business in the worlds so much more often than in infinite worlds, where they could be hundreds of thousands, to millions of blocks apart from each other and only interact through the in-game chat or voice-chat. The world as a result felt so much more alive with multiple players. I miss the old console version...

I find it extremely difficult to articulate what I mean. I've gotten this feeling throughout my entire life, even when I was a child, and I'm sure there must be many others who've experienced it; I just can't find any mention of it online.

I'll give you an example. Sometimes you might be going from place to place, doing your own thing. When you're done with whatever you were doing, you just... stop ... and take in your surroundings. Suddenly the quietness around you seems to give you a tingling, comforting feeling that's quite honestly a beautiful feeling.

I'm 22, and I've been getting this throughout my entire life; and heck, I even get it when playing videogames (particularly open-world games), if they're immersive enough. The most common place I get this feeling in the real world is when I've been travelling in a car for a while (I don't drive currently, usually it's my mother driving me), and we reach our destination: The car stops; the engine turns off; the music on the radio goes silent, and I'm in no rush to hop out. For some reason this feeling rushes over me; it feels similar to butterflies and goes through my upper legs and stomach; even in my upper arms for some reason, but is all very comforting.

My earliest memory with it (although I know I had it years prior to this), was one day when I was 7-9 yrs old. I remember it quite vividly, actually. I don't remember where I had come from (probably school or something), but my Mum had been driving me for what felt like quite a while. She pulled into our front driveway and stopped. The engine shut off; the radio went silent. It felt calming, and I didn't get out of the car because I was just appreciating and enjoying the feeling of sitting in the quietness, with the subtle ticking sound coming from the cars engine you tend to hear when turning it off, just outside. My Mum said to me, something along the lines of "Why aren't you hopping out, Liam?". I don't remember what I said in response, but I definitely had no idea how to explain the reason to her; I find it difficult to even explain now as a young adult.

Now, I've managed to learn where and when to just "stop", and have this feeling come over me, like second-nature, but I still find that I can't well explain when or how it happens with words; that's why this post is so long.

As I said earlier, I also sometimes get this feeling when playing videogames. One of my favourite games of all time is The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (The sequel, too). It's an open-world game where you can travel to almost every single nook and cranny of the land of Hyrule, on foot or by horse. One of the things I absolutely love the most, is just walking around the world, exploring, and taking it all in. I don't care about defeating every single monster in every single enemy campsite across the world, or getting from place to place in the shortest time possible, or finding the most powerful loot or weapons; I just like to immerse myself in the world, like I'm actually there. And that feeling I described: I get it around almost every single corner, especially in out-of-the-way places like the top-edges of cliff-faces, where people in Hyrule never visit. In fact, I can give you an example: I was watching IGN's video of the game from 2016 when it was still in development (video link is timestamped to where I want to show you), and because I had been watching this gameplay video for the past 20 minutes, I was very immersed and relaxed in the game world. As soon as the player climbed up to this rock that was protruding out of the cliff-face, he immediately turned around to stop and take a look at the view in the distance, due to being so high up. I immediately, immersed, had that feeling come over me again, and it felt so nice; as it always does.

Is there name for this? If so, what is this called? There has to be some kind of psychology behind all of this.

Edit: Changed the link to lead to the original Odysee article post which contains the video, rather than just to the video itself. You get more context and information that way.

I was casually listening to a band I love on Bandcamp a second ago called Justice, listening to their album Woman Worldwide, before I suddenly, out of nowhere had a nostalgia-overload nerd cry when I heard a remix in the album of the song that played in the pretty famous Better Together update trailer from 2017 that announced the cancelled Super Duper Graphics Pack. Turns out that Justice are the ones that made that original song. The original is called Alakazam ! from the album Woman

Sharing this for those who've wanted to receive Ryujinx news in their RSS feed reader. I couldn't find an official RSS feed for Ryujinx anywhere online while hunting around. I asked the AI in Brave Search, and it somehow new the address to the RSS feed, which is https://blog.ryujinx.org/rss

I can't find any articles or posts talking about this anywhere, so I just wanted to share a post about it. I received an email on July 2 from Afterpay about an upcoming change to the privacy policy which will take affect on August 1, 2024. I used a website to compare the text of the old policy with the text of the new, and found that they are now introducing targeted advertising. They harvest personal information about you and share them with third-parties and partners in order to serve you with personalized ads within the Afterpay app. They track information such as your spending habits and how you interact with their marketing messages, and they now also combine all of your personal information they have collected about you to profile you, they also get information about you from third-parties. Quoted from the updated policy:

Information from third parties about you, such as identity, preferences and inferences about you...

Just wanted to share this, since I can't find any discussion of it online. Here's a link to the policies if you want to check it out. These are Wayback Machine links.

Current Policy (As of April 2, 2024)

Upcoming Policy (Effective Aug 1, 2024)

I switched to Pop!_OS earlier this year from Manjaro KDE. One feature that KDE had is that you could write a comment on any file by clicking Properties and going to the metadata. I assumed that this wrote the comment into the metadata of every file and that this would translate over to other distributions, but it doesn't appear to be the case.

I found this old thread from 2012 which said that KDE stores it's comments in ~/.kde/share/apps/nepomuk/. If that's still true today, I'm really worried now that all of that comment data I spent hours writing has been deleted along with Manjaro, because I had no idea that the data wasn't store inside the file itself, since it was always listed with the rest of the metadata for every file in it's properties. Is there no hope of me getting these comments back, or is there some way?

Update: Despite what that old thread seemed to imply, it turns out the comments do in fact get stored in metadata. After getting help in the comments, I found the easiest solution was to simply install Dolphin (KDE's file manager) into Pop!_OS, which allowed me to view the comments just as they were when I used KDE. For future readers, some other options that I didn't try that probably also work are:

• Load a Linux distro using KDE into a virtual machine on top of Pop!_OS and view comments that way
• Flash a distro like KDE Neon onto a live USB and view the comments that way
• Use the command getfattr FILENAME -n user.xdg.comment to view the comment data within the Pop! terminal (I didn't get this working, but this was suggested to me)