Plenty of laptops ship with an IR infrared camera so you can unlock with your face. Surface especially has it as standard — on Windows 10 the feature is called Windows Hello. Basically you flip the lid open, it scans your face, and you’re in. No typing a password.
Can you use this on Linux?
Yes.
Just use this project called howdy.
I bought one of these a while back. That pair seemed to have a “channel imbalance,” but only at low impedance — put it through an amp and it was fine. Then, almost half a year later, it actually did go imbalanced. Yeah, properly imbalanced, the kind no amp can fix. The Taobao seller had promised a lifetime warranty, so I figured what the hell and messaged them — turns out the shop had gone under.
Normally with sketchy earphones of unknown origin, you’d just let it die. But I still kinda missed it.
Not the sound, though — I missed that absurdly long cable and the fit. So I went looking on Taobao and found the thing’s still being sold. Cheaper now, too: 59 yuan, free shipping.
So I bought another one…
The default Ubuntu 20.04 kernel is 5.4. It’s a bit old, sure, but that’s what the distro decided on back then. Canonical keeps pushing patches into that 5.4 line too.
That said, the Ubuntu 20.04 repos do actually have a 5.6 kernel in them, named linux-oem-20.04. You can just install it.
sudo apt install linux-oem-20.04
So what’s this kernel for? Canonical’s official explanation is that it’s “a kernel with some drivers and tweaks for certain OEM vendors’ devices” — if you’re installing on a laptop or desktop that’s been “Ubuntu certified,” there’s a decent chance your drivers are sitting in this kernel.
Mine’s a ThinkPad, so I’m definitely fine.
A female teacher I know once said something:
“In a romance it looks like the man is chasing the woman, but the initiative is always on the woman’s side. All she has to do is pick from a menu of things the man does.”
I think her version is incomplete, though. There’s a precondition: the woman has to be good-looking. If you look like Shonan’s walking dick, no man is coming over to hand you a menu.
You can also read that line the other way. In a normal man-chases-woman romance, it looks like the guy grinds it out with persistence and wins his goddess, but really the woman was just giving him chances, one after another.
Think about it. If she genuinely has zero interest in you, she won’t give you a single chance to make contact, and she won’t listen to a word you say. You think you’re conquering her. Really you’re just being allowed to conquer her.
So here’s the thing — playing this game was a complete mistake. I don’t even know when I downloaded it. I didn’t know what the premise was, who voiced the heroine, basically nothing about it. I just found it sitting on my hard drive while I was cleaning things up.
My guess is the developer name, Prekano, threw me off, since there’s a million games out there called “XX Kano” these days.
But through sheer coincidence, I ended up playing it anyway.
A long, long time ago, a game caught my eye: Suite Life, put out by MME before they went under.
My English is trash. Back in high school I used to pronounce “Suite” as “Suit,” and it took me forever to realize I’d been saying it wrong the whole time. That’s part of why the title stuck with me. Suite Life, literally “packaged life.” There’s an American TV show with the same name, but this game seems to have nothing to do with it.
Honestly, I played Suite Life not long after it came out, and then… I dropped it.
Dropping it wasn’t my intention, I was genuinely interested. The main reason was that the game was just too boring.
And years later I went back and finished it. The main reason was pretty much the same as why I dropped it: I was too bored.
I used to figure Flatpak was the same garbage as Snappy, cut from the same cloth. Then yesterday I ran into a piece of software that was Flathub-only, gave it a try, and used it for about five minutes. Holy shit.
I’m a convert.
Feeling empty, lonely, and a bit chilly lately, I decided I needed something “short and sweet,” “gets to the point fast,” “heroine’s got big tits,” “preferably that kind of plot” — in short, the “you know what I mean” kind of game. Which is how I ended up with QUALIA Yakusoku no Kiseki.
The premise is about as obvious as it gets: the protagonist is a scientist, he builds a big-titted robot girl, and then there’s that soulful look in her eyes. Sure, this year is drowning in shitty “AI robot romance” visual novels, but this one clearly isn’t like those dime-a-dozen ones. What kind of game this is — you get it, right?
Let’s go! My guy!
When ANIPLEX.exe was throwing money at visual novels, aside from ATRI -My Dear Moments-, they also put out Utsuro no Utage (徒花異譚), which has a seriously weird art style. It was made in collaboration with Liar-Soft, which immediately told everyone these people know what they’re doing, and plenty of eroge fans went “based.”
Also, you can pretty much guess that ANIPLEX.exe’s two releases were aimed at different audiences. ATRI -My Dear Moments- was clearly for the “casual moe-blob otaku,” while Utsuro no Utage comes off as a bit more hardcore.
Of course, that “hardcore” label is just my own wishful thinking. After finishing this fairly short game, all I can say is that Utsuro no Utage isn’t really a game so much as a genuine “short fantasy novel.” This “novel” won’t lecture you about life’s great truths; what it gives you is more of an emotional jolt.
I’m not going to go into detail about what Utsuro no Utage is actually about. Getting hold of the game isn’t that hard for most people, and although the scenario was written by Nozomu Kaihara, who previously wrote Uso kara Hajimaru Koi no Natsu (尋蝶者), once it steps outside the “romance game” frame, the story feels all the more comfortable in its own skin.
